Free Republic

If you don’t think ideological perceptions matter in American politics, you need read no further. If you do and you’re a Democrat, there’s something to worry about. Even as the terms of the political debate in Washington, in the eyes of many Democrats, have moved steadily to the right, the electorate is increasingly likely to see itself as ideologically closer to the Republican Party than to Democrats. Unless Obama and Democrats can find a solution to this riddle—and find one fast—they will be contesting the 2012 election on forbidding terrain.In mid-2005, as disaffection with the Bush administration and the...

A Recap Of the CRP Platform Committee Activity At the Convention There is much to be said about the California Republican Party’s Fall Convention held in downtown Los Angeles last weekend. Presidential candidates and a straw poll, great workshops and townhalls, tributes, speeches and more. The better part of a thousand GOP activists, donors and leaders descended on the L.A. Live! Marriott-Ritz hotel, across from the Staples Center (we were the pre-show for the Emmy Awards, I guess). This column, however, is devoted to only one aspect of the convention – the ongoing process of the quadrennial adoption of the...

Rush Limbaugh Schools Us On Moderates: Moderation Is Not A Substantive Belief, Moderation Is A Tactic. Moderates Exist To Be SEEN As Something Rather Than Existing To BE Something.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is still weighing a presidential bid, said Sunday that the Republican Party should stop focusing on gay marriage and "get the heck out of people's bedrooms." Giuliani, who personally supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage, said that he was against the recent vote in New York to legalize gay marriage in the state. But while he called that decision "wrong," he described it as a "democratic vote" and urged Republicans to move on. "I think that marriage should be between a man and a woman, but I think that the Republican Party...

Mitch McConnell is right now talking about making a historic capitulation. So fearful of being blamed for a default, McConnell is proposing a compromise that lets Barack Obama raise the debt ceiling without making any spending cuts at all. Consider sending McConnell a weasel as testament to his treachery. His address is 601 W. Broadway, Room 630, Louisville, KY 40202 and the phone number is (502) 582-6304. McConnell’s idea is to make the debt ceiling automatic unless Congress, by a 2/3 vote blocks the increase. Oh yes, he put a salve on it by dressing it up in tough talk...

This is what progressives do. Grow power in the executive, at the expense of other branches. Once again, you have the republican establishment snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory and putting defeat right back front and center. It's time to light up McConnell's office, no matter what part of the country you're from. One of the headlines regarding what McConnell just said is this: McConnell Proposal Gives Obama Power to Increase Debt Limit And that's exactly the kind of thing that's going to get tea partiers to form a third party. That's the last thing we need. And...

On Fox News this weekend, Jon Stewart famously denied that the New York Times pushes a liberal agenda. Perhaps the man from Comedy Central sees the paper as "moderate." After all, the Times itself apparently doesn't believe there are any liberals on the Supreme Court. In an editorial today, the paper described Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and every other member of her liberal wing of the Court, as "moderate." The Times' mind-boggling notion of what constitutes a "moderate" came in its editorial blasting the Supreme Court's decision of yesterday throwing out a huge class-action sex-discrimination case against Wal-Mart. Here's the relevant excerpt...

Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney and other Democrats by Steve BarrettWhy is Mitt Romney still running for president?Let me rephrase: Why is Mitt Romney still running for president — as a Republican? Shouldn’t he be seeking the Democrat nomination and snapping up as many center-left votes as possible while Barack Obama forages for support on the MoveOn.org fringe? After all, there’s incontrovertible evidence of Romney’s Democrat credentials. It’s called RomneyCare, and he merrily shepherded it into law as governor of Massachusetts. How’d that work out? Well, it’s estimated that without radical reform of RomneyCare, annual premiums for a typical...

Conservative Republicans are rightfully giddy about the results of the midterm elections. The enormous Republican wave washed away hundreds of Democrats at all levels of government, giving Republicans their highest number of seats in the House of Representatives since 1946, and their largest number of state legislators since 1928. More important, the currents that caused the wave clearly work to Republicans' benefit: Voters were expressing widespread opposition to the liberal direction in which President Obama and the Democratic Congress have taken the country. This has led many conservatives to argue that, on November 2, 2010, America returned to its normal...

Long term, Republicans growing more conservative, Democrats more liberal PRINCETON, NJ -- The political composition of U.S. adults held fairly steady in 2010 compared with 2009. Conservatives remained the largest group, followed by moderates and then liberals. At 35%, the percentage of moderates has declined to a new low, highlighting the increased political polarization that has occurred over the past decade. Gallup measures Americans' political ideology by asking respondents to define their views as very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. The trends represent annual averages of stand-alone, multiday Gallup surveys conducted each year, with more than 26,000 interviews...

In a dramatic display of the new Republican order, Minnesota’s state GOP banished 18 prominent party members — including two former governors and a retired U.S. senator — as punishment for supporting a third-party candidate for governor. The stunning purge, narrowly passed by the state Republican central committee last weekend, suggests more than just a fit of pique: by banning some of the state’s leading moderates, the Minnesota GOP moved toward extinguishing a dying species of Republican in one of its last habitats. Those exiled warned that the measure, which bans the 18 former members from participating in party activities...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is on the cusp of vindication after waging a high stakes - and long shot - write-in campaign to keep her job. Initial returns show write-in ballots holding a 13,439-vote edge over GOP nominee Joe Miller, and though it's not clear how many of those are for her or will be counted as valid, she's confident enough in her winning to tell supporters that they'd "made history." The write-in count starts Wednesday in Juneau.

mod-er-ates: [noun] Fans of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi -- The CBS Dictionary It would be funny if it weren't so outrageous . . . CBS is trying to pawn off the rally organized by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart—the guy who had Barack Obama on his show for for a half-hour this week—as a gathering of "moderates." CBS correspondent Wyatt Andrews used the m-word to describe the gathering masses in his report on this morning's Early Show. View video after the jump.

I don't know about you, but my heart sank when I read about Jon Stewart's Million Moderate March, planned for the Mall next weekend. My heart sank further when I learned that liberal groups, lacking any better ideas, have decided to take this endeavor seriously. It's bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a "Rally to Restore Sanity" is to make it into a television comedian's joke. But it's far worse that the "moderates" in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This is...

All Americans, including conservatives, understand why any leftist would vote Democrat this year. The Democratic party is now America’s version of a European Social Democratic or even a Green party. In domestic policy, there is no significant difference between Democrats and those European parties. So there is no question as to why those on the left would vote Democrat. There is, however, a legitimate question regarding non-leftist Americans: Why would any of them vote for a Democrat this year? The Democratic president and Democratic party have expanded the American government to an unprecedented extent. Moreover, they have done so in...

How does Lisa Murkowski compare to other Republican senators from the Rocky Mountain region? Against her 68% ACU voting record, the other Republican senators in the region have these ACU voting records: Ensign (WY) 100%, Barasso (WY) 100%, Crapo (ID) 92%, Risch (ID) 96%, Hatch (UT) 88%, Bennett (UT) 84%, Ensign (NV) 100%, Kyl (AZ) 92%, and McCain (AZ) 96%. Lisa was much less conservative than Senator McCain, the archetypical RINO or Senator Bennett, the Utah Republican denied re-nomination this year. Lisa Murkowski, not Joe Miller, is out of touch with voters in the region. It gets worse. Out of...

A Tectonic shift is in mo tion: How fitting that its focal point is Ground Zero, the inevitable fault line between Islam and the West. Only the blink of an eye ago, uttering the unpleasant truth that in terms of doctrine there is no such thing as "moderate Islam" resulted in one's banishment from what our opinion elites like to call the "mainstream," by which they mean the narrow-minded, viciously defended circle of their own pieties and fictions. You could say it, but your skin had better have an extra coat or two of thick: You were in for a...

Republicans are now leading in 47 congressional districts held by Democrats. (This is up 8 just since last week.) There are another 5 seats held by retiring Democrats in significantly Republican-leaning districts which have not been polled. That's a total of 52 seats, almost equal to the number gained by Republicans in the 1994 election (54). There are another 20 where Republicans have pulled very close to Democrats, and the Democrats are polling well below 50%, normally a sign of grave danger this early in the election season. And of course, although the media tend to poll the races where...

As past statements of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf continue to surface, many Americans have concluded that the would-be builder of a mosque at Ground Zero is lying when he calls himself a “moderate” representative of his faith. The more disturbing possibility, however, is that he’s telling the truth — that Rauf is indeed the voice of mainstream Islam. One indication is the resounding silence from the rest of the Islamic community. If that community were truly moderate — as we in the West understand the term — one might expect it to distance itself from a man who blames the...

Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim “moderate” is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization. It is really not a hard question, even if Feisal Rauf can’t — or won’t — answer it. Rauf, the would-be imam of the controversial Ground Zero mosque, is also a stud in the State Department’s stable of ready-to-travel-on-your-dime “moderates.” That same State Department has branded Hamas a terrorist organization, and we can’t even get it to say that about the Taliban, the guys we’re fighting in the overseas contingency operation formerly known as the...