Free Republic

South Carolina’s primary — and its state pride — is on the line. Faced with a state GOP that’s low on cash and a governor who’s cut off taxpayer funds, officials are scrambling to put together the $1.5 million necessary to run operations for the 2012 GOP presidential primary. Primaries used to be the parties’ burden. But in 2008, Republicans and Democrats won state funding for their presidential primaries, which now allow crossover voting, putting their management in the hands of the State Election Commission for the first time. With tough economic times in the Palmetto State, the expected funding...

People who get paid to talk for a living are bound to make a lot of innocent mistakes when they talk. This includes our elected representatives. But mistakes made by conservatives almost always generate more media coverage than mistakes by liberals. And so yet another dreary left-wing hit piece on Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) emerges. This time it is disguised as a fact-checking exercise. (Of course Bachmann’s misstatements are trifling compared to those of Barack “57 States” Obama and Joe “Stand Up For Chuck” Biden.) The phony fact-checkers are Jonathan Martin and Kendra Marr of the Politico. They say Bachmann...

... I read the reactions from a wide ranging interview which former Senator Rick Santorum gave to Terry Jeffrey of CNSNEWS.com entitled "Santorum Says He Agrees With MLK on Moral Basis for Human Rights; Can't Understand Why Obama Would Deny Them to an Unborn Child." I recommend the written article containing portions of the interview and the outstanding video of the full interview embedded within that article. ...Senator Santorum's speech in Houston and his interview with Terry Jeffrey are a breath of fresh air in an age of political sound bites and jingoism. The Senator offers substance and sanity. ...Senator...

Just hours after Tim Pawlenty ended his presidential race, the race for his supporters was already well underway. Many of the former Minnesota governor’s staffers, donors and volunteers said rival campaigns contacted them shortly after Pawlenty announced his decision Sunday. Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney all made direct phone calls to key supporters, while other campaigns put out more indirect feelers. ......Tricia Pridemore, Pawlenty’s Georgia finance chair, immediately got an e-mail from one rival candidate and a phone call from another on Sunday morning. Declining to specify who was reaching out, she said wasn’t ready to make a...

Defiant in the face of direct calls for his resignation from New Hampshire’s elected Republican leadership, embattled state GOP chairman Jack Kimball on Thursday refused to step down. “Those who seek to remove me from my duly elected position must recognize I represent a movement — a political movement — much larger than myself,” Kimball said at a press conference he called at the Legislative Office Building in Concord. “I plead with them not to pick this fight. It will only damage the party and cause unnecessary division.” The internal New Hampshire GOP war has become an embarrassing diversion just...

Gingrich warns against secularism By: Kendra Marr April 27, 2011 09:26 AM EDT Speaking at the National Catholic Prayer breakfast, Newt Gingrich on Wednesday warned Catholics that Europe’s “crisis of secularism” — spawning a “government-favored culture to replace Christianity” — has seized the United States.“The American elites are guided by their desire to emulate the European elites and, as a result, anti-religious values and principles are coming to dominate the academic, news media and judicial class in America,” he said in Washington.Gingrich lashed out against the “secular pressures” that have led scientific publications to replace Anno Domini (A.D.) with the Common...

President Obama: Fire failing teachersBy KENDRA MARR Updated: 9/27/10 12:57 PM EDT President Barack Obama took aim at the nation’s failing schools Monday, saying bad teachers should be fired if they’re not cutting it and that students should stay in school longer each year. Obama also leveled a critique of the Washington, D.C., public schools, saying his daughters wouldn’t get as good an education there as at their private school. "I'll be blunt with you,” Obama answered. “The answer is 'no' right now.” "You can't defend a status quo in which a third of our kids are dropping out," the...

Is there a double standard for conservatives when it comes to criticism of their public speaking missteps compared to liberals? Take for example Politico and its 800-plus word treatise on Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann’s gaffe, written by Jonathan Martin and Kendra Marr on Saturday. They had every possible angle covered. However, flash back to May 2008 when Martin filed a post about President Barack Obama’s 57-state gaffe — it wasn’t quite as in depth (video + 17 words). That’s the sort of double standard Bachmann questioned on Laura Ingraham’s radio show on Tuesday when she explained her gaffe, in...

The governor’s 2012 rivals have latched onto his executive order mandating the HPV vaccine and his advocacy for in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, while little has been said about his unrealized 1,200-foot-wide toll road project that would have swallowed more than 500,000 acres of Texas farmland and wildlife habitats. But as the focus of debates increasingly turn toward President Barack Obama’s jobs agenda — a plan calling for a heavy dose of infrastructure investment — that may change. “Pay to play, cronyism — all those charges can be found right here in the Trans-Texas Corridor,” said Terri Hall, founder and...

Any news junkie will tell you that Politico has been on a steady decline in journalistic standards for the past few years. They have taken it to new levels with the latest piece of hackery by the leftist mouthpiece Jonathan Martin and Kendra Marr entitled "For Michele Bachman, a pattern of getting facts wrong." This story, the top "news item" last night on politico.com was a hitpiece entirely about some verbal miscues Michele Bachmann apparently made in New Hampshire. Martin said: "For Bachmann, who leads the House Tea Party caucus and champions a return to the Constitution, to get such...

A NYT reporter has brought information to Politico‘s Editor-in-Chief John Harris and Executive Editor Jim VandeHei that has led to a reporter’s forced resignation. Politico issued a lengthy and serious memo tonight to employees announcing that Kendra Marr, a national political reporter who recently moved to a transportation beat, has been let go after numerous examples of lifted passages from other publications surfaced in seven of her stories.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Politico says a reporter has resigned after editors determined she had plagiarized stories about transportation, most recently from a New York Times article. Editor-in-chief John F. Harris and executive editor Jim VandeHei said in an online note that the stories by Kendra Marr "borrowed from the work of others, without attribution, in ways which we cannot defend and will not tolerate."