Free Republic

This is it. The final days, the home stretch. We head into the weekend and then to the polls on Tuesday for what might just be one of the most important elections of our lifetime. I don’t ever remember feeling so tired. I’m tired of hearing people try to make excuses for people like John Kerry. I’m tired of hearing pollsters and pundits project a big victory for Democrats this Tuesday. I’m tired of hearing the vicious, bitter attacks on our President’s character by the likes of people like Keith Olbermann, a pseudo-intellectual Manhattan elitist who appears to be having...

It looks like the DUmmies have started working on this poll so let's show them how it is really done! It's a little ways down on the right side of the page. Thanks for your help with my hometown newspaper's poll on the Senate race in Arizona. The D-RAT running against him, Jim Pederson, won't even put his party affiliation on his advertising even though he's be the D-RAT party leader in Arizona for years!

Conservatives who are upset that Republicans haven't done enough during their 12 years in control of the House and Senate and nearly six years in control of the White House need a slap in the face. Republicans may have controlled all three branches of government, but conservatives haven't. If conservatives believe enough has not been done to advance their agenda, let them work to elect more conservatives, not hand control of Congress over to a party controlled by far-left liberals who have no intention of moderating their tone or watering down their beliefs after the election. One issue should trump...

WASHINGTON -- The midterm elections approach, and there is excitement in Washington. Some of the learned psephologists predict a close struggle for control, at least in the House of Representatives. Others predict a "blow-out," with the Republicans being blown out in the House and possibly edged out in the Senate. Looking back on history we should have predicted setbacks for the Republicans in this off-year election. President George W. Bush broke with historic convention when he actually picked up seats in 2002, but now things are apparently back to normal. In normal times the sitting president's party suffers losses on...

Media reality says that the Democrats are going to win — either a colossal win or at least a narrow win — in the House and Senate races November 7. Maybe. But I am sticking to my view, expressed last June 15, that the Republicans will actually gain seats this fall, both in the House and in the Senate. Well, maybe only in the Senate, while holding the House. Put another way, I am expecting a delicious “November Surprise.” I know, I know. Unrealistic. All my friends who are numbers crunchers and “realistic” think that the Republicans are toast. Some...

In the midst of the campaign month of October came the news last week that the population of the United States has passed the 300 million mark. There's a sharp contrast between the negativity of the political climate and the robustness of our demographic increase -- we were at 200 million in 1967, less than four decades ago. Then, as now, Americans were in a negative mood, but had much more to be depressed about. We were then mired in a war that produced more than 20 times the number of American deaths as the conflict in Iraq has so...

Rick Santorum can't seem to win for losing, no matter what he does. The U.S. senator from Pennsylvania could save AIDS babies in Africa, end genocide in Darfur and put welfare mothers to work in his own office -- and he'd still be despised by a sizable number of those who hope Democrat Robert Casey Jr. will defeat him come November. Come to think of it, Santorum has tried all those things mentioned above, with some success, but often at great political cost. He has worked for global AIDS relief with Bono, the U2 rock star and one of Santorum's...

WASHINGTON -- Even the most partisan Democrats have said all year they expected their 6- to 10-point advantage over the Republicans in the party-preference polls to tighten as Election Day neared. But certainly no one expected the midterm congressional elections to tighten as much as they have so early in the general election cycle. Earlier this month, the Gallup Poll reported a 4- to 6-point advantage for the Democrats, which fell to 2 to 3 points, and is now down to a "dead heat" among likely voters who say they will vote Republican (48 percent) and those who say they...

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi? "That's not going to happen," snaps the president of the United States, leaning across his desk in his airborne office. He had been saying that he hoped to revisit Social Security reform next year, when he "will be able to drain the politics out of the issue," and I rudely interrupted by noting the polls predicting Ms. Pelosi's ascension. "I just don't believe it," the president insists. "I believe the Republicans will end up being--running the House and the Senate. And the reason why I believe it is because when our candidates...

Rumsfeld's cranky outburst mangles a historical analogy, bad-mouths legitimate critics, and illustrates once again why the defense secretary should resign. August 31, 2006 TWO REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS ago, the mantra of conservatives was "Let Reagan be Reagan." Apparently President Bush has decided to let Rumsfeld be Rumsfeld — even when Bush himself is no longer the Bush who taunted Iraqi insurgents with "Bring 'em on!" and posed in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." ADVERTISEMENTIn a cranky speech Tuesday to an American Legion audience, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld compared critics of U.S. policy in Iraq to those who...

In the Stalin era, Communist Party members perceived as impure — deviationists — were variously read out of the party, decreed forgotten by diktat, rubbed out of photographs, sentenced to forever in the gulag, or shot. These days, ideological purists in the Democratic Party are flattened by the big ol’ leftie steamroller. That’s what happened Tuesday to Joe Lieberman — the Connecticut Democratic senator who was Al Gore’s vice-presidential running mate six years ago. Lieberman’s defeat in the Democratic primary is viewed broadly as indicative of how President Bush and the Long War on Terror will play in the congressional...

Tom DeLay's decision to resign from Congress removes one large Republican liability this election year, but it hardly ends the party's political vulnerability. One pressing question is whether the GOP majority is going to use the few productive weeks it has left to establish a 2006 record and 2007 agenda that are worthy of re-election. Recent evidence is not reassuring. GOP leaders seem determined to avoid any meaningful legislative fights, lest their own internal fissures show. Instead, they're promising to make the election a "choice"--rather than a referendum on their own governance--and thus mobilize voters by claiming that Democrats would...