Free Republic

The chances of him winning the presidency are, um, slim. But what if Hillary just keeps him around a bit longer?In the financial world, inflation is defined as “too much money chasing too few goods.” In the world of political journalism, inflation is “too many pundits chasing too few scenarios.” Like the editors of Cosmopolitan struggling each month to find new sexual positions, implements, and erogenous zones, scribes are already running out of ways to chronicle the strategies and prospects of presidential contenders: “How Marco Can Stop Jeb”; “How Paul Can Block Cruz and Huckabee”; “How A Fiorina-Santorum Alliance Can...

In a move more reminiscent of Texas Senator Ted Cruz than Ohio Representative John Boehner, the House Speaker has pursued a strategy to defund President Obama’s executive action on immigration, leveraging funding for Homeland Security in the process. Bloomberg News reports: House Speaker John Boehner said he’s prepared to let funding lapse for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and blame Democrats if the Senate fails to pass a House-backed bill for the agency. … The Homeland Security Department faces a shutdown of nonessential operations if Congress does not reach agreement before current funding ends on Feb. 27. When asked...

Top GOP fundraisers will reportedly join Grover Norquist and Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New Economy group on a conference call next week to push for comprehensive amnesty legislation. According to a BuzzFeed report, the GOP fundraisers on the Tuesday call will include Mitt Romney’s “former finance director Spencer Zwick; California-based fast food CEO Andrew Puzder; and billionaire health care executive Mike Fernandez.” Fernandez is reportedly leaning toward Jeb Bush, who has said that illegal immigration is an “act of love” and has not backed down for his support of a comprehensive amnesty bill, while Puzder and Zwick are unaffiliated...

I tried to warn them. In addition, back in 2012, after Marco Rubio was asked about the age of the earth, I provided conservative politicians (and others interested) a primer for answering some of the “gotcha” questions that most every conservative running for political office in the U.S. will inevitably face. It seems that Scott Walker or his staff need to spend more time on my website, or on American Thinker (one of the top conservative websites in America). Byron York hopes Walker learned a valuable lesson. Silvio Canto at American Thinker doesn’t care what Scott Walker (or Hillary Clinton)...

President Obama is putting Republicans on notice that he plans to run through their cynical politics and opposition during his final two years in office. While speaking at a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco, the president said: "And one of the things I am absolutely determined to do over the next two years is not just consolidate the gains that we’ve made, not just move forward on new initiatives like free community colleges for young people around the country who need to be trained for the 21st-century economy, but part of my goal is also to restore a sense of...

Andrew Johnson of NRO reports that in 2002, as executive of Milwaukee County, Scott Walker signed a resolution that expressed support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that will “provide greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal residency.” The author of the resolution says that Walker definitely supported it. Having signed it, he should be presumed to have supported, in any case. Will this news harm Walker’s chances of becoming the GOP presidential nominee? Standing alone, it shouldn’t. It’s one thing to sign a non-bonding resolution passed by the legislature in favor of “greater opportunity” for legal residency. It’s quite...

A neat scoop by Andrew Johnson, although I’m more interested in grassroots reaction to it than I am in the story itself. “Governor Walker does not support amnesty,” the governor’s spokesman, Tom Evenson, tells National Review Online. Evenson says the 2002 resolution was “stripped of references to amnesty before passage” and, in fact, reinforces the governor’s view that illegal immigrants should face penalties before they are granted citizenship. The resolution, viewable here, did not mention or spell out such penalties, and expressed support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that would have provided “greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal...

The Walker surge in Iowa, Hillary’s Obama problem and other news from Week One of our yearlong insiders’ survey from the ground in 2016’s first-in-the-nation races.Most Iowa insiders believe Scott Walker would win their state’s Republican caucuses if they were held this week. But they’re not this week, and virtually none of the most influential thought leaders in the Hawkeye State believe that the Wisconsin governor will sustain his recent bounce in polls. This is one of several intriguing findings in the debut survey of The POLITICO Caucus. More than 100 of the most plugged-in activists, operatives and elected officials...

The early dinner crowd near the Capitol on Thursday yielded at least one notable pairing, with overtones of the presidential election cycle to come: Sen. Ted Cruz and former Ambassador John Bolton. Sharing a meal at Johnny’s Half Shell before Bolton was set to appear on Fox News, Cruz launched into a discussion of 2016 strategy audible to anyone within earshot, including a reporter for the Washington Examiner. Bolton has himself flirted with the idea of running for president in 2016, but his conversation with Cruz suggested the Texas senator, at least, views Bolton as a source of valuable input,...

Mitt Romney announced on Jan. 30 that he would not run for President in 2016, and immediately the commentariate ordained Jeb Bush the big winner. Bush was Romney’s heir, a thousand wagging tongues proclaimed. The donors would fall to him, and with them would go the Republican establishment, then the voters. The Republicans had a “frontrunner.” If there is a 2016 frontrunner for the GOP, he achieved that status six days before Romney’s announcement. On that day, Sat., Jan. 24, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker delivered a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, It vaulted him into the...

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rejected hearing Alabama’s appeal on gay marriage earlier this week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has taken the firmest stance of all potential Republican presidential candidate on the issue. Cruz introduced the State Marriage Defense Act just two days after the high court’s decision, which would allow states to decide on how to define marriage, rather than federal judges. While Republicans have long been the party supporting only traditional marriage, media reports have recently stressed how slow likely Republican 2016 presidential have been to speak out on the Alabama matter. The Supreme Court opted not to...

The Club for Growth was among the Beltway groups that battled against the “establishment” and egged on the government shutdown. To its credit however, its business membership stayed out of the immigration fight rather than join the ant-market right-wingers who want to restrict the U.S. labor market. And unlike outfits like the Senate Conservatives Fund (who tended to pick outlandish, losing candidates), the Club for Growth backed Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and now-freshman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). Under a new president, David McIntosh, the Club for Growth now has a choice whether to be an outlier group or...

THE field of Republican presidential contenders may be limited to a narrow range of conservative fellows in mid- to late-middle age, but at least there are a lot of them. The Democratic field is, for all practical purposes, Hillary Clinton. Ahead by an average of 49 points in early polls, it is not clear that Mrs Clinton has any serious competition. There is some sign that Joe Biden might jump in, but his poll numbers are dismal for a second-term vice-president. Martin O'Malley, Maryland's former governor, might run. Jim Webb, a former Virginia senator, is a possibility. Bernie Sanders of...

I don’t get it. Sometimes when I lack understanding about an issue or situation in the news, and after researching the issue, I say to myself; ‘okay, I get it.’ Other times, just like this instance, I really don’t understand. What is the problem with candidates who are without a doubt intending to make a run for the White House in 2016 committing to the fact? The obvious is Hillary Clinton. She has gathered a qualified campaign staff; several Super PAC’s have been created to finance her campaign; and she resigned as Secretary of State to allow herself to be...

Lately, the amount of attention Bobby Jindal is getting seems to be on a level normally reserved for top-tier presidential candidates. Jindal set off a firestorm with his comments in Britain about Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe, and his quip about how the threat from medieval Christians is now under control in response to President Obama’s “High Horse” speech earned him a fresh round of headlines. And of course, in between Jindal’s camp was rocked by a host of stories about his record with Louisiana’s budget that on balance were not helpful to his cause. And that came after his...

They’re coming out of the woodwork And out from under the rocks. For when the Primary season begins, It opens Pandora’s Box. The latest national census establishes the population of the United States as slightly over 325 million. Of this number (excluding Sarah Palin) nearly 170 million are old enough and eligible to be elected President. Why then is the voting population consistently doomed (with the exception of Harry Truman’s contest) to choosing the lesser of two evils? The next election is still almost two years away, but the media is replete with the names, backgrounds and chances of hopeful...

Des Moines, Iowa – Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is opening the first Iowa office among the potential 2016 Republican contenders for the presidency. Walker, who has led all other GOP presidential aspirants in recent polls, leased the space at 2775 86th St. in Urbandale, the Des Moines Register reports. The office building has a lengthy political history with Republican candidates – although Walker hasn’t officially tossed his hat in the ring for the 2016 election. Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses are tentatively expected to be held on Feb. 1, 2016 and are crucially important for presidential campaigns looking to establish a national...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) In the span of just two weeks, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has catapulted into Republican superstar status. Mitt Romney's premature withdrawal from the 2016 presidential race cracked open the doors for the emergence of a hardline right-wing alternative to the Party establishment's lone remaining consensus candidate, Jeb Bush. And with his surprisingly animated speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Walker smashed those doors down and jumped to the front of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. With his rhetorical guns blazing at every enemy of Wall Street Republicans and Tea Party conservatives alike, Scott Walker has emerged straight...

The unofficial death of the moderate American Democrat went largely unnoticed last week. Tim Ryan — a once-strident champion of the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, filled with moderate Catholic Democrats whose issues are still firmly pocketbook-based — penned an op-ed saying he now supports abortion. The Ohio congressman, who once sat on the board of the Democrats for Life in America advocacy group, made that surprising reversal as he contemplates a run for U.S. Senate. You see, plenty of Jacksonian Democrats remain in his district — and all across the country, for that matter — but no tolerance for...

Republicans have long struggled to catch-up to Democrats on high-tech voter outreach as well as courting younger voters. Jeb Bush may have found a way to kill two birds with one stone. The former Florida governor has tapped the co-founder of Hipster.com as his chief technology officer, according to his LinkedIn profile. Ethan Czahor, a Santa Monica-based technologist, will run the preparations for Bush’s presidential run at his political action committee, Right to Rise. Last week Czahor developed the microsite jebspeech.com, which accompanied Bush’s address to the Detroit Economic Club domain registration records show. Hidden in the website code was...