Free Republic

Longtime Indiana Senator Dick Lugar is trailing state Treasurer Richard Mourdock by five points in the closely watched Republican primary, according to a new poll on behalf of Citizens United. The survey shows Mourdock leading with 44 percent and Lugar at 39 percent, with nearly 17 percent of voters still undecided. Lugar supporters point out that Citizens United is backing Mourdock in the May 8 primary, however. Both candidates have seen their favorable numbers plummet and the nastiness is expected to increase with less than two weeks left. From Politico: The Club for Growth has just reserved another $421,000 of...

After 6 terms in the United States senate, long time RINO Orrin Hatch will face his first primary battle after failing to attain the necessary 60% of delegate votes at Saturday’s Utah Republican convention. After falling 32 votes short of the required total on the final ballot, Hatch will take on conservative Republican Dan Liljenquist on June 26th. In 2010 Hatch watched nervously as Utah colleague Robert Bennett was removed from the Senate in his own primary contest, a victim of having too often sold-out the conservative Republican base. Concerned with mounting criticism of his own predilection for confirming Marxists...

The Tea Party has lost a number of its top election targets this year, leaving Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) to emerge as public enemy No. 1 for national conservative groups — and poll numbers suggest they could get their man. Groups including the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks and the National Rifle Association have increasingly prioritized defeating Lugar, and social-conservative groups like Gary Bauer’s Campaign for Working Families and the Eagle Forum have endorsed Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R), Lugar’s primary opponent. Mourdock remains largely unknown to voters, but in a recent poll he trailed Lugar...

After looking at their records, Lugar’s staff found that he erroneously billed taxpayers $4,500 in hotel stays. However, a US Senate investigation, initiated by Lugar, found the number to be three times higher. “He’s paid that back with a personal check and resolved it,” said Fisher. Or is it resolved? Raju said this, coupled with the fact that Lugar has not maintained a residence in Indiana since 1977, could damage his political future. “This is the first time it’s really come to hit him this hard," said Raju.

The National Rifle Association is supporting tea-party favorite Richard Mourdock in his GOP primary race against veteran U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar. National NRA lobbyist Chris Cox is scheduled Wednesday to announce his group's support for Mourdock, the Indiana state treasurer running against Lugar in the May primary. The Mourdock campaign confirmed the endorsement Tuesday. A handful of high-profile conservative groups have lined up behind Mourdock in his bid to oust Lugar. The anti-tax Club for Growth threw its support behind Mourdock last month. Lugar's supporters have opened a pair of Super PACs recently to raise unlimited funds to support his...

REYNOLDS, Ind.—Two meetings in recent days in this Midwestern state showed the predicament facing Sen. Richard Lugar, a six-term Republican with a centrist profile, as he runs for re-election next year. When Mr. Lugar came to this farming town of 500 people Saturday to build bridges with a local tea-party group, he found mostly skepticism. "You seem to feel you're somehow indispensable in Washington," Bob Callahan, 65, a retired salesman from Monticello, told the senator at meeting in an elementary-school gym. He compared Mr. Lugar to the professional football quarterback Brett Favre, saying: "There's nothing sadder than an athlete that...

Unfortunately for Lugar, things have changed in Indiana as they have elsewhere. The fact that he lives in Virginia surely will become an issue in his bid for re-election, while the fact that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 or was a Rhodes scholar probably means little now. In fact, Lugar’s emphasis on crafting legislation to attract broad support, his efforts to solve problems in ways that go beyond knee-jerk left-right approaches and his disinclination toward sharp, polarizing rhetoric leave him increasingly vulnerable in this day and age. Moreover, instead of ingratiating himself with conservatives and...

The collapse of communism brought an end to many of the world’s command-and-control economic systems and central planning by government bureaucrats. But a notable exception is the United States government’s sugar program. A complicated system of marketing allotments, price supports, purchase guarantees, quotas and tariffs that only a Soviet apparatchik could love, the U.S. sugar program has actually lasted longer than the Soviet Union itself. It imposes a hidden tax of billions of dollars annually on consumers and businesses and has destroyed thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs. It substitutes the federal government for the private sector in basic decisions about...

Libyan rebels drive past a burning tank and other military vehicles of Muammar Qaddafi’s army that were hit by coalition forces on the road from Benghazi to Ajdabiyah on Sunday, March 20.-Newscom With US bombs and missiles hitting Libyan targets, lawmakers and other observers want to know how long the fighting will continue and whether Muammar Qaddafi will be forced from power.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the most senior member of the Senate Republican Conference, said Tuesday he will oppose the House-passed proposal to make drastic cuts to the federal budget. He is the first Senate Republican to publicly state his opposition to a plan that Democrats have blasted as “reckless.” Lugar, who is facing a Tea Party-backed challenge in the 2012 Indiana Republican primary, is taking a political risk. But he and other centrist Republicans have concerns about steep spending cuts that will eliminate funding for some federal programs in mid-year.

Indiana State Treasurer, Richard Mourdock will launch his primary challenge to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) on Tuesday with the support of a majority of both the state's 92 Republican county chairmen and its state party executive committee, he told the Fix in a recent interview. "I feel bad that he's going to be humiliated by this list," Mourdock said. Mourdock added that he believes Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and Rep. Mike Pence (R), the party's two leading figures in the Hoosier State, are going to stay neutral in the primary -- though Daniels, who was Lugar's campaign manager three different...

This is a tale of two senior senators, both Republican, both up for reelection in 2012, both eager to win. And their approaches to the tea party couldn’t be more different. Six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah is wooing the populist conservative movement. At a Tea Party Express town hall Tuesday night at the National Press Club, Senator Hatch said that he’s “very impressed” by the role the tea party is playing in helping “America to take back America.” Sen. Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana, also in his sixth term, is pushing back hard, telling the tea party: “get...

Just 24 hours after the shooting in Tucson, politicians were calling for more gun control. And the drumbeat has continued. On Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for using the information supplied on people's applications to join the military to determine whether they will be banned from buying guns. Sens.Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., promised a new push for renewing at least part of the federal assault weapons ban. The previous week had been filled with calls for everything from gun show regulations to a thousand-foot gun-free zone around politicians. But while the emotional reaction to a mass...

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) this weekend called on Congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. Lugar is the first GOP senator to call for increased gun control following the Tucson tragedy that killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. But Lugar, who supported the initial 10-year-long assault weapons ban when it passed in 1994, said he's not optimistic about the chances for passing gun control legislation this Congress. “I believe it should be, but I recognize the fact that the politics domestically in our country with regard to this are on...

Washington (CNN) - Hoping to head off a primary challenge from the right, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, sat down with Tea Party leaders last month but did little to persuade them of his conservative credentials. The two-hour meeting, which took place over breakfast on Dec. 13th at a Marriott hotel in downtown Indianapolis, was described by participants on both sides as "cordial," but the Tea Party activists left vowing to oppose Lugar's bid for a seventh term. "The Senator said he hoped he could earn the support of the Tea Party, and that he is conservative," said Greg Fettig, the...

Democrats' hypocrisy on Bolton exposed Joel Mowbray May 5, 2005 Call it the tale of two confirmation hearings. Two of the four men most recently nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations found their candidacies challenged, though they could not have faced more different receptions.  Both men were supremely qualified, but the similarities end there. The divergent paths for each reveal Democrats' rabid partisanship and belies their claims that they oppose John Bolton on the grounds that character matters. Six years ago, Foreign Service veteran Richard Holbrooke was awaiting Senate confirmation.  As former a ambassador to Germany,...

I know all the election excitement is focused on Nov. 2. Rightfully so. But I just want to make a quick note for Americans to remember two other names of entrenched politicians who long ago should have worn out their welcome for public service in Washington. They are Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Time and again these two dilettantes in Republican garb have given the Democratic Party the cover of bipartisanship in ways that should make any moral, decent, right-thinking respecter of the American principle of the rule of law shudder in revulsion....

Top Democratic allies of President Barack Obama called Thursday for quick Senate ratification of a US-Russia treaty committing the former Cold War foes to major nuclear arms cuts. "This is too important to delay," said Democratic Senator John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tasked with taking up the pact before a full vote by the entire chamber. Kerry said he would work with the panel's top Republican, Richard Lugar, after the Obama administration submits the full treaty "in early May" to hold hearings and "see that this historic treaty is ratified this year." Obama has called on...

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said Tuesday he will support the nomination of an Indiana University law professor to head the Obama administration’s internal law office. He is the first Republican to publicly declare his backing for Dawn Johnsen, whose selection to head the Office of Legal Counsel has grown into a fight about abortion rights and counterterrorism practices. Some Republicans have promised to try to block Johnsen’s confirmation either because of her support for abortion rights or because she criticized the legal justification used by the Bush administration for the torture of detainees. Lugar’s support does not guarantee the Senate...

-- Vote could come as early as MondayHe has been called "extreme" by some. But to others, he's beyond extreme... he's a "Radical's Radical."  Whatever he is, he could become President Obama's next choice for the federal judiciary. This radical is Judge David Hamilton, and he's been nominated for a position on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Hamilton has made many political enemies on the right, seeing that his politics are to the far left of the political spectrum.  Oh yes, judges aren't supposed to be political, but this one has engaged in quite a bit of leftist activism....