Free Republic

It’s hard to think of a more liberal Republican that occupies a more consequential position in Congress than Fred Upton. It’s not just the fact that the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the most powerful House panels, is a big supporter of green energy. It’s not just the fact that this same man was the Thomas Edison of the incandescent light bulb ban. It’s about Republicans shedding an image of hypocrisy. Upton is charged with oversight over Obama’s Solyndra-like loan guarantees, yet he pushed for the same type of loan for United Solar Ovonics, whose parent...

The YG Action Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), is taking out its big guns in North Carolina’s 8th district. The group reported today that it was spending about $450,000 backing Richard Hudson, a North Carolina GOP Congressional candidate in a competitive runoff with Scott Keadle, a candidate aligned with the Club for Growth. That brings the total spent by group in support of Hudson in both the primary and the runoff to $525,000. The Club for Growth and its affiliated entities have spent more than $720,000 backing Keadle in the runoff and the...

Government keeps growing -- and freedom keeps shrinking -- because we fail to make the moral case for free enterprise. Based on his best-selling book "The Road to Freedom," AEI President Arthur C. Brooks explains how we can win the fight for free enterprise by articulating what's written on our hearts. "We have to see that we're not in an economic battle for the future of America," Arthur says. "We're in a moral battle."

President Obama still inspires more enthusiasm than former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, but the gap is shrinking. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that 91 percent of Obama voters are enthusiastic, compared with 85 percent of Romney supporters. That gap widens when you look at the “very enthusiastic.” Fifty-one percent of Obama backers are very enthusiastic, compared to 38 percent of Romney backers. When we asked the same question in May, the same 51 percent of Obama fans said they were very enthusiastic, but only 26 percent of Romney supporters said the same. Overall, in May, 93 percent of...

Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. Good news first: June was our best fundraising month yet. We exceeded expectations -- more than 706,000 people stepped up and pitched in for a grand total of $71 million raised for this campaign and the Democratic Party. Bad news? We still got beat. Handily. Romney and the RNC pulled in a whopping $106 million. So, to recap: We had our best fundraising month yet, and we still fell about $35 million short. We can win while being outspent -- but we need to keep it close. You know what...

Does anyone know where we can get a bumper sticker "Vote for the American" or would someone be willing to make them?

BRISTOW, Va. -- Four summers ago, then-Democratic Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama delivered a nominating speech in support of Barack Obama. The Illinois senator's election as party standard-bearer “takes us closer to becoming what we know America can be," he said at the Denver convention. But times have changed in the intervening years -- especially for Davis himself. Now a Virginia Republican, he spent part of Thursday afternoon at the home of a Northern Virginia family talking about how Obama failed the country on the economy, and how he believes presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney is best equipped to revive...

Ted Cruz led Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst by 9 points in a recent internal poll conducted for the former Texas solicitor general’s campaign, a Cruz source has confirmed. From the earliest days of the race to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), Dewhurst has been the frontrunner. But in this survey, 49 percent of respondents said they would vote for Cruz. Forty percent supported Dewhurst, and 11 percent were undecided.

Voter dissatisfaction or not, there is very little support this year for third party presidential candidates. In a Gallup Poll released Friday that includes three minor-party candidates, Barack Obama received 47 percent support, Mitt Romney 40, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson 3, Green candidate Jill Stein 1 and Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode less than 1. Two percent of voters said they favor U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), 1 percent mentioned someone else, 2 percent had no opinion and 5 percent said they will not vote. Voter dissatisfaction or not, there is very little support this year for third party presidential...

Mitt Romney has a sizeable lead in 15 battleground states, according to a CNN/ORC poll released late Monday. The Republican candidate leads President Obama 51 percent to 43 in 15 states that will be critical in determining the outcome of the 2012 election. Obama won 12 of these battleground states in 2008 — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — and will need to keep about half of those in 2012 if he’s to secure reelection. The poll also included Missouri, Indiana and Arizona as battleground states. That’s good news...

The Obama-Biden campaign bus tour rolling through Pennsylvania this week, about four months before Election Day, illustrates that the road to re-election runs through the Keystone State. Many political analysts believe that President Barack Obama cannot win without Pennsylvania, so it would seem self-evident that the state should get considerable attention from both campaigns in the upcoming election. Instead, Pennsylvania has been downgraded by some pundits and may have been dropped from the list of top-priority swing states by the Romney campaign. We believe that's a mistake, and that Pennsylvania instead is poised to become the Ohio or Florida of...

AP has its thumb on the scale for Obama This is in response to the June 26 article titled "Obama or Romney in November? Who cares?" It was a classic spin job on an Associated Press-GfK poll that would have made the Democratic National Committee proud. The AP's slant was that the electorate doesn't see any distinction between the ability of the two candidates to get the economy going. The article highlighted that "6 in 10 gave answers ranging from slim to none." (This quote in itself is inflated and does not accurately reflect the poll results.) It went on...

The good news of the terrible news of the last couple of weeks is that there's a lot more realism about the forces at work in this election. Incumbent presidents always have a tricky re-election campaign, because they have to balance a defense of their record with a set of proposals for the next term. Often, the mandate is vague - and you won't find a better summary of the risks and opportunities involved than Ryan Lizza's superb new piece in The New Yorker. What the Obama campaign has to do is relatively simple: stop being defensive about their record,...

<p>With the federal health care law once again an election-year issue, a new poll finds Republicans are far more fired up and ready to vote than Democrats over the policy.</p> <p>A Kaiser Family Foundation poll, conducted in the wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling that upheld the Affordable Care Act, found that 31 percent of Republicans reported being more likely to vote because of the ruling. Just 18 percent of Democrats said the same.</p>

At a private meeting with a group of influential supporters including Rupert Murdoch, Mitt Romney said he wasn’t going to flip-flop from his past positions on immigration, according to Politico: Murdoch chimed in, three sources said, telling the candidate on the issue of immigration generally, “You have to take the fight to Obama on this.” Romney said the Hispanic vote is important, noting he has Sen. Marco Rubio on the trail for him and that one of his own sons speaks Spanish, but indicated he is not going to change positions from some of what he said in the primaries....

If you read my recent post, "Supreme Court Upholds Poll Tax?" you might have a little trouble understanding why this is important to all Americans. The reason is simple, the decision made by the Supreme Court on the 28th of June, a day that will live in infamy, WAS ILLEGAL!!! Our constitution is clear about the power and type of authority the Federal Government has to levy taxes, and the Federal Government of the United States of America is barred by our Constitution from imposing a direct tax on individuals. In other words they may NOT impose a direct tax...

White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew touted the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the president’s healthcare reform bill Sunday and warned Republicans to “move on” and drop efforts to undo the legislation. “I don’t think the American people want to have this debate again,” said Lew about GOP efforts to repeal the health bill on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t think they want to be pulled back into decades of debate to get to where we are. We now have a law, the law is constitutional, we should implement it.” The high court on Thursday dealt a blow to Republicans...

LITTLE ROCK — In Arkansas, it’s the Republicans who are trying to make political hay out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of the federal health care law, a big victory for the Democratic president’s signature policy issue. Reaction from Arkansas Democrats has been muted, likely an election-year reflection that the law known as Obamacare is as unpopular in the state as its namesake. GOP officials brushed aside any notion that the high court’s ruling had repudiated their vehement opposition to the law as a takeover of health care. “To the people of Arkansas I say this: I heard your...

On July 4, the tea party will dust off the tri-corn hats and head into the streets to fight the second revolutionary war against “Obamacare.” Tea party organizers tell TPM that the movement is planning a big Independence Day push in response to the Supreme Court ruling in favor of President Obama’s health care reform bill. The decision ruling the law constitutional — and the surprising vote of Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority — has breathed new life into the tea party, members say. But the tea party is also growing up. And that’s one of the reasons...

Pundit says: Romney will fail if he doesn't change course.