Free Republic

If former CIA Director David Petraeus and his ex-deputy Michael Morell are recalled to testify on Benghazi, they can expect hard questions about the mortar attack on the CIA annex which killed two former Navy SEALs. Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the powerful House Intelligence Committee, is weighing whether to recall one or both of those officials over their Benghazi congressional testimony. Rogers said the evidence suggests a highly skilled team carried out the mortar strike. Fox News has confirmed five rounds were fired in under a minute, with three hitting the annex roof -- a target roughly the size...

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...

link only: http://weaselzippers.us/2013/11/23/if-voters-had-known-theyd-lose-their-insurance-theyd-have-voted-for-romney/

I don’t relish in this. I put these posts up to make the point that there will be absolutely no room for any arguments about how “we had no idea that the Obama putsch regime was malevolent” or “we were taken totally by surprise”. As I have been saying for years and years, PEOPLE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR GOVERNMENT, and an iniquitous gutter republic, such as yours (I renounce any association or connection to the abortion of an overthrown nation-state formerly called the United States of America - I am stateless) that has the temerity to STILL crow about being...

U.S. President Barack Obama never considered the idea of dropping Vice President Joe Biden from his 2012 re-election team and replacing him with Hillary Clinton, the White House said on Friday. “Double Down,” a new book on the 2012 campaign, says Obama’s top aides considered the notion but decided not to pursue it because it did not materially improve Obama’s odds. White House spokesman Jay Carney, pressed on the issue at his daily news briefing, did not deny that such an idea was floated within Obama’s re-election campaign. …

Melissa Joan Hart, the actress most well known for playing “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” told HuffPost Live that, because she tweeted her support of Mitt Romney, she was overwhelmed with hateful insults in 2012. “I got called every name in the book. And told I was, you know, they hope I die, and that they hope my children are gay which was, somehow, supposed to be some kind of punishment,” Hart said. …

A House Intelligence subcommittee will hear from CIA security officers who are expected to tell a much more detailed story about the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans last year, CNN has learned. The men, described by sources as former Navy SEALs, former Army Special Forces and former Marines, were under contract to guard CIA agents on the ground there. The security officers were among those who responded when Stevens' compound was attacked on the night of September 11, 2012. They will appear before lawmakers behind closed doors during the week of...

In the summer of 2011, Jon Bruning, an up-and-coming Nebraska politician with all-American good looks, was on his way to becoming the state’s next U.S. senator. But, in August, Bruning’s luck began to change. Nebraska’s attorney general since 2003 found himself on a growing list of politicians who have said something offensive and had the misfortune to have it caught on camera. In Bruning’s case, he compared welfare recipients to raccoons. In the audience was a tracker recording audio and video of the speech for an upstart political-research group called American Bridge 21st Century, a fledgling group out to collect...

...snip... The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution. If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.

A blast from the not-so-far past.

<p>There's been a lot of talk about the absence of a strong and visible anti-war movement, the way there was during the George W. Bush Presidency.</p> <p>While there are protests against intervention in Syria, in general the movement seems to be a lot weaker under Obama.</p>

The 2012 election indicates that the fault lines in American politics are the same as they have been since the mid 1990s, but surprises may be in store for the future. The Almanac of American Politics first appeared in 1972 with Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa, and Douglas Matthews as editors. The 22nd edition of the is now available for pre-order on Amazon. For the new 2014 edition, editors Michael Barone and Chuck McCutcheon are joined by Sean Trende and Josh Kraushaar.- The EditorsThe reelection of President Barack Obama in 2012 was only the second time in American history that...

Charging that Delaware officials have stopped cooperating with his investigation, Sen. Chuck Grassley on Friday sent a pointed letter to the state's Division of Revenue in which he outlines specific, outstanding questions that still swirl around the handling of former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell’s tax records. “On multiple occasions, my staff has requested a copy of your records retention policy, the opportunity to speak with [officials at the state's Division of Revenue] and other clarifications related to these matters. To date, you have failed to respond,” the letter from the Iowa Republican reads in part. In a case first...

...Interview after interview of IRS employees by congressional investigators began to expose the inconsistencies in the administration’s narrative. There were no “rogue” agents, only employees who followed the implicit or explicit directions of more senior IRS officials in Washington. When Washington told Cincinnati IRS employees to “hold” other tea party cases while officials in Washington scrutinized early “test cases” concerning the group, they did it. When Washington told them to assign a tea party case coordinator, they obliged. Employees also told investigators that the IRS chief counsel’s office was not, as the American people were first led to believe, merely...

Suddenly it is imperative that Congress investigate details surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. I've never felt that way before. But Jake Tapper's scoop changed my mind. To be clear, it isn't at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress "lifted its hurdles" on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN's report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal -- itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving...

The Republican-led House Ways and Means committee on Tuesday plans to hold the fifth hearing on the IRS’ inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. Viewers who watch Tuesday’s hearing can expect to see the congressional panel — especially its GOP members — draw out dramatic accounts of the worst experiences from the review process. A representative from one of the targeted groups said the review process was “pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,” while others complained that their applications had been lost or that the IRS demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, among other...

There were two big shocks for me on election night 2012: 1) Obama beat Romney. I had concluded that 2012 would look a lot like 2004, i.e. a 50-49 victory with about 290 Electoral votes. I did not subscribe to the landslide (i.e. Dick Morris) but did see a narrow Romney victory! 2) All of the talk about the "hispano" vote. I had looked at anecdotal evidence and did not see a "hispano" wave on election day. So I was surprised with all of the conventional wisdom that "hispanos" had reelected Obama. It turns out that "hispanos" did not really...

See for yourself. Issa’s committee was told last year that the report would be ready in September, two months before the election. Eight months later, the bomb finally dropped. Why? Did the IG initially underestimate the volume of malfeasance and how long it would take to dig it up? Or are there other, more cynical reasons?Even if the report wasn’t ready, Issa claims the IG had a statutory obligation to keep Congress updated on its findings as they were made. He didn’t. Why not? Issa is referring to part of the Inspector General Act that requires watchdogs to report serious...

Voter ID didn’t reduce turnout, but the IRS may have. By John Fund The 2012 election season was filled with angry cries of “voter suppression,” almost all of them regarding attempts by states to require voter ID and otherwise improve ballot integrity. Bill Clinton warned that “there has never been — in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting — the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Democratic-party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “photo-ID laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”

Tempers flared in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, with members on both sides of the aisle castigating the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative groups with special scrutiny, and then hiding the practice from Congress.Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee's chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.But despite the IRS recognizing in May 2012 that its employees were treating right-wing groups differently from other organizations, Issa said, IRS personnel withheld those conclusions from legislators.'Just yesterday the committee interviewed...