Free Republic

President Obama's decision to televise his Q&A with House Republicans was one of his shrewdest political moves since he transformed the 2008 controversy around his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, into an occasion to discuss race in American life. The hour-long session accomplished two things that Obama has been struggling for months to achieve. It set his political base on fire, even as it set a post-partisan tone that political Independents, who have been straying from him in the polls, like so much. Evidence of how the base took the event was all over the blogs (Daily Kos, for example, live blogged...

The nation owes a substantial debt to Justice Samuel Alito for his display of unhappiness over President Obama's criticisms of the Supreme Court's recent legislation -- excuse me, decision -- opening our electoral system to a new torrent of corporate money. Alito's inability to restrain himself during the State of the Union address brought to wide attention a truth that too many have tried to ignore: The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservative majority intent on working its will, even if that means ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government. Obama called...

High prices have driven Tea Party speakers and supporters from attending the group's first convention this week. Many fear the group is losing its grassroots momentum to Republican profit-driving. Brett Neely reports. Steve Chiotakis: The Tea Party protest movement is set to hold its first political convention Nashville, Tenn. on Thursday. But grassroot's gotten pretty pricey. Tickets are 550 bucks. And if you just want to hear Sarah Palin speak, that's $350. As Brett Neely reports, it has a lot of Tea Partiers choking on their Earl Grey. Brett Neely: Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann dropped out of the Tea Party...

The conservative activist accused this week in a plot to tamper with telephones in the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) admitted to the scheme Friday.... Federal prosecutors allege that James O'Keefe helped carry out a plot in which two friends impersonated telephone repairmen to get access to Landrieu's office in downtown New Orleans. O'Keefe, 25, waited inside the office and used his cellphone to record his two colleagues saying that the senator's phone was not receiving calls, according to charges unsealed Tuesday.... If convicted, O'Keefe could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. Under a judge's...

When retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington talks about intelligence, and especially about interrogation issues, I listen. His time in Vietnam was captured well in his book Silence was a Weapon also published under the title Stalking the Vietcong. He ran a secret interrogation operation on an island off the coast of Panama after the invasion of Panama, where, he says, much was learned about Noriega's relations with Cuba and the PLO. He ran a similar secret operation after the 1991 Gulf War. In 2004, he was asked to look into U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq and produced a scathing report...

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.... Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page...

For a man intent into taking Venezuelan into the Dark Ages, it was a remarkable admission that modernity can be a threat to Hugo Chavez and his fake revolution. As students used the Internet and its tools like Twitter as wel as other modern tools like SMS messaging to mobilize and communicate strategy instantly, Hugo Chavez made his second attack on the Internet in a single week, calling the rumors and use of this technology "terrorism". A week ago Chavez had said that his supporters had to watch out for the Internet and tonight he came on TV wearing a...

It was supposed to be a gathering of true believers, an occasion to celebrate the Tea Party movement's grassroots victories.... But now rifts within the movement are threatening to derail the convention, organized by Tea Party Nation. The conflict: a convention that seeks to maximize the Tea Party's political clout by developing a mainstream organization and an audience of angry voters dedicated to grassroots actions and suspicious of top-down management. "The idea that there"s one person, one event, that can somehow be the Tea Party spokesperson is inaccurate and counter to the movement of free-thinking individuals that want less government...

Some torture stories are just too horrible to contemplate, while others are too complicated to understand. But Scott Horton's devastating new exposé of the possible murders of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006 is neither: It's simply too terrible to allow to be true. Which is why it has been mostly ignored this week in the mainstream American media and paid little attention by the usual crew of torture apologists on the right. The fact that three Guantanamo prisoners—none of whom had any links to terrorism and two of whom had already been cleared for release—may have been killed there...

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns....

When I spoke with Rep. Richard Neal, the veteran Democratic congressman from Springfield, Mass., on the afternoon of the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, he told me, "It's an alarm-clock moment for us." That is no exaggeration. Scott Brown, the little-known candidate who pulled out a victory over state Attorney General Martha Coakley, is the first Republican to win a Massachusetts Senate race since 1972 and will be the only Republican in what has been an all-Democratic congressional delegation from the Bay State. Ron Kaufman, the longtime Republican National Committee member from Massachusetts, said that "it was...

So what happened to the victory dance that was supposed to take place at the NYSE if Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat? At mid-day the Dow is down almost 200 points. Analyst Hugh Johnson says traders are viewing the Massachusetts upset through a different prism today. Today the reality is setting in that loss of Democratic control in Washington could mean less federal spending, less fiscal stimulus, less government support of a weak economy. He says the change in the political landscape casts a shadow over the assumption that if the economy were to falter again, the federal...

Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said. Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified. The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8...

There will be much harrumphing and punditry in the next few days about the meaning of Scott Brown's victory and his phenomenal campaign for Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat.... As important as the Massachusetts special election was to the health-care debate, it also represents a come-to-Jesus moment for the GOP. What kind of party will it be? On the surface, Brown's success, especially among independents, suggests that the GOP tent is expanding to make room even for moderate, pro-choice candidates like Brown. Have fiscal conservatives displaced social conservatives as the base?...

The mayor of San Diego testified Tuesday that his views on same-sex marriage evolved after he learned one of his daughters was a lesbian. Mayor Jerry Sanders took the witness stand on behalf of two same-sex couples suing to overturn Proposition 8... "I had been prejudiced," he said. "I was saying one group of people did not deserve the same respect, did not deserve the same symbolism of marriage, and I was saying their marriages were less important than those of heterosexuals."... Sanders, a Republican, now believes it's in the interest of government to support same-sex marriage. A former police...

A proposal to compel the Arizona secretary of state to independently verify the eligibility of every presidential candidate is downright laughable, considering just how little the state has cared about this issue in the past. Capitol Media Services reported earlier this week that Rep. Judy Burges, R-Skull Valley, wants to require any presidential candidate to prove he or she is a "natural born citizen," as outlined in the Constitution. Even more, the secretary of state would have to certify with independent research that each candidate is eligible, or refuse to add their names to election ballots.... Burges isn't motivated by...

President Obama begins his second year in the White House with such anemic approval ratings, you'd think he was another Ronald Reagan: Among recent presidents, only the Gipper had fallen so low in the esteem of voters at this stage of his presidency. In the end, things worked out rather well for Reagan -- a landslide reelection, success in changing the course of the nation and the world, canonization by the Republican Party. In this context, the serenity of Obama's political advisers is understandable. It has been a tough year, and the president has had to make a host of...

Bruised if unbroken, President Barack Obama faces shrinking public confidence, increasingly negative views of the country's direction and far lower ratings than those he carried triumphantly into the White House a year ago this week. But it could be worse. Despite their disappointments, 53 percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll approve of Obama's job performance overall -- 15 points lower than his opening grade, but still just over half at the one-year mark. He remains personally popular, if far less so. And confidence in his leadership, as weakened as it is, greatly exceeds that in the Republicans...

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions. E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to...

There are many reasons why America has often proved a crucible for cults of personality: its trust in the gospel of individualism; its worship of personal success; its size, which requires inspirational figures to transcend regional differences; its faith in glamour, self-invention and the Elect. Whatever fraudulences Sarah Palin may encompass, her cult of personality is bona fide: the personification of an entire value system, she is an ideology incarnate, and Going Rogue is her manifesto. That said, calling Palin's belief system an ideology suggests a coherence it often lacks. This is partly because her political attitudes are largely defined...