Free Republic

Some Los Angeles donors who attended a Sept. 30 fundraiser for Clay Aiken in Los Angeles feel “duped” after the announcement, just hours after he lost his race for a North Carolina congressional seat, that Esquire Network had been producing a “docu-series” about his campaign. According to Karen Ocamb of FrontiersLA, donors are asking that footage of the event not be included in the documentary. Donors have complained that a film crew following Aiken around that night asked attendees to sign release forms, but told them that it was for a BBC documentary that would not air in the U.S....

Wonder Woman is home from the war on women, a "war" fought mostly in the fantasies of embattled Democrats, and she sounds like a Republican who looks a lot like Joni Ernst of Iowa. Or Elise Stefanik of New York, who at 30 will be the youngest woman to serve in Congress, or Mia Love of Utah, 38, daughter of Haitian immigrants, the first black Republican woman in Congress. These are women with neither lamentations nor unresolved grievances. The only whine anyone heard on the morning after the elections was the growl of Mrs. Ernst's Harley. Despite the tedious rhetoric...

Obama’s Amnesty By BlackmailPosted By Matthew Vadum On November 7, 2014 @ 12:34 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments Ignoring voters’ historic coast-to-coast repudiation of his disastrous policies this week, President Obama is now threatening to move forward unilaterally with a massive immigration amnesty by the end of the year.At his first post-election press conference Wednesday, instead of embracing conciliation as a responsible adult might do, Obama, the petulant Chicagoland thug, pulled a switchblade. Obama tried to blackmail newly emboldened congressional Republicans, vowing to enact amnesty through executive fiat if Congress doesn’t play ball.Republicans’ newly won control of the...

Memo to the GOP. You had a great night on Tuesday. But remember: You didn’t win it; the Democrats lost it. This is not to say that you didn’t show discipline in making the election a referendum on six years of Barack Obama. You exercised adult supervision over the choice of candidates. You didn’t allow yourselves to go down the byways of gender and other identity politics. It showed: A gain of probably nine Senate seats, the largest Republican House majority in more than 80 years, and astonishing gubernatorial victories, including Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois, the bluest of the blue,...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to confirm 50 of President Obama’s nominees and move an omnibus spending bill in a last hurrah before Democrats give up power in the Senate. The nominees are part of a packed lame-duck schedule that Reid is furiously planning, and that will be a topic at Friday’s White House lunch meeting between Obama and congressional leaders. Reid also wants to move a package of expiring tax provisions, the annual Defense Department authorization bill and an extension of a tax moratorium on Internet purchases in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That will be...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) predicts that there will be enough support for immigration reform in a GOP-led Congress. According to the Associated Press, "Ryan said that as long as Obama doesn't try an executive order in November or December and works with Congress," immigration legislation can be enacted.

"To everyone who voted," President Obama said in his press conference on Wednesday, "I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate yesterday, I hear you, too." Let me begin with a bit of a rant. In a sense, this is the last piece of the puzzle to click into place for the president's Nixonian transformation. Spy on reporters? Check. Bomb a country (or two) without authorization from Congress? Check. Issue dubious claims of executive privilege to conceal embarrassments or prevent scandals? Check. Withdraw from -- and lose -- an unpopular war he didn't start? Check....

Will Hurd Tuesday night was an historic night for the Republican Party in a lot of ways. Mia Love became the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. Joni Ernst became the first woman elected to represent Iowa in U.S. Senate history. Elise Stefanik, at the age of 30, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, representing New York’s 21st congressional district. It appears that Carl DeMaio, who ran for Congress in California, will be the first openly gay Republican ever elected to Congress. And, Tim Scott became the first black Senator elected in the South since Reconstruction. But,...

Americans have entrusted Republicans with control of both the House and Senate. We are humbled by this opportunity to help struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks. Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought...

During his post-election news conference, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was repeatedly pressed by CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes about “a new crop of conservatives coming into the House” who she implied Boehner would have trouble managing. The CBS reporter asked Boehner “so the hell no caucus as you’ve put it is getting bigger and some of them don’t think you’re conservative enough. How do you deal with them differently than you did in the last Congress?”(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cordes began her questioning by listing off some new members of Congress “who have suggested among other things that women need to submit to...

Obamacare was never created to give people quality and affordable healthcare; it was designed to create a single payer system, socialized medicine, allowing government complete access to and control of your life! And if that's not offensive to each and every American, your freedoms, what is? The reason Obama refuses to drop the individual mandate is because he knows a huge majority of Americans will not want Obamacare if given the choice. Why? Because it's complete and unadulterated crap! They pick and choose your doctors, your premiums are anything but affordable and death panels will decide if your loved ones...

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, co-host Norah O'Donnell fretted that the newly elected Republican Congress would dare to pass legislation: "If you look at a number of these new senators, they're quite conservative. Why wouldn't they go along with what Rand Paul has said? They're gonna send bills up to the President, as he told Charlie Rose last night, 'We're going to keep sending bills up to the President and we'll see whether the President wants to work with us or not.' Is the President going to be forced to veto a bunch of bills?" In response, political director John...

--- SNIP --- Such measures may be too granular to satisfy the grandiose aspirations of those conservatives who, sharing progressives’ impatience with our constitutional architecture, aspire to have their way completely while wielding just one branch of government. But if, as is likely, the result of Congress doing these and similar things is a blizzard of presidential vetoes, even this would be constructive. The 2016 presidential election would follow a two-year demonstration of how reactionary progressivism is in opposing changes to the nation’s trajectory. Congressional actions provoking executive rejections would frame the argument about progressivism. And as Margaret Thatcher advised,...

What Obama intends to do by His royal decree on amnesty for illegal aliens is murky at best. Here, however, are a few thoughts.During His November 5th press conference, Obama declined to provide significant details about His contemplated Royal decree on immigration "reform." Jeff, you know, I think if you want to get into the details of it, I suspect that when I announce that executive action, it’ll be bright full of detail." That's similar to former House Speaker Pelosi's "we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it....” However, before the ObamaCare legislation passed we...

OK, this is really just for me. It's an indulgence prompted by Barack Obama's past and current blather. Obama has just lectured the press, pretending to be humbled by the events of the last 24 hours. As usual, he is full of sh*t. Here's a recap of Obama's speech today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwVVbHJ_BfUBack in June Obama said: "I don't really care to be president without the Senate." Cue the violins. About the same time he said this: The president’s political world is more and more beyond his command. Instead, it is driven by Republicans in Congress, potentially power-shifting Senate races in states...

Bridget Johnson November 6, 2014 The first African-American senator to be elected from the South since reconstruction made dual history Tuesday as Tim Scott (R-S.C.) won the seat to which he was appointed after Jim DeMint’s retirement. Scott is also the first black senator to be elected in both the House and the Senate. “South Carolina voters vote their values and their issues and not my complexion. This is a great sign for what’s happening throughout the south. But certainly, a fantastic sign for the evolution that has occurred in South Carolina,” Scott told MSNBC this morning. His win versus...

In response to a question about information likely to leave the Department of Justice with Eric Holder when the attorney general steps down, and whether Congress or the media will be able to uncover information heretofore withheld by Holder and his colleagues, Attkisson told us: Congress has gotten in some respects like some in the media, where according to members themselves and their staff, there is not the appetite to do the hard-nosed investigations and oversight that they used to do.

The state with the smallest share of Latinos in the nation has elected its first Latino congressional representative, Alex Mooney. Mooney, a conservative Republican, ran against Nick Casey, a former chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party. Mooney beat Casey with 46.7 to 44.2 percent of the vote, with 96 percent of precincts reporting. After his victory, Mooney tweeted: "I cannot thank you enough for this humbling opportunity to serve the people of West Virginia." Latinos make up just 1.2 percent – or slightly more than 22,268 – of the Eastern Panhandle state's population. Mooney, 43, ruffled feathers with his...

In the following post, I am going to go through what happened last night for those finding it hard to follow, perhaps because they don't know who is who etc. I will go systematically through the highlights and lowlights of the governor's races, US Senate races, US House races, and state legislature makeup, picking out the ones I was watching out for in particular. I will then state the big winners and losers of the night in general Finally, my opinion on where we should go next, how to improve on successes and not repeat failures. Without further ado, and...

Early last month President Obama declared that while he wasn’t on the ballot his policies were. Now that the Republicans have won seven, soon to be nine, Senate seats and hold the largest House majority they’ve had since the 1920’s, the President doesn’t want to read the election tea leaves. Rather than concede defeat, the President yesterday gave a defiant and ungracious press conference. It seems that the President believes that his policies weren’t rejected by the American public. Instead, the Democrats lost because 2/3 of the country didn’t bother to vote. The assumption of course is that if those...