Free Republic

Full Title: Right-Wing Pundit Ann Coulter: Trump Is A “Shallow, Lazy Ignoramus” — And Worse Yet, A Bust On Immigration Conservative pundit Ann Coulter provoked her customary amount of protest by appearing at a talk at Columbia University last night, though her message was a 180-degree shift from the one in her book In Trump We Trust. President Donald Trump’s performance thus far “kind of breaks my heart,” Coulter said. “He’s not giving us what he promised at every single campaign stop.” She added, “I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn’t care. … What I’m disappointed...

Pros complain about the screw-ups at the GOP convention — they didn’t distribute advance copies of embargoed speeches! The app sucked! The whole affair does have a slightly thin, network-variety-special quality. It makes you think about what’s been left out — and then you realize why it might turn out to be a success after all. There are no Bushes! No McCain. No Romneys. Do you miss them?

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site's editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday. "It's pretty simple," Kaus said in an interview, "I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty -- for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration.... I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken...

Am I missing something …? : I think Obama’s executive amnesty is probably unconstitutional, and in any case it’s bad policy. A Congress mindful of its place in our democracy would stop it on balance-of-powers grounds alone. I also share Byron York’s puzzlement over why, exactly, it has to be stopped now, as opposed to after January when Republicans will have majorities in both Houses. What I (and others) also don’t understand, though, is why the Republican House can’t at least try now, by attaching a defunding “rider” to whatever budget bill it decides to pass. (There are lots of...

or Sunday comment bait, Mickey Kaus adds a new wrinkle to the old question of whether to nominate the purest conservative or nominate someone who can win. By his logic, nominating losing Tea Partiers like Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller helped keep the surviving Republicans in line. Mickey first quotes Numbers USA CEO Roy Beck: I suspect one of the reason we did so much better with the smaller group of Republicans facing re-election was that they are more likely to believe that they might face Primary oppostion from within their own Party if they support amnesty. And then Mickey...

The Bias Matrix: What does kausfiles want? It’s complicated! Before a modern political writer can slant his coverage practice explanatory journalism determine what readers need to know, he first has to figure out whom he wants to win. That’s not always as easy as it sounds, especially if you are a blogger whose major issue** (control of our borders to help create a tight labor market) does not break down cleanly along party lines. (SNIP) Arkansas, where Tom Cotton has made immigration a consistent attack theme against Mark Pryor, who ( like every Senate Dem) voted for the Gang of...

More on whether a GOP Senate will give us immigration amnesty: Fawn Johnson of National Journal contributes to the near-dominant school of MSM reporting on immigration, a sort of locker-room pep talk in which a journalist calls activist Frank Sharry and then sketches a fanciful optimistic scenario on how amnesty could well happen. (SNIP) But many Republicans have bought into the iffy argument that they have to do something before the 2016 election to improve their share of the Hispanic vote. (SNIP) But I’m not sure. Coulter’s vicious ad hominem attack on this column could be correct: a big pro-GOP...

Mickey Kaus has a lot of fun with Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, the Florida Republican who had refused to let the lamp dim for immigration reform, and who (according to Politico) was this close to getting a damn bill. According to a superb Sueng Min Kim and Carrie Budoff Brown history of "how immigration reform died," Republicans were closer than anyone knew to maybe sort of introducing a bill that a majority of their conference could support. "Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) had been quietly shopping a PowerPoint presentation of a border enforcement and legalization bill to his colleagues and secured soft...

You knew Majority Leader Eric Cantor was vulnerable–the press had already reported a non-trivial Anybody But Cantor vote in his district. But I would have settled for his challenger, Dave Brat, getting more than 40%. I was all ready to (legitimately) spin that as a warning shot across Cantor’s bow. Instead, Brat went and actually beat Cantor–decisively, by 10 points, 55% to 45%. He and his campaign manager Zachary Werrell obviously ran a very effective race with minimal resources–against Cantor’s millions. Independent anti-Cantor actors like the We Deserve Better group — and various local conspiracies we don’t even know about...

A Cantor-First Immigration Policy: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor seems to be in a real race to retain his seat in the GOP primary. His challenger, economist Dave Brat, has attacked Cantor as soft on immigration amnesty.** The charge is accurate: Cantor’s actually written his own version of the DREAM Act, legalizing young undocumented immigrants. He supports the ENLIST Act--a seemingly appealing measure (limited to DREAMers who enlist in the military) that would nevertheless give the Democratic Senate a chance to push a much larger amnesty in “conference.”

and the whole Clinton dynasty … and maybe the Bushes too: Now that we are all Marxists, we need to uncover the materialist basis of even seemingly non-economic phenomena. Take Hillary Clinton’s campaign/non-campaign for President. Is she running or not? Why won’t she say? Let us start answering this question by asking another: What is the specific mode of production of the Clinton dynasty? Here a clue is provided by the petty bourgeois publication Politico, in a piece on Hillary’s tacit embrace of the financier ruling class: “Clinton, after all, was New York’s senator for eight years, where the financial...

Mickey’s Assignment Desk–Ben Smith, We Have Your Next Column! Why has Obama’s public campaign been so ineffective for the past month? Couldn’t someone digitally sophisticated and untanked–e.g. Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith–make a good argument that the President was led astray by the overhyped reality and promise of Internet Politics. Specifically, a) he exaggerated the power of his Web-friendly left wing; b) he overestimated the force of attack lines the Web-friendly left wing would find convincing, like pointing out, when discussing Iran in Debate #3, that Romney had once “invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the...

Mickey Kaus is still trying to get fellow Democrats to listen to him and to vote for him against Sen. Barbara Boxer in the Tuesday’s California Democratic Senate primary. He’s made a commercial stealing from Paul Wellstone which opens with Kaus saying, “unlike my opponent, I don’t have $10 million so I’m going to talk very fast…” On the serious side, Kaus has some severe criticisms of his party, not simply on policy issues, like public schools, unions and immigration reform, but over the place for argument and debate. According to Kaus, Democrats – the ones who wield power within...

Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus, the challenger to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, gets credit for making the 2010 Democratic U.S. Senate race livelier, all right -- but how 'bout that Sunday New York Times story claiming Kaus has famously "knocked boots" with just about everyone in LA? We don't know the definition in the Grey Lady newsroom, but -- ahem -- we can tell you what "knocking boots" means in the Bay Area (and the Urban Dictionary). And it ain't about the footwear.Backstory: The New York Times' Style section print edition Sunday profiled the bachelor candidate, saying that "it's difficult to...

Mickey Kaus is undoubtedly my favorite Democrat in California. That alone means that he is probably pretty well hated by the ruling far-left, establishment of the state party. The California Democrat Party, as well as the state itself is run almost entirely by the public employee unions. Hence the wonderful shape we find ourselves in today… People always say “well Arnold is a Republican.” Yes he is, but he’s a poor excuse for one and he was never any match against the unions and their bidders in the legislature. This brings me to the one democrat I have seen in...

In an obviously effective attempt to attract free attention to his hopeless primary campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, California's Mickey Kaus has just announced the three backroom bribes that he would accept from the Obama administration to drop his challenge. The California primary is Tuesday.

In a year when Tea Party activists and the GOP are getting a lot of attention, self-described "common sense Democrat" Mickey Kaus is stirring up a little party of his own - challenging U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary over illegal immigration and public employee unions' pensions."It's clear that the unions own the Democratic party - and it's going to be a disaster unless that changes," says Kaus, 58, a longtime blogger for online magazine Slate.com and author of "The End of Equality," which urges a rethinking of liberalism.Instead of "chasing after the Latino vote" and pushing for...

As bad as President Bush's poll numbers were the last few years of his Presidency, we never saw Republicans explicitly running against his record in their races. . . . in Republican Party primaries. In California (the Debt Bomb State) Democrat Mickey Kaus is running against Barbara Boxer (D-Pushy) for his party's nomination. Generally, when this happens against an incumbent, it is done from the outermost fringes of the party. In other words, it is generally a VERY far left Democrat or a fairly conservative Republican arguing that the party needs a true-believer in Washington. Mickey Kaus is an elite...

The rollout didn't go as my team of highly paid media consultants* had planned-- L.A. Weekly got it way before it was supposed to. Heads will roll around here. But I did go down to the local registrar's office Monday and take out nomination papers to run in the primary for U.S. Senator against Barbara Boxer. If I return them in timely fashion with enough signatures, I should be able to get on the June ballot. We'll see what happens. This isn't the place to make an electioneering spiel--I don't want to be a test case of campaign finance law...

Mickey Kaus, neoliberal blogger at kausfiles, will take on Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in the Democratic primary, according to LA Weekly. Kaus is a strong supporter of national health care, though he harshly criticized the White House "cost control" marketing strategy. However, he is a harsh critic of labor unions, a skeptic of affirmative action and an opponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Kaus is known for his honesty about the motivations of his allies, his opponents and himself.