Free Republic

GOP strategist Karl Rove said Saturday that rebuilding the Republican brand in California will be a tough task that will require them to diversify and create a strategy to spread their message to a wider audience. Referring to the state party’s deep losses in recent years, Rove said it needs to focus on larger themes of restoring jobs and reducing government spending. He also said the party must recruit candidates who reflect the diversity of the country, and in particular, California. By next year, Hispanics will overtake whites as the state’s largest demographic group. …

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — GOP strategist Karl Rove said Saturday that rebuilding the Republican brand in California will be a tough task that will require them to diversify and create a strategy to spread their message to a wider audience. http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/03/karl-rove.html

Marco Rubio’s softening stance toward immigration reform boils down to his mom, a new profile of the fast-rising Florida senator reveals. “Don’t mess with the immigrants, my son,” Oriales Garcia Rubio told her youngest son during a Dec. 21 phone call, Time magazine reports. Illegal immigrants, she said, are “human beings just like us, and they came for the same reasons we came. To work. To improve their lives.” Rubio took his mother’s words to heart, and says they are shaping his work on immigration. “I have to balance that humanity with reality,” he said. “We have immigration laws. They...

Dick Morris is out at Fox News, but Karl Rove is in. The future of the republic does not hinge on this development, but the divergence in the conservative commentators’ fates is nevertheless telling. Both, after all, had issued spectacularly wrong predictions on who would win last November’s presidential race. (Mitt Romney in a landslide!) Both were adamant, night after night, that their data were rock solid. On election night, Mr. Rove went so far as to challenge Fox News’ decision to call Ohio for President Obama, which effectively called the election. In the most entertaining bit of TV all...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will deliver the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address on Feb. 12. Rubio's response will be delivered in both English and Spanish, according to Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office. "Marco Rubio is one of our party’s most dynamic and inspiring leaders. He carries our party’s banner of freedom, opportunity and prosperity in a way few others can. His family’s story is a testament to the promise and greatness of America," Boehner said in a statement on Wednesday. "He’ll deliver a GOP address that speaks from the heart to the hopes and dreams...

Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist says that large-scale immigration is good for America and the Republican Party — and that critics of easy immigration should get out of the way. “There are a whole bunch of people who are listening to loud voices, some of whom claim to be Republican … talking about [employers] who didn’t fill out the paperwork, about going after [an immigrant's] aunt,” said Norquist, whose opposition to tax increases has made him popular among Republicans and a hate-figure among progressives. Once advocates for tighter immigration are sidelined, the GOP will be able to win...

Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is in talks with the Fox New Channel to join the network, a Fox spokeswoman has confirmed. She declined to say what role Brown would play at the cable network. The network recently cut ties with former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former Clinton presidential advisor Dick Morris. Brown, who lost his Senate seat to Democrat Elizabeth Warren in November, announced last Friday he would not be running in the special Senate election to fill the seat being vacated by Secretary of State John F. Kerry. Meanwhile, Kadant Inc. of Westford, a paper...

Karl Rove -- "The Architect," as President George W. Bush called him -- crafted Bush's two presidential campaigns and served as a key player in Bush's White House. Now, with an assist from The New York Times, Rove is presenting himself as a conservative leader. On Sunday, the Times reported that American Crossroads, the super PAC Rove started, was beginning a new program called "The Conservative Victory Project." This project, as the Times put it, will "recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and tea party enthusiasts." But Rove is no conservative. If you give...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will speak for the first time at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a clear sign that he is mulling a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. The American Conservative Union, which sponsors the conference, announced Tuesday that Bush will address the group, set for March 14-16 in National Harbor, Md., just outside Washington. Bush has been invited by the group to speak at CPAC several times, but this will be his first appearance. “We are pleased to announce that my friend Gov. Jeb Bush will be a featured speaker at CPAC 2013,”...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attempted to project a softer Republican tone on immigration during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday, but indicated there is a ways to go until Republicans and Democrats agree on an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws. Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, endorsed a path to citizenship for DREAMers, the undocumented young people brought to the United States as children.

He's already being treated like the 2016 GOP presidential front-runner, and now there is another reason Republicans are excitedly buzzing about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio: He alone would reverse the party's slide among Hispanic voters. A new nationwide poll from JZ Analytics found that Rubio would get 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, about twice what Mitt Romney won in 2012. Republican strategist told Secrets that a win among Latino voters that big would assure Rubio the presidency, since he would also likely keep the regular GOP base. "If he does that good, then he's the next president," said a...

Demography isn't destiny—and assuming that it is will likely make liberals overreach again. Many are arguing these days that President Obama has forged a new majority coalition of women, minorities, young people and upscale cultural liberals so large and durable that he can do what no president has done before—pursue a very liberal agenda without serious opposition or defections from his own party. Demography is destiny, this argument holds, and it is irrevocably on the side of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party. Yes, there will be fewer whites and more minorities in the future, and Republicans will have to...

If slow and steady really does win the race, Newt Gingrich could well end up being the Republican nominee for president. Thus far, this campaign season has been defined by flash-in-the-pan fortunes. Michele Bachmann was first out of the blocks and won the Iowa straw poll, but this seemed much like a house of straw when Texas governor Rick Perry entered the fray and became her Big Bad Wolf. But then he blew his own house down with a series of disastrous debate performances, allowing the Cain Train to pull into the station. This brings us to where we are...

In cities across the country, U.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez, a member of the Hispanic Caucus in the House of Representatives, is pimping for yet another full-blown amnesty for illegal aliens. ‘Family re-unification’ is the latest public relations ploy being used in an attempt to convince citizens and government officials that the plight of illegal aliens is somehow the responsibility of the United States. This amnesty would reunite deported illegal aliens with their so-called ‘anchor babies’ on American soil. There is no impediment to family reunification in the parents’ country of origin. In the legislative queue in the U.S. Congress are...