Free Republic

A seismic shift? Things will change now that Sen. Ted Cruz has entered the White House race, some say. “Every Republican candidate for president will have to move significantly to the right, starting with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. They’ll have to define their position on amnesty for illegal aliens, on fighting and winning the war radical Islam has declared on America, on spending, the deficit and the debt, and on repealing Obamacare - against the positions Ted Cruz will talk about and campaign on in the coming months,” predicts longtime conservative maven Richard Viguerie. “They will all have to...

If there is such a thing as being too conservative to be elected president of the United States, Ted Cruz is having none of it. Announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination Monday at Liberty University, the first-term senator from Texas offered himself as the pure essence of conservatism and challenged the tea party and evangelical wings of the Republican Party to rise up behind one of their own and take control of the party and the country. His candidacy is a test of a proposition, one that he has carried across the country for many months. He has argued...

Conservatives often find themselves at odds with the libertarian crowd. However, is that anger really warranted? As President Reagan once said, “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” True conservatives and libertarians, let’s not pretend there aren’t fakers on both side, all agree on the fundamentals: limited government, personal responsibility, and economic freedom. Neither group wants the government interfering in our daily lives and telling us what we can and cannot do. Now there may be slight disagreements on how that plays out in the policy arena, but we should not allow...

Because I'm a Conservative, I believe in a strong separation of church and state. As Eliade wrote in The Sacred and the Profane, "the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from 'natural' realities." We do a disservice to the truly sacred when we force it into Caesar's world. What is sacred to me is between myself and my Maker--and forcing that into the public square diminishes both of Us. Because I'm a Conservative, I care about the environment. Whether prompted by the Bible or by our own sense of morality (itself a part of...

Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who would like to run for president, is upset when people imply that he's a liberal. Gov. John R. Kasich was sipping coffee in the sun-drenched garden room of his official residence, boasting about his “Ohio story” of economic recovery, when he was told that some Republicans thought a fellow Midwestern governor, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, was more conservative. He bolted upright. “I think I have the right to define what conservatism is,” Mr. Kasich roared, launching into a breathless oration about tax cuts, the mentally ill, prison reform, faith in American culture, unwed motherhood, welfare...

By Yaakov Levi "First Published: 3/19/2015, 9:51 AM In an interview with Arutz Sheva, MK Yariv Levin, chairman of the outgoing Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, lauded his party's victory in Tuesday's elections, and said that it finally gave the Likud a clear mandate to rule Israel in the way the party felt it should be ruled." (snip) Among the issues the Likud needs to tackle is the “one-sided attitude” of the media and the justice system, said Levin. “There need to be changes in the radical leftist rule that shows itself in so many aspects of Israeli society....

"More specifically, Netanyahu's Likud Party won by siphoning voters away from the other right parties who will become its coalition partners. Mainstream Israeli opinion has shifted to the right: to win, Likud didn't need to win over a swath of centrist voters. It needed to jazz up the Right with nasty rhetoric about Palestinians and Arabs." "Meanwhile, Likud is going through a process that some observers have referred to as Tea Party-ization. Younger Israelis tend to be more conservative, increasingly empowering the more right-wing factions inside Likud. That causes center-right voters to defect to centrist parties, pushing the party ever...

Last week, I kvetched about the way the national political press was covering the Hillary Clinton e-mail pseudo-scandal. To me, it was a strikingly clear example of the media succumbing to its worst instincts by allowing itself to become part of the story and engaging in the kind of meta reporting that Paul Krugman has rightly compared to theater criticism. “Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying,” Krugman wrote, the political journalists guilty of theater criticism “tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race.” In other words, they answer a question...

Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and a number of right-libertarian groups have joined together with the ACLU and the Center for American Progress to form The Coalition for Public Safety. Headed by Obama’s former associate director of legislative affairs for Drug Control Policy, the Coalition seeks to lower prison populations through ‘soft on crime’ reforms. Its libertarian partners argue that spending on the criminal justice system is out of control and that it’s time to go easy on some criminals. While spending on the criminal justice system is high, this is due to the extreme regulatory burdens created by...

At the 2013 Reagan Day Dinner, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, standing in front of an oil painting of Ronald Reagan bathed in holy light shining down on his head, began to recount his connections to the former president. He mentioned that his own wedding was held on the day of Reagan’s birth, and also that his recall election coincided with the anniversary of “the day he was born into eternal life, the day he passed.” Walker then began to recount his visit to the Reagan Library, in suitably awestruck tones. At that point the story began to take on even...

(CNSNews.com) – Twenty years after a landmark U.N. conference on promoting gender equality, the head of the agency known as U.N. Women said Monday that a growing “conservative and extremist resistance” to equality between the sexes needs to be understood and confronted. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka called the problem “one of the new dangers” in the way of efforts to pursue the goal of global gender equality. Neither she, nor a major report prepared for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting she was addressing in New York, identified radical Islamic ideology as a leading factor, although surveys have found...

A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they're committing an "act of violence" for standing up for their members' individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America's Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement. Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training "stems...

Conservatives don't like to talk about race. And there are some very good reasons why. The first is that the left constantly and spuriously plays the race card against the right. Conservatives spent decades saying that welfare hurt the very people it was supposed to help by disincentivizing work. They were accused of being racists for saying that — until conservatives passed welfare reform, which is now widely acknowledged as one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in recent decades. Conservatives spent decades saying that public housing hurt the very people it was supposed to help (and as someone who...

I am not alone in my lengthy criticisms of our ever controversial governor. Since he took office in 2010, his budget proposals have incessantly riled up many people across the state. The name Walker inspires either revulsion or reverence. This certainly won’t change as Gov. Scott Walker competes for the GOP nomination. Though, it is important to remember the governor’s legacy has been contingent on conservative majorities in the Assembly and State Senate. This is a crucial aspect of the Walker governorship that is insufficiently discussed. It seems that when discussing Wisconsin, whether good or bad, everything is exceedingly attributed...

Scott Walker has had a pretty good run as of late. He’s made some new friends and wrong-footed the right enemies and became, in fairly short order, a leader among the pack of Republican politicians running for president. Perhaps even the leader. Not bad for a mid-Western governor, whom none would call “charismatic.” And only four years after he faced a recall election in which he was a high value target in the cross hairs of organized labor. He won that election and then ran for reelection in the normal order of things two years later. He was, in effect,...

Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn't count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker. And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress. A number of right-wing Republicans, long-wary of Boehner's commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama's policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands. But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they'd rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing...

Legacy: Just days after the Conservative Political Action Conference wrapped up, the nation lost one of the conservative movement's founders and one of its most passionate defenders — M. Stanton Evans.

M. Stanton Evans, arguably the funniest serious man in America for much of his 80 years on the planet, died Tuesday after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. For most of his life, as Mr. Evans watched fellow conservatives come and go, he lamented — always with humor, not bitterness — their tendency to catch “Potomac fever” as soon as they come to power. “When our people get to the point where they can do us some good, they stop being our people,” he said, uttering what became known as “Evans‘ Law of Politics.”

Thank you Free Republic for allowing me to post and vent on this site for over ten years. I am a young, married conservative woman who is trying to raise her daughter to be a fine, upstanding lady, an educated woman and a worthy wife to a decent man. Despite the stupidity of my generation (I am on the cusp of GenX and GenY) there is hope. Many young people are more prolife than ever. And at last, many others are beginning to open their eyes to the lies of socialism. However recent events on this site like witnessing the...

I was recently invited to make some remarks at a charity dinner for a cause that I strongly support. The organizers worried that, because their cause affected only Third World nations, they would have a hard time raising money from an American audience. Localism, it seemed, in everything from farm produce to charity giving, was the new vogue. People wanted to see their dollars at work locally rather than watch them disappear into the coffers of some international organization. Could I help them make the case for international giving? On the night of the dinner it occurred to me to...