Free Republic

Sen. John McCain is no fan of the tea party – and he’s now doing his best to purge the Arizona Republican Party of its influence. According to Politico, McCain is preparing for his 2016 reelection bid by dismantling Arizona’s tea party apparatus. That includes a massive effort to remove or undermine the many local officials who have influence across state politics and could cause trouble for McCain in a primary. Prior to Aug. 26, when the races for the party offices were held, the vast majority of the 3,925 precinct slots were filled by people McCain’s team considered opponents....

House Speaker John Boehner's not waiting until New Year's Day for a hangover -- his headache is already here. Back-to-back House Republican dramas in the final week of the year are the latest indication that many of the issues the GOP hoped to leave behind when they take full control of Congress next week — an unruly base and scandal-prone members — will continue to dog them in the new year, and might even kick off 2015 with an attempted coup on the Speakership. Though Boehner was successfully able to convince Rep. Michael Grimm to resign on Monday after pleading...

Speaker John Boehner must go. Congressman Steve Scalise (R-LA), a John Boehner man running for re-election as House Republican Whip, is in trouble. And he too must go. By making a point of backing Scalise in the middle of this mess, so now is the Speaker himself in trouble. Mark Levin has long been out there saying Boehner needed to go. So too has Sean Hannity, with both updating their views over the holidays in light of the Scalise scandal. We’ll come back to this in a minute. But first, let’s focus on Scalise’s situation. It is a textbook case...

Conservatives have regularly complained that the last time the Republican Party held both chambers of Congress and the White House – during six of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office – we missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to dramatically roll back the federal leviathan.

“It’s ending purposeless, perpetual, global warfare, stupid.” Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is obsolete. Presidential strategists sermonize that voters are instinctively concerned more about jobs, mortgages, and health care than about national security policy. True enough. But that is because presidential aspirants have failed to discern and to explain the direct connection between, on the one hand, purposeless, perpetual, global warfare and the projection of military force everywhere that has created an exorbitant, inefficient, and corrupt...

House Speaker John Boehner called it, "Another in a long line of mindless concessions." He was referring to Obama's announcement that we would resume diplomatic relations with Cuba, not his own mindless concession to the president by fully funding Obamnesty. Just weeks ago, Boehner promised to fight Obama's immigration power-grab "tooth and nail." He neglected to specify whose tooth and whose nail. The $1 trillion CRomnibus bill includes full-funding of Obama's unconstitutional amnesty – $948 million for Homeland Security, an extra $80-million to HHS for the unaccompanied drug-dealers, gang-bangers and cheap labor, and $260 million to the State Department to...

Of course Barack Obama’s latest treachery – normalizing relations with the Castro Brothers prison state – is a terrible thing. It is as fraudulent as Obama is and it will further crush any hopes the average Cuban might have of ever being free. By infusing cash to prop up a torture regime Obama has all but guaranteed the Cuban people’s nightmare will continue after the Castros have died. They need only look to Venezuela to see their own desolate future. Yet, as sad as this is for the Cuban people, it is fraught with dangers for us as well. The...

A definitive geological timeline shows that a series of massive volcanic explosions 66 million years ago spewed enormous amounts of climate-altering gases into the atmosphere immediately before and during the extinction event that claimed Earth's non-avian dinosaurs, according to new research from Princeton University. A primeval volcanic range in western India known as the Deccan Traps, which were once three times larger than France, began its main phase of eruptions roughly 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, extinction event, the researchers report in the journal Science. For the next 750,000 years, the volcanoes unleashed more than 1.1 million cubic...

Last month Republicans won a wave election picking up a dozen seats in the House and nine seats in the Senate. Last week the Republicans ignored the will of the voters and voted in favor of President Obama’s budget initiatives. The country is overwhelmingly opposed to Obamacare, so the Republicans fully funded it without making any changes. The country is overwhelmingly opposed to amnesty, in particular the country is opposed to amnesty created by the executive branch alone. Rather than refuse to fund the President’s amnesty power grab, the Republicans are funding it completely. They’re even spending a billion dollars...

I will keep nothing from you. Today, let me share with you the truth. Republicans will not stop Barack Obama’s executive overreach. In fact, while you were enjoying your Thanksgiving there were a number of stories out that the Republican leadership wants to give its members an opportunity to express their outrage and opposition. Expression is not action. They will take no action to stop the President. In fact, a few days ago the House Appropriations Committee tried to convince everyone they do not even have the power to stop the President. Congress’s own research service disagrees. But Republicans have...

"His education was bought and paid for by the Saudis. ... '... letter of recommendation to get one of his Saudi proteges into Harvard Law'..." (Ann Barnhardt 9/5/13 interview by Elijah Johnson)

It’s as if the November 4 elections never occurred. Today, the new House membership met in a private conclave and reelected every one of their top leaders by voice vote. This includes John Boehner (R-OH) as Speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Majority Leader, Steve Scalise (R-LA) as Majority Whip, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) as Conference Chair. At a time of one of the worst constitutional crises in our nation’s history, when the president is threatening to imminently remake our society with immigration amnesty – a policy over which Congress holds absolute power – Republican leadership elections lacked any debate...

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” ~ Margaret Atwood, Award-winning author Well, well, so much for bipartisanship. Ten days after Republican Senator Mitch McConnell promised to work with Democrats to improve the quality of life of all Americans, the honorable senator from Kentucky disavowed that promise by declaring war on America’s first black president. In an interview with Louisville, Kentucky’s The Courier-Journal today, McConnell, who presumably will become Majority Leader in the United States Senate in January, accused President Obama of waging a “war on coal” and declared, “I’m going to war with him.”

I don't know about you, but I've been saying since 2012 that we MUST form a viable 3rd party, and NOW! This is ridiculous! There is not a day that passes that another republican doesn't announce the GOP plans to work with Obama on this or that issue. I am sick of this. I cannot vote libertarian, either, so we must come up with a party that resonates with conservative values, with those who want a return to our Constitution, to close our borders to illegals, to reduce the size of our government, and take back our hard-earned money. Every...

"[If] the monetary authorities are intent on depreciating the currency, then I think that in the fullness of time they will succeed all too well. …The important thing about QE [quantitative easing] is this idea, this radical precedent is now on the books — the virus as it were is in the monetary bloodstream. ...all of this is…in the books as precedent, and the monetarists and Keynesians are rather preening about the evident success of these interventions, and we can be sure I think that they will not forebear to do more still next time. There will come a time...

The remains of Noah's Ark have been found 12,000ft up a Turkish mountain, it was claimed today. A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say carbon testing on remains found on Mount Ararat show they are 4,800 years old, around the time when the ark was said to be afloat. But the group left themselves open to a critical backlash after they failed to reveal the location of their find or produce photographs of the exterior of the site.

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a high profile article from one Elizabeth O’Bagy arguing that the majority of the Syrian rebels were actually moderates. Senator McCain mentioned Elizabeth O’Bagy’s op-ed during the Senate hearings, when he wasn’t playing poker, and tweeted it. That should come as no surprise, considering that O’Bagy is credited with arranging McCain’s infamous photo op with the Syrian rebel leadership. The Wall Street Journal lists O’Bagy’s role as the Institute for the Study of War. It leaves out the fact that she is the political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force...

Original soft-tissue fossils continue to challenge mainstream understanding of how and when fossils formed. Secular researchers described dozens of them over the years, from mummified skin and dried red blood to still-purple retinas, and they assign them ages of tens of millions of years. However, the science of tissue decay clearly does not permit these long ages. For example, lab bench tests that accelerate tissue decay under high temperatures place a maximum age of fewer than one million years on some of the most resilient proteins, assuming the fossil proteins were kept cold and sterile during the entire process. These...

Restricting population growth will not solve global issues of sustainability in the short term, new research says. A worldwide one-child policy would mean the number of people in 2100 remained around current levels, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even a catastrophic event that killed billions of people would have little effect on the overall impact, it said. There may be 12 billion humans on Earth by 2100, latest projections suggest. Concerns about the impact of people on the planet's resources have been growing, especially if the population continues to increase. 'Can't...

BAGHDAD — Caliph Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamic State, appeared to come out of nowhere when he matter-of-factly proclaimed himself the ruler of all Muslims in the middle of an otherwise typical Ramadan sermon. Muslim scholars from the most moderate to the most militant all denounced him as a grandiose pretender, and the world gaped at his growing following and its vicious killings. His ruthless creed, though, has clear roots in the 18th century Arabian Peninsula. It was there that the Saud clan formed an alliance with the puritanical scholar Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. And as they conquered the...