Free Republic

This is just breaking, so I thought I’d serve it up for y’all: Onstage with Robert Gibbs and CBS correspondent and “Spies Against Armageddon” co-author Dan Raviv, Rove said Republicans should keep the Benghazi issue alive. He said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012. The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with...

A belated response to the uproar after Rand Paul told an NYT reporter that the GOP’s voter-ID push was “offending people.” After reading this, I think the Guardian has his position right: “Rand Paul believes in voter ID laws. He just doesn’t think Republicans should talk about them so much.”Good enough? [T]his statement comes from Paul’s former chief of staff and current PAC director.“Senator Paul was having a larger discussion about criminal justice reform and restoration of voting rights, two issues he has been speaking about around the country and pushing for in state and federal legislation. “In the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)New York Rep. Peter King is stepping up his attacks on 2016 GOP hopefuls Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as he builds on his burgeoning presidential campaign with planned trips to Iowa and South Carolina. “I don’t want the Republican Party taken over isolationists such as Rand Paul, or people like Ted Cruz who want to shut the government down,” he said while visiting Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. “I want there to be an alternative voice which I feel is in the tradition of Eisenhower, of Reagan, and you know, traditional Republicans who believe in strong national defense...

The Republican Party is set this week to take another step in its bid to take control of the 2016 presidential primary debate calendar and prevent what GOP officials have referred to as another “circus” that damages the nominee's general election prospects. Republicans want to head off a repeat of the 2012 primary, which featured about 20 debates spread over nearly a year that provided hours of free television exposure to second-tier candidates who were underfunded and had minimal support. The process helped to artificially extend the GOP primary campaign and diminished Mitt Romney's ability to defeat President Obama later...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Republican National Committee wants to take more control over how the party picks a White House nominee. The RNC was to meet Wednesday in Memphis, Tennessee, to choose members who will effectively set the calendar for 2016's long list of potential presidential contenders. If the party's chairman, Reince Priebus gets his way, the GOP will pick its nominee more quickly than during past contests and have fewer debates in which candidates could criticize each other. The RNC also was expected to put penalties in place for candidates who don't follow the committee's plans. RNC officials described...

Fearful of a third successive Democratic triumph, concerned Senate Republicans are turning against 2016 presidential bids by upstart hopefuls within their own ranks. In forceful comments to The Hill, GOP senators made it plain that they would much prefer their party nominate a current or former governor over Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Marco Rubio (Fla.) or Rand Paul (Ky.). Those senators have created a buzz among conservative activists, but their colleagues in the upper chamber are eager to support a nominee from outside Washington with a record of attracting independents and centrist Democrats. They worry that Washington has become so...

As we know, the search for an “establishment” candidate has been on in the GOP for a while now, a savior who can rescue the party from Rand Paul or Ted Cruz. That man, of course, is Jeb Bush. Last week on Hardball, Kathleen Parker said he is definitely running. She’s a conservative columnist but not a wacko, has establishment GOP credentials and Florida ties to boot. And she spoke with the air of someone who had had this nugget leaked to her specifically so that she would go out on national TV and blurt it out. So take the...

The Republican Party is at its strongest point in two decades heading into midterm elections, according to a new Pew Research-USA Today poll, the latest daunting sign for Democrats ahead of campaign season. The GOP is at an even stronger point than in previous "wave" elections in 1994 and 2010 and looks poised to make major gains — and possibly take control of the U.S. Senate. According to the poll, out Monday, Republicans have a 47-43 lead on the generic congressional ballot. That's a 10-point swing from October, when Democrats, boosted by GOP blame for the federal government shutdown, held...

Joni Ernst, a Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, was made in the Sarah Palin mold — her first TV ad focused on her experience castrating hogs. Perhaps high off the buzz and Palin endorsement that that ad generated, Ernst just released another TV spot that is beyond parody. The 30-second spot, titled "Shot," features Ernst at the shooting range, "unloading" on Obamacare. The narrator's lines sound like a Palin speech run through the shredder. As Ernst rides into the frame on a Harley, we hear, "Conservative Joni Ernst: Mom, Farm Girl, and a Lieutenant Colonel who carries more than just...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must be thrilled about this: “If you are President Barack Obama and you want to be a transformational president, getting to that transformational stage sometimes requires you get a third term,” NBC News Senior Politics Editor Mark Murray submitted amid a sleepy Monday segment packed with idle speculation about the 2016 election cycle. “People in the White House, and President Obama, I am sure they would love to have a third or fourth term,” Murray continued. “That is some of the reasons why some of the people in the Obama orbit are happy about...

I thought Mika was going to cry as she presented the bad news in this new poll that basically shows that people are fed up with Democrats:

A group of wealthy liberal donors who helped bankroll the Center for American Progress and other major advocacy groups on the left is developing a new big-money strategy that could boost state-level Democratic candidates and mobilize core party voters. The plan, being crafted in private by a group of about 100 donors that includes billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros and San Francisco venture capitalist Rob McKay, seeks to give Democrats a stronger hand in the redrawing of district lines for state legislatures and the U.S. House.

Column: The 2014 election was decided before Obama’s second term beganFitting, I thought, when I saw Air Force One returning to Andrews Air Force Base in the rain the other day. The weather had not only assumed the character of President Obama’s demeanor, it had become a physical representation of the sentiments inside his administration, inside Democratic circles in Washington. Those sentiments are dark, foreboding, cloudy, and gloomy. The president’s foreign policy is under attack, his agenda is stalled in Congress, and his signature program remains unpopular. A second repudiation of Obama, a second shellacking, may be at hand.Less than a...

He destroyed the Clinton Political Machine - Driving a stake thru the Heart of Hillary's Presidential aspirations--something no Republican was ever able to do. Remember when a Hillary Presidency scared the daylights out of you! He killed off the Kennedy Dynasty - No more Kennedys trolling Washington looking for booze and women wanting rides home. American women and freedom are safer tonight! He is destroying the Democratic Party before our eyes! Dennis Moore had never lost a race - quit Evan Bayh had never lost a race - quit Byron Dorgan - had never lost a race - quit Harry...

Well Crafted Lie This week Judicial Watch obtained new Benghazi-related documents and emails as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department. Far from unusual with the Obama Administration, it took a court order to obtain documents previously withheld from Congress. The newly released documents reveal direct White House involvement in controlling the narrative and blurring the truth concerning the Benghazi murders. The Administration knew all along that the Benghazi attack had been a well-planned operation. Obama had just been handed a major foreign policy defeat and could not allow the American people...

A new French book that decries income inequality has become such the rage among the U.S. left that it is sparking debate on a smoldering political issue: That Hillary Clinton isn't liberal enough to win the Democratic nomination in 2016. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” uses a mountain of historical data to show that income inequality, a subject President Obama has seized on, will grow without government intervention. One idea is to devote up to three-quarters of income to taxes. Progressives, many of whom are eyeing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading up...

In a long-winded speech on Wednesday at Georgetown University, former president Bill Clinton criticized the “political press” who, he says, are so often blinded by a “storyline” that they ignore reality, especially when it comes to Obamacare. “One of the problems is, if a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on addictive to have a storyline,” said Clinton. “And then, once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving that borders on blindness, to shoehorn every fact, every development, everything that happens into the storyline, even...

Hillary Clinton is running for President. Oh, sure, she hasnÂ’t announced it yet. But all the signs are there: speeches to certain groups, third-party money-raising apparatus, little hints dropped by Bill Clinton on Twitter. Hillary can play coy, but no one in the Democrat Party believes for a second that she did not walk out of the offices of Secretary of State and right into a campaign meeting. But what about the other big female name in American politics? No, not Elizabeth Warren. She is going to run with Hillary for the VP job. WeÂ’re talking about Sarah Palin. Ever...

The e-mail revelations and the Obama administration’s lies Here is the main point: The rioting at the American embassy in Cairo was not about the anti-Muslim video. As argued here repeatedly (see here and here), the Obama administration’s “Blame the Video” story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several hours later. We’ll come back to that because, once you grasp this well-hidden fact, the Obama administration’s derelictions of duty in connection with Benghazi become much easier to see. But...

Minnesota’s Senate race isn’t one of the best chances for Republicans to pick up a seat, but a new poll shows that it’s a possibility. A new Suffolk University poll finds Democratic incumbent Al Franken leading all four, relatively unknown Republican candidates, but he fails to pick up majority support from voters. In four head-to-head match-ups with declared Republican candidates, Franken gets roughly 44 percent support to the Republicans’ 29 percent. While his lead is in the double digits, the gap falls within the percentage of Minnesotans who say they remain undecided on who to support. Nearly one-fifth, or 19...