Free Republic

For Kevin Garn, it's been 25 years of hiding, of paying big money for "secrecy," of presenting himself as a devoted public servant, twice rising to the status of House Majority Leader in the Utah Legislature. In the same 25 years, Cheryl Maher has been plagued by substance abuse and mental illness, even as she served in leadership roles in the LDS Church -- as did Garn, a former bishop. This week, it all came out: In 1985, Garn, then 30 and married, and Maher, a 15-year-old who worked for him, took off their clothes and climbed into a hot...

The tsunami of political devastation known as Barack Obama continues to wreak havoc abroad, both for American interests specifically and the cause of freedom and democracy generally (the two are often, happily, one and the same). The disastrous consequences are most clearly visible in the case of Vladimir Putin's Russia. First Obama visited Russia and displayed craven weakness before his KGB counterparts in the Kremlin. He barely even paid lip service to American values, crushing the spirits of Russia's democracy movement leaders, and his unilateral reversal of the Bush missile defense plan for Eastern Europe led only to more posturing...

By | Published: Between you and me, Toyota really messed this one up. The company long known for its meticulous quality and, by extension, its meticulous customer care drove completely off the rails in recent years, churning out ever larger production batches, ever faster, even as quality control declined inversely. That led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles across a slew of Toyota brands. The company did this — and this is where the customer care part gets really murky — only after the failure of what appears to be a Machiavellian effort to silence its customers’...

Too little, too late mia culpa. BTW we have an actual copy of McCain's original certificate of live birth. Medial Elites coming to grips about helping elect the worst President(pretender) in HISTORY. "be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office." Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33237.html#ixzz0gtd2o3xO

This sentence, deep in the Washington Post’s coverage of the health-care summit, made me shake my head and be glad I’m not a congressional Democrat: The White House's best hope — perhaps its only hope — is that Obama can use a masterful performance during the six-hour appearance to "stiffen the spine" of congressional Democrats, one senior official said, persuading them to pass health-care legislation using the mechanism known as reconciliation, which requires a simple majority of 51 rather than 60 votes to prevail in the Senate. Great, they’ve ordered up another “masterful performance.” I expect copper prices to rise...

... Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable. Other drug industry...

Since 1941, Captain America has been one of the most popular comic book characters around. The fictional super-patriot fought Nazis during World War II, took on those who burned the American flag during the Vietnam era, and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for Marvel Comics along the way. Now, the appearance that he is taking on the Tea Party Movement in a storyline about investigating white supremacists has forced Marvel to apologize for the comic hero. Issue 602 of the comic features Captain America investigating a right-wing anti-government militia group called "the Watchdogs". Hoping to infiltrate the group,...

A sign created by a poster at Free Republic, and then recreated in a Captain America comic, has led Marvel to admit a mistake. *updated "It looks like Marvel Comic's Captain America is throwing his mighty shield at the Tea Party Movement. Warner Todd Huston wrote on his Publius forum blog that the super-powered soldier who fought the Nazis in WWII observes with disdain Americans who are seemingly compared to Tea Party Movement protesters of today:"In preparation for the infiltration, Marvel Comics depicts the two super heroes out of costume and observing from a rooftop a street filled with what...

"Where Mr. Houston is correct is in our accidently identifying in one of the held up signs, the group as being a part of the Tea Party instead of a generic protest group. That’s something that we need to apologize for and own up to, because it’s just one of those stupid mistakes that happened through a series of stupid incidents. " According to to Mr. Quesada, the book was ready to go to printer, but the panel in question had a group of protesters handling signs with no words on them, so the editor asked the letterer to "fudge...

Gingrich: I was wrong to endorse Scozzafava By Eric Zimmermann - 02/01/10 03:42 PM ET Newt Gingrich says he regrets endorsing Dede Scozzafava in the hotly contested primary for the NY-23 congressional district in November. Scozzafava was criticized by many national Republicans for being too liberal. She eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, who eeked out a victory. "She turned out to be a huge disappointment, and she turned out not to be frankly a loyal Republican," Gingrich told an interviewer in New Hampshire this weekend. The former speaker added that conservatives who criticized his...

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News,” that he has “no doubt” the race for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s seat was winnable by Democrat Martha Coakley, but the White House was informed of her political peril too late. Couric, who was in Washington for the State of the Union address, asked Emanuel how “a master political operative” could have let Massachusetts go “down in flames for the Democrats?” “I, was here at the White House,” Emanuel replied. “As soon as it was brought to my attention, or...

Republican Scott Brown has been running ads in Massachusetts where he is out driving around in his old pickup truck while campaigning for US Senator something Marcia Martha Coakley refuses to do. On Sunday Barack Obama slammed Scott Brown and his truck several times in his Bush-bashing campaign speech for Martha Coakley. Maybe Barack Obama didn’t notice that Scott Brown’s truck is a GM truck.

(Boston) Outspoken chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has not held back on his feelings on the Massachusetts special election Senate race, and today is no different. Inside the gymnasium awaiting President Obama's remarks at a rally for Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Rep. Frank tells FOX News' Carl Cameron about Coakley's campaign so far: "She let it become a personality contest and that was a mistake. Some of us complained about it and we think it's turned around." Previously Rep. Frank said a win by Republican State Senator Scott Brown in this race would...

Two terrorist attacks on American soil within les s than sixty days. Administration officials declare that “the system worked” after the Christmas day attack, only to be contradicted by the President days later. The President notes on December 29th that the Christmas day attack was carried out by merely an “isolated extremist,” but then declares on January 7 that “we are at war,” and that we must stay “one step ahead of a nimble adversary," in complete contradiction of his Homeland Security Secretary and his own previous remarks. Oh, my –how does America’s liberal media explain it all away? One...

Are you positively giddy over the prospect of Scott Brown winning in the upcoming Massachusetts special election? Are you currently supporting Scott Brown through time, money or both? Do you believe that limited government policy over the past thirty years failed, leading us to ever growing government? Are you partial to the Tea Party movement? If you have answered yes to all these questions then allow me to prove to you that your support for Scott Brown is a contradiction to everything you believe in and will hurt this country more than any rubber stamp liberal. Living in Massachusetts the...

/snip/It's just a typo, and in fact, the DNI fixed it on its webpage shortly after sending reporters the statement. But it's an awkward slip-up on the same day the White House admitted that a typo prevented the State Department from realizing it had granted a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. (Someone spelled his name wrong during a search.)

President Obama came back to work this week after leaving the Presidency for his Hawaiian holiday vacation. Hawaii proved to be a restful retreat for the President, his team and the White House press corps who all took time off from their regular duties to enjoy the Hawaiian sun and ignore their responsibilities. But after 10 days of tropical silence, this week there is a sudden flurry of security reviews, media statements, ass-covering and more misstatements coming out of Washington from the Obama Administration. But we still don’t know why the State Department didn’t revoke the visa of a man...

Richard Nixon had advertising executive H.R. Haldeman; Ronald Reagan had image master Mike Deaver; Barack Obama has public relations guru David Axelrod.All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency. I don’t know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.(The Oval Office, December 29, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)(AP Photo by Chris Carlson, December 31,...

The outrage continues to build over a report from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's department that warned of the danger of right-wing "extremists," and she raised eyebrows again this week when she suggested that the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is under fire for what critics see as a string of gaffes, with a small but vocal group of conservatives calling for her to step down. The outrage continues to build over a report from her department that warned of the danger of right-wing "extremists," and singled out returning war veterans...

Upheaval in the media world continued in 2009, with 15,000 newspaper jobs lost, some glossy magazines killed and Washington bureaus either cut back or shuttered completely. And yet, online outlets sprouted — a few beefing up the ranks in D.C. — while more journalists embraced Twitter, blogs and platforms that don’t require ink on paper. While a number of this year’s more noticeable media blunders occurred through simple carelessness, some could be also considered growing pains in adjusting to changes in the media, such as reporters jumping the gun on Twitter, experimenting in video, cutting-and-pasting text from a blog or...