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Appearing on FoxNews' "Your World with Neil Cavuto" Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated his support of the Tea Party movement. “Let me make it clear," McConnell told Cavuto. "I'm a big fan of the tea party movement. I think it's been extremely important in helping us regain the House and do well in the Senate in 2010." McConnell had sparked controversy at the end of the November when he seemed to suggest on a conference call with donors that the Tea Party were "bullies" that he planned to "punch...in the nose." "There is one particular organization that I...

You know how it is with these budget deals. The tea-party guys in Congress always line up to express their outrage: Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell. Wait, what?Signs of a Republican revolt brewing? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will vote against the deal brokered by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a knowledgeable source close to the Kentucky Republican told The Daily Caller on Wednesday.While the budget proposal is expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, McConnell joins a growing list of Republican senators — including Marco Rubio of Florida, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and...

Add the Senate’s top Republican to the list of those who will oppose the new budget deal, which conservatives are blasting for blowing through the mandated spending caps on government spending next year. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will vote against the deal brokered by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a knowledgeable source close to the Kentucky Republican told The Daily Caller on Wednesday.

A Kentucky M.D. named Stephen Kiteck is shutting down his medical practice and citing Obamacare as the reason. Dr. Kiteck published an ad in the local paper saying his office will close Dec. 31, 2013 because of Obamacare. He invites his patients to drop by prior to that date to pick their charts.

Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, is taking on a new and formidable immigration policy director, a sign that he could be more serious about passing immigration legislation than his critics suggest. Rebecca Tallent, who currently serves as director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, will join Boehner’s staff on Wednesday. Before joining the BPC, Tallent held several senior staff positions with Sen. John McCain, including chief of staff. During her time with McCain, she helped the Arizona Republican draft a handful of immigration overhaul measures, including the last big push McCain made with the late Sen. Edward M....

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has hired Rebecca Tallent to work on immigration reform. She is currently the immigration policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "The Speaker remains hopeful that we can enact step-by-step, common-sense immigration reforms -- the kind of reforms the American people understand and support," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. "Becky Tallent, a well-known expert in this field of public policy, is a great addition to our team and that effort." According to her BPC bio, Tallent has worked as a policy aide on immigration and energy issues to Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and...

BOYD COUNTY, Ky (WSAZ) -- For the second time in mere months, Boyd County Sheriff's deputies were back at a home along Martin V Drive in Cannonsburg. "This has been going on here for about seven months," Boyd County Sheriff's Sgt. Rob Donta said. "We've had a lot of complaints by the neighbors." After a months-long undercover investigation, deputies arrested Jeffrey Hurn. "Last night, we bought oxycodone pills off of him, and arrested him for trafficking a controlled substance," Donta said. After searching the property, deputies found nine meth labs. It was a discovery that didn't exactly surprise investigators. WSAZ.com...

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes' family recipes, posted on her website for the Thanksgiving holiday on Wednesday, appear to be lifted from other websites. -snip- The recipe issue is reminiscent of one that ensnared Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) campaign for a few days in April of 2008. McCain's campaign was caught passing others' recipes off as favorite family recipes of Cindy McCain. After drawing negative press for the situation, the McCain campaign scrubbed the recipes off their website and accused an intern of plagiarism.

The World's Most Arrested Man, a Kentuckian who has been busted more than 1500 times over the past four decades, will spend another Thanksgiving in jail, records show. Henry Earl, 64, is locked up in the Fayette County Detention Center--which one day should bear his name--following his arrest last month for public intoxication.

The chairman for the Democratic Kentucky Family Values PAC is refusing to release the citations for a key claim in a new radio advertisement running in the special election in western Kentucky’s 7th House District. The ad is aimed at Republican candidate Suzanne Miles and says her “family’s businesses got $2.5 million in federal handouts.” Cary Blankenship, the chairman for the Kentucky Family Values PAC, refused to tell Pure Politics how the group arrived at the $2.5 million figure. Four times Blankenship said he “doesn’t discuss strategy” when asked directly about the facts behind the claims of the ad. Blakenship...

In a surprising win on Tuesday night, the White House and top Senate Democrats successfully defended provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would loosen restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantánamo Bay, advancing President Obama’s goal of closing the facility by a margin of 55-43. . . . . . . As recently as early November, Democratic Senate aides participating in the fight to loosen the transfer rules described the politics of the vote as “difficult” but “not impossible” and said those whipping the vote were five or six votes short of the bare majority they needed...

An al Qaeda-linked terrorist, who was resettled in the U.S. as an Iraq War refugee after allegedly killing American soldiers, was caught on camera in Kentucky handling heavy weapons that the FBI said he believed would be sent to insurgents back in Iraq. The 2010 video, obtained exclusively by ABC News, was part of a broader ABC News investigation into the flawed refugee vetting program, which officials said may have let “dozens” of terrorists into the country. READ FULL EXCLUSIVE: US May Have Let ‘Dozens’ of Terrorists Into Country as Refugees In the video, Waad Ramadan Alwan is seen expertly...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday will convene a special meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus and senior White Officials to discuss the troubled rollout of ObamaCare. Reid on Wednesday told reporters he would not answer questions about the hundreds of thousands of insurance policy cancellations or other issues until he has further discussions with the White House. The Senate leader said President Obama called him Tuesday evening to discuss healthcare and other issues. Several Democrats have signed onto a proposal sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would force insurance companies to let people keep their health...

As the Obamacare fiasco deepens and broadens, and one watches the panic enveloping Team Obama, which strategy looks more desperate: Defending the indefensible or savaging critics as somehow responsible for this mess? The spin control is actually amusing when you consider that it isn't Team Obama trying to influence the media. It's the media doing damage control for Team Obama. Both the offensive and defensive approaches are being tried at NBC and MSNBC. Even as journalists softly acknowledged that Obama's you-can-keep-your-insurance pledge was a cruel lie, the president's super friend and NBC anchor Brian Williams was all about the damage...

...The Associated Press has one of the all-time great look-on-the-sunny-side quotes, from Amy Fauver, chief communications officer for Cover Oregon: "We stuck to the vision, and we're experiencing now the bumps that go along with having a grand vision that doesn't work out exactly the way you hope it will." If she were good at math, she might have added that Cover Oregon's enrollment has been growing exponentially. Another state excluded from the Avalere study is Massachusetts. You might think that's because Massachusettsans are old pros at running a health-insurance exchange, having set one up way back in 2006 after...

What’s this? Bad news on Wednesday? This stuff’s supposed to be held till late Friday afternoon. Prospects of having the Obamacare website up and running by November 30: zilch, zero, nada. Butt no problem: we’ve got the marketing campaign ramped-up for when it does work: it’s called “got insurance?” and it’s got it all. Stay balanced, my friend.   Hey Susie, hey Nate: Got Common Sense? Drink up girls, it’s good for you. Guess how many people  - who used to “got insurance” that they liked  - “not ‘got insurance’ today” because it was cancelled due to Obamacare? To date:...

Liberal marketing gurus here in Colorado are masters of Obamacare distraction. While customers struggle to apply through the still-broken health insurance exchange and consumers grapple with cancellation notices, these hipster ad designers are partying it up. Who cares about the insurance market meltdown? They've got keg stands and one-night stands! The "Got Insurance?" campaign is the lame brainchild of two "progressive" outfits with dubious nonprofit status: ProgressNow and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. Their previous claim to fame: a "Thanks, Obamacare" social media movement to propagandize praise and gratitude for the federal mandate. Modeled after the "Got Milk?" ads, the...

<p>The smiling woman who was once the face of the Affordable Care Act's website has come out of the shadows to stand up to the "cyberbullying" she says she suffered after the law's flawed kickoff.</p> <p>Speaking exclusively to ABC News, Adriana, who asked that only her first name be used, said she was speaking out now to defend herself after weeks of enduring online lampooning.</p>

Two months before enrollment began in the Obamacare exchanges, the administration’s top health care official heaped praise on WebMD for launching an online resource to help Americans navigate the complex law... ... what neither Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nor WebMD mentioned at the time was that the company, which millions of Americans regularly read for health news, also stood to earn millions of dollars from a federal contract to teach doctors about Obamacare.

As the disastrous roll out of Obamacare continues, there are any number of opinions and narratives to examine. It is becoming increasingly clear that millions of Americans are losing their health insurance plans because those plans had changed. Those changes did not have to be major changes, any change would result in cancellation. The Obama administration has been working double time, trying to pin the blame on the insurance companies. They are also building the narrative that the Americans receiving these cancellation notices will actually be better off with the new plans. Because of the expanded coverage, they say. At...

According to President Obama, "health care is the single most important thing we can do for America's long-term fiscal health."  In a gruesome way, he is right. The explosion in entitlement caused debt is the greatest challenge facing the United States, and its origins lie in the retirement of "baby boomers" and a shrinking tax base due to expanding unemployment, which is itself due in part to the excessive debt monetization and taxation required to pay for the current retirees.  Assuming President Obama is correct, how does (un)affordable healthcare solve the problem? The ACA is a hideously complicated circus of...

CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, thinks that millions of Americans losing their health insurance due to Obamacare regulations is “a little bit of a red herring,” and, besides, we’re only talking about a “small portion of the population.” In other news, 1 million Californians have received cancelation notices for the very plans the Obama administration promised, again and again, they could keep... Tuesday on Piers Morgan Live, Gupta attempted to deflect the in-deflectable criticism of Obama’s bold-faced “keep your plan” lie and worse-than-third-world rollout of his signature achievement. After portraying the administration’s deliberate deceptions as merely a messaging problem, the best defense Gupta...

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) will take his turn at hammering the rollout of ObamaCare on Wednesday when his panel hears testimony from five administration witnesses. The hearing will mark the culmination of a strategic assault on President Obama’s healthcare plan by congressional Republicans. It follows a series of tactical document leaks from Issa that have created mini-firestorms for the White House and infuriated the Republican lawmaker’s critics, who accuse him of acting in bad faith over the last month. In one case, Democrats disputed Issa’s claim that the White House ordered federal health officials to disable the...

As John noted earlier today, James O’Keefe has struck again, revealing the fraudulent conduct of Obamacare “navigators” in luring prospects into that program. The party of voter fraud has indeed become the party of insurance fraud.Last May, I discussed the central role of navigators in the implementation of Obamacare and their potential for mischief — which can occur even absent active fraud on their part.Given O’Keefe’s blockbuster story, I thought I would repost part of what wrote six months ago on the subject: Obamacare is predicated on inducing young, healthy people, for whom purchasing insurance may not be the best...

[Obamacare ad] shows a 20-something woman named “Susie” holding a packet of birth control pills with an open-mouth, wide smile. She is wearing a flesh-colored, low-cut, sleeveless top, tight skinny jeans and open-toed black heels. Susie is leaning against “Nate,” who is wearing an untucked shirt with the top four buttons undone to show his hairy chest. He has a smirk on his face and one hand in the pocket of his jeans. “OMG, he’s hot!,” Susie is shown saying. “Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all...

<p>FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Old guard Republican Larry Forgy has endorsed Louisville businessman Matt Bevin ahead of next May's primary.</p> <p>Forgy, a Lexington attorney who was the GOP nominee for Kentucky governor in 1995, announced the endorsement Tuesday. Forgy is a former member of the Republican National Committee and served as Kentucky chairman of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984.</p>

One of the biggest criticisms of Kentucky’s early returns from the state’s health exchange is that an overwhelming majority have landed on the government’s Medicaid program rather than private insurance. But state officials say that’s to be expected early in the open enrollment period, which began Oct. 1 and ends March 31. The reason the number of Medicaid enrollees is so much higher so far is because if someone’s income qualifies them to be on that program, they’re automatically signed up. It’s like a turning on a light switch. Others who earn more than 138 percent of the poverty rate...

If New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has any chance of securing the Republican presidential nomination, he just might have to thank such darlings of the tea party movement as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz for an unlikely path to victory. As Mr. Paul’s and Mr. Cruz’s recent filibusters on the Senate floor have shown, the 2016 quest for the White House is well underway. A fierce battle among the new small-government, libertarian stars is already raging. That has left a growing number of conservative activists voicing concerns publicly about a scenario that would let a moderate Republican like Mr....

One Senate aide blamed Corker’s spotlight-grabbing role as Cruz’s foil on weak Republican leadership. “Because our leadership has not led for a number of months because of electoral politics, Senator McCain and Senator Graham and Senator Corker have sort of emerged as sort of de facto leaders in a leadership vacuum,” he says. “I like Senator Cornyn, I like Senator McConnell, I respect them, I know their colleagues respect them, but in fairness there just has not been a whole lot of direction, there’s really been no strategy.” “It might not work,” he adds of Cruz and Lee’s efforts (we...

".............Paul has signaled that if he runs for president in 2016, he won’t do it the way his father did, by mostly shunning the GOP establishment. Instead, he is expected to cultivate relationships with Republicans like McConnell, whose help making inroads with establishment donors could be very, very useful. Rubio clearly isn’t shunning the establishment, either. He worked on crafting an immigration reform bill earlier this year, something the establishment wing of the party has been clamoring for in the wake of a disappointing election in which Republicans performed poorly among Hispanics. And he didn’t hesitate to back McConnell, even...

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are seeking to stay relevant in the debate over ObamaCare, but they might as well be shouting in a hurricane. A hurricane named Ted. During this month’s fiscal standoff, Sen. Ted Cruz attracted the most attention of any possible White House hopeful on Capitol Hill. GOP strategists say Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, has seized the role of Tea Party standard-bearer, giving him an edge with conservative activists. The grassroots army Cruz built over the last few months could help him in Iowa and other primary battlegrounds if he decides to...

Florida Senator Marco Rubio has endorsed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over his Tea Party primary challenger: Washington (CNN) - One-time tea party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said Sunday he supports Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s bid for re-election in 2014. McConnell is facing a primary challenge in his home state of Kentucky from businessman Matt Bevin, who was endorsed by the influential Senate Conservatives Fund on Friday. “Matt Bevin is a true conservative who will fight to stop the massive spending, bailouts, and debt that are destroying our country. He is not afraid to stand up to the...

Two days after a conservative political action committee endorsed his Republican challenger, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was gifted a trump card in the form of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio, like Kentucky’s junior Sen. Rand Paul, has enjoyed immense support from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, and his endorsement of McConnell on Fox News Sunday gives the embattled senior senator some much-needed cover. Rubio’s backing comes at a critical time for McConnell.

Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) endorsed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in his primary against Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin today on Fox News Sunday. Watch: [video]

The Daily Beast's editor-in-chief Tina Brown unhinged herself in the middle of the Daily Beast's annual Hero Summit. During an interview with Senator John McCain Brown asked:  "The story of this political crisis is really, you know, the culpability not just of the Republican crazies, but of the Republican non-crazies. I mean, how do we get to the point where Mitch McConnell is Rand Paul's bitch?...Why aren't the moderate Republicans, you know, fighting back? We're always saying why don't, you know, the moderate Muslims fight jihad, but, you know, this is jihad."  

In the midst of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's lengthy floor speech against the president's health care law, a tea party group is having second thoughts about endorsing GOP Leader Mitch McConnell for re-election next year. Earlier today, McConnell rejected Cruz's plan to filibuster the House spending bill which funds the government past Oct. 1 but does not pay for Obamacare. -snip- If Mitch McConnell is not going to support efforts to defund Obamacare and in fact is going to work against them, then Tea Party groups simply need to abandon him.

Many people expected to see a Tea Party challenge to Mitch McConnell in next year’s Kentucky primary, and it could still happen. However, that challenge will not include any support from the Tea Party’s 2010 candidate for US Senate, Rand Paul. Late yesterday, Paul threw his support behind the highest-ranking member of the GOP establishment in the upper chamber: The Daily Caller has learned that Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is endorsing Sen. Mitch McConnell for re-election in 2014, ending speculation that Paul would back a tea party challenge to the Senate minority leader. “Rand Paul has endorsed McConnell,” Jesse...

Madison Project PAC Endorses Matt Bevin for Senate in Kentucky Madison Project Chairman Jim Ryun: “The only way to change the lackluster leadership in the Republican Party is to replace the career politicians who lead the party. Matt Bevin is brave enough to storm the castle of the GOP Establishment and challenge the sitting minority leader, and we are proud to stand with him and with millions of conservatives who feel disenfranchised by unprincipled GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell.” Washington, DC – The Madison Project PAC announced today that it is endorsing Louisville businessman Matt Bevin for Senate against Senator...

Wendy Caswell, the recently elected president of the Louisville Tea Party, endorsed Matt Bevin, the businessman who is challenging Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the 2014 Republican primary, on Thursday. Ms. Caswell was elected as the group's president only last month, when then president Sarah Durand resigned to become the spokeswoman for the Bevin campaign. The endorsement, however, highlighted the recent friction between the McConnell campaign and the Tea Party. It also displayed a major strength of the Bevin campaign--the ability to manage the news cycle with quick hitting attacks on a 30 year incumbent. First, the McConnell campaign was...

A Tea Party group has dropped its endorsement of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), citing criticism he reportedly made of conservative groups that has put him in their crosshairs for 2014. [big snip] "While endorsing Mitch McConnell seemed like the right thing to do at the time, Mitch McConnell has proven he is not worthy of conservative support. Glenn Beck is right. It is time to defund the GOP until the GOP pushes people like Mitch McConnell out of leadership," Phillips wrote in a post on the group's website. McConnell has clashed with conservatives in recent weeks over the...

Matt Bevin, who plans to challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in the 2014 Kentucky GOP primary, picked up a big endorsement from a national conservative group Sunday evening. The Madison Project, a conservative fundraising group headed by former Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.), who once held track’s world record in the mile, will give Bevin access to donors from around the country. Ryun’s son, Drew, a former deputy political director at the Republican National Committee, is also involved. The group praised Bevin’s candidacy in a letter to activists and donors as someone poised to storm “the decaying castle of the...

Matt Bevin’s Senate Conservatives Fund fundraising webpage. ($127.2K raised so far. Goal is $200K.) Received this email from the SCF this morning: SCF endorses Matt Bevin for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. SCF Senate Update Fellow Conservatives: U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Republican Leader, has a liberal record and he refuses to fight for our principles. It’s time to replace him with a true conservative. We have done everything possible to encourage him to stand up for our values, but he won’t listen. Mitch McConnell has cut deals with the Democrats to increase the debt limit, raise taxes, and fund...

A group that played a crucial role in Ted Cruz’s primary win is taking on a new challenge this cycle: The Madison Project has made it a top priority to take down the current Republican leadership, and one front in that war is Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin’s primary race against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. “The problem in Washington, D.C., right now is the current GOP leadership and their unwillingness to fight the big-government policies that are coming down the pike,” says Drew Ryun, the group’s political director and a former deputy director at the Republican National Committee. “That is...

While other groups are staying on the sidelines, the Madison Project has jumped in the Kentucky Republican Senate primary and is enthusiastically boosting businessman Matt Bevin’s campaign against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell: It’s a repeat of the group’s strategy in Texas in 2012, when they were the first national conservative organization to endorse Ted Cruz. “The importance of their endorsement in the early days was significant,” says John Drogin, who served as Cruz’s campaign manager and is now the senator’s state director. … But while Cruz wasn’t the establishment candidate in the GOP primary, his establishment-backed rival — Lieutenant...

WASHINGTON — Addison Mitch McConnell has made a career of following in his heroes' footsteps and vexing critics who underestimate his political skills. Now the Senate's top Republican is on the offensive against critics of the compromise he crafted with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to reopen the federal government through Jan. 15. The deal ended a two-week government shutdown that McConnell terms “a foolish strategy.” “I felt it was important to get us out of a shutdown that was overwhelmingly despised by the American people and achieved nothing toward getting rid of Obamacare,” McConnell told the Tribune-Review during...

LEXANDRIA, VA — The Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) endorsed Louisville businessman Matt Bevin for U.S. Senate in Kentucky on Friday. Matt Bevin is challenging U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the Republican primary election on May 20, 2014. SCF Executive Director Matt Hoskins made the following statement: "Matt Bevin is a true conservative who will fight to stop the massive spending, bailouts, and debt that are destroying our country. He is not afraid to stand up to the establishment and he will do what it takes to stop Obamacare. We know that winning this primary won't be easy. Mitch McConnell...

A group of Tea Party and conservative activists rallied outside of Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s Louisville office, calling for the defunding of the president’s health care law. Joined by U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin, over a dozen demonstrators spoke in support of Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, who held a nearly 24-hour marathon talk on the Senate floor to oppose the Affordable Care Act. But McConnell disagreed with Cruz's tactic to block a federal spending bill that takes out funding Obamacare in order to keep Senate Democrats from amending the measure. Instead, McConnell supports having a majority vote to defund...

Mitch McConnell got another lucky break today when Obama announced his latest climate fascism that will cripple the coal industry. He was provided with another low-hanging talking point to distract from the most immediate threat of amnesty – something he actually has the power to stop. In case you were wondering why McConnell hasn’t given any floor speeches opposing this bill, and refused to state his position until the hour of the vote on Corker-Hoeven, take a look at this article at the Huffington Post: The top two Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of...

enate minority leader Mitch McConnell likes to say, “If someone flicks a pebble at you, you hurl a boulder back at him.” His political team is just as emphatic. Some Republicans in Kentucky who flirted with working for his primary opponent, Matt Bevin, were told by the McConnell allies that they would get the “death penalty.” Another frequent warning: “Mitch McConnell doesn’t take prisoners.” McConnell’s team “shoots the wounded on the battlefield as a matter of course,” says University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato. A former GOP leadership aide who has seen the McConnell operation up close sounds terrified. “They’re...

There's a certain script Republican primaries have come to follow, and it involves establishment types proclaiming the incumbent better positioned to take on a Democrat than whichever tea-party challenger. But in Kentucky, the establishment might have it backward. Matt Bevin, the Louisville-area businessman running against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is new to politics. He's dismissed by many in the GOP as a glorified gadfly. Still, he's got something the veteran lawmaker lacks—a thin record that will be difficult for Democrats to pick apart. Indeed, Democrats are hoping to turn the Senate race into a referendum on an unpopular incumbent....