Free Republic

The Justice Department said Tuesday it will not station criminal prrosecutors at the polls on Election Day after civil rights groups said minority voters who are expected to turn out in unprecedented numbers because of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama could be intimidated. The move reverses a decades-long practice that put prosecutors on the lookout for voter fraud, ballot access violations and other polling problems.

MIAMI — Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, here to tell U.S. mayors that he wants to make cities the backbone of regional economic growth and innovation, ended up igniting a war of words with Republican John McCain's campaign over flooding in Iowa. During remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting today, Obama noted that McCain had recently visited flood-devastated Iowa. "I'm sure they appreciated the sentiment, but they probably would have appreciated it more if Sen. McCain hadn't voted against funding for levees and flood control programs, which he seems to consider pork," Obama told the mayors.An Obama...

GOP wants urban voters By David M. Brown TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, August 5, 2005 Republican leaders on Thursday used Pittsburgh -- a city controlled by Democratic elected officials for seven decades -- as an example of where the GOP hopes to expand its membership with minorities and inner-city voters who traditionally align more with Democrats. "We believe there are many people that populate these urban cities that are Republican-leaning," said Republican National Committee Co-Chairwoman Jo Ann Davidson. "We're not giving up on the urban centers." Davidson, a former Speaker of the House in the Ohio Legislature, said Pittsburgh also was chosen...

It's the Cities, Stupid. It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured...

Look at the map on this page. It should be familiar. It's one of those red-state/blue-state maps that have been tormenting Democrats, liberals, and progressives since November of 2000. That was the first presidential election in which states that went for the Republican candidate were colored red, and states that went for Democratic candidate were colored blue. As George W. Bush and Al Gore fought for the White House in Florida, "red" and "blue" became metaphors for America's divided electorate. Red vs. Blue--Republican vs. Democrat; conservative vs. liberal; pro-life vs. pro-choice; gun-huggers vs. gun-haters; gay-haters vs. gay-huggers. This red-state/blue-state map...

(CNN) -- President Bush convincingly won the popular vote Tuesday thanks to strong backing from his party's conservative base, as well as increased support from Latino, urban, Jewish, Catholic and female voters, according to exit polls.