Free Republic

ABC News had an exclusive interview with Pres. Barack Obama, ahead of his first State of the Union speech Wednesday. It was a big interview for Diane Sawyer – but it was jarring and a little odd to see Pres. Obama greet her with a kiss.

"Now CNN.com is getting in the Inauguration memorabilia game, with an entire section of CNN.com headline t-shirts about the event. The tagline: "Some of the most historic shirts money can buy."

David Gregory will be the sole anchor of MSNBC’s coverage of the presidential debates and election night.

Please Boycott FNC at 8PM on Thursday Night. O'Reilly, the ultimate panderer will interview Obama on the VERY NIGHT THAT MCCAIN ACCEPTS THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION. It is not only unprecedented for the opposing candidate to intrude on the acceptance speech, it is beyond belief that FNC would permit Mr. O'Reilly to pander and kiss up to Obama. BOYCOTT 8PM HOUR ON THURSDAY NIGHT.

TERMED a "learning" trip, Sen. Barack Obama's eight- day tour of eight nations in the Middle East and Europe turned out to be little more than a series of photo ops to enhance his international credentials. snip"He was not interested in what we had to say." In private, though, Iraqi officials admit that Obama's analysis is "way off the mark." Without the surge, the Sunni tribes wouldn't have switched sides to help flush out al Qaeda. "He gave us the impression that the last thing he wanted was for Iraq to look anything like a success for the United States,"...

The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers. And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness. On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair...

Berliners spent the whole day trying to catch a glimpse of Barack Obama. The rumor that he had spent the afternoon working out at the hotel gym took on all the significance of an Elvis sighting. Until 7:21 p.m., that is. The sentences grows louder and louder; they start to drown out the applause. At the end of most of his speeches in the US, Obama tells his audience that he loves them. But in Berlin he just said "thank you." For a moment, it was plausible to think that he wanted to quickly aunch a global transformation through this...

As they say: developing picture available on Drudge

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has sent a letter to the New York Times, protesting the paper's naming of a former CIA anti-terrorism interrogator. The CIA had objected to revealing of the man's name, but the Times decided to go ahead anyway. There was a case a while back in which many on the left became very upset about the revelation of a CIA employee's name. So far, that does not seem to be happening in this case. In any event, this is the letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Times:...

Only US presidents have been given the honour of speaking in front of the 18th Century gate, whose chariot of victory overlooked the Berlin Wall and the ecstatic party that followed its destruction in 1989. Angela Merkel's office this week made it clear that Mr Obama would be welcome in Berlin, but no more or less than his rival Senator McCain. "The mayor would be delighted to have Mr Obama take advantage of speaking at the Brandenburg Gate to spread his message," said the mayor's spokesman.

In late 2005, a suicide bomber stepped inside Qadori, a renowned restaurant nestled alongside the Tigris River, and detonated his explosives-rigged belt. The blast killed seven employees and 22 customers and shattered a totem of Baghdad life. "It all happened in a single second," recalled Alaa Hashim, a 30-year-old cook who began working at the restaurant when he was 10. His brother died in the attack. After two years of unemployment for Hashim, the restaurant is back in business, having reopened last year on a quiet street in a fortified part of the capital.

It's back and forth for Barack Obama. The candidate of change has changed some of his own positions in recent weeks, raising the risk he'll be labeled a flip-flopper on hot-button issues that look as if they will play a central role in the general election. First it was his about-face on public financing. Last week, Obama insisted "I never said that I was definitely going to be in the public-financing system." But his statement that he would "aggressively pursue" a public-financing deal with the GOP was widely reported when he made it at the start of the primary season.

SHE PRAISED Hillary and the military and expressed gratitude to America. Michelle Obama's makeover from fiery and unpredictable to sweet and scripted is underway. It's another kind of change Barack Obama believes in for victory in November.

ABC News's Bret Hovell reports: At a fundraiser tonight in Louisville, Ky., Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that the word of his opponent for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., "cannot be trusted." "You know, this election is about trust, and trusting people's word" McCain told a crowd of donors to his campaign. "And unfortunately, apparently, on several items, Sen. Obama's word cannot be trusted." McCain’s remark came at the conclusion of a number of examples of what McCain said were Obama's changes in position. McCain cited a proposal that he and Obama appear together at town hall meetings...

It would be generous to say we were stunned," says a Republican House Judiciary Member, describing his response when Congressman and Obama Superdelegate William Delahunt (MA-10) yesterday asked the vice president's chief of staff David Addington about water boarding of terrorists. Addington declined to comment, citing President Bush's refusal to discuss techniques used to attain vital intelligence, and added that another reason not to respond was that Al Qaeda is probably watching. Congressman Delahunt's response: "I'm glad they finally have a chance to see you." (Emphasis added.) But the House Republican and Judiciary member was not so stunned to notice...

A new audit concludes that rookie attorneys with Republican roots got interviewed for plum Justice Department jobs while their liberal-leaning counterparts got passed over. The Justice Department's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility released the audit Tuesday, revealing that a screening program installed in 2002 weeded out job applicants who had liberal or Democratic ties. Improper use of the screening program peaked in 2006, when politics and ideology disqualified what the audit called a significant number of newly graduated lawyers and summer interns seeking jobs. The long-awaited report confirms widespread criticism last year that the once fiercely independent Justice...

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him. In March he gave a widely praised speech on the subject after receiving criticism over racially charged comments by his longtime pastor. Obama, who faces Republican John McCain in the November election, would be the first black U.S. president.

It is difficult to single out the most outrageous aspect of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s cataclysmic Boumediene ruling last Thursday: The reckless vesting of constitutional rights in aliens whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans; the roughshod ride over binding precedent to accomplish that feat; or the smug arrogance perfectly captured by dissenting Chief Justice John Roberts’s description of a “constitutional bait and switch” — a Court that first beseeches the political branches to enact a statutory procedure for handling combatant detentions, and then, once a thoughtful law is...

I learned something about myself Thursday that I did not know: I’m a redneck. But then again, so is every one of you reading this column. Or so says Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. Mitchell, the wife of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, actually went on MSNBC on Thursday as Barack Obama was leaving the stage in Bristol and quipped live: “Interesting images today. Barack Obama, Mark Warner, in Southwest Virginia. This is real [chuckle] redneck ... sort of ... uhm ... bordering on Appalachia ... country. This is not the Northern Virginia ... uh ... you know ......

The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to. "I felt this thrill going up my leg," said MSNBC's Chris Matthews after one of the senator's speeches. snip.... Every time I hear an Obama speech, I start to giggle. But millions of voters don't. And, if Chris Matthews and the tingly-legged media get their way and drag Obama across the finish line this November, the laugh will be on those of us who think that serious times demand grown-up rhetoric.