Free Republic

It was a triumphant day for Patti Peeples, but one thing didn’t sit right with her. For more than a year, the 61-year-old Florida landlord fought to tighten the state’s law against squatting, a crime she saw up close when two women faked a rental agreement and occupied one of her Jacksonville properties. She’d done interview after interview, worked closely with her local legislators, and testified in Tallahassee. The result, a tough new law that would let sheriffs evict squatters without entering a lengthy legal process, passed with unanimous bipartisan support. On Wednesday, invited by her Republican state representative, Peeples...

As his presidential campaign sputtered, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., could sound like a candidate unstuck in time. In June, he spent days responding to a dismissive comment from Barack Obama questioning his commitment to racial justice, saying America was a “land of opportunity, not a land of oppression.” In September, he rolled out an “empower parents” plan by explaining that children “need the ABCs, not CRT.” Wherever he campaigned, he invoked his race and biography as the ultimate rebuke to race-obsessed progressives fixated on a “culture of grievance” instead of personal achievement: “My life disproves their lie.” Republican primary voters,...

Donald Trump is securing his grip on the Republican Party less than three months before the midterms, with GOP primary voters surging to the polls in Wyoming to oust his most vocal GOP critic, scores of nominees for state and federal offices amplifying his false claims and bellicose rhetoric, and many prominent party figures echoing his evidence-free attacks about the FBI search of his home. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Trump’s staunchest Republican opponent in Congress, lost her primary Tuesday in a landslide to Harriet Hageman, whom the former president endorsed with the sole mission of dislodging Cheney. The race attracted...

The Washington Post is in turmoil this weekend over twin newsroom spats involving several star reporters: Taylor Lorenz over false reporting in an article and Dave Weigel and Felicia Sonmez over a joke; a fourth Post reporter, Jose Del Real, self-immolated himself online after tangling with Sonmez over her response to the joke. Lorenz reported this week on social media influencers covering the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial just concluded in Fairfax, Virginia. Lorenz was called out by two subjects for falsely reporting she reached out them for comment before publication. The Post then engaged in several efforts to clean...

Standing near a tractor draped with the Betsy Ross flag, Jane Timken, a former state GOP party chair, told a small crowd here this week how she was different from the other Republicans running for U.S. Senate. “They wake up every day and try to get canceled on Twitter,” Timken said during a question-and-answer session. “At the end of the day, I’m a ‘get things done’ kind of person.” Later, in a brief interview, she went further: “Who’s not going to embarrass the state? That’s me.” But Timken is getting little traction ahead of Ohio’s Senate primary election on Tuesday,...

SAN FRANCISCO — The black and yellow signs were hard to miss, their message spelled out in English and Cantonese: “Vote YES to Recall the School Board.” Volunteers with the Chinese American Democratic Club urged shoppers to get registered for the Feb. 15 election, telling them why three members of the city’s school board — all Democrats — needed to be removed from office. Yung Chen, 73, was already convinced. “Martin Luther King’s speech, I believe in that: Don’t judge people by racers ,” he said. His grandson, he explained, nearly missed out on a spot at the high school...

... Since January 2017, when the president was sworn in, democratic registration has shrunk by 3,071 voters, Republican registration has shrunk by 15,554 voters, and 9,529 new voters have climbed on to the rolls with no party registration...

McSweeney's had a wry, Onion-like tongue-in-cheek response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) entering the 2020 presidential arena: "I Don't Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary And Coincidentally I'm Starting To Hate Elizabeth Warren." But it was anchored in reality. "The 2020 presidential campaign is expected to include the largest field ever of female candidates, all of them campaigning in the wake of the defeat of the first female nominee of a major party," say Annie Linskey and David Weigel at The Washington Post. And like Warren, they'll probably all "feel compelled to come up with an answer" to...

**SNIP** Climate activists expressed disappointment. "Without a mandate to create a plan and a requirement that its members don't take fossil fuel money, we are deeply concerned that this committee will be just another of the many committees we've seen failing our generation our entire lives," said Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement's spokeswoman. The push reflects the increasing power and visibility of liberals on Capitol Hill. Poised to be the largest of the values-based caucuses next year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has already received a jolt of energy from members such as Ocasio-Cortez, whose political celebrity and regular posts to...

Democrats are meeting in Providence, R.I., this weekend to advance changes to their presidential primaries, hoping to end the bitterness that followed the 2016 election — with an emphasis on “hoping.” The push for changes, which began nearly two years ago at the Democrats’ Philadelphia convention, concerns rule revisions proposed by a Unity Reform Commission and vetted by the standing Rules and Bylaws Committee. The most high-profile battles have come over the role of superdelegates, the party leaders and members of Congress whose votes are not pledged to follow the results of any primaries. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who failed...

The first week of August was a rough one for Donald Trump's campaign; by coincidence, it was also a busy one for Trump supporters, who see a media coverup protecting Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign released a Web ad that mocked Clinton's admission that she "short-circuited" by giving a misleading answer about the investigation into her emails. "She took a short-circuit in the brain," Trump said at a Saturday night rally. "She's got problems. Honestly, I don't think she's all there." At the same time, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily and a small army of would-be Twitter sleuths...

PHILADELPHIA — Three dozen union workers gathered outside city hall here on Thursday to rally against the global free-trade deals they believe have harmed Americans like them. Their candidate was Katie McGinty, the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania. But their spiritual leader was Republican Donald Trump. “He recognized there’s some problems we need to solve,” said McGinty, who is challenging Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R), a free-trade advocate. “One, we have to stop bad trade agreements. . . . And two, we have to take the Chinese on when they manipulate their currency and dump goods in our markets.” Just two...

Losing the endorsements of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — as harsh an indictment as the "establishment" can offer — is no punishment at all in the eyes of many conservatives. ... The utter failure of the Bush brand surprised some people, given that Republican voters still generally say that they like Bush. But this ignores the role both Bushes now play in conservative history — as sellouts. George H.W. Bush's acceptance of a tax hike (forced on him by a Democratic Congress) is the Genesis story of the anti-tax movement. George W. Bush's record in office, for...

Donald Trump used his first campaign rally in western New York to attack Sen. Ted Cruz for something the Texan happily boasts about: mastering party rules to elect his delegate slates to the Republican National Convention. “They’re trying to subvert the movement,” Trump said to thousands of voters crammed into a frigid airplane hangar Sunday. “They can’t do it with bodies, so they’re trying to subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans.” The Rochester rally was only Trump’s second in the 14-day New York campaign, and his first since Cruz swept Colorado’s 34 available delegates in a series of conventions. Trump’s...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) blamed “Donald Trump and his henchmen” for planting a National Enquirer story that accused him of extramarital affairs. Vehemently denying the story as “garbage” and “complete and utter lies,” “It became clear as the campaign went on that Donald was a whole lot of sizzle without any substance,” said Cruz. “When he’s scared, when he’s losing, his first and natural resort is to go to sleaze and to go to slime.” Friday on CNN, a Trump supporter, Boston Herald columnist and radio host Adriana Cohen accused a former Cruz staffer, Amanda Carpenter, of being one of...

This morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu experienced something that American politicians have become all too familiar with — being overshadowed by Donald Trump. The prime minister’s video-linked speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's conference was preceded by the unscheduled introduction of AIPAC President Lillian Pinkus and four other leaders. Choking back tears, Pinkus apologized for Monday night's speeches, implying that Donald Trump had violated a nonpartisan standard. “From the moment this conference began, until this moment, we have preached a message of unity,” Pinkus said. “We have said, in every way we can think of: Come together....

VILLANOVA, Penn. — Still vibrating from his home state primary win, Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) told crowds in the Philadelphia suburbs that President Obama had blown his chance to get a Supreme Court nominee, and that the two remaining candidates for the Republican nomination would lose the election. [Kasich wins Ohio with an eye toward a contested convention] "Neither of those guys can win a general election, so maybe they're spoiling it for the Republican Party and for the conservative movement," Kasich said of Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) "It's unlikely that anybody is going to achieve enough...

In statements from last night and Saturday morning, Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all condemned the front-runner for creating a "toxic" political environment, for stoking "anarchy" that was now unfolding on TV screens. While anti-Trump super PACs were attacking the candidate's business record, the candidates themselves were saying explicitly that Trump needed to change the way he was running for president before it did permanent damage to the country.

"The responsibility for that lies with protesters, who took violence into their own hands. But in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top. Any candidate is responsible for the culture of a campaign. And when you have a campaign that disrespects the voters, when you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence, when you have a campaign that is facing allegations of physical violence against members of the press, you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discord," Cruz said

I had a look at Liz Mair's twitter. She's the idiot that wanted Scott Walker to run a suicidal open borders campaign. Then they parted ways. This was the story that broke it all. http://www.mofopolitics.com/2015/02/01/scott-walker-once-employed-liberal-feminazi-liz-mair/ Why is The Mair of RINO feminazis retweeting this creep? I though the Trump-hater consultant types were sick of Trump's crude attacks on people. I assume Liz Mair is following this guy on twitter. Wilson said nasty things about Ann Coulter. He also threatened certain things about Trump. https://twitter.com/lizmair https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/701226786793910274 Liz Mair Retweeted Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson 7h7 hours ago Also, @jebbush could never ask for...