Free Republic

The Great One, Mark Levin, endorses Matt Bevin, primary candidate running against Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, for Kentucky U.S. Senate. Enough of the status quo and politicians who claim to be Tea Party leaders who continue selling us out. I’ve published clips and rants about Rand Paul ad nauseaum. I am not here to disparage him, but to show the implications of what his half-hearted, “soft” and veiled support of the Tea Party will mean for us nationally. If it was good for Rubio, it’s good for him. Why should he be exempt from criticism? He’s just as devious,...

Conservative television personality Glenn Beck on Saturday offered Tea Party supporters an unsavory comparison between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and President Obama. "Mitch McConnell is as big of a danger to our country as Barack Obama is," Beck said during FreePAC Kentucky, a conservative event that promoted two Tea Party challengers over their Republican incumbents in the Senate. McConnell, a five-term Senator, is facing a challenge in the November elections from Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin, who was also speaking at the event. Speaking to McConnell supporters, Beck offered a grave prediction: "You're guy's going out of business very...

The challenger in the Republican primary for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is confident in his campaign and feels like he would win if the election was held now. Bevin, however, is calling on those voters who he believes will choose him in May, to demand a debate with McConnell. A cardboard cutout of McConnell stood with Bevin, as he said McConnell is dodging his own voting record, the people of Kentucky, the media and Bevin. Bevin said he has agreed to at least four debates or forums with McConnell, including one in April on public television. The McConnell campaign...

The Tea Party Patriots’ super PAC endorsed Matt Bevin Friday in his race against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP primary. Jenny Beth Martin, president of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, said that Mr. Bevin, a Louisville businessman, is a “job creator, family man, and community leader committed to fighting for personal freedom, economic freedom and a debt-free future.” “Unlike the incumbent, Matt Bevin has never voted to raise the debt ceiling, has never cut a deal with Joe Biden to raise taxes by $600 billion, and has never worked to ‘crush’ his political opponents,” Ms. Martin...

According to one of the tea party's leading voices, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who is being challenged by conservative Matt Bevin in Kentucky's Senate GOP primary, is not an "Arlen Specter" Republican."It's not like we're talking about Arlen Specter here," said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview with The Washington Post. "Senator McConnell has a longstanding conservative record and for an opponent to beat him, they'll have to prove somehow that he's not a conservative."Specter, the late Pennsylvania senator who left the GOP for the Democratic Party in 2009, was a villain-like figure to many on the...

Fresh off his resounding Republican primary victory Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday laid out a broad vision of what the Senate would look like under his control. Bottom line, McConnell, wouldn’t run the way Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., runs it now, the Kentucky Republican told the center-right American Enterprise Institute. ‘A Senate majority under my leadership would break sharply from the practices of the Reid era in favor of a more free-wheeling approach to problem solving,’ McConnell said in a speech. ‘I would work to restore (the Senate’s) traditional role as a place where good...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had vowed to crush the tea party in this spring’s primaries. His decisive win on Tuesday over a tea party challenger in Kentucky’s GOP primary has fueled plenty of establishment-over-tea party stories. Let’s just say the war ain’t over. “After the primary is over, it’s really the responsibility of everyone who wants to see a change in Washington, D.C., come November to support our candidates,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, McConnell’s deputy GOP Senate leader, who survived a much more tepid tea party onslaught in his own primary in early March. Cornyn singled out Kentucky’s...

Sen. Mitch McConnell was all smiles today: Not only because of his Republican primary victory in Kentucky, but because of a string of about-face endorsements from conservative groups intent on destroying him. “I’m happy to have them on board,” McConnell said dryly, standing just off the floor of the Senate, where he hopes to become majority leader in November if Republicans pick up six seats and control of the Senate. “Collectively, this group spent about $1 million against me in the primary,” McConnell said. “But they all got on board last night.” Not only did they get on board, they...

Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

At present, every poll has McConnell’s race against Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, as a dead heat with Election Day just six months away. Grimes also easily won her Tuesday primary. Her race with McConnell also is expected to be the most expensive congressional race this election cycle, as Republicans try to win a net six seats to take control of the upper chamber. If that happened, McConnell would replace Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.

It was suggested that one be started so I'll take the lead!

Some businesses in states with pitched Republican primary fights are turning to a relatively new tool to help ensure the outcome they want: telling employees how they want them to vote. Thanks in part to Citizens United, it's perfectly legal — but it probably doesn't do much good. Bloomberg Businessweek describes the concerted effort by business groups to get their member corporations ready to weigh in on the election — an election, we'll remind you, that has largely been framed as business-versus-Tea Party. The National Association of Manufacturers spent a week in Kentucky, briefing "as many as 10 businesses a...

March 12, 2014 – In a recent interview with The New York Times McConnell said “I think we are going to crush them everywhere… I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country… I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers, if you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally let America know who his true opponents are, and they aren’t the Democrats. When asked about conservative candidates like Matt Bevin, who is challenging him for his Senate seat in...

Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. A major subplot of this year’s midterm elections is the competition between the Republican establishment and the tea party wing of the party. The establishment is fighting back, but has the tea party already won? The general election is still six months off. But Tuesday opens the summer preseason of intraparty contests, which starts with an important primary in North Carolina. Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. After a July break, the preseason will...

The Republican Establishment always says conservative purists would rather lose than compromise. But the opposite is playing out in Nebraska. The moment Ben Sasse got endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, Mitch McConnell went all in for Shane Osborn. Well, Osborn is now toast. He has extremely high negatives, extreme negative poll numbers, and outside groups have just finished him off with an ad blasting his involvement in a made up military memo. That leaves Sid Dinsdale who’d have you know he is a lifelong Republican despite years of significant giving to Democrats. Dinsdale too, however, is behind in the...

30 years ago, a man ran for the Senate because his opponent kept claiming to be for spending cuts while raising spending. His opponent kept claiming to be a conservative, while letting big government grow, even when he was the majority and could stop it. Maybe that candidate needs to be reminded of his own words.

The Chatter: WAVE exposes Bevin at cockfighting rally, McConnell hit on jobs comments, Grimes finally weighs in on pipeline Republican U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin is again struggling to explain his appearance at a cockfighting rally last month after a local news reporter aired Bevin’s remarks at the event in which Bevin had been asked specifically about cockfighting. WAVE 3 News reporter John Boel went to the March 29 cockfighting rally undercover and got Bevin on video speaking at the rally. Bevin was asked a direct question by American Gamefowl Defense Director Dave Devereaux. Devereaux asked Bevin “Will you vote...

Matt Bevin, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s primary challenger, told a group of Kentucky voters that American workers are less productive than immigrants. “For those who think that all these fifteen to twenty million [illegal immigrant] people are here just to take advantage of us and ride the system, you’re wrong,” he said at a diner in Jessamine, Kentucky, in March. “Most of them are not… but I’ll tell you what, there are more people like that even proportionally that were born here in this country,” he added.

Here is exhibit A of why we don’t trust current Senate leadership to do the right thing if they were to win back the majority; they refuse to block new spending when in the minority. Last week, House leadership decided to pass the “doc fix” bill (H.R. 4302) by voice vote. This bill reimburses healthcare providers for the scheduled 24 percent cut in payments for services rendered to Medicare patients. The bill extends the payments through next March. It also continues some new programs created under Obamacare. They used a hodgepodge of tenuous offsets spread out mainly over the next...

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) primary challenger Matt Bevin blasts McConnell for supporting a debt limit increase and launching “false attack ads” in a new ad. ADVERTISEMENT It’s the candidate’s first significant statewide broadcast buy, and will also air statewide on cable, according to his campaign. The ad features Bevin speaking direct-to-camera, declaring “after caving yet again to President Obama on the debt ceiling, all that Mitch McConnell can do is run false attack ads.” A narrator goes on to declare that “thirty years is enough,” and calls McConnell “too liberal” and “too long.” McConnell has attacked Bevin in radio ads,...