Free Republic

With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to 'prove' global warming's trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called "the most extraordinary scandal of our times" - that of the "seasonally-adjusted" seasonal raw global temperature data - is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed "expect there to be congressional hearings...

Liberals have been wailing over the past two decades on why poor whites vote for the Republican Party. In 2012, the New Yorker Magazine published an article on poor Republicans, that was full of all the crude stereotypes about poor whites. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/poor-white-and-republican After all, the Democrats are offering free stuff to the poor, such as free health care, free welfare payments, free food stamps, and other free goodies. In the opinion of the Democrats, poor whites are voting against their economic interests by voting for the Republican Party. Liberals have coined the term "Trailer Park Republican" to describe poor whites...

During a speech at the Democratic National Committee meeting on Friday, President Obama openly mocked Republicans for obstructing his policies, and took credit for an improving economy. Obama claimed that Republicans are shifting their rhetoric to appeal to more middle class Americans, but that their policies remained the same. “There is this old saying, you can’t just talk the talk … you gotta walk the walk!” he said. “We’ve been walking the walk.” Obama rehashed a lot of his second term agenda in the speech, calling for more tax hikes on the wealthy to support government programs for the middle...

The United States’ political parties have always been amalgams of factions rather than vehicles for any single interest. Partly because of the pressures of the electoral system and partly because of the republic’s vastness, forging either of the two major parties into a political monolith has been impossible; the need to cater to a wide base of Americans tends to keep the parties broad and relatively inclusive. This embedded pluralism of the U.S. party system has diminished somewhat in the current era of polarization but it has not evaporated entirely. The parties are still relatively broad churches. This is clearest...

Mike Lupica ought to stick to sports. When he wanders into politics he says silly stuff, as on today's Morning Joe. With HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell being interviewed about Obamacare, Lupica unctuously wondered out loud: "how did something that was this noble an idea become something over time that the other party uses against this president constantly? And is there a way, over the last two years of his presidency, for him to throw some sort of Hail Mary pass and make this look like the triumph he thought it was going to be?" View the video here.

The safest bet you can possibly make at the beginning of a presidential election cycle is that the "objective" national media will savage the Republican contenders with "investigative" journalism. Not just one Republican contender, but all the Republican contenders. It's a bit amazing to look back at 2012 and remember that every Republican candidate was punched in the kisser by "journalism" if and when he or she inched into the lead. Sarah Palin never declared, but she was slimed in 2011 by NBC star Savannah Guthrie, who casually tossed out author Joe McGinniss's claims that she was a bad mother,...

I need to mention a fact that many freepers will find painful and upsetting. In the 20th Century, Country Club Republicans had greater influence in selecting Republican nominees for President, than grassroots Republicans. There are only 2 notable exceptions when the establishment candidate did not win - 1964 and 1980. In 1964, the Republican establishment was deeply divided. Three Republican candidates from extremely wealthy, Old Money, WASP families were on the ballot. They were Governor Nelson Rockefeller from New York, Governor William Scranton from Pennsylvania, and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. from Massachusetts. Lodge did not formally enter the...

President Obama is putting Republicans on notice that he plans to run through their cynical politics and opposition during his final two years in office. While speaking at a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco, the president said: "And one of the things I am absolutely determined to do over the next two years is not just consolidate the gains that we’ve made, not just move forward on new initiatives like free community colleges for young people around the country who need to be trained for the 21st-century economy, but part of my goal is also to restore a sense of...

The Democrats on the FCC are working towards the creation of massive regulations on the internet. Preparing them in secrecy, they apparently have 322 pages worth of regulations that they’re prepared to vote on later this month. Meanwhile at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Democrats want to create massive regulations for speech on the internet. Apparently the Democrats aren’t happy with recent Supreme Court decisions which limit the government’s ability to prohibit people from donating money to campaigns and PAC’s. Their solution is to have government regulate internet speech. Some of the rules they’re talking about would regulate blogs, even...

The unofficial death of the moderate American Democrat went largely unnoticed last week. Tim Ryan — a once-strident champion of the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, filled with moderate Catholic Democrats whose issues are still firmly pocketbook-based — penned an op-ed saying he now supports abortion. The Ohio congressman, who once sat on the board of the Democrats for Life in America advocacy group, made that surprising reversal as he contemplates a run for U.S. Senate. You see, plenty of Jacksonian Democrats remain in his district — and all across the country, for that matter — but no tolerance for...

Obama claims he was the most productive US president in 50 years – until Republicans took partial control of Congress and 'stuff got blocked' President Barack Obama presented a rose-colored version of congressional history to a liberal-leaning online audience on Monday, as he claimed that he was the most productive president since Jyndon Johnson until Republicans got in the way. Asked by the news website Vox if he had a prescription for the political polarization of Washington since his arrival in 2009, he blamed the GOP. 'You know,' he said, 'my first two years in office when I had a...

What’s really remarkable about this plan is that for all the claims we’ll hear about how it undoes the tyrannical horror of Obamacare, the Republicans’ version of health care reform has accepted most of the fundamental goals and regulatory paths of the law they so deeply despise. This plan — authored by Senators Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch and Rep. Fred Upton — is little more than Obamacare Lite. Though the devil is in the details — and there are some devilish ones — this tells us that Barack Obama has for all intents and purposes won the health care...

Bill Maher ended his show tonight finally talking about Sarah Palin‘s rambling Iowa speech that was the final straw for many Republicans and conservatives. But Maher had just one question for them: “What took you so long?!” Maher mocked the revelation as an “emperor has no clues” situation and asked Republicans why they took so long, saying, “The rest of us have been watching this dog eat grass for seven years!” However, while Maher was glad that many conservatives are finally admitting Palin “is a crazy person,” he said they should maybe consider what else they’ve been “wrong” about, like...

Three House Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday in voting against a bill that would repeal President Obama’s health care law. Illinois Rep. Robert Dold, New York Rep. John Katko and Maine Rep. Bruce Poliquin all voted against the legislation which guts Obamacare while calling for a conservative replacement. “Casting yet another symbolic vote for full repeal of the law, without any replacement legislation, simply distracts us from the work that must be done to drive costs down, restore access to care and make healthcare work for everyone,” Dold said after the vote. Added the congressman: “The people of the 10th...

Shots have been fired. The GOP herd is beginning to be culled. In less than a week, the establishment hounded Mitt Romney out, and the conservative movement wrote Sarah Palin out. The message from Republican insiders is clear: We cannot let our primary become another clown show. Meanwhile, the nascent Hillary Clinton campaign has signaled it wants to push back its planned entry from the spring to the summer. “If you have the luxury of time, you take it,” one Democratic insider told POLITICO. But these Republican moves indicate that she may not have that luxury. Here’s why. We already...

That Scott Walker speech was great? It was shallow, tedious, and wrong. In other words, it struck the perfect chord for today’s GOP voters.Mitt Romney definitely had his down sides as a candidate: the retread factor, and, as I noted two weeks ago, the fact that he made all those dramatic and (apparently) wrong predictions about the future of the economy. But I will say this for him. He did pass the this-guy-looks-and-sounds-like-a-plausible-president test. I always thought that was his greatest strength. He’s central casting. None of these remaining people looks much like a president, with the exception of Jeb...

YOUR VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

In mid June 2013, a group of female Republican legislators met with leadership and House aides for a last-minute messaging session about a 20-week abortion ban that was on life support. The author of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, Representative Trent Franks (R., Ariz.), had made headlines just days earlier while defending its lack of exceptions for rape or incest. “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy [is] very low,” he’d said during a Judiciary Committee debate on the legislation. Coming just months after two Republican candidates, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, fumbled away their Senate bids with...

Conservative lawmakers are officially rolling out a new group aimed at advancing a conservative agenda in the House of Representatives after they expressed discontent with the direction of the Republican Study Committee.“Our main hope is that we can represent the voids and valleys for our constituents back home,” Rep. Raúl Labrador of Idaho told The Daily Signal today. “With a small group that is nimble and able to work on issues that are of importance to our constituents, we can make a difference in Congress.”Called the House Freedom Caucus, the group serves as a conservative alternative to the Republican Study...

We know how the mainstream media piles on Sarah Palin. It’s the industry’s obsession when it’s not covering missing planes, New Jersey bridge closings, and binders full of women. Now, we’re seeing a new attack on the former Alaska governor, and it’s coming from an unexpected source: conservative media. Palin had it coming, to a degree. She made a speech in Iowa last week, and she fantastically flubbed a metaphor after an alleged teleprompter hiccup. It’s ugly on the ears: “The man can only ride you when your back is bent … so strengthen it! Then the man can’t ride...