Free Republic

Guy analyzed this campaign spot earlier today, but I wanted to add some additional commentary as a follow-up. As my other colleague Cortney recently noted, Oregon Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Monica Wehby is not pro-life. She is of the, shall we say, Joe Biden mold in that she is “personally” pro-life but supports abortion rights in practice. The GOP establishment, however, as Cortney lamented, has endorsed her candidacy over the pro-life candidate in the belief that she is -- and will prove to be -- more electable. We’ll see. (Personally, I don’t summarily object when the party endorses...

Via WaPo and RCP, another nugget mined from yesterday’s chat with Axelrod in Chicago. As with abortion, Paul’s “different kind of Republican” brand requires a compromise here. He knows that most voters, including those in his own party, support voter-ID laws; he also knows that those laws are easily demagogued as racist by lefties, which means that toeing the GOP line too closely could jeopardize Paul’s effort to connect with black voters. What’s a different kind of Republican to do? He insists that ID is a good idea — “I don’t think dead people should vote” — but concedes to...

The latest Winthrop Poll results show that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham’s disapproval rating among registered voters has inched up. The survey of 877 adult South Carolinians conducted April 6-13 indicates that the incumbent senator is showing some vulnerability as the disapproval rating among registered voters 43.8 percent is higher than his approval rating of 39.6 percent. Poll Director Scott Huffmon cautioned that the difference between the two is just at the margin of error for the registered voter sample. “He will be in trouble when his disapproval ratings shoot significantly passed his approval ratings, and polls of likely primary voters...

Jeb Bush: ‘I’m thinking about running for president’ By Cristina Corbin Published April 23, 2014 FoxNews.com Jeb Bush said Wednesday he's "thinking about running for president," in his most direct statement yet about a possible 2016 run. The former Florida governor spoke at a Catholic school benefit in New York Wednesday morning. He previously has said he'll make a decision on whether to run for president before the end of this year, making clear that he was considering the possibility. But his comments on Wednesday appeared to be more direct. Asked what his "immediate plans" were, he said, according to...

A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

David Corn of Mother Jones has assembled a number of clips from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) over the years criticizing former President Ronald Reagan for the budgets he signed into law. In some cases, Paul declared Reagan worse on budgetary issue than his predecessor, former President Jimmy Carter.

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 23, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- One of the nation's largest pro-life groups has defended free speech before America's highest court, arguing that their liberty was inhibited in the 2010 race by an Ohio law restricting speech in election ads. In 2010, the Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List put together an ad it intended to run against then-Rep. Steve Driehaus, D-OH. The ad said Driehaus, who ran as a pro-life Democrat, had voted to fund abortions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by supporting the law. Driehaus defended his vote, saying that President Obama's Executive Order limiting federal funding...

April 23, 2014, 3:18 PM ET Republicans Set to Roll Out ‘.GOP’ Web Addresses By Rebecca Ballhaus Associated Press This summer, the Republican Party is rolling out the first-ever political website suffix: .gop. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a group that seeks to elect Republicans to state-level offices, created the new top-level domain in an effort to build the GOP’s online community, and to give the party’s online fundraising efforts a leg up. The .gop ending joins hundreds of other previously existing top-level domains, including the longstanding .com and .org, as well as relative newcomers such as .biz. Anyone will...

First it was concerns over whether Ukraine would 'steal' gas supplies bound for Europe as it passed through pipelines in the country and now, as bills remain unpaid, a Transneft unit is threatening to halt Ukraine oil products supply due to pipeline theft. •*TRANSNEFT COMMENTS ON OIL PRODUCTS PIPELINE IN UKRAINE •*TRANSNEFT MAY STOP WORK OF PRIKARPATZAPADTRANS PIPELINE SYSTEM •*TRANSNEFT: $62.7M IN OIL STOLEN FROM UKRAINE PIPE OVER 5 YRS As Bloomberg reports, 57.9k tons of oil products have been lost from theft in Ukraine and "Transneft expresses hope that the Ukrainian authorities can evaluate the risks of the current...

Back in 1995, the Tennessee Law Review published a symposium issue on the Second Amendment and firearms policy. That symposium was probably the most influential law review symposium ever published on the topic. (More on that issue, below.) This year, the Tennessee Law Review is doing another Second Amendment symposium. My contribution to the forthcoming issue is The First Amendment Guide to the Second Amendment. As the article explains, post-Heller courts have frequently looked to the First Amendment for guidance on Second Amendment questions. This is sensible, because since the Supreme Court began taking the First Amendment seriously about 75...

A poll conducted for a group supporting former Oklahoma House speaker T.W. Shannon's bid for U.S. Senate shows him surging ahead of Rep. James Lankford (Okla.) in the Republican primary, whom he once trailed by a wide margin.Shannon leads Lankford 42 percent to 32 percent among Republicans likeliest to vote, according to the Public Opinion Strategies survey. A third candidate, Randy Brogdon, lags behind. Pollster Glen Bolger notes in a memo that Shannon was down nine in March and 35 in February. The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday for Oklahomans for a Conservative Future, a nonprofit supporting Shannon.Shannon has received a...

After Zeituni Onyango, the woman President Obama once called Auntie, died in a South Boston nursing home this month, her closest relatives gathered her belongings at her nearby apartment. There, framed photographs of her with the president covered the wall. Weeping before a polished wood coffin at her wake this past Saturday, they described Ms. Onyango, the half sister of the president’s father, as “the spirit of the Obama family” and talked about raising money to send her body back to Kenya. Mr. Obama helped pay funeral expenses and sent a condolence note, Ms. Onyango’s family members said, but the...

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who filibustered the U.S. Senate over Obamacare, has endorsed Ben Sasse for the Senate and will join Sarah Palin and others Friday in North Platte for a Sasse rally.“I have gotten to know Ben Sasse, and while Nebraskans have good choices, Ben is the strongest conservative voice running for United States Senate,” Cruz said . “Ben will not be just another vote in the Senate – he will be a leader in the fight to stop the Obama agenda and repeal ObamaCare from day one.  We need strong reinforcements like him in the United States Senate.”Cruz was elected in 2012,...

A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

Former President Bill Clinton is set to back Rep. Charlie Rangel, who’s seeking a record-setting 23rd term in Congress. And the endorsement couldn’t come at a better time: The Harlem district representative has fallen out favor with several notable politicos. Mr. Rangel, 83, has had strained relations with President Obama since 2008, when he supported Hillary Clinton for president. And there’s also no love lost between Mr. Rangel and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Mr. Rangel in 2013 backed city comptroller Bill Thompson for mayor, Politico reported. That, after Mr. de Blasio had endorsed Mr. Rangel’s re-election campaign in...

There hasn’t been a lot of polling in the South Carolina Republican Senate primary, but what polling there is shows Lindsay Graham ahead by 30%+ against potential challengers. But it may still be a challenge for Graham to get the 50% he needs in the primary to avoid a runoff, and generating a runoff in which all the anti-Graham vote could coalesce, has been the strategy all along. Politico has essentially called challenges to Graham dead on arrival, How Lindsey Graham outmaneuvered the tea party: Sen. Lindsey Graham recognized the threat years before it had a chance to form —...

Geoengineering could turn our long-barren oceans into a bounty.In 2012, the British Columbia–based Native American Haida tribe launched an effort to restore the salmon fishery that has provided much of their livelihood for centuries. Acting collectively, the Haida voted to form the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, financed it with $2.5 million of their own savings, and used it to support the efforts of American scientist-entrepreneur Russ George to demonstrate the feasibility of open-sea mariculture — in this case, the distribution of 120 tons of iron sulfate into the northeast Pacific to stimulate a phytoplankton bloom which in turn would provide...

Well, that was fast. When your humble correspondent first read the New York Times/Kaiser Family Foundation poll this morning showing incumbent Mark Pryor suddenly surging into a ten point lead over challenger Tom Cotton in the Arkansas Senate race, my suspicious antenna immediately sensed something was wrong with the way the poll was conducted. However, I figured the Times wouldn't be so unsubtle as to make it easy to detect how erroneous the results were and that only polling experts would be able to dig through the reams of stats in order to point out the errors. I was wrong....

The culture warriors have decided: Disney’s Frozen is queer. Elsa hiding her ice-powers could be read as a metaphor for the closet, the Oscar-winning “Let it Go” plays like a coming-out anthem, and a character in the film evokes the question of whether homosexuality is a choice by inquiring of Elsa’s powers, “born with it or cursed?” Some liberals have praised the film for its subtext; some conservatives have denounced it. More on Frozen Frozen: Too Cynical? In Defense of Prince Charming How Parents Can Turn Frozen's Big Twist Into a Teachable Moment But the most remarkable thing about queer...

The visit of US Vice President Joseph Biden to Kiev this week and the subsequent restart of a military operation against protesters is evidence the US is controlling the actions of Ukrainian authorities, Russian Foreign Minister Segei Lavrov said Wednesday. “Now that Joe Biden visited Kiev this counterterrorist operation was declared in the active phase again,” Lavrov said during an English-language interview with the RT news channel. “It’s quite telling that they chose the moment of the Vice President of the United States to announce the resumption of this operation, because the launching of this operation happened immediately after [CIA...