Free Republic

JACKSONVILLE In a fast-paced final debate Tuesday, Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democrat Charlie Crist displayed their mutual contempt to a national TV audience in the home stretch of the costliest and meanest campaign in the country. Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article3213936.html#storylink=cpy

A new poll, this one by Talk Business and Politics/Hendrix College, puts Tom Cotton’s lead over Mark Pryor at 48-41. The survey included more than 2,000 likely voters and was taken after the last week’s Cotton-Pryor debate (as I understand it, there will be no more debates between the two). The margin of error is plus or minus 2.2 percent. According to Dr. Jay Barth of Hendrix College, the survey shows that both Cotton and Pryor have locked up the support of their respective Party faithful. However, “Cotton has a strong advantage among the state’s voters who term themselves Independents...

Controversial voter identification laws are not the primary reason minority voters are failing to cast their ballots, President Obama said in a radio interview airing Tuesday. "Most of these laws are not preventing the overwhelming majority of folks who don't vote from voting," Obama said during an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton. "Most people do have an ID. Most people do have a driver's license. Most people can get to the polls. It may not be as convenient, it may be a little more difficult." The Justice Department has challenged new voter identification laws in Texas and North Carolina. Those...

Western Kentucky University's 2014 Big Red Poll released on Monday shows that incumbent Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) leads Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes by 3 points, 45% to 42%, among likely voters in the Kentucky U.S. Senate race. The poll, coming two weeks before election day, indicates the race is still close, despite numerous recent gaffes by Grimes and news that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has stopped funding television advertising in support of her candidacy. 5% of likely voters supported Libertarian David Patterson, and 8% were undecided. The most surprising result of the poll is that, despite a bitter...

Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor argued that the federal government’s desegregation of Arkansas’s largest public school in 1957 was an “unwilling invasion” that took “a local problem out of the local authorities’ hands” and led to deep suspicions of democracy in the state, according to a copy of his college thesis obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Written in 1985, the 30-page paper—which also suggested that the state’s Democratic Party was hindering economic progress, and attributed policies such as welfare and the Equal Rights Amendment to “wild-eyed liberals”—could add to Pryor’s difficulties as he fights to protect his seat from...

Sharyl Attkisson has dug up another interesting story of government activity which is certainly questionable in nature. It appears that at least some of the people who signed up for Obamacare have been getting some unsolicited e-mail… and it has nothing to do with healthcare. Last spring, John* purchased health insurance through the Washington State healthcare exchange. He was surprised when, last month, he received an email from the exchange at the address he’d provided when he signed up. The email was entitled, “Voter Registration Information.” It read, in part: “ARE YOU REGISTERED TO VOTE? If you would like to...

The Democratic effort to pump up the African-American vote in Georgia just took an interesting turn. A reader has sent us this early-voting turnout mailer sent out by the Georgia Democratic party that focuses on the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent unrest in Ferguson, Mo. It contains an interesting line that concedes the problem of low interest among black voters: “If we want a better, safer future for our children, it’s up to us to vote for change. The choices may not always be perfect, but the cost of inaction is simply too great.” Here’s a complete look: And...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Wolf,” host Wolf Blitzer sat down with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to ask her if she could confirm a Saturday report from The New York Times that claimed President Barack Obama was “seething” at administration officials for their handling of the Ebola response. After replaying a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) calling for greater presidential leadership on the Ebola response, Blitzer asked Jackson Lee if she had been in touch with the White House. “You probably saw that story in The New York Times on Saturday saying the president was, quote, ‘seething’ because...

AUSTIN, Texas -- With Wendy Davis trailing in the polls behind her Republican opponent Greg Abbott, her Democratic supporters have resorted to a desperate, eleventh-hour attack. However it is not the heavily-criticized wheelchair ad; this is a brand new attack, launched on Monday, the first day of early voting. This time, the Democrats' messaging brings with it an added element of race-baiting, twisting Abbott's words to insinuate that he is opposed to interracial marriages, ignoring the well-known fact that Abbott's wife Cecelia is Hispanic. The issue originated with a San Antonio Express-News article from Sunday, in which Austin Bureau Chief...

Dawn McNair said she was surprised Sunday when her daughter pointed out the background on a political flier urging people to get out and vote. The front of the flier blares: "Kay Hagan doesn't win! Obama's impeachment will begin! Vote in 2014." The words are superimposed over a grainy reproduction of a photograph of what appears to be a lynching. Someone tucked the flier under McNair's windshield wiper while her car was parked at her church, Kingdom Impact Global Ministries on Murchison Road. "My daughter said, 'Mom, look in the background. They're lynching somebody.' It's the lynching of an African-American...

Much has been written about the right-ward shift of the Republican Party, but far less about a mounting left-wing movement among Democrats. While the media tends to dismiss the right-wingers of the GOP as “wingnuts,” it typically refrains from categorizing even the extreme left of the Democratic Party in a similar manner. President Barack Obama has accelerated this leftward trend in two ways. First, his administration, particularly in contrast to that of former President Bill Clinton, has laid the rhetorical basis for a move to the left by shifting the party agenda on social, environmental and economic policies. Clinton may...

Bilderbergers, the Iraq invasion, Alex Jones—the GOP senator has routinely flirted with America's paranoid fringe.This past summer, Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky and a potential 2016 presidential wannabe, was the GOP's It Girl. The New York Times Magazine splashed his mug on the cover and asked, "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?" It noted that Paul possessed a "supple mind" and was a "preternaturally confident speaker." Washington Post political prognosticator Chris Cillizza pronounced Paul the "most interesting voice in the GOP right now," and Politico gave him the No. 1 spot on its list of the 50 "most...

Nothing much the Republicans have done explains why they are on the verge of taking back the Senate and making gains in the House. (Emphasis mine) Not since the summer of 1974 or October 1980 have we see a presidency in a total meltdown. Abroad, ISIS, Putin, and the bullying Chinese have revealed that the Obama administration is either clueless or has subordinated foreign policy decisions to rank politics — or both. At home we have Ebola. Meanwhile, the list of corrupt, incompetent or politically rogue federal agencies keeps growing — the VA, ICE, the NSA, the IRS, the Secret...

This has to be one of the primary reasons Republicans lose in purple swing states by a very narrow margin. Take the latest Virginia Governor's race as an example, all looked well until the end, then a few blue districts reported at the last minute and we lost! Same with November 2012. We were winning in most crucial states right till the end, meanwhile still waiting for a few "Last Minute Deep Blue" districts to call in their votes. Is this going to happen again in those few close senate races in Georgia and North Carolina? It would seem like...

A still from an ad by Tom Cotton, a Republican challenging Senator Mark Pryor in Arkansas.One ad in the Kansas race for Senate depicts shadowy men climbing a barbed-wire fence as a narrator warns that “illegal immigration is threatening our communities and taking jobs away from Kansans who need them.” Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator running for Senate in New Hampshire, has run three border security ads, and cautioned that a “porous” border poses an Ebola threat. And in Texas, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor produced an ad showing a caravan of Middle Easterners waving flags and brandishing...

It’s hard to tell how much the far right, in its enduring hate for Obama, is seeing an opportunity in the Ebola hysteria, or the Ebola anxiety is feeding and re-igniting those racist and religious attacks on Obama from their heyday in ‘07-’10 when he was so unknown. Either way, Twitter and social media is serving as its own source of incubation and a visual breeding ground for rallying the replicants. Since the most effective treatment for noxious political memes is inoculation, it’s instructive to examine a few of these specimens to see what they consist of. This combo features...

For all the analysis which correctly notes that associating with President Barack Obama is no relief for Democrats running in 2014, particularly those in red states, it is those Democratic politicians running as “Clinton Democrats” who are watching their campaigns implode. “Self-proclaimed Clinton Democrats are struggling this election cycle, and not even their powerful namesakes may be enough to save them,” The Hill reported on Sunday. “Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have tried to turn on their charms to help centrist Democrats in Kentucky and Arkansas. But as candidates in both states are slipping, help from the party’s preeminent power...

While Sen. Ted Cruz may be a star among tea party faithful and other more socially conservative Republicans, he has been less active on the midterm campaign trail as some candidates fear he could polarize voters, The Hill reports. More welcomed in states with tight midterms contests have been Cruz's conservative brothers in the Senate, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who have been counted on to support election bids across the country, the Hill noted. “It’s almost exactly a year ago to the day when [Cruz] led to the government shutdown," Republican strategist Rich Galen told...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)We are watching the wheels come off the most radical and dangerously incompetent administration in history. “I am not on the ballot this fall,” President Obama proclaims, “but make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” This statement should be the final nail in the coffin for the Democrats. The GOP should be poised to win a landslide of historic proportions. So why is there so much debate over whether they’ll win -- at all? The answer is crystal clear. The Republican Party needed only to choose any one of a number of national...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Democratic candidates who run from President Obama in red states where he is unpopular are making a big mistake. Their holding Obama at arm's length deprives voters of a clear choice at the ballot box. Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes is a great candidate for the U.S. Senate and is running a solid campaign. But she made a mistake when she refused to answer the question from the Louisville Courier-Journal about which presidential candidate she voted for in 2012. Grimes should have said she voted for President Obama and then gone on to explain her policy differences with...