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“The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” — President Obama, remarks at a news conference, May 13, 2013 Once again, it appears that we must parse a few presidential words. We went through this question at length during the 2012 election, but perhaps a refresher course is in order. Notably, during a debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama said that he immediately told the American people that the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya “was an act of terror.” But now he says he called it...

Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican party's presidential nominee in 2012, received large applause as he was introduced on Friday's broadcast of The Tonight Show by host Jay Leno in his first appearance on the late night show since he lost to President Barack Obama in November. Leno asked Romney about the Obama administration's scandal-plagued week and gave him ample time to address the AP, IRS and Benghazi investigations. After making it clear he was done in politics, Romney was given nearly ten minutes to slam Obama's handling of Benghazi and his administration's involvement in other scandals. While discussing the...

WASHINGTON — During the 2012 presidential campaign, Harry Reid claimed to have intimate knowledge of what was secretly inside Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns. As President Obama’s campaign slammed Romney nearly every day for not releasing more tax returns, the Senate majority leader repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that, at one point in his life, Romney hadn’t paid taxes for almost a decade. He even did so from the floor of the U.S. Senate. “The word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years,” the Nevada Democrat claimed on the floor in August. “Let him prove...

One of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign co-chairmen used a leaked document from the IRS to attack GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, according to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). NOM, a pro-traditional marriage organization, claims the IRS leaked their 2008 confidential financial documents to the rival Human Rights Campaign. Those NOM documents were published on the Huffington Post on March 30, 2012. At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Solmonese was also a 2012 Obama campaign co-chairman. Both the Huffington Post's...

A Middle Tennessee company is at the center of a mystery that could turn the political race upside down. The Secret Service wants to know if a group hacked into Price Waterhouse Cooper's computer system in Franklin and got Mitt Romney's tax records. "Right through here and it was just lying on the floor there," Peter Burr recalled.

A prominent anti-gay marriage group is accusing the Obama administration's IRS of leaking private tax files that listed Mitt Romney as a contributor -- documents which were later published by a group whose president is tied to the Obama campaign. The National Organization for Marriage is on the warpath over the alleged breach. It has called for an IRS investigation and fired off a warning letter to the Human Rights Campaign, the pro-gay marriage group that first published the documents before taking them down. The group claims it appears somebody within the IRS fed the Human Rights Campaign the documents...

HOW did Harry Reid know during the 2012 campaign that "Romney had not paid his taxes?"

THIS COULD BE HUGE: What did the briefings Romney received say about Benghazi? After he got the GOP nomination, Romney was SUPPOSED to be getting PRESIDENTIAL briefings on national security. BUT HE DID NOT GET THEM UNTIL AFTER THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SANITIZED THE BENGHAZI ATTACK (from a Google news feed word-search):

After enduring the longest weekend of his previously unchallenged presidency, Barack Hussein Obama Monday covertly solicited advice from two of his most publicly criticized political adversaries, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Obama requested the meeting with Bush and Romney when his gaggle of hand picked aides failed to provide sound counsel after recent scandals with Benghazi and the IRS were forced into the liberal main stream media portraying the President as an emperor who was suddenly found to be wearing no clothes. “President Obama was blindsided by his friends in the left wing news media, and felt betrayed by...

Donald Trump said Monday that if the details surrounding the IRS targeting tea party groups and last week’s Benghazi hearing had come out last fall, President Barack Obama might not have won reelection. “This is a big, big story that is probably going to get a lot bigger,” Trump said of the IRS scandal on Fox News. “This is a terrible thing. It’s just not supposed to happen. They have laws against it. If this were somebody else, this would be the biggest story.” Trump continued: “I’ve been watching it for the last four days getting bigger and bigger and...

Just months after being slimed by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, Mitt Romney supporter and businessman Frank VanderSloot was informed that he was going to be audited not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but by the Labor Department as well. VanderSloot’s saga was told by columnist Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal last July. In April 2012, VanderSloot, who served as the national co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential finance committee, was one of eight Romney backers to be defamed as ”wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” in a post on the Obama campaign’s website. The post, entitled “Behind the...

JAY CARNEY: The republicans in this ongoing effort that began in the hours after the attack, when Mitt Romney put out a press release to try and take political advantage out of these deaths, and out of the attack in Benghazi. A move that was maligned even by members of his own party.

Michael Hirsh, one of Washington's ablest commentators on foreign affairs, has a provocative piece in the Atlantic arguing that Mitt Romney got a bum rap during the election campaign when he declared that Russia is America's No. 1 geopolitical foe, a clear and present danger to our national security. Romney's observation created an uproar. Russian President Vladimir Putin observed, "“I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems." At the same time, Romney was roundly mocked, including by yours truly, for indulging in...

I think it’s worth remembering how the Obama campaign sought to smear Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for raising legitimate questions about an egregious foreign policy failure that was made even uglier by false explanations. The Obama campaign accused Romney and Ryan of being “reckless and irresponsible” for focusing on Benghazi and the White House line about a video having caused the tragedy. “The entire reason this has become the political topic it is – it’s because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” said the Obama campaign’s most agressive flack, Stephanie Cutter. Brett Baier of Fox News tore her apart....

You just have to shake your head at some liberals who think that having a baby is like catching a disease. Mitt Romney gave the commencement address at Southern Virginia University, a largely Mormon school, where he told the grads to marry young and have children. He quoted Psalms 127: Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in...

Via BuzzFeed, here’s the latest in tolerance from last night’s Piers Morgan show. Mitt Romney spoke at a commencement for Southern Virginia University, whose student body is 92% Mormon, according to Hunter Schwartz, and Romney used his speech to talk about traditional Mormon pro-family values — or really, generic Christian family values. For quoting Psalms — by the way, an Old Testament book common to all Christians and Jews — the panel laughs Romney out of the room as a “religious fanatic�: The NIV has this as “children,� while the Ignatius Catholic version uses “sons� instead. Nonetheless, the panel starts...

<p>Cablevision Systems Corporation Go to your Portfolio » The announcement on Wednesday night came two months after TheBlaze began a campaign to get onto cable and satellite systems across the country. Cablevision, which has about three million subscribers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, is the largest system to sign the channel up since then. It is unclear if Cablevision was influenced by the campaign.</p>

During the 2012 election cycle I occasionally ran stories declaring that various Republicans being touted as White House material “will never be president.” Sarah Palin after her narcissistic Gabby Giffords meltdown; Newt Gingrich early in his race-baiting campaign; Mitt Romney after his British Olympics screw-up. I batted 1.000 for that cycle, but it was easy. In 2016, Republicans won’t be facing a Democratic incumbent, so somebody has a shot. I recently wrote that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will never be president, due to his out-of-control anger issues, but candidly, I think that’s my riskiest one yet. I feel no...

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would have won the presidency if the white and black turnout rates had stayed at their 2004 levels, according to a new analysis of 2012 election. “The battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same,” according to The Associated Press’s summary of research by William Frey, an expert at the Brookings Institution. Overall turnout declined from 62 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2012, Frey reported. The drop-off reduced the overall turnout by...

Originally Published 11/14/2012 -- Posted to Free Republic in response to a very kind request from a fellow FREEPER. My wife, Kasia, told me the story from her family’s history this morning. I already knew that her grandmother, after surviving the devastating hardships of World War II in Eastern Poland with two small children, being forcibly repatriated to a small village near Glogow, Poland (ethnically cleansed in today’s lexicon), and surviving to the see the return of her husband from Stalin’s Gulags (she had thought he was executed along with her two brothers by the NKVD/KGB ),and the loss of...

Paul Ryan says the Gang of Eight’s immigration-reform plan is “productive” and “getting us closer to a solution.” Ryan will give a speech on Monday in Chicago on immigration. Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a Democrat, will appear with him.

Even knowing that there are radicals in all movements, doesn’t lessen the startling admission recently by lesbian journalist Masha Gessen. On a radio show she actually admits that homosexual activists are lying about their radical political agenda. She says that they don’t want to access the institution of marriage; they want to radically redefine and eventually eliminate it. Here is what she recently said on a radio interview: “It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay...

A columnist at Slate made waves on Tuesday after bucking the party line of same-sex “marriage” advocates by penning a column calling for “marriage equality” to extend to legalized polygamy. After opening her column by lamenting the “tired refrain” from social conservatives that same-sex “marriage” opens the door to recognizing multiple-partner unions, Jillian Keenan quickly shows that she has adopted their logic herself. Kody Brown and his four 'wives' from the TLC show Sister Wives “While the Supreme Court and the rest of us are all focused on the human right of marriage equality, let’s not forget that the fight...

President Obama and his wife Michelle paid 18.4% in taxes on $608,611 in 2012. April 12 (Bloomberg) — President Obama, wife, Michelle, had adjusted gross income of $608,611 in 2012, paid $112,214 in taxes, according to federal tax returns released by White House. • Vice President Biden, wife, Jill, report $385,072 in adjusted gross income, paid $87,851 in federal taxes • Obamas donated $150,034, ~24.6% of adjusted gross income, to 33 charities Here are the Obama’s 2012 tax returns. What happened to the vitriol about Warren Buffett’s tax rate versus his secretary? The same holds true about the vitriol about...

Monday’s article on the nation’s least popular governors did not include Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, because he is not up for re-election in 2014. (Louisiana’s next gubernatorial election will be in 2015, and Mr. Jindal will not be eligible, having served two consecutive terms.) But recent surveys suggest that Mr. Jindal has become very unpopular in his home state amid a series of battles on fiscal policy. A March poll from Southern Media & Opinion Research put Mr. Jindal’s approval rating at just 38 percent, against 60 percent disapproval. His numbers had been similarly poor in a February survey...

Ed Morrisseyflagged this Politico piece earlier but I want to pay special attention to Huck's comments. Gabe Malor called BS on them on Twitter this morning. I think he's right. Huckabee's latest shot across the party establishment's bow: “The last two presidential elections, we had more moderate candidates, so if anything a lot of conservatives went to the polls reluctantly or just didn’t go at all,” said Huckabee in a separate interview. “If all of the evangelicals had showed up, it may have made a difference.”…Huckabee, like Santorum, was a bit incredulous at the attempt to fault social conservatives when...

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) says Democrats are "in the red" because they spent more than "everything we had" to get Barack Obama and others elected last November. In an e-mail to supporters, the DNC chair says: "We spent everything we had to spend in 2012 to win the White House, add seats in the Senate, and pick up seats in the House -- our job was to do everything we could to elect President Obama and other Democrats across the country." "We spent every last penny" - and more - Wasserman Schultz says: "The cardinal...

Just in case you missed the not-so-subtle message of Sarah Palin’s new video–”Loaded for Bear“–it appears onscreen fifteen seconds after the beginning and takes the form of a Politico headline proclaiming the one-time vice-presidential candidate a “kingmaker.” (Strangely, “kingmaker” is also one of the titles that pops up about fifteen seconds into the opening of the Colbert Report.) For such a persistent critic of the “lamestream media,” Palin has to rely on a wide variety of sources in the press to bolster her status as a power player in conservative politics. In addition to the headline in Politico, her video...

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, issued some words of advice for fellow GOPers: Get in the 21st century with same-sex-marriage issues. “We do have a platform, and we adhere to that platform,” Mr. Priebus said in a USA Today video. “But it doesn’t mean that we divide and subtract people from our party” who favor gay marriage. “I don’t believe we need to act like Old Testament heretics,” he said in the USA Today video. Rather, Republicans “have to strike a balance between principle and grace and respect.” His statements come as the U.S. Supreme Court is...

Speculation abounds surrounding the 2 billion rounds of ammunition purchased by the Department of Homeland Security and other national alphabet agencies in recent years. Moreover, as the White House and their cohorts in Congress contemplate the disarming of American citizens, the very assault weapons purported to be so dangerous in the hands of law abiding gun owners are being purchased in mass quantities by local and federal law enforcement agencies. So what is the purpose and motivation behind the government’s continued efforts to stockpile so much firepower? One frightening theory could explain what the President and his national security apparatus...

...First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to “millionaires and billionaires” and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans. This is a durable impression—witness Bill Clinton’s effective deployment of it more than 20 years ago and its continued resonance during the 2012 campaign when Team Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a plutocrat who delighted in shutting down factories and moving jobs overseas. Sure enough, in November exit polls, 81 percent of voters said that Barack Obama “cared for people like me”; a...

There are those who support – whether enthusiastically or reluctantly so – immigration reform on compassionate grounds or out of a desire to fix our broken system (border control; greater enforcement; changing our evaluation methods for who gets in and who doesn’t, etc.). Fair enough. But let’s be blunt: political gain is the driving factor. It’s no surprise that the three Republicans most publicly discussing the issue are all 2016 contenders: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Jeb Bush. We conservatives are told – by GOP strategists and consultants – that immigration reform is the key to winning the Latino vote....

Proponents of gay marriage, as they eagerly anticipate the Supreme CourtÂ’s examination of the issue next week, are chortling over recent polls that suggest the American publicÂ’s resistance to it is fast eroding. They pointed this week to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in which 58 percent of Americans support gay marriage and 37 percent oppose it. This is an almost exact reversal from a decade ago, they say, when polls then showed 55 percent of Americans opposed gay marriage and 37 percent supported it.Meanwhile, establishment Republicans, who have always been ambivalent about the issue, appear ready to wave the...

The Republican National Committee’s extended autopsy on the G.O.P.’s 2012 defeat, which officially abjures policy recommendations but then goes on to nudge the party toward supporting comprehensive immigration reform and gay marriage, is the highest-profile distillation of what I described last week as the “donorist” view of how the Republican Party needs to change. As Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, this the party elite’s vision of domestic policy reform, reflecting the views of people who are already “more likely to favor same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform on principle,” and who don’t “tend to have any major problems with the Republican economic...

Support for gay marriage reached a new high in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, marking a dramatic change in public attitudes on the subject across the past decade. Fifty-eight percent of Americans now say it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to wed. That number has grown sharply in ABC News/Washington Post polls, from a low of 32 percent in a 2004 survey of registered voters, advancing to a narrow majority for the first time only two years ago, and now up again to a significant majority for the first time. Most Americans, moreover, say the U.S....

Here's something of a surprise given Chris Christie's last-second Sandy-fueled embrace of President Obama during the final days of the 2012 presidential election, via Politico: Romney, whose supporters and aides were furious that Christie complimented the president’s response to Hurricane Sandy, has given the maximum contribution possible, $3,800, to the New Jersey governor’s reelection bid, a source familiar with the donation said. We probably shouldn't make too much of a $3,800 check—Romney didn't exactly have to sit down with his family and rework his budget to carve out the cash, and he's cut plenty of such checks in the past—but...

American Conservative Union Conservative Political Action Conference

“Learn from our mistakes and my mistakes,” former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the Conservative Political Action Convention on Friday. “It’s up to us to make sure that we learn from our mistakes and my mistakes,” Romney said. “And that we take advantage of that learning to make sure that we take back the nation, take back the White House, get the Senate and put in place conservative principles,” Romney said. …

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Returning for the first time to speak to a party stung by his defeat last year, Mitt Romney told an adoring crowd of conservative supporters Friday that he made mistakes in his 2012 campaign—without listing any—and advised the Republican Party to look to its governors for its renewal.

To give the Republicans a new lease of life requires an injection of youth to mix with experience. With Mitt Romney following his nominee predecessor John McCain’s fate in losing to President Obama back in November, the Republicans have another four years of soul-searching ahead of the next war for the White House in 2016. Many challenges face the party running up to the election. The inter-party divisions between the moderates, social conservatives and the Tea Party movement remain very much alive, they face a long four years of an emboldened Obama administration following its election victory, and the quest...

"The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals, as evidenced by the last two presidential elections. That’s what they think. That’s what say. That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012," Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) said in his address at CPAC this afternoon. Perry also slammed President Obama for undocumented illegal immigration being released from detention centers due to sequestration cuts. "This president's posture, it'd be laughable if he hadn't taken it one step too far, dangerously releasing criminals onto our streets to make a political point,"...

Doesn’t CPAC realize that 2012 already happened? Glance over the list of CPAC invitees and scheduled panels, and it makes you wonder if the organizers are aware that the 2012 election has already come and gone, not with the most glowing of possible results. Sometimes — as with the decision to exclude GOProud from the event altogether — one might be less charitably tempted to wonder whether the organizers knew that, say, 1998 had already come and gone. The event seems to have both feet firmly planted in the past. Here, from the schedule, is a summary of the events...

IN POLITICS, snubs are more important than invites. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican and social conservative, has been refused a speaking spot at the Conservative Political Action Conference to be held this week just outside Washington. CPAC, as it is known, is the Ames Straw Poll without the fun. The Ames Straw Poll held in Iowa has free drinks, free eats, free face painting and free country music followed by a bunch of speeches and a meaningless presidential straw poll. CPAC has a bunch of speeches and a meaningless presidential straw poll. Previous CPAC straw poll winners have...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush writes in a new book that Mitt Romney moved so far to the right on immigration that it proved "all but impossible" for the Republican presidential nominee to appeal to Hispanic voters last year. He says the nation needs to completely overhaul its immigration policies but cautions against providing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. In "Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution," Bush writes that the immigration debate holds serious consequences for the nation and members of his Republican party, calling fellow Republicans "remarkably tone-deaf when it comes to courting Hispanic voters — to...

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, the former campaign adviser to 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, has repeatedly argued that the Republican Party should be more inclusive — of almost everyone, it seems, except Sarah Palin. On Friday night’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” during its online “Overtime” segment, Schmidt tersely responded to a viewer question about McCain’s selection of Palin to be his running mate: MAHER: Steve Schmidt, ‘Is it possible you picked Sarah Palin the wrong year?’ Oh, my. ‘Could she have swung the women vote in 2012 enough to have put Romney in the White...

Mitt Romney says it "kills" him that he's not president. But he doesn't blame Superstorm Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or anything else on his loss to President Barack Obama--except his campaign's failure to connect with minority voters. “I lost my election because of my campaign," Romney said on "Fox News Sunday" in his first television interview since his November defeat, "not because of what anyone else did." The former Massachusetts governor refused place blame on Christie, who some Republicans say elevated Obama in his embrace of the president in the wake of the storm. Romney said his inability...

Mitt Romney is coming back into public view. This weekend the former Republican presidential candidate will appear on "Fox News Sunday," his first interview since losing to Barack Obama nearly four months ago. And on March 15, Romney will speak to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, the same event at which he declared himself a "severely conservative Republican governor" during a 2012 speech. Romney's re-emergence is likely to be met by a mixed response from Republicans. Yes, many respect him as a decent man who has done a lot of good things in his life. But just as...

Hard to argue with that assessment today of all days, but … Mitt Romney’s also been invited this year. The future doesn’t get any more limited than that. Also, since when is one’s prospects in the GOP a litmus test for whether you’re CPAC-worthy or not? Every time someone objects to GOPround’s exclusion, the rejoinder inevitably comes that it’s the “Conservative Political Action Conference,” not the “Republican Political Action Conference.” Okay, in that case, who cares about Christie’s future in the GOP? Either his ideas are conservative enough or they aren’t. Verdict: They aren’t. Or rather, one isn’t. New Jersey...

Meaning Romney Was Also An Idiot For Not Noticing ... Sometime before Election Day, before the debates, people already knew Stuart Stevens and his team were in over their heads. From the utter fiasco of Romney’s convention speech, which he stripped down to a thin gruel of bland forgettable pablum (and of course, stripped of any mention of America’s servicemen and women abroad), throwing aside Bush’s micro-targetting programmed wholesale, allowing his Hollywood aspirations to make him give the prime speaking slot at the RNC to Clint Eastwood (without any vetting) instead of people who would humanize his candidate, I just...

Via Mediaite, I’m going to cut this guy a bit of a break, for two reasons. One: He’s not denying that the media’s on Obama’s side. He’s quibbling with the phrase “in the tank,” which he seems to define, roughly, as being unwilling to ask uncomfortable questions under any circumstances. By that definition, he’s right — why, just this morning the White House press corps got Jay Carney to skedaddle from the podium by pressing him a bit too hard about OFA influence peddling. It’s not that they categorically refuse to report stories that are “unhelpful” to the administration, it’s...