Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen.-elect Rand Paul says GOP lawmakers must be open to cutting military spending as Congress tries to reduce government spending. The tea party favorite from Kentucky says compromise with Democrats over where to cut spending must include the military as well as social programs. Paul says all government spending must be “on the table.” Paul tells ABC’s “This Week” that he supports a constitutional amendment calling for a balanced budget.

I am opposed to the building of the "mosque" two blocks from Ground Zero. I want it built on Ground Zero. Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000...

There appears to be a rift in the House of Paul. Republican Rep. Ron Paul has split with his son Rand over the mosque near Ground Zero, formally known as the Cordoba House. The senior Paul, in a statement released Friday, ripped into opponents of the religious and cultural center. In the statement Paul compares lawmakers to the infamous Emperor Nero, "It looks to me like the politicians are 'fiddling while the economy burns,'" and goes on to blame the neo-conservative movement for fueling the controversy, "They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for...

A new financial report filed Sunday evening showed Sarah Palin’s political action committee has taken its fundraising to a higher level – and suggests that she has begun building a more sophisticated political operation in place of a bare-bones organization powered mostly by her rock star status and scrappy on-line presence. The report, filed with the Federal Election Commission, shows that Palin’s political action committee raised more money in the second quarter of this year – $866,000 – than it had in any previous three-month stretch since Palin formed the group in January 2009. The committee, Sarah PAC, also spent...

As Congress considers appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for the Department of Defense, a bipartisan group of legislators today announced an initiative to urge the President’s deficit reduction commission to reduce military spending as part of government efforts to address the budget deficit. At a press conference today, Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA), Ron Paul (R-TX), and Walter Jones (R-NC), along with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), released a copy of their joint letter to the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and outlined their plans for forcing serious consideration of spending that has long been considered...

The administration's terrible healthcare reform bill is now law, but the debate over how-- and whether-- the federal government should be involved in providing healthcare services is not over. It is not too late for America to correct its course and stop the march toward a government run, "single payer" healthcare system. Polls show that a large majority of Americans don't want Obamacare. Congress should seize the opportunity to repeal the very worst aspect of this new legislation, namely the mandate that forces every American either to purchase health insurance or face an IRS penalty. This mandate represents nothing more...

This one was one that you just couldn't let go - that libertarian champion and former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, Texas, doesn't have a basic understanding of economics. That was the claim made by CNBC senior analyst and commentator Ron Insana on the June 14 broadcast of "Closing Bell." At issue was a June 14 Washington Post article by Robert O'Hara and Dan Keating that suggested there was a conflict of interest in Paul's investments and his policy stances, as in he is a proponent of the gold standard and other uses for the precious medal. "Rep. Ron...

If I had my druthers, the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine would be but a small news brief in American newspapers. But since we police the world, we must always monitor our global police scanner, where not only Israel's conflicts, but those of North and South Korea, the nation of Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and pretty much everywhere else is the United States' business because we insist on making it so. What many Americans bizarrely consider national "defense" is actually an aggressive and enduring offense, and yet we are always surprised when other nations get offended. Last week,...

Behind the scenes the insider Republican establishment is now in an uproar as the odds are high that Rand Paul wins the Republican nomination for senator from Kentucky. This would be a major embarrassment to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and raises a big question about 2012: Why is Sarah Palin getting so much attention, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) so little, from the national media and pundit classes? Certain pundits appear strangely infatuated with Palin, but it seems to me that if Ron Paul runs for president in 2012, he could win a plurality of delegates in a multi-candidate field....

The one main benefit to the financial reform effort so far is that it helps further do away with the false paradigms of "left" or "right" and "Democrat" or "Republican" - fewer and fewer people are falling for those lies anymore. Try to get an ideological conservative to explain why Republicans love spending and so eagerly give welfare to banks. Try to get your local liberal to explain why it was a good idea to make backroom deals with abhorrent corporations and drill, baby, drill. Heck, even try to get a Tea Partier to explain choosing bailout-lover Sarah Palin to...

Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demonstrates his fundamental misunderstanding and hostility towards the truly free market. But a closer, honest examination of his policies and actions in office reveals that, much like the previous administration, he is very much a corporatist. This in many ways can be more insidious and worse than being an outright socialist. Socialism is a system where the government directly...

The Tea Party is still in the infanct stage of development, and as such we are still learning exactly what the movement looks like. A recent poll by POLITICO/TargetPoint confirmed what many already thought about the Tea Party demographics. First, what unites the Tea Party is an intense anger against the growth of government and policies of the Obama administration. Three-quarters of Tea Party members believe that President Obama is driving a "socialist agenda." The bad news for Republicans is that this anger extends to them as well. Three-fourths of Tea Party members said they wished to send a message...

Sarah Palin, 55 percent unfavorable poll ratings notwithstanding, is a political phenomenon the likes of which American public life rarely has seen. There's something distinctive, something deeply personal, about the way her legions of strong supporters rush not just to defend her but to counter-attack any and all of her critics. Palin has a way of establishing a sense of connectedness with her backers -- such a strong, attitudinal sense that she is not just like them but one of them -- that she has created what amounts to a one-woman, conservative "identity politics" writ very, very large. Yet if...

A woman who calls herself a "hardcore street activist" and "psycho babe" of internet radio is accused of locking her daughters out of her house because they wouldn't do what they were told. Christie Czajkowski, 37, is charged with five felonies in Taney County: -Two counts of felony child abuse -Two counts of endangering the welfare of a child -One count of resisting arrest On Thursday, Taney County Judge, Tony Williams, reduced her bond from $50,000 to $10,000. Two hours after her bond reduction hearing, Czajkowski posted bond and left the jail. KSPR talked to Czajkowski about the charges ...

Recently I ran across a video interview in which Sarah Palin enthusiastically declares "I support Michael Steele…I think he's doing a great job. Michael Steele is an outsider. The machine, I think, is tough to penetrate--I think it's been good to have an independent outsider trying to create some change in the Republican Party." Michael Steele has from the first day of his tenure been a spokesman for the RINO, pro-abortion, amoral, 'money is god' elite minority that presently controls the Republican Party. The statement that Steele is an outsider is an outright lie. He has for some years now...

Why in the hell is Karl Rove on my TV? Why is Karl Rove on my radio? Why is Karl Rove on anywhere? Unless he’s on trial or being interrogated, I can’t imagine of what possible use this George W. Bush relic could be to conservatives and yet he’s everywhere, hocking his book “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” a title as credibly right-wing as Stephen Colbert and as historically accurate as the movie “Titanic.” Craig Shirley and former Reagan official Donald Devine summed up Rove’s duplicity well in this week’s Washington Post: “From William...

(snip) VAN SUSTEREN: Governor Palin, if you were vice president today, what would you be telling a President McCain about what to do about immigration, if anything? PALIN: I support his position on immigration. It all comes down to securing the border. And he who has actually proposed some solutions, the Obama administration does not want to listen to Senator McCain or any other Republican, and that, of course, leads to a greater problem that we have in Washington, D.C. And it's that lack of the new administration's ability and enthusiasm for listening to those on the other side of...

On her blog, Elizabeth Wright offers an excellent analysis of the mass hysteria that is the Sarah Palin phenomenon. Wright is a black conservative who specializes in debunking the sense of victimhood that so many black leaders love to employ to their advantage. She argues that the many wannabe conservatives who are Palin fans are employing the same tactic. They invoke the liberal sense of victimhood in her defense. That of course is the essence of the Palin cult. It consists of people who feel that they're being put upon by their betters. It never occurs to these characters to...

There was a shooting just outside the Pentagon today, at a security checkpoint. Two cops were injured; breaking reports say the suspect, J. Patrick Bedell, has died. The suspect, believed to be a U.S. citizen, walked up to a security checkpoint at the Pentagon in an apparent attempt to get inside the massively fortified Defense Department headquarters, at about 6:40 p.m. local time. “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” at point-blank range, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with...

For the most part, CPAC ran smoothly, but there's one thing they don't do well, and that's straw polls. In 2008 Romney stacked it by purchasing many, many CPAC tickets for his friends. I don't know how they did it previously, but this year voting was cut off at noon on Friday, before probably half of the attendees were credentialed. As a result, only about 25% of the attendees voted (2,500 out of 10,000), so those who like work for a living and could only come for the big events on Saturday, didn't get counted. But ALL the Ron Paul...