Free Republic

Thursday on Ora TV's "PoliticKing with Larry King," left-leaning actor and director Rob Reiner compared the designated terrorist group Hamas to the American political conservative movement, the Tea Party.

As Tea Party-affiliated Super PACs keep losing elections, their grassroots fundraising keeps going up, up, up. What’s the mentality there? Despite losing eight of nine GOP Senate primaries and being nearly shut out in a handful of Republican-on-Republican House showdowns in 2014, the three top D.C.-based Super PACs that fueled many of those losing efforts are continuing to rake in donations from supporters across the country. According to the latest monthly filings with the Federal Election Commission compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the groups—the Senate Conservatives Fund, Club for Growth Action, and FreedomWorks for America—all saw one of...

No matter if there's a black man in the White House; there's always a power structure founded on and fostered by whiteness that exists with little challenge. Rude Pundit with a heartfelt exposition on the same principle once expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. as "rioting is the language of the unheard": That photo is of police patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of a night of riots and looting in the wake of the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white cop. In that suburb of St. Louis, the population is 67% black,...

“We ask for your blessing upon the conservatives in this state, that they might stand strong and firm. Father, we even ask for you to bless our enemies, and Lord they are truly our enemies that head the Republican Party and the whole political establishment. ‘We’re asking, Father, for two things. We’re asking, Father, that you would expose them, set division amongst them, set them one against another, bring confusion and fear into their camp, into their thinking, for the purpose of pulling them down, for casting them down out of their high offices and reducing them, Lord, to having...

The New York Times yesterday featured a story about how the Tea Party has influenced the GOP on immigration: "On Capitol Hill, the Tea Party wing continues to drive the party’s agenda. Last winter, as House Republican leaders drafted their 'principles' for immigration overhaul, they largely disregarded the opponents of any form of legal status for immigrants in the country illegally, dismissing them as a loud but small minority.” Niger Innis, the executive director of TheTeaParty.net, the nation’s largest grassroots tea party organization and convener of regular Tea Party caucus events on Capitol Hill, issued the following statement: What we’re...

Most Americans have long believed — in embarrassing ignorance — that the share of the U.S. federal budget spent on foreign aid is an order of magnitude higher than what we actually spend abroad. Years ago, this mistaken view was amplified from the far right by the John Birch Society. Today, it is the Tea Party movement complaining that joblessness and poverty in the United States result directly from the lamentable fact that “President Barack Obama keeps sending our money overseas.” Actually, spending on foreign assistance has remained remarkably steady for many years in Washington, at around 1 percent, a...

The emerging conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is being vanquished by the GOP establishment, based solely on the fact they are beating primary challengers, is exceedingly myopic. If you believe that, you have a very superficial view of what constitutes “winning.” These primaries are forcing the allegedly mainstream candidates to move far to the right and the performance of the past few years proves that when this happens the Party stays far right as a result of this threat. Primaries can be very effective tools if used properly — and if they are backed up by money and influence,...

With, most recently, incumbent Republican Senators Pat Roberts in Kansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee winning their respective primaries, Tea Party challengers failed in all attempts in this primary cycle to defeat Senate incumbents. Now we’re starting to hear eulogies about the Tea Party movement. But let’s not confuse birth pains with death throes. The Tea Party is on its way in, folks, not on its way out. Change is hard and doesn’t happen overnight. The undeniable facts are that America has huge problems, that these problems have been growing and festering for years while being ignored by our...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)President Barack Obama said the power of conservative opposition, including in the media, is blocking his agenda in an interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman late last week. “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things...

This week, a judge in True the Vote (TTV) v. IRS granted a victory to the IRS when it rejected an attempt by the conservative Tea Party group to have the court appoint a forensics expert to find Lois Lerner’s missing emails and documents. The ruling demonstrates what kind of an uphill climb groups like TTV can expect to face as federal judges have become increasingly beholden to the federal government. The irony is there is a one-page document already in the public arena that would win TTV’s case but attorney Cleta Mitchell refuses to point to it. That document...

Conservatives are literally praying that the Texas senator will be the 2016 nominee. The rest of the Republican Party isn't so sure. FORT WORTH, Texas—After finishing his speech, Ted Cruz announced he would take questions from the audience. But instead of asking him anything, they just wanted to tell the Republican senator how great he was. "When I look at you, I can imagine you would be just like one of the founding fathers of this country," one woman said from the microphone stand in the middle of the hotel ballroom. "Honor to you, Ted Cruz," said the next. "We...

This week, ProPublica released a report on the financial (and moral) corruption of a Tea Party group operating under the name Move America Forward, which was founded by one Sal Russo. Russo also helped start the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, aka the Tea Party Express. Move America Forward has run fake drives to give care packages to troops, stolen images of other charitable campaigns and passed them off as its own, and trumpeted a nonexistent partnership with Walter Reed Hospital — all while funneling very real millions to itself. The group is an industry leader at taking your Tea...

Sen. Lamar Alexander easily dispatched rival Republican Joe Carr in the Tennessee primary Thursday, completing a clean sweep for this year's Senate incumbents who faced intraparty challengers claiming the Tea Party label. Yet while they were winless, the hard-core conservatives intent on selecting a Senate more to their liking this year were far from utterly defeated. All of the challenged GOP incumbents reacted to the pressure by working to reconfirm their credentials with conservatives. This held true even for those whose credentials should have been least in doubt. Having induced this embrace of their policies and principles, the GOP's most...

Mainstream conservatives ran the table in Senate Republican primaries as tea party upstarts lost all six challenges to GOP incumbents.The results left the establishment upbeat about midterm elections, and the insurgent movement beaten but unbowed.

The GOP Establishment wing of twitter is abuzz today about this story by ProPublica writer Kim Barker. ProPublica, for those who don’t know, is a far left-wing rabblerousing organization that has spent a ton of time and energy attempting to dig up dirt on right wing charities and PACs in an effort to slow the effectiveness of these groups. Ever willing to play the useful idiot, many establishment cronies are trumping up this story as proof of TEA Party corruption as alleged by Steve LaTourette’s nonsensical and hypocritical piece yesterday. The basic thrust of Barker’s article is that Move America Forward, a charitable...

My Republican Affiliation and Renewal Confirmation Card arrived today. Here's how I filled it out and returned it at my own expense. The Republican National Committee needs to buy a clue. Later I'll publish the answers I supplied to a Republican-financed survey. The questioner was clearly distressed that I did not provide the expected responses.

The hard-right tea party faction has claimed just one big win so far this primary season — in Virginia, where House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was unseated by a little-known conservative, Dave Brat. But The Washington Post reported Wednesday "the truth is that in some ways the movement continues to get stronger." "The tea party wins when it wins, and it wins when it loses," Washington Post blogger Paul Waldman writes. "Five years after it began and long after many people (myself included) thought it would fade away, it continues to hold the GOP in its grip." Waldman points to...

Today's victim is the corrupt Charlie Rangel

Today, in Tennessee, the tea party has its last-best chance to beat an incumbent senator in a race that’s a marquee match-up with the GOP establishment. After millions of dollars, the tea party failed to topple incumbent senators in Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, and most recently earlier this week in Kansas. If Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander beats back his tea party challenger state Rep. Joe Carr, this will be the first cycle since 2008 when no incumbent GOP Senator has lost a re-nomination fight. snip FiveThirtyEight’s Take: Polling Past polling in Tennessee primaries has not been terribly accurate. Errors of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Wednesday’s political coverage was about as predictable as the drive by media fawning over the Obama regime. The narrative had already been set. Now the media, flush with Potomac fever, a disease far worse than Ebola, announced the tea party is dead. For liberals, the tea party probably is like a monster from a bad horror movie. Unfortunately, liberals never seem to learn. The monster in the bad horror movie never dies. Neither does the tea party. The left picked a curious race to call as the end of the tea party. In Kansas, Dr. Milton Wolf, Barack Obama’s second...