Free Republic

Conservative commentator Kathy Barnette, who came in third in Pennsylvania's Senate Republican primary, is "having discussions" with Dr. Mehmet Oz's team about endorsing her former rival, she told the Washington Examiner in an interview Tuesday. For much of the campaign, the Pennsylvania GOP primary was centered on Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and businessman Dave McCormick. The two nearly tied when all the votes were counted, with Oz coming out on top by less than 1,000 votes. Barnette began surging in the polls during the final days of the race, as the battle between Oz and...

In the final weeks of the Senate campaign, Kathy Barnette has taken to campaigning with the phrase, “I am you, Pennsylvania.” But as her candidacy ascends in recent polls, we have to ask ourselves: what do we really know about Kathy Barnette? Renowned Pennsylvania reporter, Saleno Zito, couldn’t even get basic information out of Barnette and her campaign this week. Barnette’s campaign refused to supply information on when she was accepted into military Officer Candidate School, or when she moved here from Virginia (which she claimed was her residency in a book published in 2020). She refuses to release her...

Barnette, in her bio on her webpage, says: "Appearing regularly on national TV and radio, Kathy Barnette is a veteran, former adjunct professor of corporate finance, sought-after conference speaker, and conservative political commentator. Next up — Kathy is taking on Washington D.C. and is running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania." The bio also reads: "Kathy served her country proudly for 10 years in the Armed Forces Reserves where she was accepted into Officer Candidacy School. She worked with two major financial firms in corporate America and sat on the board of a pregnancy crisis center for five years." The...

Roy Moore will win the U.S. Senate special election, #NeverTrump-er Erick Erickson reluctantly concedes. Yet The Resurgent still feels compelled to attack the Republican nominee while muddying its prior position about the accusations. Of course, when he ran it, Erickson banned candidate Donald Trump from Red State’s national conference for similar reasons. The false allegations against Judge Roy Moore, aiming to derail his challenge to the establishment, are also revealing the fault lines between the genuine and the superficial throughout the conservative movement. Then Erick Erickson banned me on Saturday from The Resurgent while he was acting as the arbiter...

Our political establishment always eagerly supports reform as long as it is no more than theater meant to fool the voters, an entirely phony exercise. In the early 1990s, I held in my hand a small-run book, “Lip Service,” by Richard Viguerie, which highlighted the attempts of Republican leaders to fool conservatives. Finally, after years of conservatives ignoring the obvious need, Steve Bannon, former Trump White House adviser and Breitbart editor, is launching a sustained war to eject Democrats pretending to be Republicans and elect actual, genuine Republicans to the U.S. Congress. Our country is lost without this. But many...

Republican Christine O'Donnell returned to political debate on Thursday to slam GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. "I have no desire to get in the fray. Now it looks like he's going to be the nominee. I can't sit back anymore. I can't hold my tongue," O'Donnell said during an interview on CNN. "He did nothing to liberate the middle class from political correctness until he decided to run for president," O'Donnell added during her interview with Brooke Baldwin. O'Donnell is known in political circles for a stunning upset during the Tea Party wave of 2010 when she defeated establishment favorite and former...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So I just saw Fox News Channel here during the break, and I see a little headline the bottom of the screen: "Hillary Clinton Launching Charm Offensive to Win Over Republican Voters." Well, now, that's not possible. I mean, a charm offensive is not possible. Winning over Republican voters? Hell, anything's possible. You know what she said? She said, "I do not have horns," and everybody's applauding it. "Oh, man, look at Hillary! She's in Omaha. She's in Nebraska. She targeting Republicans. "She's claiming that she's on a charm offensive. She's gonna convert Republicans! She's assuring them...

Adding to the long-running saga of IRS dealings with conservatives, former Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell says the tax agency punished her mistakenly for the second time in five years by imposing an erroneous levy on her bank accounts. Ms. O’Donnell told The Washington Times she only discovered the levy when she couldn’t access her checking account as she was preparing to visit relatives over Thanksgiving. “The day before I was heading out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, my bank told me the IRS had frozen my accounts. They didn’t give me reason why, just a phone number to call.’”

Last week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced his intention to "actively explore" a run for president. That announcement spurred spasms of joy in some segments of the Republican Party who have been itching for an effective counter to the enthusiasm of the grassroots right. Those Republicans -- largely coastal donors who scorn social conservatives as rubes, and shun the supposed fiscal extremism of the tea party -- have been searching for a candidate who will buck the base on immigration, who doesn't mind hand-in-glove corporatism, and who, most of all, feels the same way they do about the grassroots....

Politically active liberal Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is now blocking Republican candidates from his social media website Facebook in the GOP’s bid to retake control of the U.S. Senate in November. Facebook deleted late Monday night an “Event” this author created to ask for donations to Kevin Wade, running for U.S. Senate as a Republican in Delaware from his 4,937 Facebook friends. Freshman Democrat U.S. Senator Chris Coons is up for re-election this fall. His approval rating was only at 49% a year ago in September 2013 according to a University of Delaware poll. The year since that 49% approval last...

SNIP As you may know, last year I was told by a TIGTA (IRS’ in-house watchdog) investigator that, on the very same day I announced my 2010 U.S. Senate candidacy, a government official inappropriately accessed my private tax records. Then just hours later, an erroneous tax lien was placed on a house I no longer owned. The dubious lien then was widely circulated in the media throughout my entire campaign. After spending countless hours on hold with the IRS and being pawned off to numerous IRS operators, I was finally told that the lien was caused by a “computer error.”...

With the July 8 deadline looming, Delaware Republicans still have no declared candidate for United States Senate in 2014 to run against Democrat Chris Coons. However, a distinct possibility emerging is successful businessman Kevin Wade, who was the 2012 nominee of the Delaware Republican Party (DEGOP). As the country's circumstances worsen and it becomes clear to Republicans that really there is no one else actively considering the task, Kevin Wade is taking a new look at the race. Christine O'Donnell has ruled out a rematch, citing -- genuine and serious -- family reasons. Her father passed away last year from...

Republican insiders don’t actually know how to run successful political campaigns. But conservatives don’t know how to run campaigns effectively, either. The two sides need to stop accusing each other, and start (re)learning how to win elections. As a result, Republican elites want to tell us which candidates are “electable.” But they have no idea. They don’t know. A greater proportion of establishment-backed candidates lose contested general elections than do conservatives, particularly if you subtract the factor of insiders sabotaging conservatives. Elites cannot make valid predictions because they have forgotten how political campaigns actually work. One cause is that decades...

...The risk of the Ernst ad is that it may cause people not to take her seriously. While Iowa is one of the top agricultural states in America, 64 percent of residents live in urban communities. The question that deserves to be asked is, how does this ad play with urban women? From the ones I talked to on Tuesday, it didn't set very well. "It reminds me a little of the 'I'm not a witch,' ad," one woman told TheIowaRepublican.com. "I think you could tell that story in a speech, but I would never use the word castrate in...

We now know that Obama Administration actions were intentional and partisan when the Internal Revenue Service targeted, harmed, and intimidated conservative and tea party organizations. Keep in mind the timetable while reading this – that the plot against conservatives inside the IRS was gearing up in March 2010 and in full force in September 2010, according to recently released Lois Lerner emails. Also keep in mind that Lois Lerner previously worked enforcement at the Federal Election Commission. The Obama Administration offered excuses that disparate treatment of conservatives was a result of confusion or accidental mishandling by lower-level staff. Yet these...

We now know that Obama Administration actions were intentional and partisan when the Internal Revenue Service targeted, harmed, and intimidated conservative and tea party organizations. Keep in mind the timetable while reading this – that the plot against conservatives inside the IRS was gearing up in March 2010 and in full force in September 2010, according to recently released Lois Lerner emails. Also keep in mind that Lois Lerner previously worked enforcement at the Federal Election Commission. The Obama Administration offered excuses that disparate treatment of conservatives was a result of confusion or accidental mishandling by lower-level staff. Yet these...

One of the Articles of Impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon was merely threatening to use the Internal Revenue Service to selectively audit political opponents. Don’t let anyone forget that. Today, IRS officials should go to jail for the overt campaign of intimidation, threats, and persecution of tea party organizations, conservative organizations, and individual critics of the liberal agenda. Yet the conservative response to the IRS scandal consists mainly of begging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute and begging the IRS to start playing nice by releasing information implicating its own staff in wrongdoing and perhaps criminal...

Whether Democrat or Republican, do you really want your private tax information leaked with impunity? On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware. Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes. It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says. That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS...

The government’s war on conservatives hasn’t stopped. On Saturday, Christine O’Donnell revealed a second onslaught from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in addition to the illegal accessing and abuse of her income tax records by the Internal Revenue Service. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is investigating the IRS on that. News recently broke that the IRS targeted Dr. Ben Carson, for the first time, immediately after he criticized Barack Obama. O’Donnell revealed on Saturday morning that the FEC is demanding payment of tribute (my words) to settle false accusations invented by a George Soros front group. Perhaps such shakedowns are an...

Karl Rove is a political hack good at only one thing, fundraising. Karl Rove was the biggest loser of the 2012 elections. And what does the man who squandered over $300 miillion on ridiculous election ads do? He creates a new money-making spinoff of American Crossroads; the Conservative Victory Project. Equating the term Conservative with Karl Rove is akin to likening it with Barack Hussein Obama. Good old Karl now has his hands in three Republican PACS. For those that may have forgotten, Rove and the GOP establishment backed David Dewhurst over Ted Cruz, Trey Grayson over Rand Paul, Bob...