Free Republic

With the runoff just two days away in Louisiana’s Senate race, the excitement of the final contest in the 2014 midterms is so thick one could cut it with a knife … at least on the GOP side. Since independent pollsters gave up on the finale of Mary Landrieu’s Senate career, Republican pollsters are the only ones taking surveys — or at least the only ones publishing the results. The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker takes a look at the latest results from WPA Opinion Research, working on behalf of the conservative group Independent Women’s Voice, and finds Bill Cassidy out...

Local radio hosts in Louisiana mocked Sen. Mary Landrieu for giving a poor interview immediately after having the embattled Democrat on the air on Wednesday. During an interview on 710 KEEL News Radio in Shreveport, La., conducted by Robert Wright and Erin McCarty, Landrieu continued her drum beat for the last week of the runoff election by answering every question with accusations against her opponent Rep. Bill Cassidy and his medical work at LSU. ....

**SNIP** The Senate race will be the main attraction of the night, as we wait to see whether Landrieu can retain her title as a political survivor or if Cassidy will become seat number 54 for Republicans in the next Senate class. Having won two of her three previous elections through runoffs, Landrieu’s campaign continues to express optimism that she can pull out another surprise victory this year. The last time Landrieu faced a runoff in 2002, she was widely expected to lose the contest. But in the final days of the campaign, a late-breaking story fueled rumors that the...

Republicans appear poised to expand their Senate majority with a runoff election in Louisiana on Saturday that would cap big wins for their party in the Nov. 4 midterm elections. Republican Representative Bill Cassidy is running against Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, and has a comfortable lead in polls. If he wins, he would be the ninth Republican to capture a previously Democratic seat. His victory would give Republicans 54 seats in the 100-member Senate, enough for a majority but not the 60 seats needed to avoid the tactical blocking procedure known as...

The Keystone XL Pipeline project is almost certainly dead. No, not because a bill that would have finally given the go-ahead to begin construction fell one vote short in the lame duck Senate last month. Sure, that halted the legislative approval process in its tracks, but only until January, when a new Congress arrives and is sworn in. Republicans, who will have a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have pledged to bring it back for another vote in the next session. The next vote may well bring a different result, but will the pipeline ever...

The number of people who cast their ballots early in Louisiana dropped off from the Nov. 4 primary election to the Dec. 6 runoff election in every statewide category except one: registered Republican voters. About 85,900 registered Republicans took advantage of early voting for the Dec. 6 runoff. That's almost 3,000 more than voted early for the Nov. 4 election, and amounts to a 4 percent bump in early voting overall from a month ago. The jump in early Republican voters is noteworthy, given that early voting overall dropped by 10 percent from the November primary to the December runoff....

Only by overlooking important forces in markets and politics can anyone assert that Saudi Arabia is letting crude prices fall mainly to extinguish competition from North American shale oil. With oil, the Saudi regime always takes the long view. With security, however, its motivations are more immediate. The kingdom faces unusually intense threats: Islamic State (IS) militancy in Iraq and Syria, the chance that Iran won’t agree by a Nov. 24 deadline to suspend its nuclear ambitions, terrorist insurrections from restive Yemen, durability of the menacing government of Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus. Falling oil prices hurt the IS and Iran,...

Sometimes what makes a very good TV ad is that you don't know it is a TV ad until it is almost over. In this ad, it starts by a woman talking about how she is pregnant and bleeding and concern for her baby (unborn). Then the husband starts talking about the bleeding and prospect of a pre-mature birth. Next, the couple shows the baby born at 24 weeks, and remarking how beautiful the baby is. It is commented on how viable the baby is at this point. Next the ad talks about late term abortions and how terrible they...

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu isn't running against President Barack Obama, but she might as well be. The president is intensely unpopular among white voters in Louisiana, and Republicans and Democrats agree that dynamic could doom Landrieu in a Dec. 6 runoff against Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.

Today is the last day Louisiana residents can vote early before election day on Dec. 6. The polls are open until 6 p.m. snip With one day left in the early voting period, Louisiana residents don't appear to be casting their ballots early as frequently as they were before the Nov. 4. primary. Around 174,700 people have voted early so far, compared to 236,000 overall before the primary election. The Dec. 6 early voting period has included fewer days than the Nov. 4 early voting period because of the Thanksgiving holiday, which could have affected turnout. Louisiana has not had...

|Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, who's running for Senate, says his opponent, Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu, has failed to advance an oil pipeline that would benefit Louisiana.

One Democratic congressman is so opposed to the Keystone XL Pipeline that he wouldn’t vote for it even if his party got a minimum-wage bump from Republicans in exchange. “I wouldn’t make that trade,” Rep. Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” of a hypothetical raise to $9.50 per hour. Senate Democrats late Tuesday filibustered a measure to green-light the contentious oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast, potentially dooming the chances of party colleague Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and underscoring the power of the pro-environment caucus. Republicans vowed to put President Obama’s veto pen to the...

When it came time for the US Senate to vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline, Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) “clout” did not have much of an impact on fellow Democrat senators. In fact, 35 of the senators who voted against the project were given campaign cash by Landrieu since the 2008 election cycle. Take a look here at the list of senators who don’t seem to acknowledge Landrieu’s “clout.” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) $10,000 Sen. Richard Blumenthal (R-CT) $5,000 Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) $10,000 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) $7,000 Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) $10,000 Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) $3,500 Sen....

TransCanada Corp. is dramatically expanding its effort to win public support for its proposed $12-billion Energy East project, including an effort to target opposition groups that are gearing up to fight the project in central and eastern Canada. Documents obtained by Greenpeace and released late Monday show the embattled pipeline company has hired the world’s largest public relations firm, Edelman, which has a reputation for aggressive tactics in the United States and proposed a similar approach in Canada in a strategic plan completed in August. TransCanada spokesman James Millar said Monday the company learned valuable lessons in its battle over...

“Understand what this project is,” Barack Obama said earlier this week when pressed on why his administration continues to stall on the Keystone XL pipeline after almost six years of waiting for a decision. “It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.”CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Understand what that was, Glenn Kessler responds today in a Washington Post fact check. It’s a three-Pinocchio lie based on an ignorant-at-best interpretation of a presentation slide from environmental activists. The refineries in...

Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are stoking fear about the project by connecting it to two of the biggest bogeymen in politics: Charles and David Koch. The claim goes that the Koch brothers stand to make $100 billion if the pipeline gets built. The figure, which would effectively double the Kochs’ net worth, has bounced around liberal news organizations and was repeated this month by progressive radio talk show and TV host Thom Hartmann on his RT show. Take it with a block of salt, a PunditFact analysis finds.

(CNSNews.com) - "Tonight the Senate has an important opportunity to send a bill to build the Keystone Pipeline to the president's desk," House Speaker John Boehner told a news conference on Tuesday. "Now let's be clear about this. A Keystone Pipeline veto would send the signal that this president has no interest in listening to the American people. Vetoing an overwhelmingly popular bill would be a clear indication that he doesn't care about the American people's priorities.""It would be the equivalent of calling the American people 'stupid,'" Boehner said.

What do train whistles and Warren Buffett have in common? If you answered old-fashioned charm, you’re wrong. The Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, calls the avuncular billionaire “the man behind the exploding trains.” Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns Union Tank Car Company, North America’s largest leaser of tank cars. Berkshire also owns BNSF Railway Company, which moves many of those cars.

So the Senate Democrats just defeated the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline by 1 vote. Sitting duck Mary Landrieu — the soon-to-be former senator from Louisiana — begged her Democratic colleagues to vote for the energy-and-job-creating project but, no, the Fauxcahontas Elizabeth Warren “Green” wing of the party chose leftist sanctimoniousness over practicality. Here’s the thing about energy: we need as much of it as we can get as cheaply as possible. Are you worried about “the environment,” “peak oil,” etc.? Then you should be an aivd supporter of fracking, the Keystone pipeline, and any other means of extracting fossil...

Nov 18th 2014 5:58PM New Orleans mayor: Do-over in bungled rape cases Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Tuesday that a special team of police officers would reopen hundreds of mishandled cases uncovered by a city inspector general's audit that was released last week. The report charged five detectives failed to do substantial investigation of more than 1,000 sex crimes and child abuse cases.