Free Republic

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Almost overnight, Virginia has emerged as a critical state in the nationwide fight to grant gay men and women the right to wed. Related Stories Okla. gay marriage ban struck down; ruling on hold Associated Press Judge rules Oklahoma gay marriage ban unconstitutional AFP US judge strikes down Oklahoma gay marriage ban as ‘arbitrary, irrational' Christian Science Monitor Utah appeals gay marriage ruling to top US court AFP The Supreme Court Puts Utah's Gay Marriages on Pause The Atlantic Wire This purple state was once perceived as unfriendly and even bordering on hostile to gay rights....

If you ever doubted that money outweighs principles in contemporary politics, then the case of Richmond campaign consultant Boyd Marcus should permanently erase such ambiguity in your mind. Marcus, a prominent figure in Virginia politics for two decades, made headlines in August when he abandoned a lifetime of supporting Republicans to endorse Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor. McAuliffe’s team and Marcus trumpeted the conversion as an important political sign that mainstream Republicans were rejecting the tea party conservatism espoused by GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli II. Instead, we learned Thursday, the primary motive was entirely mercenary. An e-mail was made public...

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli leaves office Saturday, but he will continue to take on what he considers overreaching by the federal government. Cuccinelli will be the lead lawyer in a suit filed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., against the Obama administration over the data-collection policies of the National Security Agency, according to The Associated Press. As attorney general, Cuccinelli took on the Obama administration in court over the Affordable Care Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate emissions....

January 02, 2014, 12:54 pm 11 attorneys general slam Obama healthcare fixes as illegal By Rebecca Shabad Eleven GOP attorneys general say the Obama administration is breaking the law by repeatedly making changes to ObamaCare without going through Congress. The attorneys general specifically criticize President Obama's executive action that allowed insurance companies to keep offering health plans that had been canceled for not meeting ObamaCare's more rigorous standards. “We support allowing citizens to keep their health insurance coverage, but the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action,” the attorneys general wrote in...

Beretta has eliminated Virginia from its short list of states to move its company because anti-gun Democrat Terry McAuliffe was elected governor. The firearms manufacturer made the decision to scratch Virginia off the list after the McAuliffe campaign fixated on restricting gun owners’ rights after receiving over $1 million in campaign donations from billionaire New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “The anti-gun ads that McAuliffe ran in northern Virginia were particularly offensive,” Jeff Reh, general counsel of Beretta USA, told me in an interview. “And the fact that he could gain a voting advantage by doing so caused us additional...

The Justice Department has reportedly delayed until next year a decision on whether to indict outgoing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife in connection with a gifts scandal — a decision that came after a face-to-face appeal by the couple’s lawyers. A report by The Washington Post late Wednesday night said U.S. Attorney Dana Boente told lawyers for the governor and first lady Maureen McDonnell a week ago that he planned to ask a grand jury to return an indictment by this past Monday over allegedly inappropriate help they gave dietary supplement maker Star Scientific after receiving gifts from...

Adam Schaefer and Nancy Smith have posted the results of some fascinating experimental research on Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in  Virginia. Their research suggests “an aggressive attack on McAuliffe for supporting Obamacare was ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. An attack on McAuliffe’s business record possibly helped, but was anemic.”So what would have worked in Virginia? What moved the voters most was an attack on McAuliffe’s positions on abortion; a single phone message emphasizing McAuliffe’s support for unrestricted, late-term, and taxpayer-funded abortions shifted support a net 13 to 15 points away from McAuliffe and toward Cuccinelli. The cost per vote here...

Of all the ways Republicans in the U.S.A. could still fumble their promising 2014 Congressional elections, one is the error of “the Ballistics Theory of Political Candidates” or the “Perfect Candidate Excuse.” Missing opportunities to master the techniques and science of winning elections, Republicans are instead searching for the perfect candidate. But that is only an excuse for avoiding the hard, real work of running effective election campaigns and studying how to become effective in running campaigns. In the United States, liberals are busy sharpening their skills at selling inferior candidates with unpopular platforms and failed policies to gullible voters....

The Republican Party’s loss of the Virginia Governor’s race has sparked extensive analysis searching for “lessons learned” while heading into the crucial upcoming 2014 Congressional elections. Conventional wisdom argues that the government shutdown drama hurt Ken Cuccinelli and his running mates, although later the flawed ObamaCare roll-out helped Virginia Republicans regain some lost ground. Facts Do Not Support Shutdown Hurt Cuccinelli But the facts don’t support the theory that the government shutdown and debt ceiling battle hurt Ken Cuccinelli. Virginians who voted in the November 6 elections about equally blamed both President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress, according to...

<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Sen. Mark Obenshain says he's going to outline his next steps in the nearly knotted race for attorney general.</p> <p>The Harrisonburg Republican has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday in Richmond. Unofficial state election results show Democratic Sen. Mark Herring with a narrow lead over Obenshain.</p>

The recent elections underlined a growing tension in political money circles: Business people are increasingly fed up with the activist wing of the Republican Party. It's a trend that will have broad implications for next year's midterm elections and the presidential race in 2016, political experts say. [Snip] And there's more to come. Business interests appear to be rallying behind moderate Republicans Brian Ellis, David Trott and Mike Simpson against tea party-approved challengers Justin Amash, Kerry Bentivolio and Bryan Smith for House seats in 2014 (Ellis and Trott are running in Michigan and Simpson is in Idaho). [Snip] "If the...

Richmond, VA–Merely hours after the close of a bitter and divisive Governor’s race in Virginia that saw Democrat Terry McAuliffe pull out a win over Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, irregularities in voting data have emerged. According to mainstream media outlets McAuliffe supposedly defeated Cuccinelli in a razor-thin 47-46 percent victory to become the next Governor of the great state of Virginia. Immediately following the announcement, Cuccinelli’s office opened a full investigation into the legitimacy of the vote and quickly turned up surprising results. In 13 districts, multiple instances of intimidation at the polls were reported. Large black men wearing...

The dust has settled (mostly) from last week’s elections, so I thought it time to present a very different assessment of what happened in Virginia than the snapshot I’ve seen from others. For example, Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices, Women Vote Action Fund distributed a wholly self-serving and unconvincing memo titled “Unmarried Women Cast Deciding Votes in Virginia Election.” It’s unconvincing, of course, because Republicans always lose unmarried women, regardless of an election’s outcome. Unmarried women are more liberal than most voters and are not part of any winning Republican coalition. NBC’s Domenico Montanaro and The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart...

In an attorney general’s race that remains too close to call, Republican Mark D. Obenshain began today with a 17-vote edge over Democrat Mark R. Herring. But by afternoon, the pendulum had swung the other way when the numbers in four Richmond precincts were updated, putting Herring ahead by 115 votes out of more than 2 million cast statewide.

Yesterday, Derek Hunter declared that libertarianism has entirely lost its meaning, that the party has devolved into a catch-all for people who want to criticize the government without doing anything about it. He also assumed that any Republican candidate would be better than a Democrat for classical liberals. Hunter could not be more wrong. The Libertarian Party is still the face of “individual responsibility, small government, and free markets,” but how the LP arranges those priorities is changing. The Party needs to represent its constituency, appeal to young voters who largely have experience with Ron Paul, and has to emphasize...

Virginia Republicans may have a strong candidate for the 2014 US Senate seat in Ken Cuccinelli. As reported in the Daily Caller, conservative writer and Congressional candidate Quin Hillyer gives voice to a movement to draft Ken to run against incumbent Democrat U.S. Senator Mark Warner. Yet it would be a problem for the 2013 campaigner Ken Cuccinelli to run for U.S. Senate, from what we saw in Ken's unsuccessful campaign for governor. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Ken Cuccinelli as a potential senator. Yet Ken will fail badly unless he fires his 2013 campaign strategists, consultants, and leaders,...

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems about the Virginia gubernatorial race are gushing forth about why Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd. They tell us more about who produces this punditry than about the reality of the situation. We're hearing that tea party activists killed Cuccinelli's candidacy with the government shutdown (according to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, they "stabbed him in the back") and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can't win women's votes. What I see is very different....

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday defended the party's strategy in the Virginia gubernatorial race against attacks from conservative groups that it didn't do enough to help GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli. Tea Party groups said the GOP establishment kept its wallet closed to Cuccinelli, the conservative attorney general who lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday. Democratic party organizations, those groups said, spent more heavily on McAuliffe than the GOP did on Cuccinelli. But Priebus said the RNC invested heavily in Cuccinelli's "ground game," commenting that he was "proud" of the effort. "The RNC outside the presidential election...

There was a time I called myself a Libertarian. And there was a time I was a Libertarian. I just wanted to get government to leave me alone, to leave people alone and to go all crazy and limit itself to doing only that which is spelled out clearly in the Constitution. That was what a Libertarian was. But it’s not anymore. The word no longer has any meaning, no definition or parameters, certainly no coherent philosophy to speak of. And there’s no one to blame for that except Libertarians themselves. So what happened? By not even loosely defining...

The Republican establishment continues to undercut the campaigns of conservative candidates.  Ken Cuccinelli was just the latest.   In early 2013, a Texas-based Tea Party website posted a series of articles that documented how the G.O.P. establishment, at the county, state and national levels, had worked against six candidates supported by Tea Party organizations -- five running for House seats, and one G.O.P. nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. A seventh case detailed how the Chair of the Illinois State Republican Central Committee was chosen. It illustrates the "Illinois Combine" - the bipartisan collaborative formula going national these days.   The...