Free Republic

When the polls closed Tuesday evening, Minnesota's Secretary of State's office showed that Norm Coleman had a 725-vote win in his closely contested race against Al Franken. By the next morning, however, Coleman's victory was already shrinking. As various precincts and county auditors have "corrected" their totals, Coleman's lead has dropped to a mere 237 votes. Minnesota Republicans are concerned that the fix may be in. An example of the kind of thing now going on was reported in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune: Just as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was explaining to reporters the recount process in one of...

I get it -- Al Franken is a serious senatorial candidate despite his penchant for the pornographic. Franken's one-liners about rape and oral sex and his leering fantasies about big-busted women were just for yucks, right? Last June, DFL bigwigs chose to forget about their man's decades-long record of sexual crudity after he hooked the endorsement by putting on a serious face and saying "sorry" at the party's convention. But Franken didn't apologize for another aspect of his trash-talking shtick. He's aimed some of his most offensive material at religious believers, particularly Christians. Why hasn't this been aired in public?...

Not only Sarah Palin is running against The New York Times. So is a new musical that opened on Broadway last month, A Tale of Two Cities. The Times sneered at the production based on Charles Dickens' novel, particularly its "blasting ballads that let singers prove that they coulda been contenders on American Idol.' Another reviewer, from Toronto, complained about the reaction of apparently ignorant theater-goers: "The audience stood and cheered . . . some even wept." That's what happened the night I attended. The singing and staging were excellent, and the colorful Dickensian plot moved along and moved attendees....

On Sunday, October 12, CBS wrapped up its “Evening News” with the apparently charming scoop that Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old Catholic nun living in Rome, would cast her first presidential ballot since 1952 ... for Barack Obama. That’s one more evening-news story than CBS has devoted to Obama’s radical legislative record on abortion. Try this on for size: ABC, CBS, and NBC together have unloaded more than a thousand stories on Obama’s presidential campaign, and we’re still waiting for the first broadcast network TV story devoted to examining Obama’s abortion record. CBS’s man in Rome, Allen Pizzey, packaged his...

I'm watching Sarah Palin address a campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, live on Fox News, and I can't recall ever seeing a GOP rally like this. The crowd is genuinely pumped, which is rare enough. But what's genuinely amazing is watching and listening to Gov. Palin. I can't recall ever seeing a politician who so clearly relishes campaigning. She's animated and enthused. I know she's speaking from a teleprompter, and she's probably delivered large chunks of this same speech before many times, but she's tuned in on every line. She is simply infused with joy. And it flows off the...

A presidential debate at its best gives voters a glimpse of a candidate's personality, quick-wittedness, likeability, sense of humor, judgment, basic honesty, knowledge, even character. If the debate is a success, voters get a sense of whether they'd be comfortable with the candidate in the White House for the next four years. Voters got none of that in last night's so-called town hall debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. What they saw instead were two presidential candidates mostly on autopilot, repeating whole paragraphs from their stump speeches in response to policy questions. Spontaneity was absent. So was lively discussion....

As the presidential election draws closer, a conservative group has launched an effort to “reclaim pastors’ constitutional right to speak freely and truthfully from the pulpit.” Pastors may comment on candidates and voting -- without fearing loss of their tax exemption, the Alliance Defense Fund insists. The group says its Pulpit Initiative is a legal effort designed to protect the First Amendment rights of pastors. As part of that effort, pastors participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday on September 28 will deliver to sermons of their own that apply Scripture to the subject of candidates running for government office. Not so...

If it were not so important, we should be able to laugh at the tax returns and U.S. Senate disclosure forms of Senators Obama and Biden. In 2004, obviously neither Senator Biden nor Senator Obama realized that their tax returns would be made available to the public. And neither of them “walked their talk”. In 2004, the Bidens reported that they had $234,271 in adjusted gross income and made contributions of $380. Biden spokesman David Wade said the deductions on the tax forms ``are not the sum of their annual contributions to charity.'' The Bidens ``contribute to their church, and...

As part of the microscopic scrutiny applied to Sarah Palin’s record, the public has been told that as the incoming Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska in 1996, Palin dared to ask the town librarian what would happen if anyone objected to an inappropriate book. She merely inquired, but "anti-censorship" activists, perpetually filled with visions of a trash can full of burning books, exploded. At the time, the Anchorage Daily News captured the librarian, one Mary Ellen Emmons, putting up her First Amendment dukes. “I told her clearly, I will fight anyone who tries to dictate what books can go on the...

Rusty at TheJawaReport connects the dots between the Obama campaign, a major PR firm, and a variety of baseless anti-Palin smears being circulated by lefty bloggers. As he notes, "Within an hour of this post going up, YouTube videos implicating Ethan Winner were yanked, sockpuppet accounts deleted, and more importantly, the Wikipedia entry on David Axelrod began to edit out mentions of his well-known astroturfing campaigns." If he were totally off base, would everything be coming down off the net? Sure seems like somebody's got something to hide. UPDATE: I like the way Ace puts it: "eswinner" is not sitting...

The National Organization for Women endorses the Obama-Biden ticket. NOW ought to change its name to WOW. Such stunning independence. A working woman with five children, the governor of a sovereign state, isn't a sufficient accomplishment. Who knew? Actually, Sarah Palin is a triumph for the "third stage" of feminism. The first stage of the modern woman's movement saw the destruction of the "feminine mystique." It's been almost 50 years since Betty Friedan argued that women lived in a "comfortable concentration camp" in the suburbs, prisoners with lots of rooms but no identity to call their own. She overstated the...

IN POLITICS, cheap shots and invective are occupational hazards. But when have we seen anything to match the frenzy of rage and contempt set off by the nomination of Sarah Palin? Virtually from the moment John McCain selected her, Palin has been under assault. There has been legitimate criticism, of course. But there has also been a gusher of slander, much of it — like the slur that she isn't the real mother of her infant son, Trig — despicable. For someone who has been in the national spotlight for only three weeks, Palin has been the victim of an...

You know it's not politics-as-usual when you're attending a meeting of the nation's governors and one of them goes into labor. When -- just a few months later -- that new mother is preparing to speak to the Republican National Convention as the party's vice-presidential candidate, you know that politics-as-usual is gone for good. We've heard a lot about Sarah Palin, the governor of our 49th state, whose acceptance speech is expected tonight. But we are likely less familiar with the Republican woman governor of our 50th state -- Linda Lingle of Hawaii -- who was with Palin when the...

DENVER — Democrats have made it a priority to lure more evangelical and Catholic voters from the Republican camp into their own, but the likelihood of success is becoming more problematic given pronouncements by two Catholic archbishops and a decision by the editor of an evangelical Christian magazine. Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Denver, said Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden should avoid taking Communion because of his support for abortion rights. In 2004, the Archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley stood by a statement he had made the previous year that pro-choice Catholics are in a state...

THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION exposed the central defect of Senator Barack Obama's candidacy: the absence of compelling evidence he is up to the job of president. The exposé comes courtesy of a bad habit of his running mate, Senator Joe Biden. When in doubt, Mr. Biden exaggerates. And in the past week, he did a lot. Voters expect candidates to embellish, but only so much. Go beyond acceptable stretching and a candidate may squander his most precious political possession: credibility. Mr. Obama may be on this perilous path. Last Saturday, America heard Mr. Obama's new running mate exclaim, "I watch...

RedState.com reported last week they had uncovered the transcript of Barack Obama’s 2002 floor speech in opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (“BAIPA”). The transcript makes clear Barack Obama opposed the BAIPA not because, as he claimed, it would encroach on abortion rights, but because the law would “burden the original decision of the woman and the physician.” It was too much of a burden, according to Obama, to ensure that a child, born alive, get medical care to sustain the child’s life. Understanding both the timeline of Obama’s votes against the BAIPA and the language of the...

Anyone who thinks the media have been balanced and unbiased during the current election simply hasn't been paying attention. Barack Obama has benefitted from adoring coverage, a lack of journalistic rigor, and a sizeable advantage in media coverage. In short, everything in the media seems to break his direction. Large parts of the American public already recognize this. According to a recent study by Rasmussen Reports, 50 percent of independent voters and even 27 percent of Democrats believe that the media are trying to help Obama win. Just 12 percent of independents said the media were helping John McCain. This...

Last week, controversy erupted when Archbishop John Nienstedt informed St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis that it could not hold a gay pride prayer service in its sanctuary. The service -- held for several years in conjunction with the annual Twin Cities Gay Pride festival -- celebrates the gay identity. In response, organizers moved the celebration outside the church. One gay activist attended in what must have struck him as a clown's outfit, given the occasion -- the robes of an archbishop, miter and all. David McCaffrey of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM) condemned what...

There's a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago--at least we'll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely. The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc.,...

Long before Sen. Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination, the candidate mused about the first thing he would do as president. At a Planned Parenthood gathering in Washington, D.C., last July, Obama told supporters of America's largest abortion network: "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The purpose of the pro-abortion legislation—first introduced in the Senate in 1989—is clear: "To prohibit, consistent with Roe v. Wade, the interference by the government with a woman's right to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy." The bill has never passed Congress, but...