Free Republic

Yesterday, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter spent an entire segment unloading on Governor Palin. At one point in the interview, Ingraham pontificated, “In all seriousness, I think the country is looking for…look, people like Palin, it’s fine to show up at these events and whip up the crowd. There’s a place for that…I think we need that. But people — when I talk to them, they seem to be desperate and hungry more so than ever for real substance beyond kind of the sloganeering and the bumper sticker stuff and Obama is driving the country down.” Yes, Laura, what you...

What a weekend! From Iowa to New Hampshire, S4P had the incredible opportunity to see Governor Palin speak at two lively Tea Party rallies in seventy-two hours. While we’ll still reeling from the sheer awesomeness of this weekend, we wanted to take the time to share with you some of the extraordinary (and, yes, hopeful!) things we observed this weekend! 1. The Young People Were Out in Force If you read/watch anything about the Tea Party courtesy of the MSM, you probably will be left with the distinct impression that Tea Partiers are “hicks,” “hillbillies,” “terrorists,” and even “hobbits.” They...

As Rick Perry's record is beginning to be scrutinized, the budget mess in Texas has started to receive national attention. Apparently, there is a $31 billion deficit in the current fiscal year that will necessitate drastic cuts. It has also come to light that Perry, rather than making the necessary cuts in 2009, took Obama stimulus funds and used over $6 billion of the stimulus to plug his deficit. The deficit has now exploded, as they tend to do when not addressed early, and the stimulus money has dried up and blown away like a tumbleweed, leaving the state awash...

While watching Sarah Palin's speech yesterday at Indianola, it occurred to me that she is beloved by her supporters and detested and feared by her enemies for at least one common reason: She is an extraordinary political talent, willing and able to call a spade a spade and to do so with a combination of moxie and panache that is both devastating and funny. She represents a clear and present danger both to the GOP Establishment and to the Democrat left, the two sides of the same false coin which has embedded itself in D.C. as the "Permanent Political Class"....

Before I began to research Rick Perry's record, I perceived him to be nothing more than a garden variety southern Republican governor, probably conservative, certainly more conservative than his 2010 opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison. But the fact that he had such a spirited challenge from both sides in the GOP primary, both from the moderates AND the Conservatives, made me wonder just how conservative he really was. Just a bit of research revealed the gardasil mandate on preteen girls and their parents (and the cronysim associated with it), his full throated advocacy of open borders, including a pipeline for illegals...

In case you haven’t noticed, Governor Sarah Palin is running for president in 2012 — though she has not officially announced it yet. The reason she’s engaged in a stealth campaign for the Republican nomination is because she clearly learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid. Here are the top 5 lessons Governor Palin pulled from Hillary’s defeat and how she will prevent the media, the Left, and the Cocktail Party GOP establishment from doing to her what they did to Clinton three years ago. 1. WAIT AS LONG AS POSSIBLE TO ENTER THE RACE SO...

Texas, we have a problem. Your GOP governor is running for president against Barack Obama. Yet, one of his most infamous acts as executive of the nation's second-largest state smacks of every worst habit of the Obama administration. And his newly crafted rationalizations for the atrocious decision are positively Clintonesque. In February 2007, Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a shocking executive order forcing every sixth-grade girl to submit to a three-jab regimen of the Gardasil vaccine. He also forced state health officials to make the vaccine available "free" to girls ages 9 to 18. The drug, promoted by manufacturer Merck...

I listen ad nauseam to posters, some who are pro-Palin and some who are anti-Palin, discourse about Sarah Palin's entry (or non-entry) into the 2012 Presidential sweepstakes, generally advising her to "Hurry up!". Those afflicted with PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome) gleefully proclaim that she is not running. Of course, not only is there no evidence for this proposition, her actions in the last six months, as well as many of her statements, would lead any rational observer to believe that she will run. But leaving aside the PDSers (who are in any case engaging in wishful thinking because they do...

Rick Perry is rapidly becoming known as a politician who talks a good game, but whose actions belie his words. Last year, he waved the bloody shirt of secession, which horrified the New York Times...until they dug deeper and found that Perry wasn't just talking about seceding. He was aiming to hook up with Mexico in order to fulfill his "shared with [Mexican President] Vincente Fox for open borders." Seriously, though, Perry is becoming a caricature of himself. He first waved the tenth Amendment on gay marriage and abortion, first supporting the interpretations that states should be responsible for defining...

I've liked what I've seen in Perry so far, though admittedly, I don't know a great deal about him. That's likely to change given his announcement to Mark Halperin that he wants to be President. Frankly - and we need to be frank about all our potential nominees at this point - my chief concern about him is that he may be more compromised, conservatively speaking, and compromising, than his image would make it appear. The healing of the Bush rift and the Bushies now being firmly behind him does little to assuage any concerns from a purely conservative perspective,...

On Saturday Texas Gov. Rick Perry is expected to announce whether or not he will run for president. Many now believe he will. Perry is eager to separate himself from his predecessor in the Texas governor’s mansion, George W. Bush — who is unpopular with both tea party Republicans and the American electorate as a whole. But one area where Perry’s positions are virtually identical to Bush is immigration. When I ran for president in 2008, I tried to pressure the Republican candidates to take a hard line against illegal immigration. For this, Perry called me a racist. When he...

Last week on successive nights, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump both decried Mitt Romney's "finger in the wind" strategy regarding the debt ceiling hike, . Both Palin and Trump condemned him as missing in action on the debt ceiling hike, coming out against the deal only after it was a fait accompli. Trump found it be be strategically insane to raise the debt ceiling so high that it will not have to be addressed until after the 2012 election, in effect sparing Obama from having to revisit this issue next spring or summer on the eve of the campaign, when...

With the capitulation of the Congressional GOP all but a fair accompli, the next question beckons: Where do we go from here? Before answering that, I think it wise to assess what Obama and the Democrats hope to accomplish by this so-called budget deal. Then we can consider possible ways to frustrate their plans. At the outset, one can observe that the GOP has dealt itself a serious, though not necessarily fatal, blow. However, it would be wrong to condemn the TEA Party Freshmen who buckled under the tremendous pressure. The GOP is not just leaderless. Its Congressional leaders are...

The following twenty-two House members stood firm and opposed the Boehner bill, which is nothing more than a vehicle which will be sent to the Senate, reworked by Harry Reid into something even worse than it already is, and then returned to the House. Boehner will dutifully bring it up and the Tea Partiers who voted for it will then vote against it, but it will not matter. Boehner and Reid will pass the Bill in the House with Democrat votes and Obama will sign it. The votes today cast by conservatives, many of whom are good people, are very...

The news and blogosphere is filled with responses to the July 14, 2011 story by Joshua Green, the Senior Editor of the Atlantic, entitled "Michele Bachmann's Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist." That is because it raises a serious matter which should not be taken lightly, and one which the candidate must address. First, let me share some personal context. I am what is often called a "revert" to the Catholic Church, someone who returned to the Church of my childhood after a long search for the truth. I love being a Catholic Christian. I hold an undergraduate degree...

As I have written before, the election will be decided along a large swath of states beginning with Pennsylvania in the East and extending West and North across the upper Midwest to Iowa. I dub these states the "fertile crescent" because they will award seventy electoral votes in 2012. These states,Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa are as important to Barack Obama's reelection as are Texas and Florida to the GOP candidate. Together with a handful of small Western states, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado (and perhaps New Hampshire in the East), these states represent the only true swing...

As Governor Sarah Palin prepares to launch her campaign for the Presidency, and the waves of disinformation about her intentions begin to subside, the next predictable narrative, as night follows day, is: “She’s a quitter.” How will she handle this charge? In a sense, she already has, with the statement at the time of her resignation, which provided cogent reasons for anyone fair minded enough to consider them. But in our popular culture of sound bite journalism, a pithier response is no doubt appropriate, a reply that can be employed within the context of a thirty second answer in a...

Much has been written about Michele Bachmann's lack of any executive experience and the crippling disability it poses for her campaign for the GOP nomination and for the Presidency. But candidates with no executive experience have won the Presidency before. Both JFK and Obama come to mind. It is true that no GOP nominee in well over 100 years has lacked executive experience. (Even Senator Warren Harding had served as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and William Howard Taft had been the Governor of both the Philippines and Cuba). It is a major obstacle for her, especially in this cycle and...

I recently posted an article suggesting that Mchele Bachmann's candidacy, and its impact on Sarah Palin, is reminiscent of the 1980 candidacy of Phil Crane, which Ronald Reagan considered a threat to his nomination: Is Michele Bachmann Sarah Palin's Phil Crane? LINKAs I point out in the article linked above, Crane never really thought he had a chance for the nomination, and he was content to have one of the moderates (Baker or Bush) get the nomination in hopes that they would install Crane as the Vice-Presidential nominee. I did not explore some of the reasons why Crane's belief was...

Michele Bachmann's efforts in 2007-8 to have Drug Dealer and Money Launderer Frank Vennes pardoned for his 1987 convictions have begun to receive some light scrutiny in the media. Some embarrassing details have emerged, including the fact that, while Bachmann was lobbying hard to secure a pardon for him from President Bush, Vennes himself was engaged in a brand new, massive $3.65 billion ponzi scheme, for which he was recently indicted by a Federal Grand Jury. Worse yet, Vennes and his family had donated money to Bachmann--a lot of money--in the 2006 and 2008 campaign cycles, $27,400 to be exact,...