Free Republic

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Former CIA Director David Petraeus reveals that he “screwed up royally” in having an affair with his biographer.

It is only two weeks since his re-election, and his second term remains two months away, but Barack Obama is already blundering again on the world stage, with the kind of gaffes that would have been plastered on the front page of The New York Times if they had been committed by George W. Bush when he was in the White House. Obama's first term was littered with foreign policy gaffes, and there is every chance the second term will be more of the same. On his trip to Asia this week, President Obama struggled to pronounce the name of...

Mickey’s Assignment Desk–Ben Smith, We Have Your Next Column! Why has Obama’s public campaign been so ineffective for the past month? Couldn’t someone digitally sophisticated and untanked–e.g. Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith–make a good argument that the President was led astray by the overhyped reality and promise of Internet Politics. Specifically, a) he exaggerated the power of his Web-friendly left wing; b) he overestimated the force of attack lines the Web-friendly left wing would find convincing, like pointing out, when discussing Iran in Debate #3, that Romney had once “invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the...

Benghazi-gate: The president reveals a disturbing callousness toward our war dead on yet another talk show. When will he tell jihadists to stop clinging to their guns and religion and fearing people not like them? During the second presidential debate President Obama told challenger Mitt Romney that he found suggestions that he and his administration were covering up the truth about the terrorist attack on Benghazi for political reasons "offensive." He said he was the one who had to greet the coffins when they came home. Then they deserve more honor, respect and protection than they were given by their...

So the other morning a reader e-mails me a picture of a handful of women demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Ohio Republican party — in what we expert analysts round about this point in the quadrennial election cycle like to call the critical battleground of the Buckeye State. The women each wore two giant pieces of cardboard, front and back. Ah, I thought, a timely protest. These activists understand that, with Obama’s flatline economy drifting inexorably to a $20 trillion federal debt, we’ll soon be living in cardboard shacks in shantytowns in the parking lot of the bankrupt Solyndra...

Maybe NBC wallows in loony tunes liberal propaganda because its personnel lacks the competence required for factual reporting. For example: NBC News was one of the first to learn of the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong on Saturday, but instead announced the death of astronaut Neil… Young. “Astronaut Neil Young, first man to walk on moon, dies at age 82,” read the NBC News headline shortly after 3 pm EST, which was tweeted out and picked up by thousands of others before it was changed. As a refresher, Neil Young is a 66-year-old rock star who is very much alive.

2nd 'potatoe' moment this week for campaign in Ohio If Barack Obama carries the key swing state of Ohio in November, it won’t be because he and his supporters know how to spell. Today, at a Republican rally in Powell, Ohio, an airplane pulling a banner attempted to capitalize on Mitt Romney’s “joke” yesterday in Michigan about not needing to show his birth certificate. The Democrats have responded by accusing Romney of having joined the “birthers,” and the airplane banner continued that theme. Unfortunately, the supporters who sponsored the banner – MoveOn.org, as reported by a Los Angeles Times reporter...

While I gave NBC News credit for breaking the news of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s death, someone at NBCNews.com screwed up big time with this headline, confusing Neil Armstrong and Neil Young: No, Neil Young was not an astronaut, and is not dead. The current version of the story has the following correction: “Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story included the wrong name in the headline.”

No wonder Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill wanted to run against Rep. Todd Akin, even investing in his GOP primary victory two weeks ago by spending $2 million on ads that described him as “too conservative.’’ Missouri Republicans saw that as a plus, just as she’d hoped. But after his Sunday comment that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy, even some in the GOP are calling for him to step aside. The Republican lawmaker was trying to explain why he opposes abortion in cases of rape, but instead marched straight into the tar pits, where he will hopefully serve as a...

Mitt Romney's week-long international trip resulted in unrelentingly negative coverage from the big three broadcast networks, a stark change from the glowing press awarded to then-candidate Barack Obama's world tour in 2008. While "MSM" pr0mod Obama rock star (from the Associated Press: "It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic...."), Romney endured a focus on gaffes and the trivial.

As Telegraph readers will recall, one of the earliest actions of the Obama presidency when it came to office in 2009 was to return a bust of Sir Winston Churchill to the British Embassy, an extraordinary move considering the huge admiration for the wartime leader on both sides of the Atlantic. Tim Shipman, The Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent at the time (now Deputy Political Editor at The Daily Mail), was the first to break the story: A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's...

One cannot help noticing the struggle between Barack Obama’s natural instincts and the serene and benevolent persona he projects to the world. Beneath the visage of a cosmetically populist, post-racial, post-partisan reformer who wants to “perfect” America and to have “millionaires and billionaires” “pay their fair share” is just another condescending, self-important, sarcastic, academic liberal Democrat, who believes in false consciousness and in scholastic theories that success in life can be attributed to birth or luck or community but not to individual effort and grit. Obama may be talented at self-fashioning, but he cannot maintain his public face constantly. The...

It is Corbett himself who is most guilty of hesitating. Hesitating as then-attorney general to appropriately staff the Jerry Sandusky investigation, and hesitating for years to make an arrest, both of which jeopardized children. That hesitation, and Corbett’s stonewalling, has created an intense firestorm.

n television journalism, few reporters are as controversial as Brian Ross of ABC News. The investigative correspondent has landed major scoops and won prestigious awards for his reporting on the Peace Corps, Solyndra, and U.S. antiterrorism efforts — to name just a few. And yet, he has also produced more high-level haphazard reporting than perhaps any other reporter on television. Ross came under attack again Friday when he reported that James Holmes, the suspect of today’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., may have connections to the tea party — basing that on a single web page that listed an Aurora-based...

Simply put, people are not shopping at J.C. Penney. AFA and OneMillionMoms are showing success in the effort to educate people to Penney's aggressive national campaign to promote "gay" marriage. The company is going downhill fast. Since February, the company stock has lost more than half its value, and Standard & Poor's Ratings Services lowered its credit rating on J.C. Penney Co. further into "junk" status.Snapshot of J.C. Penney under same-sex marriage crusade February 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 JCP announces Ellen DeGeneres as their new spokesperson. JCP launches catalog ad featuring two "gay" moms. JCP launches catalog...

President Obama’s bizarre marriage-theme fund-raising scheme — where he asks couples to request campaign donations from their guests in lieu of wedding gifts — has been a total flop. The desperate initiative, dubbed “the Event Registry,” is being mocked by event planners and couples — and shows how desperate the Obama campaign is to keep up with GOP contender Mitt Romney’s fund-raising. Campaign officials launched the initiative in late June, the same month Obama raised just $71 million compared to Romney’s $100 million. So far, “the Event Registry” has been all but ignored on social-media sites — even though Facebook,...

Former Gov. Mitt Romney would collect at least 72 of the 110 electoral votes available in eight battleground states if President Barack Obama’s current polling numbers, as reported by The Huffington Post, are overstated by a mere one percent. Romney would win that electoral majority in Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Wisconsin if there is a one percent undercount and if undecided voters there split evenly between Romney and Obama. That would give the former Massachusetts Gov. at least 253 — just a few votes shy of the 270 he will need to claim the White...

President Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out of the agreement over Third Site missile defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. And last night Barack Obama caused huge offence in Poland by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as “a Polish death camp” while awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom...

The president referred to “Polish death camps” while awarding a posthumous Medal of Freedom to Polish professor Jan Karski, a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance. Poles believe they're blamed unfairly for the Nazi Holocaust, and the Foreign Minister led the outrage in a late night tweet. The remark, which barely drew notice in America, is all over the Polish news today. On the country's largest television station:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- J.C. Penney gave investors two reasons to ditch the stock: the retailer said Tuesday that it is suspending its dividend and that sales are dropping dramatically. The budget-conscious chain said same-store sales dropped roughly 19% in the first quarter of 2012.