Free Republic

The ‘smoking gun’ email that reveals who instructed Susan Rice to blame the Benghazi attack on a video also exposes a recipient named Mehdi K. Alhassani. Alhassani was the leader of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a Muslim Brotherhood front group and attended the sister mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) mosque attended by the Boston Marathon bombers. It is a mystery how Alhassani slipped through the cracks to become a Special Assistant to the Office of the Chief of Staff, National Security Council Staff, and Executive Office of the President. It is unknown why a...

The CBS Evening News on Wednesday ignored one of the day’s top news stories: the revelation that White House aide Ben Rhodes — brother of CBS president David Rhodes — instructed Susan Rice to emphasize a false talking point about the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya. In a White House email chain recently obtained through a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, Ben Rhodes urged Rice “[t]o underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy” ahead of her infamous appearance on several Sunday shows. The decision by CBS to ignore the story...

An analysis of public records by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has found more than $20 million in federal stimulus funds benefitting real estate projects financially tied to Joseph Shepard, husband of Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill. Earlier this month, the Associated Press published an analysis , stating, "businesses affiliated with the husband of Senator Claire McCaskill have received almost $40 million in federal subsidies for low-income housing developments during her first five years in office..." The NLPC analysis released today showed more than $20 million in financial benefits from the federal stimulus law to real estate projects associated...

Game Changer? The federal government paid nearly $40 million dollars to Claire McCaskill’s husband’s businesses her first five years in office as Missouri Senator. During that time McCaskill has had influence over federal policy that has directly affected her family’s income. Missouri royalty - The rest of the country has suffered but Claire McCaskill and her husband Joseph Shepard have done very well these past five years. There are renewed calls for Democrat McCaskill to release her tax returns. ABC3040 reported: Businesses affiliated with the husband of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill have received almost $40 million in federal subsidies for...

Sen. Ted Cruz won his seat in 2012 in a surprise victory, and since then he has been vocally pushing a conservative agenda—a tough foreign policy, social conservatism, limits to government—inspired, he says, by his hero since boyhood, Ronald Reagan.

Open letter to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and all God fearing, pro-life, pro-family, pro-small government, strong defense conservative grassroots patriots and leaders!! What are you waiting for? We know who and what Romney is. It's no secret. In his past he was intentionally to the left of Ted Kennedy. He campaigned for Roe v Wade as settled law that should be preserved and sustained and he delivered liberal activist judges to do just that. He campaigned on the platform that abortion should be safe and legal in America and he delivered taxpayer funded abortion in Massachusetts to make it so....

**Graphic Warning Obaba & Obama pictured on link. ** Finding renews doubts the board will be able to handle mayoral election later this year. Nearly six months after President Obama began his second term, the votes of some 1,600 Brooklyn residents who went to the polls were not counted until this week, the Daily News has learned.

Over seven in 10 Obama voters, and 55 percent of Democrats, regret voting for President Obama's reelection in 2012, according to a new Economist/YouGov.com poll. Conducted to test the media hype about a comeback by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the new poll found voters still uninspired by Romney, but also deeply dissatisfied with Obama who has so far failed to capitalize on his victory over 15 months ago. The poll asked those who voted for Obama's reelection a simple question: “Do you regret voting for Barack Obama?” — Overall, 71 percent said yes, 26 percent no. — 80...

“I can’t fake it,” then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney said as the political advisers and family members nearby deflated. They knew what that meant. The scene, which occurred during the heated 2008 GOP primary battle between Romney and his rising political adversary, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), occurs early on in the new Netflix documentary, Mitt. The film premieres on Netflix at 11 AM today and offers a rarely-seen look at the former Governor and his family as they trudge through two seemingly-endless presidential campaigns. Director Greg Whiteley was given great access to Romney during those campaigns, and he uses it to...

On Election Night 2012, Democrats had more than the reelection of President Obama to celebrate. Karl Rove, the mastermind Republican strategist hated and feared by Democrats, had a meltdown live on Fox News. A new documentary, "Mitt," Greg Whiteley's film of Mitt Romney and his family during his 2008 and 2012 presidential bids, released on Netflix on Friday, sheds more light on that bizarre incident. Rove's famous hissy-fit took place when the network called the state of Ohio for Obama, putting the president over the 270 electoral votes needed to win reelection. Rove argued that Fox's analysts had acted prematurely.

A new documentary about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney premiered Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. The film, "Mitt," is an extraordinarily intimate look at the former Massachusetts governor as he ran for president twice, in 2008 and 2012. Director Greg Whiteley had impressed Romney with his 2005 documentary "New York Doll," which brilliantly chronicled a broken-down rock musician's conversion to Mormonism, and for the new film, Romney gave Whiteley unprecedented freedom to record behind-the-scenes moments as the candidate and his family endured the trials of two presidential campaigns..... the old lack of confidence came out again...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration Tuesday launched a bid to rein in the use of tax-exempt groups for political campaigning. The effort is an attempt to reduce the role of loosely regulated big-money political outfits like GOP political guru Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the pro-Obama Priorities USA. The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department said they want to prohibit such groups from using ‘‘candidate-related political activity’’ like running ads, registering voters or distributing campaign literature as activities that qualify them to be tax-exempt ‘‘social welfare’’ organizations.

Did White House know about fabricated and manipulated job numbers before 2012 election? Is it possible to kill quantitative-easing painlessly? Sorry kids, but this debt's on us Let me be the first to ask: Did the White House know that employment reports were being falsified? Last week I reported exclusively that someone at the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia region had been screwing around with employment data. And that person, after he was caught in 2010, claimed he was told to do so by a supervisor two levels up the chain of command. On top of that, a reliable source whom I...

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

I suppose the danger of AJ Schnack’s immensely entertaining documentary “Caucus” is that it retells all the hair-raising twists and turns of the 2012 Republican caucus in Iowa as human drama, with the things we’re supposed to care about – the ideology, the “politics” – stripped away. We know for sure that none of these clowns will ever be elected president, so we’re free to view them as flawed, interesting, crazy and sometimes even sympathetic characters in a larger narrative that’s beyond their control. I would argue, in fact, that this gripping and grotesque portrait of retail politics in the...

By now, everyone knows that Mitt Romney’s inner circle was righteously peeved at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for spending the final days of the 2012 presidential race arm-in-arm with President Obama as they toured the Jersey coastline after its thrashing by Hurricane Sandy. The buddy-buddy act boxed Romney out of national media coverage for days while lending the president some bipartisan street cred. But it wasn’t just the storm. Christie had rankled Romney’s team throughout the campaign: He held back his endorsement as long as possible, flirted with big-shot GOP donors who begged him to jump into the race...

(CBS News) WASHINGTON -- CBS News has been digging into the cause of the delays in preparing the website for the government's health insurance market and has learned was a major interruption in the months before President Obama's re-election. At the height of the 2012 presidential election campaign, it was crunch time for the Obama administration to release key instructions so contractors could work toward the October 2013 deadline. But a Health and Human Services official who was closely involved tells CBS News that in late summer, the administration stopped issuing proposed rules for the Affordable Health Care Act until...

•Axelrod wanted campaign manager Jim Messina fired, but he wound up the odd man out himself• Palace intrigue led 'Axe' to refer to Messina and White House messaging chief David Plouffe as 'two strongmen running the Kremlin'• The two men resented Axelrod for getting rich by taking a percentage of the hundreds of millions spent on campaign ads •An aloof Obama stayed out of the way as his inner circle fought a political gladiator game that pushed out Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs The man most responsible for getting Barack Obama to the White House – the man who...

A blast from the not-so-far past.

President Obama stopped Israel from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities a year ago, according to the then head of Israel’s National Security Council, Gen. Giora Eiland. Gen. Eiland spoke with Israeli journalist Rotem Sella, a former former senior writer for the daily Ma’ariv, at the Daily Capitalist blog on the “Mida” online news site. Some quickly-translated extracts from Sella’s report are below: Exclusive: Prime – Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was about to order an attack on Iran in September 2012, but canceled the operation in response to U.S. pressure, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council said last...