Free Republic

Things are just humming right along: In what appears to be a significant October campaign shakeup, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu is replacing her campaign manager and hiring her former chief of staff as a senior adviser.The Democrat has pushed Adam Sullivan out of the manager role and replaced him with Ryan Berni, who ran her brother MitchÂ’s reelection campaign as New Orleans mayor. Berni is a former aide to Clintonista and Louisianan James Carville.Polls show Landrieu falling short of the 50 percent she needs to avoid a December runoff, and Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy has a slight lead in...

Meg Kissinger, a long-time reporter for the politically liberal Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, attempted to cover a Milwaukee campaign speech by First Lady Michelle Obama. She was stunned to discover that she was prohibited from talking to members of the audience. Michelle’s aide Mary Burke explained that “it is important that the message the First Lady is trying to communicate not be confounded by inappropriate crowd comments to any reporters. This is, after all, her event. She has a right to control how it is perceived and reported.” “To say that I was creeped out is an understatement,” Kissinger said. “We...

First lady Michelle Obama believes that Democrats running for Congress eagerly desire her presence on the campaign trail during the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections. However, she has avoided helping some Senate Democrats because she’s mad at them for failing to show adequate support for her deeply unpopular attempt to change people’s diets. The Daily Caller is not making this up. The New York Times has reported it. The first lady has expressed frustration with Senate Democrats because they didn’t do enough to fight Republican attempts to weaken the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,” explains the Times. The 2010 law...

Is "campaign finance reform" a good way to regulate money in politics? Nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and best-selling author George Will shows that, despite the innocent name given by its proponents, campaign finance reform is really a euphemism for controlling free speech. If the goal is to get money out of politics, the real solution is to get politics out of money. In other words, shrink government. In five minutes, learn the truth.

On hearing Friday’s news that Mary Burke’s job-creation plan was plagiarized from other Democrats running for governor, in Delaware, Tennessee, and elsewhere we thought, well…there are think tanks whose business is to share such ideas. But Burke reacted less calmly, firing the consultant responsible for the cut-and-paste job. Why? For duping her into thinking she had a jobs plan? More intriguing than Burke snatching ideas that may be interchangeable among Democrats is her apparently scant familiarity with what she is proposing. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel quoted her saying “This is my plan on how to drive Wisconsin’s economy forward,” later adding...

If you need Rob Astorino signs and you live in Wayne, Ontario and Seneca counties, I have some for you as well as window stickers.

As the midterm campaigns heat up, Democratic candidates are turning to the White House for help and an injection of star power. But it is the first lady, not President Barack Obama, —who in some places is emerging as the more sought-after campaigner. Some Democrats contend that Mr. Obama's sagging popularity limits where he would be helpful this election cycle. Bringing higher approval ratings and a less-partisan pitch, Michelle Obama already has hit the trail, appearing earlier this month in Georgia with Senate candidate Michelle Nunn. Next month, the first lady's campaign travel will include a visit to Iowa, where...

Senators are not permitted to use Senate cash to fly to fundraisers - but that didn’t stop Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu from taking 43 trips on her Senate office account. The Perkins Coie law firm reviewed Landrieu’s travel from her 18 years in the Senate: The report found that Landrieu's official office paid $33,727.02 -- about 11 percent of the total amount her official office paid for chartered flights during that time -- should have been prorated and paid by her campaign. Landrieu blamed the mistakes on "sloppy bookkeeping" in a written apology. Her constituents, however, may not be...

President Obama told congressional leaders at a White House meeting on Monday he wouldn’t need their authorization to expand his military campaign against Islamic terrorists. The president offered the assurance at a private White House meeting one day before a primetime address he’s scheduled to give to the nation. Wednesday’s address is a pivotal moment for the president just months before a midterm election in which the Senate’s majority hangs in the balance. Polls show that confidence in Obama’s foreign policy is eroding just as anxiety over the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has...

First lady Michelle Obama is warning Democratic voters that Washington will “be even worse” if they let Republicans win in November. “Instead of leaders coming together on behalf of hardworking families and finding consensus on the issues that matter most, we’ll just see more conflict and more obstruction,” Mrs. Obama said at a voter registration rally Monday night in Atlanta. She said Republican victories in places like Georgia would result in “more lawsuits and talk about impeachment, more votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or even shut the government down — behavior that just wastes time and wastes taxpayer...

Inside the Strangest Job on the Campaign Trail "What about your gaffes?" Campaign trackers make sure candidates can't escape slipups.By Emma RollerKelli Farr remembers running through a cornfield after getting yelled at by a crowd of Sarah Palin fans.It was 2008, and Farr was working as a campaign tracker—someone employed by an opposing political party to follow a candidate on the campaign trail, documenting his or her every move, in hopes of capturing a slipup......Farr is now the vice president and director of tracking at American Bridge, a Democratic organization that is sisters with Media Matters and Correct the Record,...

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would like you to donate. Right now. The campaign organization, hoping to lead Democrats to control of the House come November, has spent the past week sending out a series of strongly-worded, seemingly desperate, fundraising e-mails trying to get supporters to donate. "All hope is lost," reads the subject of one such e-mail. "We're in serious trouble," it continues. "Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers are massively outspending us...If we get blown out right now, we might as well give up hope until 2016." Another e-mail says Democratic campaigners weren't ready for Republican attack ads....

RUSH: There was a story -- I intended to already be into my media Stack here 'cause it's great, but something just struck me. I didn't go into detail on it yesterday. I intended to, I just didn't get to it. There's another thing I didn't get to yesterday. There's a bunch of polling data out, and I saved it for today, that American people and African-Americans think race relations are worse today than since Obama was elected, and even an Obama pollster is admitting this, and I've got the sound bites. But there was another story yesterday that I...

Is it just me or does this look a little bit like campaign finance fraud? Liberal darling and free-birth-control advocate Sandra Fluke is her own biggest donor in her state Senate race, according to official California campaign finance reports.Fluke donated $12,000 to her campaign and $4,826.27 in non-monetary contributions. While $16,826.27 may not sound like a lot, Fluke also loaned her campaign $100,000.Where does a 2012 law school grad working as a social justice attorney get a loan that size? Her campaign never responded to a Washington Examiner inquiry, so weÂ’re left to speculate. The Examiner piece by Ashe Schow...

Soon there will be three anti-Clinton books on the market, which is apparently enough to have gotten under the skin of Team Hillary. The First Family Detail by Ronald Kessler, set for release next month, will join Clinton, Inc. by the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper and Blood Feud by Ed Klein on bookshelves. Yesterday we reported that Clinton, Inc. has shot up the charts and now both Halper and Klein’s books are outselling Hillary Clinton’s recent memoir Hard Choices. “With Klein, Halper and Kessler, we now have a Hat Trick of despicable actors concocting trashy nonsense,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill...

Republican threats to impeach President Barack Obama are guaranteed to generate two things: Democratic outrage and Democratic cash. Sarah Palin this week joined a long line of Republican firebrands in raising the specter of impeachment against the president, writing in a Breitbart.com op-ed: “The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.” And like clockwork, the Democratic outrage machine sprang to life — using her comments to mobilize grass-roots supporters and raise small dollar campaign donations from Obama die-hards. The result was a flood of grass-roots...

An IRS employee was suspended for 100 days for using his job at the agency’s help line to try to convince callers to vote for President Obama, a government watchdog agency announced Thursday. The employee, whose name wasn’t mentioned in the announcement from the Office of Special Counsel, admitted to using his job for political purposes and agreed to the settlement that involved a 100-day suspension. “OSC’s complaint alleged that, when fielding taxpayers’ questions on an IRS customer service help line, the employee repeatedly urged taxpayers to re-elect President Obama in 2012 by delivering a chant based on the spelling...

Racist attack on GOP House challenger Glo Smith follows recent pattern of hate toward black Republicans.A Florida Republican congressional candidate’s campaign sign was vandalized with whiteface paint last week in a district with overwhelmingly Democratic voter registration. The attack follows a string of bias incidents against black Republicans. Glo Smith, who reports that she has also had a number of signs stolen, tells National Review Online she became aware of the racist defacement of an eight-foot-by-four-foot sign Tuesday. The sign was situated on private property in view of Interstate 10 in Jacksonville. The vandal sprayed white paint over the face...

Two gaffes bookended Clinton’s week: Comments that she and former President Bill Cilinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House took hold of the coverage of her book tour on Monday, and a contentious exchange with NPR’s Terry Gross on gay marriage again derailed the focus of her memoir “Hard Choices” on Thursday. The rollout drew criticism not just from Republicans, but also nonpartisan reporters that have covered her for years. Mark Halperin, part of the reporting team that produced “Game Change,” an in-depth look at the 2008 campaign, said the one-time candidate was “very rusty.” The book...

DENVER — Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado said Thursday he supports granting citizenship to people who enter the country illegally and serve in the U.S. military. Photo - Rep. Cory Gardner is challenging Democratic Sen Mark Udall and has been criticized for not favoring a broader path to citizenship for people living in the country illegally. (Denver Post file) + caption The Republican is challenging Democratic Sen Mark Udall and has been criticized for not favoring a broader path to citizenship for people living in the country illegally. Gardner's statements, in an interview with The Associated Press, came a day...