Free Republic

NOTE: Links to webpages begging for end of quarter contributions have been removed. Which is a shame because the begging was truly pathetic. upchuck -- According to our records, here's what we have down for this exact email address: -- Supporter: upchuck -- High-powered lobbyist: No. -- Currently a Koch brother: No. -- Level of awesome: Dangerously high. -- Suggested action today: Keep on being awesome. OFA is about putting power back in the hands of real people. And corporations and shady interest groups (who aren't real people) are spending big to try to stop that from happening. If you...

After supposed RINO Thad Cochran relied in part on African-American voters to defeat Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel and win the Mississippi GOP’s nomination to the Senate, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe was very upset. Kibbe was so angry, in fact, that he was moved to petulantly declare, “If the only way the K Street wing of the GOP establishment can win is by courting Democrats to vote in GOP primaries then we’ve already won.” This Black Knight-like declaration of victory following conspicuous defeat was widely mocked as yet another example of the Tea Party’s preference to curate reality.

Suburban Albany is not known for its rip-roaring weekend scene, but this most recent Saturday night, it was the momentary center of the political universe, as an underfunded political party was using its quadrennial convention to try to force America’s most powerful and best-financed governor to submit to its demands. Though the Working Families Party’s conventions are typically low-key affairs, this one had drawn 800 activists and operatives and most of the New York press corps—all to see if the party would endorse conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo or run a third-party candidate against him. In the end, when the...

A new documentary makes the controversial case that a political cocktail of big corporate money and racially charged sentiments has helped fuel the rise of the tea party. And squarely behind that movement, the film argues, are the Koch brothers. Co-Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with “Top Line” to discuss their film, “Citizen Koch,” and why they say the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, the Koch brothers, are such figures in American politics today. “Money – $100 billion now,” Deal said in explaining the Kochs’ influence. “When we started out making this film, their net worth was about $68...

What’s an “Islamophobia”-promoting academic to do when there simply aren’t enough hate crimes to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender came up with a brilliant idea for this spring’s Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference: they invented a thought crime called “latent Islamophobia.” According to the conference description and “inspired by [the late Columbia professor] Edward Said’s work on Orientalism,” “Islamophobia” can be broken into two categories: latent and manifest: Latent Islamophobia is founded upon an unquestionable certitude...

The Catholics United Education Fund, a Democrat-leaning advocacy group which began criticizing Church opposition to same-sex “marriage” in 2012, received most of its operational budget that year from a gay activist foundation run by influential multi-millionaire Tim Gill. “I would say it is very obvious that Mr. Gill does not agree with the Catholic Church and Her teachings on the issues of homosexuality and marriage,” Jennifer Kraska, executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, told CNA May 29. “His attitude toward the Church on these issues is definitely one of extreme disagreement.” Tax forms show the Colorado-based Gill Foundation made...

A retired United States Army colonel expects as many as 30 million like-minded individuals will descend on Washington, DC this week and demand that President Barack Obama and other members of his administration be booted from office. Those are just some of the demands that Col. Harry Riley, founder of “Operation American Spring,” said he’ll ask the Obama administration to adhere to when militia members and patriots of all sorts arrive in the nation’s capital on Friday and begin demonstrating against a government the group considers to be in violation of the principles established by the founders of the country....

Surprise action outside Denver's Brown Palace Hotel this morning, as a press release from a coalition of groups including Together Colorado and the Colorado Immigration Reform Coalition (CIRC) explains: Outside a fundraiser headlined by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) for Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) today, local leaders staged a rally to protest the fact that these three House Republicans are key obstacles standing in the way of immigration reform that would keep Colorado immigrant families together. It has been 322 days since the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill, but Speaker Boehner and House...

More Republicans are pushing for an immigration overhaul.House Republican leaders are mum on a timetable for advancing immigration overhaul legislation and have so far been noncommittal on moving on the issue before the end of the 113th Congress. But a group of mayors and business leaders from across the political spectrum is determined to prove that momentum is growing for a rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws — even among conservatives. The coalition, Partnership for a New American Economy, on Wednesday held the first in a series of monthly conference calls moderated by Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist...

The fast-food worker strikes are expanding to more U.S. cities and going global. Workers in up to 150 cities across the country are planning to strike on May 15, according to labor organizers. The movement is also headed overseas, with plans for workers to join protests in 33 countries. On Wednesday, the workers announced the protests outside a McDonald's in New York City, and delivered a letter that called on the fast food giant to raise wages and respect workers' rights worldwide. However, security guards didn't allow the workers to bring the letter inside the restaurant. So, they posted the...

Democrat Who Wanted to Hand Out KKK Hoods to GOP Gets Absolutely Schooled By Black Conservative Woman By Emily Hulsey Days after announcing his plan to hand out KKK hoods at Wisconsin’s GOP convention, State Representative and Democrat candidate for Governor Brett Hulsey (no relation to author) took to the streets once again. Dressed in a (homemade and inaccurate) Confederate uniform, he flagged down conservative attendees to speak about what he says is the GOP’s racist agenda. However, I don’t think he intended for it to go like this…

It's generally a waste of space to reference Sarah Palin, which is why she so rarely appears here. She long ago devolved into a cartoon, and her clout (such as it was) continues to wane. She's like the incoherently choleric aunt you see once a year at Thanksgiving. She's like the real-life version of Kristin Wiig's brain-addled Aunt Linda. But... (You knew there'd be a But.) But every great once in a while, John McCain's Hail Mary gift to America says something so scintillating that we'd be remiss to ignore it. Her remark earlier this week about the religious virtues...

Shane Osborn is done in Nebraska. He cannot get the momentum to win the race. At this point, Osborn is taking the position that if he can’t win the Senate race, neither should Ben Sasse. Osborn, who thought the race was his, is desperately upset. Joined with a Mitch McConnell Super PAC, Osborn is now throwing everything he has at Ben Sasse. Waiting in the wings, with Osborn fully understanding what is happening, is Sid Dinsdale. Dinsdale is extremely rich, has a lot of money to burn at the end of the race, has benefited from sitting on the sidelines...

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday about a big setback for the Wendy Davis campaign for Texas governor.  The Democratic Governors Association (DGA) did not include her campaign as a top target which means it won't be prioritized for heavy spending. The reaction from the Davis campaign could best be described as an angry hissy fit which bitterly attacked the DGA. Pretty big political news from Texas to the extent it was covered by the Wall Street Journal. Therefore you would expect the Texas Tribune which is supposed to cover the nuts and bolts details of Texas politics to...

When Michael Bloomberg announced he would spend $50 million on gun control this year, he said he hoped to make the National Rifle Association “afraid.” This weekend, the Bloomberg-backed group Everytown for Gun Safety will help pay to send hundreds of anti-gun violence supporters to the NRA’s annual convention in Indianapolis. Cleopatra and Nathaniel Pendleton, parents of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl shot and killed in Chicago in 2013, are part of a group of survivors traveling to Indianapolis this weekend for the NRA convention with Bloomberg-backed Everytown for Gun Safety. Ten days after Michael Bloomberg announced a $50 million...

A verified @Faith4Hillary Twitter account purporting to be the "Faith and Value Voters for Hillary Clinton 2016" appears to have purchased a large percentage of its 42.6k followers. The website Twitter Audit determined that more than half of the account's followers were obtained by "inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means," and the similar website StatusPeople calculated that only 18 percent of the account's followers were "good." Per StatusPeople, the rest of the followers were either fake accounts or accounts that are inactive. Additionally, the account has a comparatively small amount of interaction via retweets and favorites compared to the amount of...

The journalists at ABC's World News on Sunday enthusiastically touted a fawning question from a Democratic activist to Hillary Clinton. After anchor David Muir insisted that "it didn't take long for a student there to ask a pointed question," college student Vrinda Agrawal wondered, "If you don't represent women in politics in America as a future president, who will?" [MP3 audio here.] This is a tough question? The event was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel and held at Yale Law School. Agrawal followed-up by enthusing, "I will proudly run your campaign." At no time did Muir or reporter Susan Saulny inform...

Ten city blocks of Manhattan became a river of black Sunday as 50,000 dark-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews took to the streets to protest Israel's proposal to force their young boys into its army. The gathering took up a stretch of Water Street, with demonstrators standing behind police barricades amid tight security as they prayed in solidarity with their brethren in Israel. 'These kids, a lot of them don't know how to hold a gun. They don't know what physical warfare is,' said Long Island rabbinical student Shmuel Gruis.

Paramedics and emergency medical technicians made it clear that they do not want to form a union at Huron Valley Ambulance. According to information obtained from the National Labor Relations Board in a Freedom of Information Act request, votes tallied by the NLRB showed that 221 EMS workers voted against forming a union while just 138 voted in favor of the petition to unionize. There were about 430 eligible voters, but only 359 votes counted and 10 others were listed as “changed ballots” and not counted in the total vote. In January, workers from HVA Workers – with the help...

EyeOn College Basketball Missouri students block Westboro Baptist protest of Michael Sam By Chip Patterson | College Writer February 15, 2014 4:46 pm ET The Missouri community has shown overwhelming support for Michael Sam since the Tigers' football star announced that he was gay earlier this month. On Saturday a group of students united to drown out the protest efforts of the Westboro Baptist Church. The group was in town for the Tigers' home basketball game against Tennessee, protesting Missouri's support of Sam outside Mizzou Arena. Students blocked the Westboro Baptist protesters from view with a human wall, turned their...