Free Republic

Charlie Crist has scrapped plans to go to Cuba this summer, citing time demands in his campaign for governor and delays in getting federal permission to visit the island nation. “I had to make a decision,” Crist said. “We’ve got to win this thing, and we can’t sap any more of my time or staff’s time to the detriment of victory. … I need to stay focused on Florida.” Crist’s about-face was immediately called a “flip-flop” by Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign, and it follows a recent poll that showed his July plans were not popular with Cuban-American voters in Miami-Dade,...

A new CNN/ORC poll indicates that the Democrats have been unable to overcome the apathy that threatens to keep much of the party’s traditional voters home this November. According to that poll’s survey of registered voters’ preference on the generic congressional ballot – a measure of voter enthusiasm that traditionally favors Democrats – the president’s party maintains a two-point lead over the GOP at 47 to 45 percent. However, among those who voted in 2010, a filter CNN/ORC uses to determine who are most likely to vote in November, the GOP holds a four-point advantage over Democrats at 49...

BILOXI, Mississippi — A staffer for Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) re-election campaign was fired after he was arrested and accused by police of stealing campaign signs for Cochran's primary opponent, state senator Chris McDaniel. Lee Ellis Blair, a member of the DeSoto County GOP executive committee and Cochran campaign staffer, was arrested late Sunday and charged with “malicious mischief,” according to a partially redacted copy of the police report provided to Breitbart News. “He's fired. Unlike Chris McDaniel, we don't tolerate that type of behavior,” said Cochran's spokesman, Jordan Russell, in an email. The police report alleged Blair “did willfully,...

Charles Barsotti, 80, whose clean-lined cartoons, often depicting dogs, kings, or overbearing businessmen, were a staple of the New Yorker magazine for decades, died June 16 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. The cause was brain cancer, his daughter Wendy Barsotti said. In Mr. Barsotti's world, an adult dog offers this suggestion to a puppy: "My advice is to learn all the tricks you can while you're young."

I am a lifelong Mississippian, and I was a Cochran supporter for years and had planned to vote for him again this time. However, I had a chance to meet Chris McDaniel at an event in DeSoto County. I grilled him and asked several questions about what he could do for us in Washington? For me, it is not all about the money. I believe in States supporting themselves. Federal funds should only be given to States in the event of an emergency. I think that was what our Founding Fathers thought too. I chose to vote for Chris McDaniel...

Charlie Crist is a millionaire, who made more than $700,000 last year, far more than he did in all four years he was Florida governor. Charlie Crist’s loss in a U.S. Senate race was a crushing defeat, but it did wonders for his checkbook

As readers are well aware, the Tea Party is a growing anti-big government movement that seeks to change American politics by often promising to get government out of the lives of citizens – as if that is even remotely possible. Most people of our generation began their voting lives as Democrats. We understand that when people get a little older, more successful and sometimes more conservative, they might transition from being moderate Democrats to Republicans. That’s fine. But right-leaning Tea Party Republicans are as out-of-step with middle America as the left-leaning fringes of the Democratic party. And they certainly won’t...

BILOXI, Mississippi -- U.S. Senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain will campaign for his longtime colleague Thad Cochran this weekend on the Mississippi coast. McCain and Cochran will make an appearance somewhere in the Biloxi/Gulfport area on Sunday. The time and place are still being determined, according to Adam Buckalew with the Cochran campaign. In a bit of political irony, McCain's former running-mate, Sarah Palin, has endorsed Cochran's opponent, state Sen. Chris McDaniel of Ellisville. Cochran and McCain have served together in the U.S. Senate for the past 27 years. Also, late Wednesday the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,...

Former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre is hoping he can help Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) pull out an overtime win in his runoff battle with primary challenger Chris McDaniel. The championship quarterback offers his support to Cochran in a new ad out from the Chamber of Commerce in which he touts Cochran as Mississippi's "strong voice in Washington." "I’ve learned through football that strong leadership can mean the difference between winning and losing," he says in the ad. "Trust me, Mississippi can win," he goes on, with Cochran in office. The three-time MVP started his career as a quarterback...

Weather concerns are prompting the Sevier County Tea Party to move a high-profile bash next week that will include Sarah Palin to the Sevierville Convention Center. The June 26 event, originally scheduled to take place outdoors at Smokies Stadium, marks the one-time GOP vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor’s first public appearance in the region since she testified at the trial of an email intruder four years ago. Mindful of the possibility of rain, the event is shifting indoors, said Sevier County Tea Party Chairman Steve Osborn. Also set to appear is former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, former New York...

The full-page advertisement in Mississippi Link, a weekly newspaper aimed at black residents of Jackson, the state’s capital, urged readers to vote for Senator Thad Cochran in the June 3 Republican primary. That might be unremarkable except for one thing: The political action committee that paid for the ad shares an address and leadership with a local church. “All Citizens for Mississippi” did not appear to exist at the time of the ad’s publication. Its registration as a super PAC with the Federal Election Commission was posted online last week and contains one important clue about its origins. All Citizens...

...To some degree, an improving economy may be holding up his job approval rating and offsetting any potential negative effect from the VA and Bergdahl situations. Still, his average 44% job approval rating since April is not particularly good. Given the strong influence that presidential approval has on midterm election outcomes, Democratic candidates face a strong headwind as they campaign in this year's elections.

With just seven little words, the freakout began: “The government holds a monopoly on violence.” These were written by David Brat, a professor of economics at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College and, now, the Republican party’s nominee for the state’s seventh congressional district. “Unusual” and “eye-opening” was the New York Daily News’s petty verdict. In the Wall Street Journal, Reid Epstein insinuated darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, Politico’s Ben White suggested that the candidate’s remarks “on Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don’t make a whole lot of sense.” As is its...

DES MOINES — It’s not often that a Democratic Party top national strategist travels to Iowa to lament an election loss of a prominent conservative Republican leader. But that happened Friday when Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz warned that the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who is the second most-powerful U.S. House leader, could be a harbinger of deeper political extremism, gridlock and obstructionism....

Charlie Crist has been endorsed by Florida’s largest gay rights group in his run for Governor.... Equality Florida officials made the announcement at a visitors center for gays and lesbians in Miami Beach, citing Crist’s current support for same-sex marriage and ongoing legal efforts to overturn the state’s ban on the unions.

Democratic operatives were just as surprised as everyone else by Eric Cantor’s defeat — but now they’re trying to figure out how to make the most of it. The early thinking: Stay out of the GOP’s way. Virginia’s 7th Congressional District probably isn’t going their way, regardless of the Republican candidate switch. But operatives planning for the midterms believe they can turn Tuesday’s surprising tea party resurgence into something much bigger. They see the attention to the defeat as another cut at the House Republicans as extremists, a new way to highlight congressional dysfunction, a chance to pump more GOP...

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, spent his career denouncing liberals, sucking up to the Tea Party, and doing everything possible to derail President Obama’s agenda. Despite this, Cantor was ousted Tuesday by a Republican challenger in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. Cantor’s loss follows last week’s Mississippi Republican primary, in which Sen. Thad Cochran, another conservative, was edged out by a Tea Party opponent who’s expected to dispatch Cochran in a runoff. How do right-wingers like Cantor and Cochran lose to challengers even further on the right? The answer lies in the extremism of Republican primary voters. On June 2,...

Tuesday’s defeat of the sitting House majority leader, Eric Cantor, apparently sent a series of “messages,” which we in the pundit world who missed all of the signs that The Shock Heard ’Round the Campaign World was coming, are beginning to interpret. Among the strongest messages: Incumbents beware. To hear some tell it, this message is bipartisan. Because Democrats apparently are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of low turnout midterm elections in districts drawn to be more partisan than they were, which would be an interesting observation if it were actually true. The reality is that in most states, the rates...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his Republican primary today in a completely befuddling upset that no one saw coming. When people saw that Cantor was behind David Brat, an unknown and underfunded economics professor, in the returns, jaws dropped, and dropped, and dropped until they hit the floor and left everyone so speechless they had no worries of needing to express their shock in more than 140 characters. As was very evident from how Twitter responded.

Republican Tea Party forces are rejoicing and the party establishment is somber or altogether silent in the wake of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary defeat at the hands of political neophyte David Brat, an unflinching foe of loosening immigration laws.