Free Republic

First Christians in Korea, now Muslims in Indonesia: Lady Gaga's Asian tour is stirring up controversy. The WSJ's Deborah Kan speaks to reporter Eric Bellman.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels on Tuesday dismissed suggestions that Richard Mourdock's upset victory over incumbent Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) last week was a "tea party phenomenon."

Lennart Poettering has written a guide for optimizing systemd to the extent that a two-second boot-time or less for this popular free software project. The systemd optimization guide can be found on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. While right now there's many manual steps to lower the systemd-controlled boot-time, the goal is to eventually incorporate these tweaks into upstream distributions as the defaults. "It is our intention to optimize the upstream distributions by default (in particular Fedora) so that these optimizations won't be necessary. However, this will take some time, especially since making these changes is often not trivial when the general...

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican who serves on the Senate Banking Committee, has called for a hearing on the $2-billion trading loss by JPMorgan Chase & Co., saying that "policies are going to be derived out of what’s happened." Corker, who was a key participant in the debate over the 2010 financial reform law, said it was important for policymakers to get the facts about the situation and whether pending regulations would have prevented it.

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - Richard Mourdock's Senate campaign is now the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission. It has to do with the accusation that the Mourdock campaign improperly downloaded information from a GOP database. The state Republican Party last week cut off the campaign's access to the database known as Salesforce. The complaint was filed by John McCane, a former mayor of Rushville, who alleges that Mourdock used a state campaign committee to pay the $125 fee to access Salesforce and then illegally transferred information including email addresses to his federal campaign.

The morning after the senior Republican U.S. senator was defeated by a Tea Party-backed challenger in Indiana, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Pete Sessions said he was confident that every GOP House member from Texas would survive Tea Party challenges in the May 29 primary. Speaking at a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Republican predicted that “each of our people (will) get out of it without a runoff.” Acknowledging that “a number of my (Texas) colleagues do have these challenges within our party,” he praised the Tea Party for “actively pushing each and every one...

A super PAC supporting Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst's Senate campaign has released an internal poll showing him at 57 percent in the GOP race with less than three weeks left until the primary. The poll shows Dewhurst at 57 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at 16 percent, Tom Leppert at 12 percent, and Craig James at 4 percent. Eleven percent were undecided. If Dewhurst finishes with over 50 percent of the vote on May 29, he wins the nomination outright. If not, the top two finishers will advance to a July 31 runoff. The Perception Insight poll of 800...

Instant analysis of Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar’s crushing defeat at the hands of state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in Tuesday’s Republican primary cast it as yet another example of a tea party-aligned GOPer ousting a prominent face of the party establishment. And that instant analysis would be wrong. Lugar lost — and lost badly — for a number of reasons, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the relative tea party-ness of his opponent. At its heart, Lugar’s defeat was attributable to the fact that he broke the political golden rule: Never lose touch with the people who...

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Trent Lott famously said "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them." - and I know what I think. I want to know what you think. Has she(Coulter) surrendered to the progressives within the republican establishment?

There's one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page 'ckremoval' does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux. A multi-seat computer is a system that offers not only one local seat for a user, but multiple, at the same time. A seat refers to a combination of a screen, a set of input devices (such as mice and keyboards), and maybe an audio card or webcam, as individual local workplace for a user. A multi-seat computer can drive an entire class...

A conservative activist running an insurgent candidacy against the Maryland Republican establishment seized the post of national committeewoman at the state GOP convention Saturday, beating longtime party stalwart Audrey E. Scott. The victory by Nicolee Ambrose of Baltimore represents a generational changing of the guard for Maryland Republicans. Her win came after a bitterly fought internal struggle that played out in blogs and on Facebook.

You gotta click the link to see the video. If anybody can get at the direct link, please post it.

The actual Republican Establishment — political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits — are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration. Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure that employees are legal and allowing state police to arrest illegal aliens. He is the rare Republican who recognizes that in-state tuition, driver’s licenses and amnesty are magnets for more illegal immigration.

Former appointed Sen. George LeMieux, whose reputation as former Gov. Charlie Crist‘s "maestro" once made him the embodiment of the Florida GOP establishment, has been endorsed by Herman Cain, who hailed LeMieux’s anti-establishment credentials at a Hernando County GOP dinner over the weekend.

On Saturday, the Constitution Party nominated Virgil Goode, a former U.S. House member from Virginia, as its presidential candidate. He won the nomination on the first ballot with 203 out of 403 delegates. He defeated Darrell Castle of Tennessee, national vice chairman of the Constitution Party; Susan Ducey, a constitutional activist from Kansas; Laurie Roth, of Washington, a columnist and talk show host; and Robby Carr Wells of North Carolina, a former NCAA Division I football coach at Savannah State University. The final vote total was Goode 203, Castle 120, Wells 58, Ducey 15, Roth 6. Jim Clymer, the national...

Lowest turnout for a Presidential Preference Primary since the current system was established. Voter turnout for the Republican Presidential Preference Primary was the lowest since the current system was established in 1980, according to Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. Figures reported to Merrill's office show just 14.4 percent of eligible Republicans turned out for the Primary Tuesday.

Portman is unfit to be anybody's veep at any time. He's a Bushie. NO MORE BUSHs! NO MORE GOP-E! Give smaller government a try! I spent a few minutes looking into this guy, and according to the ever unreliable Wikipedia The public debt went up by $469 Billion according to them, and they do point to TreasuryDirect.gov, which I think it's reasonable to say is more reliable. Just plug in the dates. Portman was held the office of OMB from April 18, 2006 to June 19, 2007. The math works out for me to be around $445 Billion. Still too...

Levin talks about what he says few have the guts to talk about, and that is how the Senate GOP establishment, McConnell, is trying to minimize conservative Sen. Ron Johnson who has made it clear he isn’t in the Senate to buddy up with the leadership, but rather to represent his constituents and fight for conservatism. And on the other hand, the establishment types like McCain are teaming up with one of the go-along-to-get-along increasingly liberal senators, Dick Lugar, to help him defeat a great conservative he’s running against. So while they claim to be conservative, what they really want...

Freshman GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) is looking to purge nearly his entire Washington, D.C.-based legislative team, according to multiple Republican sources familiar with the situation. Johnson's frustration with his legislative staff has been one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington for months, those close to Republican Conference politics said.