Free Republic

Sarah Palin visits South Fulton in April to campaign for Karen Handel. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin weighed in via Facebook this morning with a couple of Georgia GOP U.S. House runoff endorsements: former state Sen. Barry Loudermilk of Cassville in the 11th and surgeon Bob Johnson of Savannah in the 1st. It’s another tea party stamp of approval for Loudermilk and Johnson, who have the backing of national groups as well. When Palin backed Karen Handel in the U.S. Senate primary, the Handel campaign reported a surge of donations. Here’s Palin’s full post: Just back from a beautiful weekend...

Politically speaking, Sarah Palin is crazy — but in an entertaining way. Speaker of the House John Boehner may look reasonable by comparison, but his supposed rationality is pretty dubious.. Before I proceed to pick on these GOP icons, I want to acknowledge that I spend a lot of time blasting Republicans in my columns and cartoons. Many readers assume it’s because I’m a commie-pinko, America-hating liberal Democrat. Actually, my constant critique of today’s GOP has more to do with the fact that I grew up in a time and place where Republicans were often the smart, sane ones and...

A billionaire tech investor says he has enough backing to put on the ballot a plan to split California into six states. Timothy Draper, a venture capitalist founder of a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that has invested in such tech companies as Twitter, HotMail, Skype and Tesla, told Reuters he has the 808,000 signatures needed on a petition to force the measure onto a public referendum in November 2016. Under the far-fetched plan, one state would be called "Silicon Valley" and would include the tech mecca, as well as San Francisco. "California needs a reboot," Draper, who has spent...

Hillary Clinton already wears the mantle of presumptive nominee for president. She's an accomplished lawyer, a member of Walmart's board of directors, a close adviser to her husband when he was president, a two-term senator from New York, and secretary of state. And yet, she is a horrible politician. So far, she has been able to sew up lots of Democratic money and support, and build an organization without actually beginning her campaign. She hasn't even decided on running, but maintains the repose of someone awaiting her party's coronation. That is a wise strategy. Consider that Clinton has run in...

Business group has been major force in 2014 races.On the day after New Jersey and Virginia’s gubernatorial elections last fall, Mitch McConnell showed up at a board meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with another race on his mind. He announced that the day’s most consequential contest had been neither Chris Christie’s victory nor Ken Cuccinelli’s defeat. Instead, the Senate minority leader explained, it had been a GOP primary in South Alabama. The Chamber had shelled out about $200,000 in the sleepy district on the Mississippi border to rescue a mainstream candidate who was struggling to fend off a...

On Monday, Morning Joe played a game of “Fact or Fiction” and Joe Scarborough had a lot to say when they arrived at this prediction: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will win the 2016 GOP nomination. “Fiction, fiction, fiction,” Scarborough declared. Scarborough admitted that if Paul runs he will probably do well in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but beyond that, “he will be his father’s son.” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said he “would have agreed” with Scarborough assessment, but does not know who on the Republican side has what it takes to beat Paul. “I have to continue to look...

Huckabee is flying more comfortably than during the 2008 race.As a presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee made a name for himself as the regular Joe on the debate stage, a threadbare underdog who couldn’t afford his opponents’ Madison Avenue-style commercials, plush hotels and chartered planes. In his campaign memoir, Huckabee proclaimed that he “kept in touch” with ordinary people while eating food-court fare and waiting for long-delayed commercial flights as “other candidates were stepping onto their Gulfstream jets.” These days, the former Arkansas governor is living — and flying — far more comfortably. Now a Fox News commentator and highly paid...

The economy might play a role in presidential politics, but its impact is near nil in the midterms. This month's surprisingly strong jobs report elicited fresh optimism that at long last, the economy was poised to recover its full strength. And in Washington, naturally, the question quickly became: Would Democratic candidates receive an unexpected boost from a late-in-the-election-cycle economic surge? The short answer? Don't count on it. Even if job gains do spike—and there's plenty of reluctance to predict an accelerating recovery after years of stop-and-start growth—it's unlikely voters will feel demonstrably better about the economy in time for November....

We just talked about the HuffPo/YouGov poll, which is rather cut and dried. This Rasmussen poll, however is a bit different, as it gives voters different choices. More people favor electing an opposing Congress [Republicans] than impeaching Obama, as a solution to the problem. This troubles me, simply because those folks must not have been paying attention as Obama has ignored Congress, and the Rule of Law, for quite some time. We already have proof positive that Obama will never follow the Rule of Law, and will continue to do as he pleases until he is removed from office. The...

Eric Holder, Attorney General, issued some stinging criticisms of Sarah Palin this weekend. Palin, a failed GOP vice presidential candidate and professional media provocateur, has recently been trying to garner the public’s attention again with a series of calls for the impeachment of President Barack Obama. “She wasn’t a particularly good vice presidential candidate,” Holder said. “She’s an even worse judge of who ought to be impeached and why.” The Attorney General’s comments are part of a larger assault on the stubborn gridlock caused by congressional republicans and their obstinate refusal to work with the president, even to the...

Inside the offices of Republican gay-rights groups, a strategy is forming to convince party leaders to strip opposition to gay marriage from the GOP platform. The target, operatives say, is to see party leaders drop their support for a gay-marriage ban in time for the Republican National Convention in summer 2016. It's a long shot, but Republican gay-rights lobbyists think they can build on the momentum provided by courts nationwide and the belief that, philosophically, the GOP's social conservatives are fighting a battle that puts them well out of step with the majority of the country, and that could demographically...

Obama is the Antichrist, Republicans are heretics, and compromise is unholy. Politics can’t explain how the right acts.America has long been the incubator of many spiritual creeds going back to the Great Awakening and even earlier. Only one of them, Mormonism, has taken root and flourished as a true religion sprung from our own native ground. Today, however, we have a new faith growing from this nation’s soil: the Tea Party. Despite its secular trappings and “taxed enough already” motto, it is a religious movement, one grounded in the traditions of American spiritual revival. This religiosity explains the Tea Party’s...

Representative Bob Goodlatte took to the Sunday morning chat circuit, specifically ABC’s This Week, to assure his fellow Americans that there was no need to impeach the President and no plans to do so in the foreseeable future. The Corner has the details. Representative Bob Godlattte (R., Va.) does not believe President Obama has done anything that would merit impeachment under the Constitution. “We are not working on or drawing up articles of impeachment,” Goodlatte, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday. “The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment...

Sarah Palin has finally lost it. In an essay on Breitbart.com, Palin demands the impeachment of President Barack Obama. Her piece starts off loopy and devolves from there. "Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president," she begins. "His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, 'no mas.'" I'm sorry, what? Why the switch to espanol? Is she implying Obama is a wife beater? That America is a battered, Spanish-speaking esposa? No idea, but by the end of her essay, I felt positively battered by her battiness. She accuses the president...

Pollster John Zogby reports in our weekly White House report card that the troubles dogging President Obama and his inability to handle them have prompted even his most ardent supporters to give up. "Now some people have really bad weeks. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff got an 'F' after the nation's soccer team lost to Germany. “But President Obama's week was just as bad. Israel and the Palestinians are at war again. The president should have visited the U.S.-Mexican border where so many immigrant children are in danger and so many American citizens are worried. “It just seems that even those...

On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews and Howard Dean slammed the supposedly "lunatic" Republican Party for opposing President Obama's $3.7 billion request to deal with the ongoing crisis at the U.S-Mexico border. Dean likened the political stalemate over this issue and in general in Washington to McCarthyism in the 1950s: "It reminds me of the 'who lost China' debate...where one side is frothing at the mouth and finding communists under every bed; and the other side – including some reasonable Republicans...actually trying to run the country." Matthews endorsed the former Vermont governor's take, and targeted fiscal conservatives/the Tea Party as somehow...

Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst will take a break from campaigning for two weeks to take part in active-duty training for the Iowa National Guard. But before lacing up her boots, Ernst was to record the Republicans' national radio address, the Republican National Committee said Friday. Ernst, a lieutenant colonel and state senator from southwest Iowa, recorded the speech Thursday evening just hours before she was scheduled to report for duty at 6 a.m. From central Iowa Ernst was leading a convoy to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, where for the next two weeks she will drill with her transportation battalion....

It has been a while since former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) embarrassed herself, but staying out of the news isn't good for her livelihood, which relies on lucrative speeches, television appearances and a regular stream of news accounts of her Facebook posts where she offers up her special brand of leadership. So since things have been a bit quiet for her, this week she insisted that everyone who resists impeaching President Obama must go. In her words, "we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment," and this other...

The WMUR/Granite State Poll gives Christie a first-place 19 per cent showing among New Hampshire Republicans But when Romney is added to the mix, he draws 39-percent support and leaves everyone else in single digits Paul Ryan has the highest 'favorable' numbers of the field, at 55 per cent Christie's 46 per cent favorable number is soft since a separate 36 per cent say they don't like him When asked which potential White House hopeful they would never support, More Republicans name Christie than any other pol.Chris Christie narrowly leads the pack of potential Republican presidential candidates in a poll...

For a few political cycles now, Republican leaders have strained to distance themselves from some in their midst and focus on the basics to secure and extend their power in Washington: The less-than-sweeping economic recovery and President Obama’s foundering, as they see it, at home and abroad. And those in their midst have continued to define the party in ways that drew an injurious response from key voter groups. There was the dust-up in 2012 when Todd Akin, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Missouri, defended his opposition to abortion by positing that women’s bodies blocked conception resulting from rape....