Free Republic

New emails and testimony from Department of Homeland Security FOIA officer Catherine Papoi reveal that a former Obama campaign staffer repeatedly asked Papoi and her team to redact portions of “politically sensitive” documents, as well as portions of documents that were already publicly available. Papoi, who came under fire at DHS for complaining that “sensitive” FOIA requests were being vetted by political employees, testified on March 3 that Willard “Clint” Carte, a DHS attorney with the title of “confidential assistant,” attempted to block a FOIA request for DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s calendar in which Napolitano’s secretary had referred to Secretary...

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class -- pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class. By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent...

As Wisconsin union workers continue to protest Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal, Organizing for America — the Democratic National Committee’s campaign arm housed at BarackObama.com — is “mobilizing to defend Wisconsin‘s public employees’ right to organize.” During his Wednesday broadcast, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh condemned the outspoken protesters for shutting down the work of democratically elected representatives doing the “people’s business.” Building on the momentum in Wisconsin, OFA has also started to mobilize its army of followers in Ohio and Indiana where measures similar to Gov. Walker’s are taking shape. On Thursday, an estimated crowd of more than...

Proof of direct involvement of the White House in promoting chaos. Impeachment hearings.... ? (Crickets chirping)

One can only shake the head in wonder at why Barack Obama, the brilliant-beyond-brilliant presidential candidate, has flopped so badly in the same type of campaign-stump venues he enchanted with fairy dust a mere two years ago. Perhaps, as he opined himself in The Audacity of Hope, the throngs loved him in '08 because he was a "blank slate" upon whom voters cast their own pictures. Now that he has an actual record of governance, his audiences are no longer fodder for easy bamboozling. In '08, the people saw what they wanted to see; reality bites back in 2010. Or...

Organizing for America, the permanent incarnation of the Obama presidential campaign, has a new offer to its members: send money now and be automatically registered for a chance to win a trip to meet Barack Obama. It will happen October 22, when Obama appears at a rally for faltering Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Las Vegas. "The president will be kicking off the final push at a grassroots rally," an Organizing for America email says. "We're saving three backstage passes for supporters like you."

A must view. Fascinating doco. The late great agitator Saul Alinsky at work on the Rama Indian Reservation in Canada. A rare glimpse at how the man who inspired Barack Obama actually worked.

The legislation could prove problematic to Republicans as the gubernatorial contest here could ultimately be determined by the state's growing Latino electorate. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which I oversee, set out to learn how local Latinos decide whether to participate in elections. The issue was more complicated than we'd anticipated. We began our research with six focus groups composed of registered Latino voters who had cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election, yet hadn't always voted in elections for California governor. We wanted to know why they sometimes didn't vote. But the groups had...

The Brooklyn Tea Party will be meeting at Ciro's Pizzeria at 377 Avenue X, off McDonald Avenue. The pizzeria is located right next to the Avenue X stop on the F train. The meeting will begin at 2:00 pm and will discuss our government's wrong-headed tax policy. We will also be recruiting people who are looking to become officers within the Tea Party. If you would like to get actively involved, this is your chance to step up!

If elections were like football games, this would be your two minute warning. All of the passion, energy and renewed interest in politics that propelled the tea party movement of 2009 opens the door to a new level of involvement. As patriot groups around the country prepare for the November 2010 elections, a quiet force has been building behind the scenes. Investigative reporter Carol Greenberg’s work inside Obama’s Organizing for America has already helped expose the OFA’s connection to ACORN and its network of top Democrat party insiders.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a major victory for organized labor, unions will have an easier time signing up airline and railroad workers after the Obama administration Monday changed a 76-year-old rule on union elections. The change is the most significant so far in a string of White House moves designed to boost unions, which are struggling to reverse years of decline in membership. The new rule, announced by the three-member National Mediation Board, would recognize a union if a simple majority of workers who cast ballots approve organizing. The previous rule required a majority of the entire work force to...

Blogger and activist Carol Greenberg approached me recently with an exclusive look at her work investigating Organizing for America. I was impressed with Carol’s investigative reporting initiative and realized that America needed to see the “Obama Machine” in action. I began working with her on unraveling the truth behind OFA. Obama’s “permanent campaign” Organizing for America has managed to skirt campaign finance laws while continually providing the unprecedented “opportunity to help the president.” Countless emails fill boxes across America with the sender name President Barack Obama. Organizing for America has kept a high profile and played a key role in...

With the national unemployment rate elevated and stalled at 9.7%, much higher in some places, and grumbling growing about the unstimulating stimulus spending bill with the $787-billion price tag, Organizing for America is doing its part: It's hiring people. The hangover organization of the perpetual Obama presidential campaign is now a well-organized wing of the Democratic National Committee. And it would like to organize even more than it already has organized during the campaigner-in-chief's first 15-plus months. If you thought all those "grass-roots" watch parties, support groups, e-mail and telephone campaigns were amply abundant in the effort to convince his...

Barack Obama came to town a year ago to change the way politics worked, and Organizing for America was to be his instrument. The successor to his campaign organization, with the largest e-mail list in America, was poised — many observers thought at the time — to bring the campaign’s movement fervor and Web-centric tactics to pushing Obama’s legislative agenda through Congress. A year later, politics is working pretty much as it always did, and it’s Organizing for America that’s on defense. With little public profile and a difficulty in pointing to concrete accomplishments, OFA, as it’s known, has faced...

Friend -- This year, when you're writing holiday cards to your friends and loved ones, there are two more people who need to hear from you: Senator John Cornyn and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. With the Senate deep in final negotiations -- and a compromise just introduced that increases choice and drives costs down -- your senators need to understand how urgent reform really is. So we've come up with a unique way for you to get the message across -- by sending your senators a card with your holiday wish for the season. Send a holiday card to...

In his new book The Audacity to Win, Obama for America campaign manager David Plouffe recalls that Sen. John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate was a fundraising boon -- for the Obama campaign. "We had taken in millions of dollars in the three hours since Palin had started speaking," Plouffe recalls. "We hadn't even asked for most of it; we had sent out just a single unplanned fund-raising email highlighting her attacks on community organizers, but it was just starting to hit people's in-boxes as I checked the numbers. So the big response from...

Posting at Renew America and quoting Confucius, Neil Brian Goldberg envisions the grassroots propelling Sarah Palin into a presidential run: Confucius say: "It is often following crowd who push leader forward." ...and so the Sarah Palin for President campaign begins...How does he propose to launch this campaign? Next, being sure of what we want, we simply begin this "Sarah for President" campaign.If it were only that simple. What Goldberg is proposing here is nothing new. We have to wonder if he's aware that others have been -- as the Chris Rea song goes -- Working On It. There are a...

Public Discourse: The candidate who told his supporters "to argue with them and get in their face" now finds the shoe on the other foot. So they're taking names and encouraging you to turn in your neighbors.So this is hope and change — telling American citizens who in a democracy disagree with you that they are mind-numbed robots participating in mob action and expressing "manufactured" outrage. Considering that upward of 80% of those hooligans like their doctors, like their insurance and like their care, anger over your government-run health care was not that hard to assemble. It was not that...

President Barack Obama to me: This is the moment our movement was built for. For one month, the fight for health insurance reform leaves the backrooms of Washington, D.C., and returns to communities across America. Throughout August, members of Congress are back home, where the hands they shake and the voices they hear will not belong to lobbyists, but to people like you. Home is where we're strongest. We didn't win last year's election together at a committee hearing in D.C. We won it on the doorsteps and the phone lines, at the softball games and the town meetings, and...

Forget Norman Rockwell. The town hall meetings that many representatives and senators are holding back in their districts to make the case for a health care overhaul are turning into knockdown-dragouts. Some of the aggressive questioning, and even heckling, of legislators meeting with constituents across the country appears to be staged. A memo on "best practices" for disrupting town hall meetings has surfaced on the Web. A conservative group in Connecticut called Right Principles laid out how it "conducted an action" at a town hall meeting of Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) in late May, even calling it a "potential playbook"...