Free Republic

As former Vice President Mike Pence positions himself for a possible presidential race, he is setting a great example of substance of the sort that the public should demand from all White House aspirants. On Thursday, Pence’s Advancing American Freedom organization launched a “Freedom Agenda” featuring what, by modern standards, is a remarkable amount of depth and specificity. Readers may also be struck by how much its tone sounds Reaganesque, more focused on what the group (and thus Pence) is for than what it opposes. The agenda is divided into three sections: American culture, American opportunity, and American leadership. Each...

On Friday, President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be updating the Title X regulation framework to better enforce the letter of the law, which outlaws federal funding for abortion, and to ensure that federal family planning dollars do not go to facilities that perform abortion. This new framework is based largely on President Reagan’s similar Title X regulation in 1988, which was challenged in court but eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in Rust v. Sullivan.However, up to now, the framework has never truly been enforced. President Clinton quickly ditched it as soon as he took...

Steve Malzberg's Own @SteveMTalk 2 hours ago Does #Paulryan have an evil twin? Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob2cWB1iLug@NewsmaxTV #Trump @realDonaldTrump

In a cramped banquet room on the top floor of Janesville's historic Armory building, a contender for Wisconsin's state Senate tells an old joke—the one about politicians and diapers needing to be changed often, and for the same reason. "These politicians start to stagnate after awhile," the candidate, a businessman named Brian Fitzgerald, tells the crowd of local Republicans. Just then, a voice booms from the back. "Brian! I'm right here!" The room erupts in laughter. It's Paul Ryan. To the dozens gathered, Ryan is a hometown hero. He's the boy wonder who emerged from Janesville, population 63,820, to become...

Speaker John Boehner finally declared this week that President Obama's goal over the next few years is to "annihilate" the GOP. Wow, he finally figured that out. And to reporters about his ticket's defeat in November, Rep. Paul Ryan stated that there was a failure to turn potential Republican voters out -- again, another "ah ha" moment. What is really going on is that the more old-time Republican Establishment is starting to realize that simply playing the same old game against a new, brilliant and Democratic political juggernaut led by their symbol of success, President Obama, will likely yield the...

We've all heard the objection that political conventions have become empty kabuki theater. The high drama of multiple ballots is dead and gone. Uncertainty about the outcome is no more. "Today," laments political guru Mike Murphy, "delegates are bound through the application of TV ad ratings points, not machine deals. They sit in the convention hall like the background actors in a TV show, milling about to the director's orders, wearing costumes and denied a single line. It seems a shabby ending to a great tradition. It's time for a mercy killing." Mike Murphy is an astute observer of all...

My colleague Jack Farrell made a good point that the Ryan pick has some echoes of the successful Clinton-Gore ticket of 1992. There's a lot to be said for that. The Romney-Ryan ticket is energizing to the GOP base, like it was for Democrats in '92. Clinton and Gore were about the same age, but that's not true here; Ryan is Tagg Romney's age. But the father-and-son imagery kind of worked in Norfolk although with neither man being a veteran, their appearance on a decommissioned battleship seemed ... odd. Ryan has his selling points. He dominates in a swing district...

"I went to a Goldwater organizing session in 1964. I met with Ronald Reagan for the first time in 1974. I worked with Jack Kemp, and Art Laffer and others to develop supply side economics in the late '70s. I helped Governor Reagan become President Reagan. I helped pass the Reagan economic program and worked with the National Security Council on issues including the collapse of the Soviet Empire," Newt Gingrich said at tonight's debate.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich has moved to capture some Republican voters who lean toward Ron Paul and other Republicans who were Jack Kemp followers by naming two gold bugs to the Gingrich future team of advisers. The former House speaker says he intends to appoint investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, famous in the Reagan era for his red suspenders and gold-standard advocacy, and Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, as President Gingrich’s Gold Commission - if and when of course Mr. Gingrich wins both the Republican nomination and the general election in November. Mr. Paul, a Texas...

Dubuque, Iowa - Continuing to contrast himself against Mitt Romney, the "Massachusetts moderate," Newt Gingrich declared he would grow the economy as president by reining in the government the way he had done with Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. "In 1982, Reagan was talked into a tax increase, I opposed it. Kemp and I led the fight against it. Reagan said it was a mistake; it was the biggest single mistake of his administration. In 1990, President Bush wanted to raise taxes and I opposed it. We had a huge fight. The majority of Republicans voted no. And this fight...

NEWT HELPED FORMULATE CHRISTMAS December 21, 2011Every few years, heinous Democratic policies -- abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, Hillarycare, Obamacare, to name a few -- compel previously uninvolved Americans to leap into politics. This is great, except for two things: (1) We have to get heinous Democratic policies first; and (2) newcomers have short memories, sometimes no memories at all. The second point is the only possible explanation for why some conservatives seem to view Newt Gingrich as the anti-Establishment outsider who will shake up Washington. Newly active right-wingers would do well to spend a little more time quietly...

Note: Old post but worth posting to show everyone how retarded Newsweek is by disrespecting the dead! No wonder their circulation was cut in half!) One does not want to be disrespectful of the dead, and Jack Kemp was an admirable man in many ways. If the Republican Party had only followed his advice about reaching out to the inner cities and underclass—and ignored his happy talk about supply-side economics—the GOP might not be in nearly the fix it is today. Unfortunately the opposite happened. Kemp, a consummate professional as a football player, was a classic case of an amateur...

Despite having written some tough criticisms of Jack Kemp over the years, having even called him a socialist when he was running the Department of Housing and Urban Development (1989–1993) under the first Bush administration, I've always had a soft spot for him. His death is really a tragedy and all the more so that it was not even widely remarked upon in Republican ranks. He was a major intellectual force in his day, and his sympathies with genuine liberalism of the old school made him attractive, at some level, to libertarians, if only because we understood each others' language....

I know I’ll probably catch hell for saying this, but no matter how nice a fellow Jack Kemp was, no matter how genuine his care for the poor might have been, no matter how compelling a political figure he was, and no matter how inspiring he was to a generation of young conservatives — and he was all of those things, as has been pointed out repeatedly — I think his political career ultimately did the cause of limited government more harm than good. Jack Kemp was greatly responsible for the now widely embraced GOP argument that cutting federal spending...

"I've taken showers," Jack Kemp loved to say, "with the kind of people most Republicans have never met." By the time Kemp died last week at 73, he was no longer a force in the Republican Party, but the warning contained in his joke resonates more than ever.... He wanted the "big tent" of the Republican Party to cover the entire football field where he once starred as a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. The black linemen who blocked for him and the blue-collar workers who cheered for him should all have a place in the GOP. But as Sen....

Former Vice Presidential candidate, Jack Kemp passed away this past Monday at the age of 73. He was a great American, and his brand of leadership will be sorely missed. http://conservativebrawler.blogspot.com/2009/05/tribute-to-jack-kemp.html

Jack Kemp was a great player in the world of ideas, with a mind as strong as his arm. His strength and friendship will be missed greatly.

Quarterbacking for Growth by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 05, 2009 It wasn’t only the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement that lost an elder statesmen with the passing of former Congressman Jack Kemp. Known for the historic tax cuts that bore his name, the former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills also consistently argued that inflating the money supply endangered the nation. I personally watched him do this 24 years ago. In those days, he would deliver a speech the way that he delivered touchdowns. “When the coat comes off, look out,” a co-worker warned me before then-Rep. Kemp spoke at...

The veteran strategist traveling with Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp was sneaking a smoke outside the Boeing Field hangar where his candidate held forth in final days of the 1996 campaign. "Whichever way this election goes, I can say that I've been with a winner: The guy is smart as a whip, never discouraged, full of ideas," said Washington, D.C., lawyer John Sears. Sears' words stopped there -- wisely. The parties' rival nominees for president, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, were famous for beating up on staff. Sears was fired as Ronald Reagan's manager a day after the Gipper's...

......the prize for over-the-top zealotry has to go to newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter, who all but accused the GOP of literally killing Jack Kemp. Speaking on "Face the Nation," Specter blamed the GOP agenda for his leap across the political aisle. "If we had pursued President Nixon's war on cancer," he said, I think Jack Kemp would be alive today." If Specter truly has the power of predicting life and death, he should leave the Senate and start booking bets....... if he truly believes government spending is all it takes, he needs not worry about establishing his Democratic bona...