Free Republic

David Perdue kicked off his campaign for governor of Georgia with an emphatic endorsement from former President Donald Trump. But since then, his primary challenge to unseat Brian Kemp -- the Republican governor Trump loves to hate -- has been a big flop. Perdue, a former US senator, has so far raised a fraction of what Kemp has in his campaign war chest. Very few Republican elected officials, operatives, donors and activists in Georgia have abandoned Kemp in favor of Perdue. And limited public polling hasn't been promising, either. "I think Perdue is on life support and knows it," said...

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Monday her party cannot accept the "poison" of the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and should not "whitewash" the January 6 Capitol riot -- and Donald Trump's role in fomenting it. "We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy," Cheney said, speaking behind closed doors at a conference in Sea Island, Georgia. "We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6...

Washington (CNN) In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did. "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are," Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy. McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump's supporters and begged Trump to call them off. Trump's comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious...

President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how the President had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, comments that came as more than 40,000 Americans already had died from the virus, which was ravaging New York City. In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was "getting the country back from the doctors" in what he called a "negotiated settlement." Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the "panic phase" and "pain phase" of the pandemic and that the country was...

(CNN)Miles Taylor, a former senior Trump administration official, endorsed Joe Biden's presidential campaign on Monday, becoming one of the highest-ranking former Trump administration officials to do so. Taylor, who served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, also accused President Donald Trump of repeatedly using his office for political purposes, including directing officials to cut wildfire relief funding to California because voters there overwhelmingly opposed him in 2016. Taylor, a longtime Republican and political appointee at DHS from 2017 to 2019, endorsed the former vice president in a video produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump...

Donald Trump has always been a man of absolutes. Something is the best or the worst, a person is a winner or a total loser, an event has never happened before, even when it has. Absolutism was the unwritten credo of his career in business and is the guiding light of his presidency as he makes an assertion rarely heard from an American president: that he can do as he pleases. Now that approach faces its ultimate test as a foundation of Trump’s defense in his impeachment trial, namely that he is cloaked with unrestrained authority. How that question is...

The journalist Joe Klein, a leading Bill Clinton chronicler in the 1990s, said Tuesday that he was an “enabler” for defending the then-president. Klein said in an interview with the NPR show On Point that he didn’t think Democrats today would stand by Clinton the way they did in the 1990s as the cultural landscape has shifted on sexual misconduct. “I must confess to having been a Clinton enabler during that time,” Klein told guest host Jane Clayson. “In that I defended him, and we all knew that he was a cad. There's no question about that. But it was...

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is vetting Carly Fiorina as a potential running mate, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned. According to a spokeswoman for Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and one-time presidential candidate is being vetted by Cruz's campaign. "Normal stuff," said Sarah Isgur Flores, who served as deputy campaign manager during Fiorina's bid, when asked about the process. She added that Fiorina has met with members of the Cruz campaign and has given them financial disclosures and other documentation. Flores added that "no offers" have been made. On ABC's This Week Sunday, reporter Jon Karl floated the idea that Cruz...

Jeb Bush has the support of just one percent of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, according to a new poll from CBS News. The poll, released Sunday, found Bush with the same level of support as Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and John Kasich. That puts Bush behind Chris Christie (2 percent), Rand Paul (3 percent), Ben Carson (5 percent), Marco Rubio (13 percent), Ted Cruz (34 percent), and Donald Trump (39 percent). The poor numbers for Bush come nearly a month after Right to Rise, the super PAC supporting the former Florida governor, made a $25 million ad buy in...

Jeb Bush is qualifying some recent criticism of fellow Floridian and GOP rival Marco Rubio. Last week the former Florida governor said that the young senator does not have the “skills to fix things” as president. What’s with the change of emphasis? As CNN’s Sara Murray reported Sunday, some donors to Bush’s campaign are not pleased with prospect the super PAC supporting Bush, Right to Rise, will aim its fire at Rubio. “They actually like Rubio,” Murray said of the Bush donors. “They think he could be a good second choice if Bush can’t get his poll numbers up, they...

Hillary Clinton still leads the Democratic field in Iowa, but according to a new Public Policy Polling survey of "usual Democratic voters" in the Hawkeye state independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is making gains there.

.Allen West's new ad: The most brutal clip of 2012? The video: The campaign season has seen its share of vicious attack ads, but freshman Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) has just released what might be the most brutal campaign commercial of the year. (Take a look at the 30-second video below.) The spot begins with a montage spotlighting the controversial, blunt-spoken Tea Party favorite's military career, saying that on Feb. 16, 2003, West, then an Army colonel, was at Fort Hood, Texas, where he had just received deployment orders, and was preparing his men to go to war. Then it...

*snip* The Obama transition team released the names of 13 people on Wednesday who will direct a top-to-bottom review of federal agencies and another six who will lead teams that will review Treasury, State and Defense department policy, budget and personnel issues. *snip* It includes four former lobbyists, three top campaign fund-raisers and two former employees of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, with some overlap among them. Four people in the group have ties to the consultant McKinsey & Co. and two have experience leading high-tech start-ups. Mr. Obama's transition advisers include Tom Donilon, a top lobbyist for Fannie Mae,...

When one third of Democratic voters say that they believe President Bush knew in advance of 9/11, and a majority of Democrats either believe this nonsense or aren’t sure about it, we are obviously in deep trouble. How has our society and our educational system failed so badly? How can so many people ignore crystal clear facts and reach conclusions of such lunatic proportions?