Free Republic

Despite claims that he switched to the Democratic Party as a result of "GOP racism," Charlie Crist has been unable to secure strong minority support and as a result has lost the lead in his bid to reclaim the Florida Governors mansion against incumbent Governor Republican Rick Scott. In the latest CBS/New York Time/YouGov poll, Scott now leads Crist by five points in a race analysts suggest may be getting away from Crist. Charlie Crist led the race by as many as 15 points in polls taken early this year, but has been unable to muster strong support from minority...

Republicans are not planning to impeach President Obama. Yes, Sarah Palin has called for it. The South Dakota GOP passed an impeachment resolution. Andy McCarthy is out with a book arguing that the legal foundation for ousting Obama exists, but the political will does not. And the occasional House back-bencher floats the 'I-word' from time to time. But there is no groundswell of support, or any semblance of a serious campaign, to remove the President of the United States from office. That's not a thing. When asked about Palin's impeachment advocacy House Speaker John Boehner -- who's suing Obama...

Republicans are running competitively for 10 Senate seats now held by Democrats, heightening chances for the party to capture a majority of the U.S. Senate in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Republican Party is generally less popular than either President Barack Obama or the Democratic Party, according to the Journal. Those sentiments are evidently offset by a combination of appealing Republican candidates and deep public disapproval of the president. Democrats now hold 55 seats in the Senate. Republicans need a net gain of six for a majority. Republican senatorial candidates are doing well in seven states that went...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she wanted more Central American citizens to apply for asylum to live in the United States from their home countries. The Obama administration is reportedly considering setting up a satellite facility in Honduras to allow people to apply for asylum without coming to the United States, but Clinton said Guatemalans and El Salvadorans should have asylum facilities in their nations as well. In an interview with Jorge Ramos on Fusion, Clinton said that she wanted facilities "over there" to "screen kids... before they get in the hands of coyotes, or they get on...

Mark Begich is the Democrat Senator from Alaska because the Democrats smeared the good name and reputation of Ted Stevens, the Republican who held the seat until 2008. Stevens was savaged by the Democrat controlled media and criminally charged with being corrupt. Although he was pretty much cleared before the election, the people of Alaska decided “better safe than sorry.” In Begich they got worse not better and plenty to be sorry about. Begich delivered not for Alaskans but for Barack Obama and Harry Reid when he joined in the sneaky Christmas Eve passage of a bill the Senate Democrats...

Why would an honest polling company ask Chris McDaniel’s supporters if they favored a second Civil War and if so, which side they would support? These are the questions one has to ask after reading Public Policy Polling’s (PPP) report on its survey of Mississippi voters on the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Thad Cochran and Democrat challenger Travis Childers. What was the purpose of these questions? Who paid them to ask these questions and why? Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democrat polling firm based in Raleigh North Carolina. Thad Cochran’s team has strong connections to Democrats; some...

A holiday weekend video treat: How cable music channel VH1 turned booing of Senator Hillary Clinton into cheering. Senator Clinton was booed when she walked on stage last October at a rock concert in Madison Square Garden to benefit 9/11 victims. It was shown live by VH1 but, as ABC's John Stossel illustrated in a July 20/20 special on media distortions, when the Viacom-owned cable channel replayed it sound technicians replaced the booing with cheering and applause. And that version is the permanent record VH1 put onto its DVD of the event. During his July 12 20/20 look at media...

Should the Democrats nominate Elizabeth Warren for President in 2016, as a draft-Warren movement, some liberal pundits and enthusiasts at this week’s Netroots Nation convention believe? Should Republicans nominate Ted Cruz, who has kept his options open with frequent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire? In some ways, Cruz and Warren are mirror images, and the cases for and against them are surprisingly similar. But there are also some critical differences.Before 2008, the idea of a presidential contest between two first-term Senators in their (by then) fourth year in Washington would have seemed ridiculous; in 1988, Dan Quayle was roundly...

Not so long ago the federal deficit was projected to destroy the country, our children’s future and just about everything else. Budget battles shut down the entire government for a couple weeks. How times change. A count by our colleague Alice Crites illustrates how the issue gained media traction – - especially after the Bush/Obama stimulus packages to mitigate Bush’s Great Recession – and how much it’s faded from the front pages. So what happened? Simple answer, of course, is that the deficit is way down and, for now, no longer a big problem.

If President Obama is as thin-skinned as his critics say then his ego is in for a bruising in Colorado today. Obama will be campaigning in the Centennial State – one of the key battlegrounds in his bid to hold the Senate for his party – but neither the incumbent senator he is trying to save nor other top-tier Democratic candidates will appear in public with the president.

Allahpundit touched on this idea briefly this week in an article primarily to do with Mitt Romney in specific and the general question of whether or not there are second acts for losing party nominees in the 21st century. But apparently the idea has taken root in a few places, and as he noted in the article, the Daily Caller (or at least Mark Halperin) talked about it without being entirely tongue in cheek. Mark Halperin, the senior political analyst for “Time” magazine, appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday and boldly reiterated his Wednesday Twitter assertion that Al Gore —...

[...]If Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush were to become president of the United States it would mean the power and influence of the presidency remained in the hands of the Clinton family for possibly sixteen years, and that’s not even counting the princess in waiting, Chelsea; and in the case of the Bush family, possibly twenty years, and that’s not counting the heir apparent, George Prescott Bush. Have we devolved into a nation of bleating sheep, or screaming teenagers at an episode of American Idol? Can it be true that there are no other citizens in this great nation worthy of...

After an absence of several years, the new Pew Research Center political typology poll was just released. It breaks the American political electorate into eight groups. And, it makes clear what the Democratic challenge is in November midterm election. The Pew political typology has two dimensions. One is the likelihood of voting. Pew factors voters into three categories: "General Public," "Registered Voter," and "Politically Engaged." I'll assume the "Politically Engaged" are those likely to vote in the November midterm election and focus on those percentages. The second Pew dimension is the degree of partisanship. Pew sees three clusters. The first...

A new conventional wisdom is forming which says Democrat's gaffes don't matter because they aren't connected to (bad) Republican policies. There's a grain of truth to this argument and yet it misses the big picture. Hillary's policy positions won't be able to save her from her own serious flaws as a candidate. Progressive writer Brian Beutler explained why Romney's gaffe's mattered (and Hillary's didn't) this way: "Romney's weaknesses ran much deeper than tone-deaf asides about close friendships with NASCAR team owners, or a car elevator. His unfamiliarity with material deprivation was badly compounded by his devotion to an agenda (and...

President Obama on Wednesday predicted the Republican Party would have to "move back to the center" if it ever wanted to win another presidential election. During an interview with "Marketplace" radio show, Obama defended his recent effort to sidestep Congress on a number of issues this year in the face of inaction. He said Republicans are unable to carry out "basic functions of government,” pointing to the failure to pass immigration reform and the government shutdown last year. "I don't think this is a permanent state of affairs,” he said. “I think over time the Republican Party will move back...

Bill Maher took on Hillary Clinton‘s big book tour/2016 pre-campaign and amid the mockery of Clinton downplaying how well-off her family is (he sarcastically sympathized with someone emerging “from the financial rut that is the U.S. presidency”), Maher had some advice for the soon-to-be-official presidential candidate: go away. Contrary to people saying that doing the book tour now will inoculate her from criticism in 2016, Maher said Clinton being constantly on TV and in the news will give way to a different result; namely, “we’re sick of you.” And people will grow tired of her by 2016 anyway.

Pointing out that post-election challenges usual fail, one Tea Party leader, Judson Phillips is calling for Thad Cochran's primary challenger, State Senator Chris McDaniel to run as a write-in candidate in the Fall. “The Republican Establishment thinks they have fought back an insurrection from conservatives and now we will meekly fall in line in November and support a RINO who needs Democrats to win? Never,” said Mr. Phillips, who also writes a column in The Washington Times. “If Chris McDaniel loses his challenges to this election, then he needs to be a write-in candidate this fall.” It's increasingly clear that...

If anyone doubted that the Republican Party would become more conservative after the ousting of Eric Cantor, his successor put those doubts to rest over the weekend. In an interview with Fox News, incoming House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) revealed leadership's first significant policy shift: opposition to reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank when its current charter expires on Sept. 30, a move that would shutter the credit agency. "One of the problems with government is it's going to take hard earned money so others do things that the private sector can do. That's what Ex-Im Bank does," he said. "I...

At the end of the Civil War, but before the pernicious reach of Jim Crow undermined the Union Army’s battlefield victory, former slaves and free blacks found themselves in possession of a most precious right -- the right to vote. It didn’t matter if a man had been a war hero in the famed, all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment or a house servant on a Southern plantation. All that mattered was that he was a man. To say that this development didn’t sit well with the progressive-minded women of this country is an understatement. Before the war, the abolitionist...

Hillary Clinton says she and her husband aren’t truly “well off,” despite the fact that they’ve made millions. Clinton made the comment in an interview published Saturday night in The Guardian. The exchange touched on the recent comment she made about how she and former President Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001—a statement many regarded as out of touch. "But they don't see me as part of the problem," she said of voters, "because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names;...