Free Republic

A few months ago, Brian McFadden’s weekly comic strip in the Sunday Times offered ways for Mitt Romney to improve his image. One panel showed him with me on the set of Inside the Actors Studio, under the heading “Take Acting Lessons to Appear More Relatable.” Initially amused by this unsolicited enlistment, I’ve found myself returning spontaneously and with increasing frequency to the task, sometimes starting awake in the middle of the night with acting advice for the candidate. Convinced that the only way to exorcise this possession is to confront it, I offer the following counsel. In this media-saturated...

When Barack Obama made his unsurprising announcement today that he has finally evolved far enough to endorse homosexual marriage, ironically an evolutionary dead end, he made two other interesting statements. First, he attributes his evolution to his Christian faith. This is sort of odd, speaking as a Trinitarian Christian, because it puts Christ in the position of disavowing himself. This is not surprising. Anyone who learned Christian theology from Jeremiah Wright is bound to have imbibed a substantial number of heresies. The most surprising statement was this: [W]hen I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who...

The White House crowed on Friday about the unemployment rate dropping a 10th of a percent. At the same time, the number of people out of the labor force reached a record high. The Obama administration can report all the funny numbers it wants, but the American people know in their guts that things are getting much worse. A recovering economy is supposed to create jobs, not shed them. According to government math, 115,000 new jobs were added in April. But over the same period, 522,000 people dropped out of the labor force and were not counted as unemployed. This...

I cannot logically justify voting for Romney. I do not "hate" him (as mentioned in this video), but I love the truth of this musical vid.

President Obama and Vice President Biden released their tax returns today, ahead of Tax Day, which is on April 16 this year (since April 15 falls on a Sunday). According to the White House, "Together, [the Bidens] reported adjusted gross income of $379,035. The Bidens paid $87,900 in total federal tax for 2011. They paid $13,843 in Delaware income tax and $3,614 in Virginia income tax. The Bidens contributed $5,540 to charity in 2011." In other words, the Bidens donated less than 1.5 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity. The president and his family were more charitable, giving...

Yesterday the president went out of his way to try to exert maximum pressure on the Supreme Court judges. Where was the uproar? “ In an unprecedented moment, Obama left for posterity, his tape showing how he overstepped the law, as you can see here. First of all, he lied: in reality, the health care law, the Affordable Care Act, ACA, was not passed unanimously as he lied. The ACA was passed by a party-line vote in the Senate and seven votes in the House, and what is more striking is that it passed without NO support of ANY of...

-snip- Although Fehrnstrom is one of Romney’s longest-serving aides, he, like his boss, has no roots in the conservative movement. Fehrnstrom started out as a reporter covering alderman meetings in Boston and lives in liberal Brookline, Mass. His work as a GOP operative has been confined to New England — a region, as he often notes, that’s “pretty rocky terrain for Republicans.” To some influential conservatives, Fehrnstrom is an enigma. It’s not that conservatives don’t trust him. It’s that some don’t even know him. “I’ve never heard of him. I’ve been going to conservative meetings since I was knee-high to...

Think about this: A high-profile sheriff orders a team of former law enforcement officials to examine whether the president is truly a natural born citizen and that he has the constitutional and legal right to occupy the White House. Their official report is that Mr. Obama’s documents are shoddy and he likely engaged in deliberate fraud. And yet, most of the American press corps doesn’t believe this is an important news story? The liberal media has become rotten to the core. Ironically, the foreign press reported widely on the story. For example, Pravda — that’s right, the former official organ...

WALTER KIRN'S column in GQ on Mitt Romney and Mormonism is to my mind far and away the most interesting meditation on the subject this campaign season. Unlike most commentators, Mr Kirn, who was an observant Mormon for a few years after his family converted to Mormonism when he was a teen... SNIP ...Mr Santorum obviously does not hesitate to argue for his favoured policies on narrowly sectarian grounds. In contrast, America's present wariness of Mormonism, which is indeed analogous to mid-century wariness of Catholicism, requires that Mr Romney argue his case on grounds acceptable to a relatively wide range...

Obama’s phony recoveryBy Dick Morris - 02/14/12 06:11 PM ET President Obama, faced with no recovery from the recession as he enters an election year, has come up with a handy political gimmick: Fake the statistics. The economic data that portend recovery are totally and completely inventions of Obama’s political operation. The reality is that no recovery is taking place! Economist James Fitzgibbon, of the Highlander Fund, explains how cooked the economic statistics on which the president bases his claims of recovery really are. Begin with “gains” in the stock market. Fitzgibbon explains that they are no indication of changes...

They found the Ark of the Covenant where Moses placed the 10 Commandments, in a cave under Golgotha. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior. Who would have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. 1 Tim 2:3-6 Rom 3:28-30 Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes of the...

JournalTimes.com No danger to students, authorities say as investigation continues Deputies: Parkside student confesses to creating list CHRISTINE WON and MICHAEL BURKE christine.won@journaltimes.com, mburke@journaltimes.com | Posted: Friday, February 3, 2012 4:16 pm SOMERS — Following days of reported hate crimes and heightened security at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, a student has confessed to creating the list threatening black students because she wanted greater attention to the issue, according to authorities Friday night. The suspect, whose identity was being withheld for her protection, reportedly told authorities she created the fliers — which listed 13 black students by name and threatened they...

WASHINGTON — The burst of job growth in January gives President Obama a fresh — but tricky — opportunity to revise the grim economic narrative of his presidency while offering Mitt Romney a choice: embrace a new optimism or campaign against a sinking economy even as it shows signs of turning around. The Labor Department reported on Friday that the unemployment rate had fallen all the way back to the level of President Obama’s first full month in office, to 8.3 percent, from a high of 10 percent in late 2009. Yet unemployment also remains higher than it has been...

The date was January 2, 2010 and I started the year with some thoughts on Barack Obama that ended up going around the world a couple of times. Insofar as Friday 22nd is Good Friday, I am going to post those thoughts again in lieu of an original commentary. Feel free to share this with friends and family.The date was January 2, 2010 and I started the year with some thoughts on Barack Obama that ended up going around the world a couple of times. Insofar as Friday 22nd is Good Friday, I am going to post those thoughts again...

Mitt Romney could face new questions about his overseas investments after a campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that his campaign is revising his financial disclosure forms to report more than a half dozen offshore holdings, including income from a multi-million dollar Swiss bank account that was not disclosed last year. The tax returns released by the Romney campaign this week showed that the Ann Romney Blind Trust had reported $1,783 in interest income from a bank account held at UBS in Switzerland in 2010. But the Swiss bank account -- as well as other offshore investments in the Cayman...

If you Google “Mitt Romney is a phony”, you get 102,000 hits. If you do the same search on “Rick Perry”, you get 51,800; “Ron Paul”, 32,300; and “Newt Gingrich”, 3,960. At the opposite end of the “authenticity” spectrum, if you Google “Herman Cain is a phony”, you get 8 hits. When someone comes across as phony, it is because there is something that they are hiding. What Mitt Romney is hiding is that, while he passionately wants to have the most “strategic” executive job on the planet (and he may well get it), he is not a deep strategic...

What is the biggest political lie of 2011? There are so many to choose from. I admit I was skeptical when PolitiFact said it was ready to declare the “Lie of the Year 2011.” After all, its record for bashing conservatives was pretty much unblemished. Two years ago, the scribes who put together PolitiFact selected Sarah Palin’s comment about “death panels” as the biggest lie of 2009. In 2010, they once again sprang to the defense of Obamacare, pooh-poohing claims that it represented a “government takeover of health care” as the year’s biggest falsehood. So imagine my surprise when the...

HONOLULU — President Barack Obama paid his respects at Pearl Harbor on Thursday, offering a solemn tribute to the thousands of Americans killed on the “date which will live in infamy.” The president swapped his casual vacation outfit for a dark suit as he and the first lady toured the memorial on his first visit to the site since he came here in late 2008 as president-elect.

Obama and Jay Carney praise bipartisanship on the Senate payroll tax cut bill, yet Obama eschewed the bipartisan Simpson (R)-Bowles (D) plan, that was supported by Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. Here is how it goes: When Tea Partiers say no to a bill, that's unacceptable to Obama, Reid and Pelosi, but when Progressives that make up the base of tge Democrat Party effectively kill Simpson-Bowles then that is ok with Obama, Reid and Pelosi. The Dem base is what caused them to cave, despite some others being against it. Here's more of how it goes in...

His payroll tax cut plan might be stuck in Congress, but President Obama found another way to boost consumer spending Wednesday: He went Christmas shopping. (KEVIN LAMARQUE - REUTERS) Obama ducked out of the White House at about 12:45 p.m. for a quick jaunt into Virginia, where he dropped more than $235 in less than an hour. The excursion began at some big box stores at Potomac Yards in Alexandria. With his wife Michelle and two daughters already vacationing in Hawaii, Obama brought the only remaining member of the family with him: Bo, the Portuguese water dog. It was a...