Free Republic

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy. “On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged...

At a breakout session during the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, one of us posed a question to the audience: What do members of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have in common?Hint: it has something to do with the 2008 bailout of private banks by American taxpayers. The insidious stink from that sorry episode lingers to this day—on both parties. Now the reasons for outrage over the bailouts were different for each group. For the Tea Partiers it was an unwarranted intrusion into the free market; for the Occupiers a taxpayer-financed gift to wealthy executives they believe caused...

The world’s largest search engine is setting itself up to become the global arbiter of truth online.

The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign-finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections. A rare conviction of a Virginia campaign operative this month is part of a broader focus on cases in which candidates may be violating a federal ban on sharing strategic information with well-funded independent allies, Justice officials said. “The opportunity to commit the crime has increased dramatically,” said Justice spokesman Peter Carr. “Illegal coordination is difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders...

[Editor's note: The original copy of this article incorrectly identified Rep. Ellison as a Democrat from Wisconsin. The oversight has been corrected, and a formal apology has been sent to the people of Wisconsin.]Forget about the Tuesday following the first Monday of November… Let’s just run an online poll for future public elections. Maybe we can set up a phone bank, kinda like PBS donation drives, for people without access to the internet. Heck, let’s just do a show of hands: Hillary or Jeb for 2016?Okay, that might be a slight over-simplification of what Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) was suggesting, but...

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

President Obama’s temporary deportation amnesty will make it easier for illegal immigrants to improperly register and vote in elections, state elections officials testified to Congress on Thursday, saying that the driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers they will be granted create a major voting loophole.

“Confession is good for the soul,” said Mark Twain, “but it’s bad for the reputation.” Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 confessed to his top advisor, David Axelrod, “I’m just not very good at bull____ing.” Actually, he was very good at it. He told millions of Americans that he believed marriage was “a sacred union” between a man and a woman. He answered about marriage in Rick Warren’s question famed Civic Forum, going even further to say that “God is in the mix.” Four years later, he claimed he had evolved. We’ve all seen those Darwin fish with feet bumper devices....

When I asked her for an example, she replied, “Every morning, we hold a meeting about how to build that evening’s broadcast. We’ve been doing this for decades. Everybody talks about which stories we’re going to air, what the line-up looks like, and which reporters we’ll have live in the field and which ones will be filing taped pieces. In the past, the left-wing bias was always left unspoken. People just ‘got it,’ because they all thought the same. “Once Obama pulled ahead of Hillary and certainly once he became president,” she said, “the bias came out of the closet....

Excerpt in video of "Rolling Stone backtracks on UVA rape story"

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, let's keep our eye on the ball. The reason I've been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq 20 times — I've been up in the Kunar — I've been throughout that whole country, mostly in a helicopter and sometimes in a vehicle. The fact is we went there for one reason: to get those people who killed Americans, al-Qaida. We've decimated al-Qaida central. We have eliminated Osama bin Laden. That was our purpose. And in fact, in the meantime, what we said we would do, we would help train the Afghan military. It's their responsibility...

The Church’s conflict with non-Christian religions is to be expected. Israel’s monotheistic faith was in direct confrontation with the many gods of Babylon and Egypt. Christians were confronted with the many altars to the gods of the Greco-Roman Empire. Interfaith was not on the cards. This situation clearly reflected the fundamental differences between the many forms of Oneist paganism in which everything is God, and Twoist biblical faith, in which God is the separate Creator and everything else is creation. In one case everything is one and the same; in the other, God and creation are radically different. There is,...

As this campaign season draws to an end, doubtless many will comment on what was right and what went wrong for each party. Let me beat the crowd by stating whatever the outcomes of the Congressional and state races the notion of Republicans continuing to allow Democratic operatives posing as newsmen and women to act as moderators in candidate debates is one of the most inexplicably stupid blunders of all. And yet each election it is repeated. Let this be the last time. Here are some names and incidents that should be engraved forever on the RNC steps and in...

Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. “I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

Awesome" is a very common word used by Democratic operatives in Colorado when discussing potential voter fraud. Project Veritas Action went undercover in the Centennial State to reveal just how prone their mail-in ballot system is to likely voter fraud.

Right now, millions of Americans are disenfranchised by our political process. They can pay taxes and contribute to social security, but they can’t vote. They can be sentenced to life in prison, but they can’t vote. Every day, their bodies, lives and futures are affected by politicians and policies they did not choose. Who am I talking about? Felons? Guess again. We need to lower the voting age. This is a prime moment to ask ourselves whether our voting system is yet fully equitable. Last month, Scotland made history when, for the first time in British politics, 16- and 17-year...

White voters are more likely to say they support voter ID laws if primed with a picture of an African American voting, versus a White person voting, or no picture at all, according to a recent study. In order to examine the way bias might play a role in support for voter ID laws, researchers with the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication conducted an online survey in 2012 of a nationally representative sample of 1,436 adults.

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s super PAC, Next Gen Climate, wants to implement a “haircut strategy” against Republican campaigns in order to depress conservative turnout. “Our Republican Haircut Strategy — a precision focus on a specific harm in target Republican markets — we will seek to degrade Republican performance,” a memo from Steyer’s super PAC explains in a memo obtained by Politico that the RNC flagged as a “voter suppression” tactic. “The election results in many states may be as narrow as a few thousand votes, so we sought to determine whether we could have an impact at the margins of...

A bombshell hidden-camera video released Wednesday airs a claim that Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor has privately told gay rights activists he supports a redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbians unions. Pryor, who is in a tight reelection battle, has publicly maintained an anti-gay-marriage stance in the red state in order to stay electable. 'I support traditional marriage, and I've been pretty clear on that for a long time,' Sen. Mark Pryor said in a May 31 news broadcast on KHBS-TV40 in the city of Fort Smith. But one of the state's prominent gay rights leaders told an undercover...

We are now three weeks to Election Day, which means we are deep into another round of the voting wars—the ceaseless legislative, legal and regulatory battle over which Americans can vote, and when and where and with what paperwork they must do so. Here's a modest proposal: How about we finally call off the fight? Forget it, you say. There is no way the Republican Party and conservative movement, which have invested so much time and effort in restricting the franchise to serve partisan ends, are going to give up now. But what if there are some good reasons why...