Free Republic

In his latest book, Collision 2012, Dan Balz, a Washington Post writer, expresses his incredulity over “the inability” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to “humanize” its candidate. This is one reason why, in Balz’s estimation, Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. Yet there are two other reasons that he supplies to account for Romney’s defeat. The one pertains to the “technically superior” character of his rival’s campaign. The other is in regard to Romney’s “ambivalence” concerning his bid for the presidency. The first thing that should be noted is that if Romney’s consultants had difficulty in “humanizing” their...

Barack Obama, to hear his advisers tell it, has finally found The One he has been looking for: John McCain. “We have been looking literally for years for someone we can cut deals with, and finally someone has stepped up,” a White House official said. West Wing aides say they now talk with McCain roughly every other day. McCain, to hear fellow Republicans tell it, has finally found The Two he has needed to make such conversations worth the bother: Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who can actually get things done in the Senate, and Denis McDonough, a White House...

(Originally published March 28, 2012) When I first heard the murder of Trayvon Martin took place in Sanford, Florida the first person I thought about was the late, legendary sports editor of the AFRO, Sam Lacy, a member of the journalists’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. When I became a reporter for the AFRO in 1989 I was blessed to share the same office with Mr. Lacy; I couldn’t put a price on the education in journalism and history he gave me that first year. But, the series of stories he told me about his involvement in Jackie...

The small Scandinavian nation said it would be the first nation in NATO to draft females into military service after decades of confining its conscription activities to men. "We are sending a signal that, once again, Norway's thinking ahead when it comes to equality, Norway's foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide said in an interview Sunday, two days after the parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new law mandating the drafting of women. About 10% of Norway's military is currently female, but the goal is to take the number to 20% by 2020. Norway has long considered itself a forerunner...

The Taliban said they were opening an office in Qatar to start peace talks with the Afghan government and revive talks with the U.S., taking an important step toward ending a conflict that has dragged on for over a decade.

If this story has you scratching your head in confusion: Secretary of State John Kerry quietly acted last month to give Egypt $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid, deciding that this was in the national interest despite Egypt’s failure to meet democracy standards. http://news.yahoo.com/u-quietly-allows-military-aid-egypt-despite-rights-063310258.html;_ylt=A2KJ2PZbvrFRxWgA7YHQtDMD Kerry made the decision well before an Egyptian court this week convicted 43 democracy workers, including 16 Americans, in what the United States regards as a politically motivated case against pro-democracy non-governmental organizations. Rights groups believe Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi is retreating from democratic freedoms, notably in a new civil society law and in proposals for...

Rand Paul is the latest Republican to tell his party to open up to a wider range of views within its ranks. "The party can be big enough to allow people who don't all agree on every issue," Senator Paul told an audience in California, a state that produced three Republican presidents in the 20th century but now votes reliably Democratic. "When the Republican Party looks like the rest of America, we'll win again," he said. "It's not going to change who I am or what I talk about but I think we can be a big enough party to...

"I think the atmosphere, unlike when I tried it, is better, maybe for the wrong reason. The right reason is it's important to reform a broken system. I'm not sure a right reason is that in so doing we win votes. I mean when you do the right thing, I think you win votes, as opposed to doing something that's the right thing to win votes. Maybe there's no difference there. It seems like there is to me though." —George W. Bush on immigration reform, according to the Huffington Post.

To date, 80 North Carolina residents have squeezed their savings for the bragging right of owning the Tesla Model S electric car, some paying more than $100,000 for their g-force ride, but they may be among the last. A legislative proposal, backed by the N.C. Automobile Dealers Association, would make it illegal for Tesla, or any other car maker, to bypass dealerships and sell directly in the state. The proposal cuts at the heart of Tesla’s business model: selling luxury cars over the phone or Internet and then delivering them to the front door of high-net-worth customers. **SNIP** The whole...

A week ago, he noted on his Facebook page that his poll numbers after voting no on Toomey/Manchin put him somewhere south of “pond scum.” Today, this. He won’t face the voters again for five and a half years, but he shares a home state with Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly. They can hurt him by campaigning against him in 2018 more than they can anyone else in the Senate. No wonder he’s looking for ways to flip: Republican Sen. Jeff Flake told CNN he is willing to reverse his opposition to expanding background checks for guns if the Senate...

Alex Conant @AlexConant: "We haven't had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery". Mind you, he isn’t talking only about illegal immigrants. He’s talking about any non-citizen who lives in this country permanently, including millions of Green Card holders. And by implication: Conn Carroll @conncarroll: For those of you keeping score at home, Rubio spokesman @AlexConant just compared all Schumer-Rubio opponents to slave owners If this is Team Rubio’s strategy for winning over conservatives, good luck with that.

Foxx, who will receive the MTV Generation Award tonight, is wearing a shirt featuring the late Trayvon Martin's face on the red carpet. As we all know, Martin died last year after getting into an altercation with George Zimmerman, who became suspicious of the teenager's hoodie. The whole story was tragic on so many levels, but Foxx showed his support for the young man wh died before his time at tonight's show. "As a comedian, Academy award-winning actor and Grammy award-winning artist, Jamie Foxx is a triple threat superstar unlike any we've seen in a long time," Stephen Friedman, MTV...

A legal battle is brewing over whether California gold miners should be allowed to vacuum up the bottoms of rivers. The controversy is about a process called suction dredge mining, a practice popularized on the Discovery Channel show "Bering Sea Gold" but banned for the last four years in California, as state courts continue to weigh new environmental regulations. "Suction dredging is the best way to extract gold from the environment," said Craig Lindsay, a former dredger and president of the Western Mining Alliance, an advocacy group working to protect mining rights in Western States. Suction dredge mining is a...

Energy: In yet another green folly, the lawless Environmental Protection Agency continues to fine gasoline producers for not using cellulosic biofuels in quantities that don't exist, making only more pain at the pump. Last month, a federal court dealt a serious blow to the Environmental Protection Agency's renewable fuels push by ruling that the agency exceeded its authority by mandating refiners use cellulosic biofuels, which aren't commercially available. The EPA's lawless response in a lawless administration was to raise its requirements. In 2005 and 2007, Congress twice amended the Clean Air Act to establish a renewable fuel standard (RFS) that...

Why does it seem like wherever there is human suffering, some giant bank is making money off of it? According to a new report from the World Development Movement, Goldman Sachs made about 400 million dollars betting on food prices last year. Overall, 2012 was quite a banner year for Goldman Sachs. As I reported in a previous article, revenues for Goldman increased by about 30 percent in 2012 and the price of Goldman stock has risen by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months. It is estimated that the average banker at Goldman brought in a...

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has published an op-ed: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Sunstein located the source of Obama's inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution--though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa's ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt's proposals as their foundation. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights--not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals--was as follows: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak,...

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is sharing his regrets about his "fiscal-cliff" strategy, less than a month after the House bitterly swallowed a last-minute deal hatched in the Senate. In a private speech to the Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner said that he should have taken a different course after the November election by immediately demanding that the Senate produce a bill to avert the worst parts of a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that were due to hit on Jan. 1. Instead, Boehner delivered a formal speech at the Capitol on the day after President Obama won a...

(Reuters) - Ending a self-imposed silence about the November election, 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said on Wednesday that he and presidential running mate Mitt Romney lost not because of ideas, but due to ineffective communication.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. ... There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically...

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Deficit Is Basically Solved Walter HickeyJan. 10, 2013, 4:00 PMMany people think that fixing the deficit is a painful process that involves deep cuts to crucial programs. Some think the process is too hard, and it's not worth trying yet. That's not correct, according to a chart from from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Richard Kogan showing just how far the United States has come in the past two years. We've talked before about how the painless and most effective solution to the deficit is additional growth in GDP. As the recovery progresses and GDP...