Free Republic

In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead. Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he...

Lee Atwater, the famous Republican political strategist of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s and a musician led Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to victory 1980, 1984, and 1988. I remember a couple of weeks ago, here on FR, one of you said if Atwater was still alive there would have been no Clintons or Obamas. They would have been eaten alive by Atwater's research and that Bush II would have won in bigger margins in '00 and '04. Would Atwater be on the Trump train? Would he have destroyed the Left today (Resistance, Maxine, etc.)?

If Marco Rubio fulfills expectations and announces Monday that he is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and not re-election to the Senate, Florida's chief financial officer and a Democratic congressman will become the leading candidates to replace him. Republican CFO Jeff Atwater would be the immediate favorite to replace Rubio after dominant wins in two statewide campaigns. Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy is not nearly as well-known. But he is seen as a moderate who can win crossover votes after defeating incumbent Republican Rep. Allen West in 2012 despite West's massive fundraising and national tea party support. The...

Democrats bet big on Charlie Crist’s bid for governor, and his loss Tuesday is not only a potential career-ending outcome for one of Florida’s most prominent political figures of the last two decades, but also another gut check for a party at a low point in statewide influence... Democrats lost six seats in the state House of Representatives, giving the GOP a super majority. The partisan makeup of the state Senate did not change, but Republicans are still just one lawmaker shy of their all-time high. Additionally, every Cabinet position — governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner...

Atwater Police Chief Trevor Berger 'dispatched' the chicken on August 16 after a neighbor complained of a 'chicken on the loose' The bird, named Carson Petey, belonged to five-year-old Phoenix Turnbull Phoenix's mother Ashley Turnbull had been asked to remove three hens and two ducks she had given her son as a birthday gift, but was not home when Berger killed the hen

Calif. mayor charged for drunken fit over milkshake, report says (CBS) ATWATER, Calif. - Craig Mooneyham, who was filling in as mayor of Atwater, Calif., is accused of throwing a drunken fit over a $7 milkshake, CBS Sacramento reports. According to the station, witnesses say the mayor was so mad about having to pay $7 for a banana milkshake, he started cursing and nearly got into a fight. "He was just throwing the f-bombs and pretty much everything else," Liliana Gracian, an employee of Fosters Freeze, a fast-food chain, told the station. Mooneyham reportedly swore he was overcharged for extra...

Atwater, a city of roughly 28,000 in California's Central Valley, may declare a fiscal emergency as soon as next week, but it is trying to avoid becoming the fourth California city to file for municipal bankruptcy this year... Since late June, three Golden State cities-Stockton, San Bernardino and Mammoth Lakes-have filed for bankruptcy protection... may have to declare a fiscal emergency" on Oct. 3.

"Taken out of context!""You just didn't understand the irony!""Just kidding!" The incredibly lame excuses those on the left come up with to try to explain away statements they made that have come back to haunt them is growing more hilarious by the day. Robert Reich clearly stated at a 2007 Berkeley lecture what an honest candidate for president who didn't worry about getting elected would say to senior citizens who face costly treatment to keep them alive: "It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." Reich's excuse for this and other bizarre health care statements by a hypothetical honest...

RALEIGH, N.C. — A probation officer assigned to a teenager now charged with killing the University of North Carolina's student body president was handling 127 cases without training, state corrections officials said Wednesday. A state investigation also found that 17-year-old Laurence Lovette never met with probation officer Chalita Thomas. The probation cases of the other suspect in the killing, Demario Atwater, were handled by 10 different officers. "This is a dark cloud over our agency," said Robert Lee Guy, director of the state Division of Community Corrections. Guy said no one has been fired but three senior probation and parole...

[SNIP] Can Wadhams take Allen from a little-known senator to a spot on the national ticket? It's a gamble, for sure: Even some Republicans snicker at Allen's tendency to turn every thought into a football metaphor (primaries are "intersquad scrimmages"; Senate recess is "halftime"). Questions about whether Allen is smart enough to be president are sure to dog a potential bid. And Wadhams has never run a national campaign before—or for that matter, a campaign outside a red state. The Republican presidential primary will be crowded, which means that his reflexive go-negative strategy could be risky: Voters who are turned...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 - Victory may have a thousand fathers, but if President Bush's triumph this week had a Big Daddy it was indisputably Karl Rove - the seer, strategist and serious student of politics and the presidency that a grateful Mr. Bush himself referred to as the architect of his winning campaign. And with Mr. Bush's re-election, Mr. Rove has not only cemented his reputation as one of the canniest campaign gurus in a generation but has also put himself in position to shape second-term policies that could help realize his longtime goal of consolidating a broad Republican electoral...

To an outsider George W. Bush's political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated references to God, and to resoluteness of purpose. But to a trained eye and ear these performances have the deliberate balance of a country singer at the Grand Ole Opry. Speaking in a quasi-rural dialect that his critics dismiss as affected, W is telling his core voting groups that he is one of them. No matter that he is the product of many generations of wealth; that his grandfather was a New England...

As voters turn their attention toward the coming presidential election, an abiding question from the previous one frustrates Democrats: How is it, they wonder, that Al Gore told small fibs and was branded a liar while George W. Bush told big ones and was elected President? Gore's many exaggerations may have been foolish—that he had somehow invented the Internet, that he grew up on a Tennessee farm, and so on. But surely, this line of thinking goes, they paled alongside Bush's audacious claim that he could cut taxes by $1.3 trillion, effortlessly privatize Social Security, and still balance the budget....

<p>This space normally contains the article posted by a particular user. This time, it does not.</p> <p>There is a website called the PalmettoJournal. At one time, it was almost like a South Carolina centric DrudgeReport. Apparently, they have recently had a change of ownership. The new owners seem to want to use it to push Democrat propaganda. I guess they decided that the several thousand visitors the PalmettoJournal generally attracted would be a nice audience to purchase access to. Of course, the fact that the audience will flee them probably never dawned on the new owners.</p>