Free Republic

Barbara Boxer: Why no Viagra complaints? By: Tal Kopan March 25, 2014 11:28 AM EDT As the Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday about the Obamacare mandate on birth control coverage, Sen. Barbara Boxer questioned why those up in arms about the requirement have no problem with most insurance covering Viagra. “I have never heard Hobby Lobby or any other corporation, I could be wrong, or any other boss complain that Viagra is covered in many insurance plans, practically all of them, or other kinds of things, you know, for men, which I won’t go into,” Boxer said Tuesday on MSNBC’s...

The conservative 2016 contender wants to lure young and black voters to the GOP, so he's taking his message to them. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ BERKELEY, Calif. – Rand Paul's swing through Berkeley is just the beginning of his foray into traditionally Democratic territory. After his visit to this liberal stronghold, where he's speaking to students about the NSA and privacy, the Kentucky senator will make stops at the National Urban League in July and at the NAACP in the coming months, if an informal invitation from the group is made official. He's also plotting a trip to Chicago and Milwaukee, Paul said...

On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) addressed the University of California, Berkley at an event hosted by the university's Berkeley Forum...

Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown announced Friday that he is laying the groundwork for a possible challenge against incumbent Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, but Shaheen is comfortably ahead of Brown for now in Rasmussen Reports’ first look at the possible U.S. Senate race in the Granite State. A new statewide survey of Likely New Hampshire Voters finds Shaheen with 50% support to Brown’s 41%. Four percent (4%) like some other candidate in the race, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Former Rep. Ron Paul says that America’s reaction to Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine should be,“so what?” “Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?” the Texas Republican and libertarian icon wrote in a USA Today op-ed Monday. ...Over the weekend, Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia,which the Russian government has moved to approve. American politicians have called the vote a sham and the administration has said it does not recognize the results of the vote,placing sanctions on some Russian officials in response. Ron...

The first opponent is the left. They still call us the “Tea Party,” though we rarely use that term anymore. It’s fun to hear the liberals say it – it’s like listening to grandparents trying to sound cool. Yeah, those hepcats are sure hip with their cool jive, daddy-o. Every day, the lefty punditry opines about the Tea Party’s death spiral. And every day, the Tea Party refuses to crash and burn. We conservative insurgents have another opponent, but this opponent recognizes us for exactly what we are – a dangerous, existential threat. This opponent is the GOP Establishment, and...

It has become a truism that House Republicans have voted dozens and dozens of times -- at least 50 in all -- to repeal Obamacare. They have been obsessed with repealing the Affordable Care Act, President Obama told a Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington last month. You know what they say: 50th time is the charm. Maybe when you hit your 50th repeal vote, you will win a prize. Maybe if you buy 50 repeal votes, you get one free. We get it. For more than a year, Democrats and their advocates in the press have been ridiculing the...

Putin is set to respond to Obama's sanctions of Russian officials with his own list. Several U.S. Senators and officials will be banned from visiting Russia, including Sen. Dick Durbin. U.S. senators, congressmen and top Obama administration officials are sure to be on Vladimir Putin’s sanctions list; a response to the Obama Administration’s announcement on Monday that 7 Russian officials and 4 Ukrainian officials would be barred from holding assets or traveling to the United States.

A Republican Senate hopeful in Virginia has turned the tables on his Democratic competition, claiming that his political foe is waging a war on women — by supporting abortion. Shak Hill, who’s running for the U.S. Senate seat for Virginia, blasted his incumbent Democratic counterpart, Mark Warner, for waging a “war on girls” by easing the path for late-term abortion, in a statement and accompanying YouTube video “Mark Warner is waging a war on girls, and it’s killing them,” Mr. Hill said in the statement. “Warner claims he personally opposes abortion, yet he demands that the government give women a...

Ted Cruz has been earning himself somewhat of a “bad-boy” reputation in political circles these days. He’s been characterized as a bully by his colleagues and the left has demonized Cruz as a rogue Tea Party Terror bent on destroying the fine, upstanding, hard-working men and women of Congress. Recently mysterious posters of Cruz photoshopped onto a tattooed torso with a cigarette in his mouth began popping up all over Los Angeles..... Apparently Sabo’s art has inspired others to pay their own form of tribute to the GOP’s bad boy. This work of art popped up on YouTube just this...

Dmytro Yarosh, a leader of the Right Sector movement, addresses a rally in central Independence Square in Kiev [Caption from] Reuters The leader of the far-right Ukranian Nationalist Pravy Sektor (Right Sektor) party has reportedly threatened to attack Russia's lucrative gas pipeline which travels through Ukraine to prevent the Kremlin from sparking a "Third World War.' ...

Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs appeared on the “Meet the Press” roundtable Sunday and laid bare truths about Washington, and his former boss’s spokesman. As the show’s featured guest, White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer painted a ludicrously optimistic portrait of the 2014 midterm elections for Democrats, stating emphatically, “I believe we will keep the Senate.” Later in the show, Gibbs admitted the Democrats could “absolutely” lose the Senate. He added: “If [Obama] doesn’t get more involved in raising money and making this a choice, as Dan Pfeiffer said, you lose the Senate. And, if you lose the...

Fresh off a congressional trip to Ukraine, Sen. Chris Murphy on Monday rejected criticisms that Russia’s posture on Ukraine has something to do with the failures of the Obama administration, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin is improvising as he goes. “I think he is making this up as we go along,” Murphy said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” of Putin’s moves into the Crimean region of Ukraine. “I worry, though, that he’s going to realize he needs to move further than Crimea in order to get the end that he desires here.”

Barack Obama’s presidency will come to an end. The legacy of pain he will leave behind will not -- at least for years to come. He and his fellow Democrats plan to keep their grip on the levers of power-even if they lose control of Congress and the White House. And they will do so with “invisible hands” gone but not forgotten. Every first-term president has a single compelling desire: to win a second term. But for Obama and his liberal allies to accomplish a second major goal, to “fundamentally transform America,” requires more than two terms. Their agenda depends...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and his Democrats face the challenge of limiting fallout from Obamacare and drumming up voter enthusiasm in the November congressional elections, problem areas exposed by the loss of a Florida candidate who had led in the polls. The defeat of Democrat Alex Sink by Republican David Jolly in a special election last Tuesday has raised anxiety levels for Democrats as they struggle to hold on to control of the Senate in November and pick up seats in the Republican-held House of Representatives. Paramount on the Democrats' list of concerns about November is the need...

MURRAY, Ky. (AP) - Texas Gov. Rick Perry threw his support behind U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell on Saturday, telling 300 fellow Republicans that the minority leader will win re-election. McConnell finds himself in a GOP primary fight with wealthy businessman Matt Bevin, who attended the event but wasn’t allowed to speak. “I love the number six,” Perry told the crowd at the Lincoln Reagan Dinner of West Kentucky. “Sam Houston was 6 foot 6 inches tall. And Mitch McConnell is going to be in his sixth term as United States senator.” Organizers said the dinner was supposed to unite the...

A delegation of U.S. senators looked to up pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin Saturday, as tensions around Ukraine heightened. A bipartisan group of eight senators traveling through Ukraine blasted the Russian leader, and called Sunday’s election on whether Crimea should join Russia rigged and illegitimate. Some of the senators called for the U.S. to provide military equipment to Ukrainian troops, and the group vowed crippling economic sanctions against Russia until the nation pulled back. “This is the person that stated that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said Sen. John McCain...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is warning Republicans that if they expect to be relevant in the future and grow the party they will have to soften on social issues. In an interview with vocativ.com, Paul said he had "sort of a Jeffersonian belief in unity, peace and commerce with all" and that the best way to build the GOP for the future is to include people with whom they don't agree on every issue. "I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues," Paul advised. "The Republican Party is...

KIEV - The man Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast as one of Europe's potential new Adolf Hitlers is a little late for coffee this Saturday morning. Igor Mazur, or Topoyla (Poplar) as he's known because he's 6'7" is the leader of the Ukranian Right Sector at Maidan, Kiev's Independence Square. The Right Sector are the radical nationalists of this Ukranian Revolution. There are others: the right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) Party, for one, which has an actual political following, 12 percent of the vote in the last elections. It used to identify itself as a national socialist movement, just like the...

“No, absolutely not,” Democrats should not shy away from supporting the Affordable Care Act, even though Democrat Alex Sink lost the special congressional election in Florida on Tuesday, says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Sink’s Republican opponent, David Jolly, campaigned against Obamacare, but that’s not a winning strategy for Republicans, Pelosi told a news conference Thursday. …