Free Republic

It was pretty much a rout for Tea Party/insurgents in yesterday’s primaries, as establishment-backed candidate for the North Carolina Senate nomination Thom Tillis easily exceeded the 40% threshold necessary to avoid a run-off, while incumbent House members John Boehner (OH), Renee Elmers (NC), Walter Jones (NC), David Joyce (OH), and Susan Brooks (IN) defeated challengers from the right. But before concluding that all is hopeless, consider a few aspects of the situation.

It tells you everything you need to know about the utter contempt those in the White House and the circles of power that the announcement of 0.01% economic growth thus far this year was blamed on—wait for it—the weather! Specifically, a cold winter. If you have been paying any attention of late, the weather and the climate have become the reason for everything in general and for tornadoes, floods and forest fires, in particular. The fact that these natural events have always been subject to whatever the weather is or the larger climate trends seems to have escaped the notice...

At the Brookings Institute, a center-left think tank, Washington Post contributor E.J. Dionne, theological professor Gary Dorrien, and Columbia University professor Dorian Warren discussed the future of religious progressives in American society and how it could influence community organizing. “The Romney coalition is actually made up, a religious make-up that is even more white and Christian of Americans over 65 years old” while the “Obama coalition [has] more religiously unaffiliated [voters] …[a] higher proportion of non-white Christians…much closer to the younger cohort.” He claimed, “The Obama coalition is much more diverse.” Yet, Dionne admitted, “Only 13% of Democrats are religious...

A new French book that decries income inequality has become such the rage among the U.S. left that it is sparking debate on a smoldering political issue: That Hillary Clinton isn't liberal enough to win the Democratic nomination in 2016. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” uses a mountain of historical data to show that income inequality, a subject President Obama has seized on, will grow without government intervention. One idea is to devote up to three-quarters of income to taxes. Progressives, many of whom are eyeing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading up...

Citibike is a success. Unqualified. Raving. Success. “Citigroup, who was the recipient of over $476 billion dollars of taxpayer bailout money,” wrote Alex Garcia on Townhall Finance in 2012, “has joined forces with the City of New York to sponsor a $41 million dollar bike share program.” That program became Citibike. The goal wasn’t quite as ambitious as Obama’s target of a million electric cars on the roads in eight years. But still the program aimed at putting 10,000 bikes in 600 locations around New York City for commuters to share in the name of environmentalism, health and being hip....

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton needs to provide "hours and hours" of private depositions if any House select committee is effective in uncovering what happened in the 2012 Benghazi deaths that killed four Americans, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said on Saturday. "The public hearings that get so much attention are the last things that should happen," Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush White House, told Jeanine Pirro on her Fox News program. "We need former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton giving hours and hours of depositions before they put her back out in public testimony. That's...

Academic freedom used to be a staple of higher education in America. It has slowly been whittled away to the point where conservatives are generally unwelcome. Worse still are researchers who reach conclusions not approved by the left. Over at Harvard Sandra Korn openly advocates for eliminating academic freedom in favor of “academic justice.” Opinions and research which aren’t approved by the left would be banned from college. One can imagine any research opposing “climate change” theory would be banned. As would any research on race, sex or ethnicity that doesn’t fit into the left’s narrative. Truth would be sacrificed...

Remember poverty? It was once a chief preoccupation of the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson made war on it. An entire ecosystem of federal, state and local programs has been created over the course of the past half-century to combat it, costing taxpayers more than $1 trillion annually. Yet the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten the poor. The proposal to increase the minimum wage by a few dollars is trifling compared with the vaunting ambitions of the War on Poverty. Sargent Shriver, Johnson's poverty czar, predicted that welfare state programs would eliminate poverty by 1976. Throughout the post-Great Society era,...

From education to gun control, progressive movements need to do a better job empowering the people whose interests they claim to serve.At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.” As the questioner pointed out, those disproportionately affected by these developments are poor and minority communities. Chicago, for example, a city that is one-third white, has a public school system in which 90...

A professor at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) was caught on audio telling his creative writing class that Republicans will close colleges if they prevail in 2014 and that “racist, misogynist, money-grubbing people” want to suppress the liberal vote. In a four-minute recording of a classroom lecture obtained by Campus Reform, Professor Brent Terry is heard strongly suggesting that conservatives are greedy racists who want to suppress the vote of anyone who might vote liberal. “It's absolutely possible that the Republicans will take over the Senate as well as the House. And we will live in a very, very, very...

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time reading about the Bundy Ranch Saga, looking into the area in Nevada where the Bundys live, and asking Google a bunch of questions I wanted answers to. While researching, I happened upon a press release from an environmental group, and decided to call the person listed as the "contact" person. The leftist environmentalist and I had about a 45 minute conversation over the phone about the Bundy Ranch, Nevada, and the history of what has been happening there, from his perspective. It was a long time to be on the phone,...

We learned that the government will do anything to private citizens in order to grab land and private property either under the guise of protecting an “endangered” desert tortoise that is actually overpopulated, or getting rid of “feral” and destructive “trespassing cattle” grazing the land for generations, cattle that are in the way of developing a $5 billion Chinese solar panel plant (ENN), and the exploitation of rare earth elements in the larger adjacent area. Mr. Bundy was too stubborn, the last rancher standing in Clarke County, Nevada, clinging to his inconvenient “feral” cattle, his agreement with the State of...

For 20 years the federal government has fined Cliven Bundy for grazing his cattle on protected land. And for 20 years Bundy has refused to pay. Last month this dance came to an end when the Bureau of Land Management sent Bundy a letter informing him that it intended to “impound his trespass cattle” that have been roaming on federal property. It closed off hundreds of thousands of acres, and moved to round up Bundy’s cows. Protesters challenged the BLM, and Bundy’s son was arrested for “refusing to disperse” from the area in question. Bundy’s cause caught fire on right-wing...

Are conservatives linguistically challenged? Or are they just naïve enough to think they can win the battle of ideas with — ideas? Okay, and money. Conservatives, like liberals, will spend huge amounts of money this year to get their ideas across to voters. But what they fail to do is bundle their thoughts into a bright, shiny linguistic package that explodes in the face of their enemies when opened. The left has assembled a rich lexicon of phrases that serve either as stilettos that can be turned again and again in the guts of their opponents, or shields that obscure...

And about time. “I’d rather talk about Luddite liberals and insufferable progressives,” Pepperdine historian Gordon Lloyd said at the Philadelphia Society’s annual meeting. For its part, the Philadelphia Society provided a receptive audience for the topic. The Society was founded in 1964 by conservative intellectuals in the wake of the Goldwater defeat. Thus, the word Philadelphia in the title is a reference to the spirit of 1776 and many of its annual meetings take place outside the City of Brotherly Love. Lloyd, at this year’s meeting in Chicago, dismissed the “libertarian Left” as “a perverse Libertarianism.” Born in the West...

President Obama was doing his favorite thing this week: talking to crowds of adoring young people who already agree with him while acting like he persuaded them about something. They also seemed to give Obama the impression that he’s a really funny guy. On Wednesday, he told a crowd of 1,400 at the University of Michigan that he visited a local deli, Zingerman’s. He proceeded to tell a long story about ordering the small Reuben sandwich, which he said was “killer.” That description got a good laugh. Then he explained how he thought the sandwich was too big, so he...

Progressives are awful people willing to exploit anything and anyone to advance their agenda. From the human props trotted out at every White House event to former Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings mocking Andrew Breitbart’s death to push Obamacare, there’s no line they won’t cross, no lie they won’t tell, to force their government religion on people who simply want to be left alone. Force is the cornerstone of the progressive philosophy. Hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered in the name of “progress” in the last century. Lynchings, forced sterilizations and “work” camps may have morphed into “anti-poverty programs,” speech...

No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd. Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted. State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. Now he is facing several felony charges for attempting to facilitate gun-running. One count alleges that Lee sought to provide banned heavy automatic weapons to Philippines-based Islamic terrorist groups. State Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Montebello), who had succeeded one brother, Thomas, in the state Assembly and was succeeded...

The California state Senate today took the unprecedented step of suspending three of its members who have been accused of crimes including corruption, perjury and conspiracy to traffic weapons -- a move that takes away their power but maintains their pay. With a vote of 28-1, senators ousted colleagues Democrats Leland Yee of San Francisco, Ron Calderon of Montebello and Rod Wright of Baldwin Hills with a resolution that says they can't resume office "until all criminal proceedings currently pending against them have been dismissed." Expelling them would be premature, Senate leader Darrell Steinberg said, because Yee and Calderon have...

In the last year there have been a lot of conservative rumblings against the new progressive education agenda called Common Core. This is yet another in a long line of new progressive initiatives since they created modern government education a century ago. The last was Outcome Based Education, which as usual failed to produce increased learning or test scores unless the tests were dumbed down. You say that it was a failure, the progressive left views this a success. The goal of American government education has never been about learning, it’s been about indoctrination. It’s about separating the next generation...