Free Republic

While California has become a bastion of liberalism, the Golden State is not without conservative voices. It was actually a project to narrow this list to 25 people – my apologies to many who would have made the top 50. You can find any of them via a web search. I did not include elected officials in this list. I looked for people whose voices are heard beyond Twitter and/or Facebook. Here are the Top 25 Conservative Voices in California, in alphabetical order:

Neither the Louisiana Republicans nor the Democrats are interested in participating in the so-called "SEC primary" for the 2016 presidential nominations that most other states in the Deep South have decided to join. Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama are likely to hold their presidential primary contests on the same day -- March 1, 2016. Florida and Texas are also considering scheduling their primary contests on that date. But Louisiana seems poised to stick with it's original plan -- a March 5 primary contest. "We are better off being on a date by ourselves. ... If you throw us in...

The Deep South has elected Republicans to every top office in the region. Now it wants to be sure that clout extends to the choice of the GOP’s 2016 presidential nominee. Officials in five Southern states — Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas — are coordinating to hold their primary on March 1, 2016. Texas and Florida are considering also holding a primary the same day but may wait until later in the month. Either way, March 1 would be a Southern Super Tuesday, voting en masse on the heels of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The joint...

Since talking about it on Morning Joe earlier today, a few people have asked me to expound on my theory regarding what Jeb Bush would have to do to overcome the many challenges he would face on his way to the Republican nomination. It seems clear that Bush is hell-bent on not pandering to the base, so the obvious challenge he will have to overcome is winning a Republican primary while holding some positions (immigration reform, Common Core, etc.) which are anathema to the grassroots conservatives who will comprise a decent chunk of the primary electorate. The way to overcome...

We have been betrayed. Again. Just like in 2010, the outgoing GOP class compromised a referendum election before the new Congress even had a chance to take their seats. In this case, the GOPe "leadership" essentially funded everything the new members were specifically elected to stop. What can the incoming Congressmen do? 1. Vote for new leadership 2. Remember that no Congress can be bound by a prior Congress. What if... we had a GOP president and owned both houses of Congress. After losing a wave election where Congress is going to fully flip sides in January, the outgoing Congress...

The passionate stand by Americans across the country in protesting the failure of grand juries to indict policemen for killing two unarmed people – both poor, black men – is revving up the demand for a political response from Democrats in Washington. Young people of all colors, but mostly blacks, Hispanics and immigrants, are the primary source of that pressure. Their political agenda extends beyond outrage over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York. They also want Democrats in Congress to get busy defending ObamaCare. But their rising political engagement is best seen...

The Democratic Party’s losses at the state level are almost unprecedented, and could cripple it for a long time to come. "........With that said, there are more costs to Democratic weakness in the states than just House elections. States are where parties build talent and try new ideas. Here, the GOP is instructive. Its brightest stars are either governors (Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Chris Christie) or former state officeholders (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Joni Ernst). And Republican-controlled statehouses have been incubators for conservative ideas, from experiments in tax cutting (Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana and Sam Brownback’s Kansas) to full-fledged...

".....Yuma,Colorado, a farming town of 3,500 people near the Kansas border, celebrated last month as homegrown Republican Cory Gardner was elected to the U.S. Senate. Gardner, a high school football player and the son of a farm equipment dealer, defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall to help the GOP gain control of the Senate in the second-most expensive congressional race of all time.Gardner represented Colorado’s 4th Congressional District for four years, an expansive territory that covers the mostly flat and rural eastern third of the state. Farmers there mostly grow corn to feed cattle, and water comes from the quickly...

A flock of (relatively) new conservative media sites have gained attention in the mainstream-ish media over the past few weeks, a function of their increased role in driving political attention and, in some cases, their savvy in redirecting Facebook's traffic hose toward themselves. Bloomberg's Dave Weigel notes a series of scoops from the Washington Free Beacon (largely focused on Hillary Clinton); at Slate, Betsy Woodruff explains Twitchy. At the Awl, John Herrman noted the rise of the Independent Journal Review, which "landed big" on Facebook. For all of this success, for all of the novelty of new sites with sharp...

Rep. Hank Johnson, Georgia Democrat, said black people like retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson are trying to tap into the ignorance of people who have been whipped “into a frenzy, like a lynch mob.” Mr. Johnson was speaking on Michael Smerconish’s radio show about President Obama and opposition that he’s faced since winning election. “I support the president, I believe he’s done as much as is humanly possible to advance the cause of justice and prosperity and freedom for all people, not just blacks, and not just here in America, but across the world. I think he has changed the paradigm...

"Anybody who runs as a conservative," Brent Bozell declared, "is going to have to satisfy our army." The digital army sprung to life with a click of a mouse in a nondescript office park in Alexandria. Less than 10 miles away, at the White House, the phones began to light up. One call came into the switchboard and then another. Thousands of people flooded the phone lines. It was early August 2014, and the callers were conservatives lambasting President Obama for promising what they described as "executive amnesty." The deluge of angry activists was not the work of a heavily...

The values that are pre-eminent for Republican Party voters are probably freedom, independence, autonomy, limited government and self-reliance, and a strong belief in the powers of capitalism and a free market,” Cross said. “We see them in the South: the calls or less government, the call for people to take personal responsibility, the inveighing against the dependent class.” And in Louisiana and other energy-producing states, he said, the perceived antipathy of national Democrats for the oil and gas industry helps swell Republican ranks. “We’re looking at something more than just a bad year,” said Charlie Cook, the Shreveport native who...

There's no official Sen. Ted Cruz presidential team — yet. But the Texas Republican is already surrounding himself with key strategists and advisers that could make his transparent White House ambitions a reality. The tea party firebrand relies on a small circle of advisers to inform his views and amplify his ultraconservative message. The inner circle breaks down into two groups: his chief advisers in the Senate office, and the chiefs of his nationally-focused political operation, which he beefed up in the summer of 2014 by hiring a crop of seasoned Republican campaign operatives. These are the key players that...

The Internal Revenue Service, which claims to be so understaffed that it can’t bother to collect unpaid taxes, or search backup tapes for Lois Lerner’s “missing” emails, apparently has plenty of time to read the comment threads on conservative blogs that have been critical of the agency (Hi there, IRS agents!). William Jacobson, one of the best-informed and most effective critics of the agency, writes on Legal Insurrection: Hey, remember the Reader Poll we did about whether it was okay to follow and try to interview Lois Lerner in her neighborhood? Do you approve of media confronting Lois Lerner in...

Late last year, Senator Cory Bernardi published his first major work on political theory, illustrating his vision for a responsible, confident society and the governing principles that will be needed to foster it. The Conservative Revolution (Connor Court) was not intended to be a manifesto but has nevertheless been described as such since it was released for sale to the public. Perhaps the greatest interest to students of politics and to the media was less the content of the volume as the visceral neck-twitching reaction to its public release. There is something to be said for the confidence of Bernardi’s...

Author David Petrusza discusses the pivotal 1924 election for president, won by "Silent Cal Coolidge."

".....As of publication time, Republican Johnny Tacherra is leading longtime Democratic lawmaker Jim Costa in the yet-to-be-decided race for the Golden State’s 16th congressional district. With provisional ballots still to be counted, and with a 700-plus-vote cushion, Tacherra is confident that he will survive. He and his wife are heading to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to take part in freshmen-member orientation on Capitol Hill....... ....The New York Times put the race on its “Democrats Are Expected to Win Easily” list, and the Cook Political Report labeled the seat as “Solid Democrat,” or uncompetitive. Republican national committees and organizations stayed out...

Over at the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein makes the interesting case that the GOP can only win the presidency by nominating a real conservative.Regarding the failed presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, Klein notes,“His clumsy statements, such as declaring that he was ‘severely conservative’ and that his preferred immigration policy would lead to ‘self deportation,’ were rooted in the fact that he was just regurgitating what he thought conservatives wanted to hear rather than explaining views with which he was comfortable. This was also at the heart of his butchering the conservative critique of the culture of dependency with his ’47...

“There is no possibility of a government shutdown. Remember me? I’m the guy that gets us out of government shutdowns,”— Soon-to-be-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Time magazineThe lefties over at Think Progress were elated.It was September 30, 2013, and they thought they had the GOP right where they wanted it as Texas Senator Ted Cruz plowed ahead with the idea of defunding Obamacare—an action that caused Democrats to promptly shut down the government — and blame not just Cruz but the Republican Party. The whole event was giving prominent Republicans in and out of office the political willies. Think...

It is often claimed that conservative religious voters, especially white evangelicals, are going the way of the dinosaur, consigned to demographic irrelevance. But they were a key component of the Republicans’ 2014 midterm victories. According to exit polls, Conservative religious voters made up as big a percentage of the electorate as ever, and they backed Republicans at least as strongly as ever. White evangelicals were 26% of the electorate this year, and 78% of them voted Republican. That’s up from 2010, when they were 25 percent of the electorate, and 77 percent voted Republican, and 2006, when they were 24...