Free Republic

The Obama campaign is out with a new two-minute attack ad, hitting Mitt Romney on his past at Bain Capital. The ad, set to run in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, plays up the “vulture capitalism” angle. “It was like a vampire,” says a former GS Steel worker named Joe Cobb. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” The Romney campaign is expected to push back aggressively on what they view as a major distraction from the president’s disastrous economic record. It shouldn’t be terribly hard. The bankruptcy and layoffs occurred in 2001, two years after...

Darryl Jones doesn’t have plans to celebrate Mother’s Day. At a time when households are honoring the maternal bonds of the family unit, Jones, the boys basketball coach of city-power Satellite Academy in the Bronx, which has won three of the past five city championships in the PSAL’s Alternative League, has a more pressing matter to deal with. Jones’ daughter is missing, and hasn’t been seen by her family or heard from since April 27. Stevie Bates, a 19-year-old former cheerleader at the Bronx High School of Science, with an infectious smile and shoulder-length blond dreadlocks, was traveling cross-country with...

CANTON, Ohio -- Rudy is the quintessential average white guy, right down to his last name. "It literally is Guy," he said, laughing at the irony. Born in New Eagle and raised in Charleroi in Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, Guy comes from a long line of Democrats. "My grandfather worked at Corning Glass, my father worked in the mines, the steel mill and finally at Corning," he recalled. "The family always had union ties, and that usually meant a tie to the Democratic Party." That's no longer true for him, however: "As my life started to improve financially, I realized that...

A PBS 'American Masters' documentary investigates the mystique of the elusive 'Tonight Show' host, 20 years after he left TV. Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer all made their best pitch but were turned down. Johnny Carson, the man who changed forever the world of late-night talk, wasn't talking. The network news powerhouses had separately attempted to secure interviews with Carson to get him to speak about his life and his place as one of the most influential figures in TV history. But from his 1992 retirement after 30 years on"The Tonight Show"until his death in 2005 at age...

Here are the remarks as I was reading them via the teleprompter control screen during Mitt’s speech. It was very interesting to see how many times Mitt added parts to the speech that were not in the prompter and also how many times he simply changed the wording on the fly. I’d love to get a chance sometime to see if President Obama does the same thing or if he stays 100% true to the prompter.

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama came out in 1995 and has sold over a million copies, but to rightbloggers it is a constantly fresh source of discovery. SNIP "I don't believe Obama had many girlfriends. Personally, I always pegged him to be gay," said Support Your Local Gunfighter. "Obama admits to writing fiction... The only real question here is if, by 'multiple,' he meant 'imaginary,' or if by 'girlfriends,' he actually meant 'boyfriends,'" said Vox Day. "Composite sketch expert renders Obama's 'girlfriend,'" wrote I Own The World, offering a drawing of a guy with a "Ramrod Club" tattoo...

Barack Obama once wanted to "Win the Future." Now he's just hoping to get there. "Forward" is the new message of his re-election campaign, which he outlined Saturday in the first two official speeches of his 2012 presidential campaign. While his message still contains the old slogan's optimism of a brighter tomorrow, the force of the president's new argument is not so much that Americans could achieve greatness but that they must lock arms to keep Mitt Romney from dragging the country back to a dark past. Hope and change are still alive, said the president, referring to his 2008...

The University’s journalism school has officially recognized the power of a spell check. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s spelling and grammar test, a requirement for all students in the school, will no longer include a spelling portion as administrators attempt to adapt to the changing industry. The school will alter the test in the fall for the first time since the test’s creation in the 1970s

The first Mama Grizzly reference came in the first minute or two of former AK Gov. Sarah Palin’s stint guest hosting NBC’s Today show. In the opening segment, a very energetic Palin noted New York’s “warm” weather (by comparison to Alaska, where it was 25 degrees this morning, about 20 degrees cooler than NYC), Ann Curry scoffed at the idea that it was warm and that’s when Palin whipped out the Mama Grizzly. Alaskans are just made of sterner stuff than hardened New York network hosts, it seems: Curry was bundled up and visibly reacting to the mild weather. Matt...

Former White House Reporter Awarded for Being Friend to Palestinians Helen Thomas, who covered the White House for 50 years before being forced to resign over anti-Semitic comments, can add another distinction to her resume, reports Haartez. The Lebanese-American reporter was honored by the Palestinian Authority on Sunday for her, “long career in the field of journalism, during which she defended the Palestinian position every step of the way.” Perhaps the most famous member of the White House press corps, Thomas was forced to resign in 2010 after she said to a reporter on camera regarding the Jews in Israel,...

The Iranians have dispatched a network of covert assassins to hit Jewish, Israeli and Western targets in Turkey, Sky News reports. And now the surreptitious hit-squad has finally been given a name: Unit 400. A 53-page secret study from a foreign intelligence agency obtained exclusively by Sky News reports: Unit 400 is a top-secret "special ops" unit within the elite overseas wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF). It plans and carries out terror attacks on external targets, and provides material support to foreign militia groups, at the direct behest of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This...

Former Counterterrorism Bureau chief tells 'Post' that jihadist organizations seeking to attack Israeli, Jewish targets overseas. Israelis and Jews around the world are under a growing threat from Islamic terrorists and need to demand that local authorities provide better security, former Counterterrorism Bureau chief Brig.-Gen. (res) Nitzan Nuriel said Monday, hours after a gunman killed four people outside of a Jewish school in France. Nuriel told The Jerusalem Post that a coalition of jihadist organizations have made a decision to attack Israeli and Jewish targets wherever they may be without distinction. "They attack whoever they can and wherever security is...

It sounds like the bizzare script of a Hollywood B-movie. In a parallel universe the Nazis have won the war, Adolf Hitler moves to LA where he mingles with the stars of the silver screen while running his evil empire from a luxurious ranch deep in the LA hills. But during the 1930s, American sympathisers were so confident this exact scenario was actually going happen they spent millions building a deluxe compound ready for their fuhrer's imminent arrival.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, on Tuesday presented a letter of complaint to the UN Security Council and to the organization's Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, over the Council’s silence in the face of the continued rocket attacks on southern Israel. “250 missiles since Friday, a rocket every 20 minutes, and zero response from the Security Council,” Prosor wrote in the letter, reminding Ban that “during your visit to Israel you met with children from the south and saw the situation for yourself. Yesterday you told the members of the Council that the firing of rockets at Israel's...

Monday, March 12 marked World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, a date punctuated by Reporters Without Borders’ annual release of its Enemies of the Internet list — a grouping of all of the nations noted for instances of content filtering, censorship and online surveillance over the past year. The countries deemed ‘internet enemies’ and ‘countries under surveillance’ are listed below.

Plans to use surface-to-air missiles to protect the skies over London during the Olympics could be thwarted – because they will disturb the habitat of a rare wild flower.

(Crain's) — New City Bank, the South Michigan Avenue lender for which indicted Cook County Commissioner William Beavers is vice chairman, was closed today by state banking regulators. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. couldn't find another bank to take on the assets and deposits, and instead will pay back depositors up to the $250,000 limit at which the FDIC insures deposits. New City had $72.4 million in deposits and $71.2 million in assets as of year-end 2011. The bank was launched in 2003 by a group of local investors, including Mr. Beavers, a South Side alderman at the time. Mr....

Occupy Wall Street in New York City could run out of funds in the coming weeks.

White House officials were in close contact with the Agriculture Department in the hours leading up to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's decision to fire USDA employee Shirley Sherrod in 2010, according to nearly 2,000 pages of internal emails released by the administration.

A little scene-setting for you before I bring you this brand spanking — emphasis on the spanking — new video from my friends at ShePAC. As I noted earlier this morning, I discussed the miscreant Bill Maher and called him what he was: An invertebrate (and yes, I meant “invertebrate,” not “inveterate” — though both would do) coward. I also said that countless conservative women out there are fed up and pushing back. ShePAC, which supports principled conservative women in public office, has just released a video exposing the depths of Maher’s misogyny. The ladies’ hands are probably red from...