Free Republic

TOKYO — Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Sunday that he will not resign, even as vote tallies increasingly indicated that his Democratic Party was heading for a major political setback in a midterm election widely seen as a referendum on the struggling nine-month-old government. With many districts reporting at least 80 percent of the vote counted in the Upper House election, the Democrats were trailing behind the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, with neither party likely to gain a majority of the 121 seats being contested. The results, if they hold up with further tallying, would be an embarrassing reversal for...

There are two ways to look at Republican Scott Brown's pivotal victory in the Senate race to represent Massachusetts. -- The voters looked at runaway spending in Washington and the corrupt deals cut to grease the support of key Democratic senators, government workers and Big Labor for Obamacare, and said: Enough. -- Fickle voters in a state that gave Obama 62 percent of the vote in November 2008 turned around and handed victory to a Republican, who pledged to block President Obama's health care package, because they voted in a knee-jerk response to this question: Whom do I hate the...

Contrary to continuing media propaganda, the 2006 election and the killing of the Senate "comprehensive" immigration bill do NOT prove that anti-amnesty is a loser for Republicans. The Democrats who won in 2006 campaigned with Republican-rhetoric messages calling for border security, and they kept their promises in the decisive cloture vote on June 28. Republican Senators voted "no" by a 3-to-1 majority (37 to 12), and they were conspicuously joined by three new Democratic senators who defeated incumbent Republicans in November after criticizing the failure of the U.S. government to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across U.S. borders. They...

Print Article Close Window Political Meltdown in Pennsylvania By Ralph R. Reiland Published 11/15/2005 12:05:04 AM PITTSBURGH -- "Politicians should be changed regularly, like diapers, and for the same reason," said Richard Davies, a Welsh Biblical scholar, five centuries ago. On election day in Pennsylvania this year, more of us than ever before agreed with Davies. On the morning after the election, the front pages of the newspapers told the results of an unprecedented wave of voter anger: "It is the first time in more than 200 years of Pennsylvania history that an incumbent judge has lost his bid for...

Recall High Anxiety By Tammy Bruce FrontPageMagazine.com | September 26, 2003 Earlier this week a disturbing tune had begun to infiltrate my conversations with friends. Both Republicans and Democrats (yes, I have pals who hail from both camps), began to express something which I can only describe as Recall Fatigue. Even though we’re being bombarded with messages by people who do not have our best interests in mind, it’s too important a time to tire. Many of my Democrat friends, most of whom had signed the recall petition and were looking forward to voting “Yes” on the ballot, began to...

Government seems to grow constantly bigger and ever more intrusive in our lives. Modem history reads like a tale of interventionism run amuck. In a recent Freeman article, Robert Higgs outlines the pattern of government growth in the United States in the 20th century.1He explains that national crises (e.g., World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II) have contributed to a shift in public ideology, leading to popular acceptance of ever-bigger government. Increasingly, special interest groups have learned to manipulate the political process for their own ends, and the private economy has become a "cash cow" used as...