Free Republic

The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama dodged a politically perilous "bullet" when he declined to nominate Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State. Had he done so, the President would have provided his critics a high-profile platform for exposing and critiquing his administration's conduct with respect to Benghazigate and the larger, dangerous practice of "engaging" Islamists, of which it was a particularly dismal example. Yet, President Obama is reportedly intent on creating what may prove to be a similar "teachable moment" by nominating former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to replace Leon Panetta as Secretary of Defense. Sen. Hagel...

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA Did you know.... 1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold 2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html 4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886 5....

NORMAN, Okla. -- Remember the hanging chad problem? Well, we don't have to worry about it any more. The solution? Electronic voting machines. There are, however, a couple new problems. One, the programming code used to count the votes is a secret from everyone outside the company making the machines. Two, these companies aren't exactly impartial. Diebold Inc. is the second-largest maker of touch-screen voting machines in the country. Diebold's CEO is Walley O'Dell, who recently stated that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." He recently held a $10,000-a-plate Bush fund-raiser...

The research and activism arm of BlackBox Voting.com   CONTENTSIntroductionPart 1 - Can the votes be changed?Part 2 - Can the password be bypassed?Part 3 ? Can the audit log be altered? ************* Introduction According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system. The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how...

In what's being called a Christmas 'miracle' by Teri Robert's family, just hours before they planned to end her life on Dec. 22, the beloved wife, mother and grandmother opened her eyes. Roberts still faces an uphill battle after she lost four of her limbs from her illness. Teri Roberts' grieving family had already come to terms with her likely death, planning to turn off her ventilator, when they say a "miracle" happened. The 56-year-old wife, mother and grandmother, had been in a spiraling coma for 12 days when just four hours before her family planned to pull the plug,...

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Gunfire erupted during a crowded party in a vacant house in Omaha early Saturday, leaving three people dead and five wounded, and most witnesses refusing to help investigators, according to police. As many as 50 people were in and around the small home when shots were fired "by multiple shooters" around 2 a.m., Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said. No arrests have been made, and police said they were confident the shootings were gang-related.

One of the women killed early Saturday was Jakela Foster, 19, The World-Herald has learned. Foster had a young son, and according to her Facebook page, was a sales associate at DialAmerica, a telemarketing firm. She had studied culinary arts at Metropolitan Community College. A party at a northeast Omaha house turned into a killing scene early Saturday when, police said, eight people were shot, including two women who died. Hours earlier, two more people were shot in a house nearby, also during a party, police said. That 10 people were shot within 4½ hours in the Prospect Hill neighborhood...

One of the primary health insurance companies in Nebraska and Iowa is folding, after federal grants and loans were cut off in mid-December. The lack of emergency loan money has put CoOpportunity Health Care on the ropes, according to the Iowa Insurance Commission. Policy holders are scrambling to switch to one of the only two remaining health insurance companies in Nebraska – Coventry or Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

After failing probation, Charlie Rogers didn’t show up for her 90-day jail sentence Thursday. Rogers, 36, was sentenced to a week in jail and two years’ probation in April 2013 for faking an anti-gay hate crime that stunned Lincoln and captured the country’s attention the summer before. Rogers, a lesbian and former Nebraska basketball star, lied to police when she told them three men broke into her house on July 22, 2012, tied her up, carved anti-gay slurs into her skin and tried to light the house on fire. Lancaster County Court Judge Gale Pokorny, who has since retired, made...

Walking into a public health clinic for information about abortion isn't an easy choice to make. A group of Nebraska senators want to make sure anyone who does, has the facts they need to possibly reconsider. Senator Bill Kintner introduced a bill Monday that would require updated informed consent laws to be made public; both online and on the doors of any clinic that performs abortions. Those forms remind women that it's against the law for anyone to be pressured to have an abortion. So could this help bring down abortion rates? Kintner thinks so. "It might yes, it might....

Now that the U.S. economy is showing signs of life, President Obama is not wasting a moment to take credit for this recovery. “The steps we took nearly six years ago to rescue our economy and rebuild it on a new foundation helped make 2014 the strongest year for job growth since the 1990’s,” he said in a recent speech. For sure we can expect the president to continue this message in his upcoming State of the Union address, as he works to rebuild his credibility, thinking toward his final two years in office and his place in history. And...

For a symbolic issue, the Keystone pipeline has sure caused a lot of damage—to Canadian-American relations, to Democrats, to President Obama. And it feeds, underscores, or reflects a variety of political divisions, some of them quite bitter. I’ll get to Keystone’s victims shortly, but first the explanation of why the issue is purely symbolic. If the pipeline is built, it will carry oil from northern Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. If it is not built, the crude oil will be transported either to Canada’s west coast or to New Brunswick, a maritime province in the east, where it...

President Barack Obama will veto the Keystone XL bill if Congress passes a measure green-lighting the oil pipeline, White House press secretary Josh Earnest announced on Tuesday. Newly minted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline project as the first of the new Congress. The bill has some bipartisan support, but environmentalists and progressives have heavily lobbied the White House to oppose the pipeline.... Earnest added that the White House reviewed the text of the bill to authorize the pipeline on Monday....

Video at link. (CNSNews.com) – Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, says President Barack Obama is “factually incorrect” to say that the Keystone XL Pipeline will not benefit Americans. At the press conference in Washington Tuesday, CNSNews.com asked Gerard about Obama’s remarks in November about the pipeline, which, if approved, would transport crude oil from Canada and from two U.S. states to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, held a press conference with reporters on Jan. 6, 2015 following his annual State of American Energy speech in Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com/Penny...

President Obama said Tuesday he would veto any bill that tries to start construction on the Keystone XL pipeline before a federal review is finished — a process in its seventh year. You can argue whether Obama is being sincere in his desire to follow procedure, or just trying to run out the clock so he doesn't have to make a decision, but by any measure, six-plus years is a long time. Jason Russell tries to put this in perspective at the Washington Examiner by calculating what other things someone could do while Obama's reviews held up the pipeline. Among...

Democrats launched the first filibuster of the new Congress on Thursday, objecting to the GOP’s effort to try to bring the Keystone XL pipeline bill to the floor early next week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to schedule action early next week on the bill, and promised an open process, including allowing both sides to offer amendments to the bill — an attempt to break with the previous few years, when Democrats controlled the floor and kept a tight lid on amendments. But Democrats objected to Mr. McConnell’s request, forcing him to begin the procedure for breaking a filibuster.

**SNIP** Sharpton said, “This is the largest majority Republicans have had since the 1920s, and what will happen, and how we deal with our interests, when we have both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives dominated by the Republicans — one, we need to realize and recognize, had we voted like we should have we wouldn’t be here,” he said. “But secondly, all is not lost, the president can use veto power, which he already said he is going to do about the Keystone Pipeline legislation, and executive action.” “Even though the legislature is tied down, the executive...

Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation face a difficult balancing act. Their supporters who are advocates of renewable energy anticipate them to vote against the pipeline. President Obama has threatened to veto the present pipeline bill due to the fact it quick-circuits his administration’s assessment course of action. But Minnesota politicians who oppose the pipeline flirt with a attainable lengthy-term raise in oil train traffic on tracks that quite a few constituents say are already overloaded with railcars carrying flammable fuel. “It is a precarious position to be against oil train transport and to be against the Keystone pipeline,”...

It was 2008 when TransCanada initially filed an application with the U.S. government to construct the multibillion-dollar Keystone XL pipeline to carry up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. Illinois Senator Barack Obama had just secured the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party. Hurricane Ike made landfall, Usain Bolt set world records at the summer Olympics, and the Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. More than six years and many significant historical events later, TransCanada still does not have approval to build an environmentally safe pipeline that would create jobs and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress and a state supreme court have thrown the political hot potato known as Keystone XL straight back onto President Barack Obama's lap. So loath is Obama to making a decision about the proposed oil pipeline that deliberations have entered their sixth year — a period nearly as long as Obama's time in office. He's blamed the seemingly endless delays on bureaucratic formalities and parochial issues in Nebraska, even when skeptics claimed that the politics of the next election were giving the president cold feet. Now the election is over, the Nebraska issue is resolved,...