Free Republic

Most comedians would kill to create a character which impacted not just his or her own career but the national conversation. Others, like Tina Fey, would rather not be reminded of their creation - assuming said creation is former Gov. Sarah Palin.

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Just a week before the New Year, Obama enjoyed his highest approval ratings of 2012. According to Gallup, 58% of Americans approved of the job Obama was doing. Survey results released today by Gallup, though, show Obama's approval rating has plummeted to just 49%. It is a dramatic drop, especially coming over a holiday period when people traditionally pay little attention to politics. Four years ago, at his first inauguration, a full 69% of Americans approved of Obama. The drop in Obama's approval from 4 years ago is understandable, given the sluggish economy and the hope American's had as his...

NASHVILLE, Tenn.- Metro Police patrol officers will soon carry their own rifles in their police cars. It's a new and affordable option Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson said will be implemented almost immediately after some training. Since last month's massacre of 26 people including 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School security has changed all over the country. In Nashville, the Metro Police Department is taking steps to better arm first responding officers. "We're not going to be sitting outside a school in an active killer situation. We're going to respond to that situation. We're going to make a tactical...

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was indicted Friday on charges that he used his office for personal gain, accepting payoffs, free trips and gratuities from contractors while the city was struggling to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The charges against Nagin are the outgrowth of a City Hall corruption investigation that already has resulted in guilty pleas by two former city officials and two businessmen and a prison sentence for a former city vendor.

THEY are the unlikeliest double act since Tom and Jerry. One is quiet and thoughtful, the other makes PT Barnum look like Marcel Marceau. One has great power and responsibility, the other reaches for the foghorn in a New York minute. When placed beside this pair, even the shotgun wedding of John McCain and Sarah Palin begins to look sensible. As far as we know, Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, did not put in a personal plea for Piers Morgan, second-best-known host of CNN's Tonight, to join him in a quest to bring in serious and lasting...

This Humean notion of Americanism that acknowledges the right of a self-governing people to secede is framed in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is primarily a document justifying secession, but it has been thoroughly corrupted by Lincoln’s reading of it and the ritualistic repetition and expansion of that reading. The Lincoln tradition reads the Declaration as affirming a metaphysical doctrine of individual rights (all men are created equal) and takes this to be the fundamental symbol of the American regime, trumping all other symbols, including the symbol of moral excellence internal to those inherited moral communities protected by the...

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell granted staunch gun rights supporter Michael Bloomberg a platform to blast the NRA as "stupid", and brush aside gun-owning Americans as a radical minority. O'Donnell set up the New York City mayor to accuse the gun rights group of being under the thumb of gun manufacturers. The CBS anchors also took a more subdued approach to the Bloomberg segment, compared to their contentious interview of NRA President David Keene just minutes earlier. Co-anchor Charlie Rose led the segment with a softball question to the billionaire politician [audio clips from the...

Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, especially in the U.K.. and in the United States, Congress has already approved the use of drones for domestic surveillance. ... New York-based artist Adam Harvey doesn’t like it one bit. So he’s taken it upon himself to design anti-surveillance clothing to foil government snoopers. An Invisibility Cloak For Heat Harvey has been looking at the effects of such surveillance on culture for some time. Last year he designed a kind of face makeup called CVDazzle to avert face-recognition software. In the spirit of fooling cameras – and messing with surveillance – Harvey has now come...

Barack Obama's Jobs Council hit a notable milestone on Thursday: one year without an official meeting. The 26-member panel is also set to expire at the end of the month, unless Obama extends its tenure. The group, formally known as the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, last convened on Jan. 17, 2012 for a White House session where it presented formal recommendations to Obama. It was the panel's fourth official meeting since it was created in early 2011. A spokesman for Jobs Council chairman Jeffrey Immelt, who's the CEO of General Electric, referred questions about the panel's future to...

Running off at the typewriter. … Thank goodness for Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o and his fake girlfriend, both of whom have been the genesis of some of the best comedic lines since the invention of Twitter. Here are the top 10 one-liners that fellow tweeters and I came up with this week: •Now we know who was sitting in Clint Eastwood's empty chair: It was Manti Te'o's girlfriend. Two people most disappointed Manti Te'o's girlfriend doesn't exist: (1) Manti Te'o (2) Brent Musburger. Who has a better chance of being a starting quarterback in the NFL next year —...

Donald Trump says he recorded a YouTube endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu for re-election because the Israeli prime minister asked him to. Trump tells Shalom TV that Netanyahu called and asked if he would "do an ad or a statement" to support his campaign in next week's Israeli parliamentary election.

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) made a strenuous argument for limiting the number of bullets a given gun ought to be able to fire before needing to be reloaded. “I find the argument that a person might need more than two or three shots to defend himself from an assailant unconvincing,” Nadler said. “I mean, if you're that bad of a shot giving you more bullets seems like it would be a greater threat to public safety than if the attacker murders you.” Nadler maintained that “a dispassionate look at the numbers is what I'm arguing for. A victim wildly spraying...

It's time to STAND AND FIGHT for freedom! That's why I'm going on Sean Hannity's show tonight for one full hour. If you want to hear the facts about gun control's failures, and hear the truth about how NRA is fighting to make our families, homes, schools and communities safer, then I urge you to watch. If you can't watch tonight, record it so you can watch it this weekend. And if you want to help NRA win the battle to protect the Second Amendment, please tell family, friends and fellow gun owners to watch as well. The nightmare battle...

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) -- A federal judge on Friday barred the IRS from imposing a series of new regulations, including a competency exam, on hundreds of thousands of tax preparers. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington ruled against the IRS in favor of three tax preparers who filed suit last year with the help of a libertarian legal group, the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for Justice. Since 2011, in response to what it says has been a growing problem of poorly done returns, the IRS has sought to impose a series of new regulations on tax preparers. That included...

It's been almost exactly four years since George W. Bush left the White House, yet liberal media members still can't resist taking a poke at him when the opportunity presents itself. On Thursday's Hardball, MSNBC's Chris Matthews accused the former President of "speaking English as a second language" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary): http://www.mrctv.org/videos/chris-matthews-accuses-george-w-bush-speaking-english-second-language> Coming back from a commercial break, Matthews introduced Bush's first inaugural address with a brief discussion of the Florida recount debacle. After a short clip of Bush's speech, Matthews swiped, "You know, he seemed to be speaking English as a second language there, didn't...

A pet grizzly cub is on the lam after escaping from its Naples, Fla., home. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is leading the search for the 125-pound cub, which disappeared from its habitat Tuesday afternoon. Dexter Osborn, the owner of the cub, has two other bears and tours the country with an educational show, “A Grizzly Experience,” visiting festivals, fairs and sport shows, according to his website.

here's PolitiFact's original "fact check" on the matter: [Mitt Romney] Says Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs. (link at article) Ok. Now here's what the Reuters reported earlier this week: Fiat (FIA.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler expect to roll out at least 100,000 Jeeps in China when production starts in 2014 as they seek to catch up with rivals in the world's biggest car market. ... "We expect production of around 100,000 Jeeps per year which is expandable to 200,000," [Chrysler CEO Sergio] Marchionne, who...

Despite constant hammering by the national news media, the National Rifle Association has a favorability rating of 54 percent in the latest Gallup survey, slightly higher than President Obama's rating of 53 percent. While those figures are within the poll's margin of error, they show that the NRA's popularity is in the same range as that of the Democratic president who issued 23 executive orders to accomplish goals the gun-rights group has promised to combat in “the fight of the century.” According to an article by Frank Newport, the Gallup poll -- which was conducted Dec. 19-22 -- showed that...