Free Republic

At Iowa's "Ag Summit" on Saturday, Jeb Bush had an auspicious debut, while Dems skipped town and others struck out. There’s a new player in the game at the Iowa caucuses this season, and the competition has just been elevated. That new player is Jeb Bush, and his debut at Saturday’s Iowa Agriculture Summit in Des Moines could be a game changer — for both Republicans and Democrats. Even though they were invited, Democrats were missing in action at the Summit. Republican hopefuls took full advantage of the opportunity to appeal to Iowa’s core industry, as entrepreneur and President of...

Sarah Palin is weighing in on Hillary Clinton’s use of private email addresses to conduct State Department business, saying it “makes a mockery of transparency.” “That’s unethical, no doubt illegal, and flies in the face of all claims of transparency,” Palin wrote in a op-ed for Fox News published Monday. As Palin notes in her op-ed, she once faced an email flap of her own. During her 2008 run for vice president, citizens and news organizations requested to see emails from the governor during her time in office. Following open-records requests by Mother Jones and other news outlets, Palin released...

Why not all 'outsiders' are built the same, and how that might benefit Ted Cruz.Today the neurosurgeon Ben Carson is coming under political fire, including from conservatives, for giving this answer to a CNN question about whether being gay is a choice: Absolutely. Because a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight -- and when they come out, they're gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question[.] Uh, let's not and say we did? First of all, I think the correct answer to that question, from any presidential candidate, is...

Washington (CNN)Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson apologized for commenting Wednesday that prisoners' changes after they leave jail proves being gay is a choice, but said that the science is still murky on the issue. In a statement, Carson said he "realized that my choice of language does not reflect fully my heart on gay issues." "I do not pretend to know how every individual came to their sexual orientation. I regret that my words to express that concept were hurtful and divisive. For that I apologize unreservedly to all that were offended," he added. 

"....Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't have George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy of the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern Democratic Party is set up to beat...."

While racist xenophobes like Rudy Giuliani, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and self-hating xenophobes like Ben Carson may not realize it yet, there is a special place reserved for them in the Land of Eternal Torment. You see, one day, many, many white people who have been duped by the anti-black coded messages that these and other Repugnican politicians throw out like swill to the swine may just come to their senses and condemn these demagogues for just what they are — greedy liars and swindlers who would just as soon see...

We know what happens when Scott Walker musters an “I don’t know” about Barack Obama’s religious faith. The wrath of the media comes down howling “how dare you!” But what happens when Scott Walker’s faith is the subject of ridicule by a prominent left-wing publication and a former staffer for Russ Feingold and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin?

Sen. Ted Cruz is getting close to announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. The Texan is spending almost as much time in Iowa and New Hampshire as he does on Fox News; he's hired a staff and collected a long list of fiercely conservative supporters.. There's at least one hitch: Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta. His mother was a U.S. citizen, born in Delaware; his father, a Cuban refugee working in Canada's oil fields. Thanks to his mother, Cruz was a U.S. citizen at birth. But that doesn't clear up a...

Here are the 10 most bizarre Tea Party bills currently being debated in the Montana Legislature, which is now controlled by the right wing of the Republican Party. Some of these bills, believe it or not, have a chance of making it to the governor’s desk. 1) Prepare for National Ammunition shortage (SB 122). When Obama comes to get our guns and bullets, Montana will be ready... 2) Establish Armed Militias in Every Town (SB 130). Even if we have enough bullets, Montana could still be in grave danger from the federal government... 3) Require that nipples and areolae be...

What’s most successful when it appears to be something it’s not? Astroturf. As in fake grassroots.The many ways that corporations, special interests and political interests of all stripes exploit media and the Internet to perpetuate astroturf is ever-expanding. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.Below are the top ten astroturfers as viewed by respondents in an informal, non-scientific survey.* TOP 10 ASTROTURFERS 1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown2. Media Matters for America3. University of California Hastings Professor...

So … Scott Walker is all but officially running for president, and the country is getting a look at a man whom we residents of Wisconsin have been living with since before he became governor. While the national press has focused on the policies and conservative ideology that Walker has imposed on our state, these don’t define the man or explain the mayhem he has caused here. The massive protests against Walker in 2011 began with “Act 10,” which stripped public employee unions of almost all of their rights and power. Walker loves to leave the story there and depicts...

Did the mainstream media – or Time magazine, specifically – ever try to find Barack Obama’s high school teachers? Unlikely, but the magazine managed to dig up Gov. Scott Walker’s high school science teacher for her reaction to Walker’s “punt” of a question about evolution.

Correction: February 15, 2015 An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that teacher layoffs in Milwaukee in 2010 happened because Gov. Scott Walker “cut state aid to education.” The layoffs were made by the city’s school system because of a budget shortfall, before Mr. Walker took office in 2011.

The debut edition of our leader board of the Republicans most likely to win the presidential nomination, based on what we know now, shows the field may not be as big as most people think. 1) JEB BUSH (age 62, to Hillary’s 67): He’s got money, momentum, Florida, big ideas. His surprise, early signal that he’s running is THE PLAY OF THE CAMPAIGN so far — pushing OUT Mitt and perhaps Christie by freezing or stealing their money and talent. Jeb will be first Republican to $100 million by a mile. Now, watch for the use of overwhelming force to...

Jeb Bush was preparing to release the emails he sent and received as Florida governor when he was excoriated by a letter-writer to The Miami Herald. The headline: “Don’t trust Jeb Bush with the power of the presidency.” The subject of many of the emails was Terri Schiavo. The letter-writer was her husband, Michael. Bush’s effort to stop Michael Schiavo from removing his brain-damaged wife’s feeding tube was a defining moment of Bush’s time in office. Bush, a devout Catholic, sided with Terri Schiavo’s parents in the end-of-life dispute and reached for unprecedented authority to intervene. Michael Schiavo said his...

Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Democratic presidential candidates in 2016 should embrace President Obama’s economic policies and “run on what we have done” instead of running away from the administration. “In my view, those seeking to lead the nation should protect and defend and run, yes run, on what we’ve done and own what we have done,” Mr. Biden said in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa. “Stand for what we have done. Acknowledge what we have done. And be judged on what we have done, if we have any chance for continued resurgence in 2016.” He added, “Some...

MILWAUKEE — Scott Walker was gone. Dropped out. And in the spring of his senior year. In 1990, that news stunned his friends at Marquette University. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.

ulture: An unlikely issue has entered the infant 2016 presidential campaign: Vaccines and required vaccinations. Let's hope the fact there's no scientific link to autism or anything else isn't lost in the political fray. Candidates will often look for an edge over their opponents. Thus, both New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky recently suggested that, while vaccinations are good, forcing parents to vaccinate their children might be too much. We believe vaccines are safe and should be routine, but concern about parents' rights is not unreasonable. What really gripes us, however, is listening to the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: It's unbelievable. It is happening again! It's happening all over again. You remember during the Republican -- it was a primary debate in January, two years ago, Mitt Romney, out of the blue, was asked by George Stephanopoulos, "So what do you think about contraception?" And Romney's going, "What? Contraception? George, what are you talking about?" Stephanopoulos kept pushing and kept pushing, and it wasn't an issue anywhere. So Romney finally answered it, and that gave birth to the War on Women. There was no War on Women, and now this vaccination thing has popped up. It's...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told reporters Tuesday that the vaccination issue "is largely silliness stirred up by the media. Nobody reasonably thinks Chris Christie is opposed to vaccinating kids other than a bunch of reporters who want to write headlines." CBS News' John Nolen reports that Cruz went on to say, "This question has historically been decided at the state level. And most states choose to do what the state of Texas does which is to mandate vaccines for children to prevent the outbreak of infectious diseases." A statement he released noted that most states make exceptions for good-faith religious...