Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal’s Reid Epstein is up with a report that, if true — and it is well sourced — will prove very troubling for Scott Walker on the campaign trail. Epstein writes that Walker “told a private dinner of New Hampshire Republicans this month that he backed the idea of allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and to eventually become eligible for citizenship.” That conflicts with statements the governor made as recently as three weeks ago that, in a reversal of his previously held position, he no longer supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told a private dinner of New Hampshire Republicans this month that he backed the idea of allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and to eventually become eligible for citizenship, a position at odds with his previous public statements on the matter.

"Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory," Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens writes • Stephens advises Israeli government to "repay contempt with contempt." In an exceptionally sharp critique published on Monday, Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Bret Stephens ripped apart U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy. The op-ed, titled "The Orwellian Obama Presidency," detailed the flaws of Obama's approach to foreign affairs. "To adapt George Orwell's motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory," Stephens wrote. "There is an upside-down...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may be on the verge of burning himself down before he actually gets started, given what is now becoming something of a circus regarding his actual stance on immigration. According to this new Wall Street Journal report, it’s quite possible a supporter of Jeb Bush, or another candidate went to the media regarding Walker’s recent comments at a private GOP dinner, it doesn’t matter. With three sources now (anonymously) on record, he appears to have Walkered himself right into this one. If his name becomes synonymous with waffling on a critical issue like immigration, his next...

A body found in a New Jersey river is that of missing Wall Street Journal reporter David Bird, who disappeared more than a year ago, authorities announced Thursday. Bird's remains were pulled from the Passaic River by dive teams Wednesday about a mile from where he vanished -- on the border of Morris and Somerset counties. Bird, an avid hiker and father of two, was last seen by his family on Jan. 11, 2014, as he was leaving his Long Hill Township, N.J., home to go on a walk.

Hillary Can’t Delete This As Secretary of State, Clinton says she stopped at nothing to get a blind dissident out of China. That’s not what he remembers. By DAVID FEITH March 15, 2015 This book won’t help Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Its author, Chen Guangcheng, is the blind Chinese human-rights lawyer who in April 2012 escaped rural house arrest and sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The ensuing diplomatic tussle over his fate was a high drama that Mrs. Clinton touts as an accomplishment of her tenure as secretary of state. It reminded her of the “responsibility...

Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Pence is moving ahead to extend Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers under the federal health law after securing a key concession from the Obama administration. The deal, to be announced Tuesday, could pave the way for half a dozen more states to seek similar deals, boosting Medicaid expansion proposals in Republican-led states including Florida, North Carolina and Wyoming. Indiana and Washington officials had been locked for months in negotiations over an issue that could shape the future of Medicaid, the 50-year-old federal-state health program that covers more than 60 million low-income Americans. Mr....

As the calendar turns toward the final two years of the Obama Presidency, this is a moment to consider the world it has produced. There is no formal Obama Doctrine that serves as the 44th President’s blueprint for America’s engagement with the world. But it is fair to say that Barack Obama brought into office a set of ideas associated with the progressive, or left-leaning, wing of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. “Leading from behind” was the phrase coined in 2011 by an Obama foreign-policy adviser to describe the President’s approach to the insurrection in Libya against Moammar Gaddafi. That phrase...

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) walked into a meeting with Wall Street Journal editorial writers last year and laid his cards on the table. “I don’t really care what other people write about me, but I really do care about what the Wall Street Journal writes,” Cruz said, according to a source in the room at the time. The blandishment failed to move his audience. Cruz occupies a place of singular ignominy on the opinion pages of the paper, which treats him as an opportunistic charlatan — even by Washington, D.C., standards. And yet, the strained relationship between Cruz and...

A huge front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal is called "Israel Outflanks White House in Pressing Gaza Strategy." The piece contends among other things that Israel has been doing an end-around the White House by securing munitions directly from the Pentagon. That contention is false. In fact, buried in the twenty-first paragraph of the piece is an explanation that the weapons purchase that they suggest is an end-around in the first few paragraphs is actually standard operating procedure. The WSJ piece begins: White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign...

What is happening at the southern border is a true and actual crisis. News accounts justly use words like chaos, collapse and breakdown. They feature images of children—toddlers, 4- and 5-year-olds—being shuffled to warehouse holding centers, sleeping crowded at night on what look like pallets, covered only in Mylar blankets. "I never thought we'd have refugee camps in America," said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, "but that's what it's appearing." All this gives normal people a feeling of besiegement and foreboding. Is a nation without borders a nation? Washington's leaders seem to recognize what's happening as a political problem, not a...

There is rarely a good time to do hard things, and America won't advance if legislators act like seat-warmers. When I learned that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor had lost his Republican primary, my heart sank. Not simply because I think he is an intelligent and talented member of Congress, or because I worry about the future of the Republican Party. Like others who want comprehensive immigration reform, I worried that Mr. Cantor's loss would be misconstrued and make Congress reluctant to tackle this urgent need. That would be the wrong lesson and an undesirable national consequence of this single,...

Behind the surprise exchange of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees were secret negotiations that began three years ago and ended over the weekend with the retrieval of America's last known prisoner of war, rekindling debate over the propriety of such deals with American adversaries.

One of the strategically interesting things about Vladimir Putin is that he has been careful not to set himself against religious belief but attempted to align himself with it. He has taken domestic actions that he believes reflect the assumptions of religious conservatives. He has positioned himself so that he can make a claim on a part of the Russian soul, as they used to say, that his forbears could not: He is not anti-God, he is pro-God, pro the old church of the older, great Russia. ... At the top, religious references. Crimea is "where Prince Vladimir was baptized....

Jim Jordan wants to know what the White House knew about the IRS targeting scandal, and when they knew it-- as if we didn’t know. The conservative Representative from Ohio has penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the activities of the IRS and, more specifically Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who is at the center of the controversy. Jordan essentially is saying where there is smoke there is fire, and oh yeah, where there’s fire, there is fire too. “Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her...

Russia gave its clearest signal yet Monday that it plans to move fast to annex Crimea, defying U.S. and European threats of sanctions a day after a referendum in the breakaway Ukrainian region to secede passed handily. The Moscow-backed leadership of Crimea wasted no time in formally asking to join Russia following the hastily called referendum in which 97% of voters supported becoming part of Russia. "We will take care of our part quickly, quickly and responsibly," Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the lower house of Russia's parliament, told reporters in response to the Crimean parliamentary vote, according to local news...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

President Obama: "20 Million people have logged on to the website and that certainly shows that the interest is there for health care ... "

The Obama administration may give Americans extra time to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, postponing when penalties for failing to buy coverage will go into effect, MarketWatch has learned. The health care law requires most people to have health insurance by Jan. 1, 2014, but allows for “short coverage gaps” of up to three months before imposing the penalty, which is $95 or 1% of an individual’s income (whichever is greater) next year. That means someone must be covered by March 31, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed, which is...

I posted this last night on the thread that discussed the NBC report, but it needs to be seen by some of our talking heads who lurk on here and later report things without looking at the details... So it has it's own thread. Go to the complete poll PDF on the WSJ web page on page 16 it has the demographics of the poll. 43% of Respondents are Democrats and 32% were Republicans. 44% voted for Obama vs 35% for Romney. And 5% did not know who the voted for? That right there should instantly put this poll in...