Free Republic

It’s the admission conservatives have been waiting for! Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) just told the world what conservatives have suspected for decades:“Our party has gotten to be a party of liberal elites. That’s great if you want to be in the minority for the next 30 years. That’s not where America is. Democrats have left our lunch-bucket allies behind.”In an interview regarding his opposition to the EPA, Rep. Schrader makes the admission after after calling the EPA the “big problem for economic development in our region.” …

If Michelle Obama decided to run for president in 2016, she would pose the most significant threat, among likely contenders, to Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the Democratic nomination, according to a new Rasmussen poll. A telephone survey of 1,000 likely voters conducted by the polling company found that in a hypothetical match-up between the current first lady and the former secretary of State, Clinton would best Obama 56 percent to 22 percent. That may seem like a significant margin, but according to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling average, Elizabeth Warren, a popular hypothetical challenger to Clinton, receives only 12.5...

Martin O’Malley plans to announce his presidential intentions on May 30 in Baltimore, a move that could present another Democratic challenger to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former Maryland governor will hold a conference call with top supporters on Thursday night to discuss his plans for the announcement in his adopted hometown, where he served as mayor, an O’Malley aide said Thursday. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning and was not authorized to speak publicly. O’Malley, who completed his second term as governor earlier this year, has been considering a potential challenge to Clinton, the leading...

There will be no breathless stories about how left-wing extremists and obstructionists have hijacked the Democratic Party. No hand-wringing about the state of American politics now that congress has defied the will of the first black president. There will be no scary pieces on how a stubborn minority party is holding up bills that have proven to create jobs – both here and abroad. There’ll be no passionate speeches about the dangers of big-money interests buying democracy. Remember these aren’t your parents’ Democrats. And when Democrats rebelled against Obama’s bipartisan trade initiative this week and voted to stop debate on...

Former Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley said that if he runs for president, he'll launch his campaign in Baltimore: "We haven't had an agenda for America's cities probably since Jimmy Carter ... We have left cities to fend for themselves. ... But look, the structural problems that we have in our economy, the way we ship jobs and profits abroad, the way we failed to invest in our infrastructure and failed to invest in American cities, we are creating the conditions. Please, Speaker Boehner and his crocodile tears about the $130 million, that is a spit in the bucket compared to...

When running for office in 2012, President Obama frequently inveighed against "millionaires and billionaires" who don't pay their fair share of taxes. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist arguably to the left of Obama who plans to run for president in 2016, wants to narrow his focus to just billionaires.

If all it took to get my vote was being a 73-year-old dude who’s grooving out to the folk songs he used to shout-sing in a Vermont jam band, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would have my vote. If you click on the audio button on the lower right (see video on this page), you can hear him shush the reporter who is playing his old music and say “Shhh. I’m getting in the groove here!” What’s not to love, really? If you didn’t know he was a sitting U.S. Senator, there is no way you’d put that on a list...

In case you haven’t heard, Martin O’Malley is looking at challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democrats’ nomination next year. (And judging by the media coverage, you may not have heard unless your last name is O’Malley.) Another thing to be aware of when it comes to O’Malley is that he is a former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, so when the riots broke out this was clearly an appropriate place for him to show up and comment. Or at least somebody on his staff seemed to think so. But as it turned out, not all of the residents...

It’s very easy (and fun) to ridicule Joe Biden as a buffoon, but there are more than a few people who take him seriously as an alternative to Hillary Clinton as Democrat nominee.  Biden fever is rising as Hillary herself is getting harder and harder to take as a serious nominee.  Scott McKay argues in the American Spectator: If ever there was an ill-fitting and ill-considered elevator pitch for a political candidate, it’s the narrative of Hillary Clinton as the defender of ordinary Americans. The sales job, which reportedly was the product of months of consideration from the Clinton...

Following a brief feint in which the White House masterfully exploited the servility of congressional Republicans to create the impression that Barack Obama was still firmly in command of the country’s destiny, the revolt of liberal lawmakers over a proposed free trade has made it clear that the president is very much a lame duck. The internecine fight among Democrats over the Trans-Pacific Partnership has elevated Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to the status as chief liberal opponent of a Democratic White House. “The government doesn’t want you to read this massive new trade agreement. It’s top secret,” Warren said...

Sure, it was tongue in cheek. But still, it revealed an underlying truth . . . On today's Face the Nation, when Bob Schieffer wondered why the Dems have fielded only one presidential candidate, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank responded by suggesting that Schieffer himself should go for it. Milbank said there was a "real opportunity" for someone to run against Hillary by filling the Elizabeth Warren slot and then observed that Schieffer would "have some free time after this summer" [since he has announced his retirement.] Schieffer began a Shermanesque response: "if nominated I would not" before dissolving in...

Why are the Democrats running for president so old? Blame the Clintons. There are five Democrats who have either declared or are thinking about running for president. Three — Joe Biden, Bernard Sanders, and Jim Webb — will be over 70 years old on Inauguration Day 2017. Frontrunner Hillary Clinton will be nine months short of 70. Only Martin O'Malley, who will turn 54 a couple of days before the 2017 swearing-in, has not reached retirement age already. In 2008, Democrats had a 47 year-old candidate who mesmerized the party and ran away with the votes of Americans aged 18...

The early days of American political campaigns are always marked by a certain pantomime absurdity, but one could be forgiven nevertheless for wondering whether Hillary Clinton’s confused, staccato launch has been especially daffy. For an event that has been at least six years in the making, last Sunday’s confirmation was unusually schizophrenic and almost entirely inchoate. In the morning, we were told that Clinton would be demonstrating her tech savvy by announcing with a video and a tweet. Instead, we got an insipid e-mail from an aide. In the evening, we were informed that Clinton would be driving across the...

Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee said Thursday on CNN that he's running for the Democratic nomination for president, just a week after announcing he formed an exploratory committee, his most definitive statement he's made toward formalizing a 2016 campaign. "Yes, that's why I'm running. Because I feel strong about where we're going as a country," Chafee told CNN's "New Day" on Thursday, when asked why he's been so critical of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Chafee was asked by CNN's John Berman in the context of having not formally declared his presidential campaign. Chafee spokeswoman Debbie Rich said Chafee did...

A source with knowledge of Hillary Clinton's plans has confirmed that she will officially announce her 2016 presidential bid on Saturday or Sunday. This will be imminently followed by campaign travel. A spokesperson for Clinton's campaign team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Clinton has long been expected to enter the 2016 race. Polls show her well ahead of all her likely Democratic and Republican rivals. She has been ramping up her presidential preparations including leasing office space for a headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and hiring key staffers. On Tuesday, CNN reported Clinton's...

George Stephanopoulos was one of the leading members of Clinton's 1992 U.S. presidential campaign and worked in the Clinton administration before turning "journalist." In 2012, he injected the birth-control-pill issue into the 2012 presidential election debate to create the illusion of a GOP "War on Women." The objective may have been to help create camaraderie among women to benefit Hillary. Now, it seems that he is doing it again. Out of the clear blue, he pounded Mike Pence on signing a bill that many states have. The issue this time is LGBT. Is it possible that Hillary is going to...

(Reuters) - Hillaryclinton.org bears the likely Democratic presidential candidate's name, but she would not want supporters to go there: some cyber security experts said this week the site contains malicious software. The site is registered, not to Clinton, but to an administrator in the Cayman Islands. Its existence underscores the challenge 2016 U.S. presidential hopefuls will face in trying to control their digital brands, more important than ever before as voters increasingly turn to the Internet to learn more about candidates. An examination by Reuters of domains including the full names of eight Republican and four Democratic hopefuls, ending in...

There doesn't appear to be anything Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) can say to stop the questions about her presidential ambitions. "You didn't think you'd get away with this interview without me asking point-blank: Are you going to run for president?" the "Today" show's Savannah Guthrie asked Warren on Tuesday morning. "No. I'm not running and I'm not going to run," Warren said. Guthrie pressed Warren. "I'm not running. I'm not running," the senator insisted. Her initial reply is almost identical to what she said the day before, according to The New York Observer. Warren visited a Manhattan bookstore to promote...

Taxpayers abandoned his state in droves during his tenure as governor, but that’s not dampening the presidential aspirations of Martin O’Malley. In 2014, his final year in office as governor, Maryland had the second-highest foreclosure rate in the nation. Now he wants to ride this embarrassing record to the White House. At the Brookings Institution in March, O’Malley test-drove some campaign rhetoric: “Behind all of our data, there are people, living their lives, shouldering their struggles. They deserve a government that works.” Unfortunately, in the state O’Malley governed for eight years, he gave deserving Marylanders anything but a state government...

Incensed that Republicans want to abolish Obamacare and that the “billionaire class wants more and more for themselves and less for working families,”  socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont barnstormed the Bay Area with a spate of speeches and interviews signaling a possible 2016 presidential run. “If you go to almost any state in this country, including the most conservative, and you ask them if it makes sense to give tax breaks to billionaires while making cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and education, they will say ‘no,'” Sanders said on Monday in San Francisco.