Free Republic

Fox News host Sean Hannity continues his streak as conservative king maker, as the network announced Thursday that he will have the first interview with Jeb Bush after his presidential campaign announcement next week. The former Florida governor is expected to announce his presidential campaign Monday in Florida. On Tuesday, Hannity will interview Bush. Bush will also appear on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" that same night. Bush campaign spokespeople confirmed that Bush will not hold any interviews Monday and that Hannity will be his first.

John Kasich is a highly popular governor of a vital swing state, possessed of national experience and long-standing ties to his party’s financial and ideological elite. He is launching a presidential campaign that stands virtually no chance of success, if you define “success” to mean acquiring the nomination. It looks increasingly likely, however, that Kasich defines success as something else altogether. Kasich began his career in a dissident role. As the Republican Party careened in the 1980s and 1990s toward militant supply-side economics, Kasich carved out an identity as an old-fashioned deficit hawk. Kasich was evangelical on the subject of...

President Barack Obama has an offer for Democrats who fear political attacks if they back his trade agenda: Give me your vote now, and I’ll have your back come re-election next year. Days from a critical House vote, it’s still far from certain Obama can muster enough votes. Although Republican leaders in Congress strongly support the budding trade deals, Obama has little leverage with individual GOP lawmakers. So the president has been dangling a carrot in front of Democrats in the form of a promise to campaign for them in 2016 if they face primary challenges or attacks by unions...

Obama To Circumvent Congress With ‘Gag Order’ On Firearm Coverage by AWR Hawkins 7 Jun 2015 On June 1 Breitbart News reported on Obama’s Spring 2015 “Unified Agenda.” The gun control measures contained therein which were to be passed by executive fiat. Since that time Representatives like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4th) have placed riders on a DOJ appropriations bill to stop portions of the executive gun control push in its tracks. Now the NRA-ILA is revealing that the Obama administration is working behind the scenes to stifle reporting on firearms. From the NRA-ILA: Even as news reports have been highlighting...

There are signs that liberals are making a comeback — and not just because a socialist is running for president, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire and pot legalization is gaining acceptance. A new analysis of Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll data finds a marked increase in the share of registered voters identifying themselves as liberals, and an even bigger drop in the share saying they are conservatives. In three national polls conducted so far in 2015, the analysis found that 26% of registered voters identified themselves as liberals — up from 23% in 2014. At the same time, the...

Franklin Graham was speaking at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville , Florida a few weeks back when he said “America will not come back.” “Time is like a river. You cannot touch the water twice, because the flow that has passed will never pass again.” A USMC Vet wrote: The American Dream ended (on November 6th, 2012 ) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind. A coalition...

Nevada's Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, secured an unlikely victory when the conservative state Legislature approved a huge tax increase at his urging as part of a plan to boost education spending. The $1.1 billion package raises taxes on businesses and cigarettes, and it makes permanent a $500 million bundle of temporary payroll and sales taxes.

President Bush said Tuesday he was "dismayed and shocked" at disgraced lawmaker Mark Foley's behavior and supports House Speaker Dennis Hastert's call for a full investigation. -snip- Some, including a Washington newspaper, have called for Hastert (R.-Ill.) to resign, but Bush expressed confidence in the speaker's ability to resolve the matter, calling him a "father, teacher, coach." "I know Denny Hastert. I meet with him a lot. He is a father, teacher, coach who cares about the children of this country," Bush said.

George P. Bush, the Texas land commissioner and heir apparent to the GOP’s preeminent political dynasty, is teaching a class on character. The 30-minute lesson, which will be streamed on YouTube on Friday, will focus on the character of Texas’ first settlers and how their lessons apply today.

President Obama won a big victory for his trade agenda Friday with the Senate’s approval of fast-track legislation that could make it easier for him to complete a wide-ranging trade deal that would include 11 Pacific Rim nations. A coalition of nearly 50 Senate Republicans and more than 10 Democrats voted for Trade Promotion Authority late Friday, sending the legislation to the House for a difficult fight as Obama faces more entrenched opposition from Democrats. The Senate coalition fought off several attempts by opponents to undermine the legislation, defeating amendments that were politically popular but potentially poisonous to Obama’s bid...

Two senators have a plane to catch to Cuba, others were hoping to impress Republican presidential primary voters and then there’s Sen. Lamar Alexander, who is slated to deliver a sunset piano performance of “Ol’ Man River” on the banks of the Mississippi. The Senate’s slow-motion amble toward Memorial Day break threatened all that. “It’s not the weather, it’s the Senate that’s the problem,” said Alexander, the Tennessee Republican and former governor, as he waited out the impasse in his office Friday. On a borrowed Senate piano, he tapped out “The Memphis Blues,” with a wink, eager to head home...

On life support as of early Thursday morning, President Barack Obama’s trade agenda has found new life. In a dramatic vote critical to the future of the president’s goal of securing new trade deals with Pacific Rim and European countries, the Senate on Thursday broke a bipartisan filibuster of legislation to give the president “fast-track” authority to negotiate new trade deals. The 62-38 vote preserves the possibility that the Senate can finish the trade bill before the Memorial Day recess, which would be a major boon to Obama and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. It came after a...

Last week, I argued that Sen. David Vitter – the undisputed leader in this year's governor's race – should be nervous because of our electorate's long history of punishing frontrunners and promoting also-rans. (SNIP) Democrats have a clear choice: send Edwards into a runoff that he almost certainly cannot win – or back a moderate Republican, who could defeat Vitter. If Democrats have any power left in Louisiana politics, it is electing moderate Republicans. That's not a goal that will launch Democratic activists out of bed each morning but it's about all the power the party has left (in statewide...

Republicans are not keeping the campaign promise they made to voters in 2014 to halt President Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America,” conservative and Tea Party leaders charged in an open letter to Congress on Monday. On April 28, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) cited fast-track trade legislation and a bill requiring congressional review of the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran as the major accomplishments of the GOP-led 114th Congress so far. Earlier that month, Obama praised what he called “some outbreaks of bipartisanship and common sense in Congress” over Iran and trade. The president also said he was holding...

WASHINGTON — ABC News host and former Clinton White House staffer George Stephanopoulos has bowed out of moderating a GOP presidential debate after acknowledging he failed to disclose $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation while interviewing an author critical of the charity. The anchor voluntarily withdrew from the February GOP debate, said network spokeswoman Heather Riley. ABC said it stood behind him.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie attempted to draw a bright line between himself and Jeb Bush on the Iraq War in a CNN interview on Tuesday, definitively stating that given the absence of weapons of mass destruction he wouldn't have authorized the war. "I think President [George W.] Bush made the best decision he could at the time, given that his intelligence community was telling him that there was (weapons of mass destruction) and that there were other threats right there in Iraq," he told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead." "But I don't think you can honestly say that...

The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found. For what is likely the first time in U.S. history – certainly the first since the early days of the country – the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however, remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for...

They’ve had plenty of tangles over the years. Now, the two Republicans are rivals in the quest for GOP megabucks. Jeb Bush was running for reelection as Florida’s governor in 2002 and needed the help of his brother, the president. But there was one person standing in his way: Karl Rove. Rove, the storied strategist who helped steer George W. Bush into the White House two years earlier, had laid down a strict rule for candidates seeking presidential assistance: No one — not even Jeb — would have unfettered access to the commander in chief. -snip- Now, at the onset...

If you are watching the news, or were listening to Mark Levin’s rant last evening, the subject du jour is the Senate passage 96-1 of the Corker-Cardin bill. Yes, that is Tennessee’s own Republican Senator Corker, who obviously has his political eye set on a future in the White House. The bill is advertised by Republican leadership as a great victory giving Congress 30 days to review the President’s secret nuclear treaty negotiations with Iran before enactment. Under present law, the President cannot execute a treaty with a foreign nation unless it has the approval of 2/3 of the Senate....

As the June 30 deadline for a nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran approaches and the passage of a U.S. Senate bill that does not require the deal to be viewed as a treaty by Congress, the Center for Security Policy’s (CSP) President Frank Gaffney warned of the consequences of this scenario. “We are dealing with national security fraud on the part of the Obama administration and its apologists or champions with regard to this agreement,” Gaffney said at a panel discussion hosted by the CSP on Friday in Washington, D.C. “It will not prevent Iran from getting...