Here are a few related links:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1399368/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1398507/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1397619/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1396921/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1396353/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1396346/posts
They also plan (or are currently doing it) to rate their search results based on 'quality', which means if it's from CBS it is high quality, but if it is from a conservative site, that is low quality. All you have to do is click through 150,000 hits to find the story.
I think that you can get around any political ranking of found items by subscribing to daily Google (news) Alerts with the keyword(s) of your choice. All the daily news centered around that keyword, relevant or otherwise, will be brought to you. For example, if you used the keyword "Republican-In-Name-Only," you would get conservative stuff relating to Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, and John McCain.