Free Republic

Iron-fisted U.S. House Speaker John Boehner is moving quickly to punish conservative Republicans who tried to oust him Tuesday during the biennial leadership election. Hours after the contentious vote, Florida Rep. Daniel Webster – who actively campaigned against Boehner and persuaded 12 GOP members to support him – found himself left off the membership list of the powerful House Rules Committee, where he served for the last two years. Rep. Rich Nugent, a fellow Floridian who voted for him, suffered the same fate. 'My philosophy,' Webster told reporters after he heard the news that he had been bumped from the...

“There seems to be a movement on the local and state level,” Scott said, of black Democrats who want “to align with their values” rather than with their history as Democrats. “We’ll continue to see that shift.” Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama, has been a Republican for only a few months. But his speech tonight at the Republican convention is important because he reflects a major theme of Mitt Romney’s campaign against President Obama and another theme promoted by the GOP. The Romney theme is that it’s okay to have changed your mind about Obama. Davis, an...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I'm gonna break this down in even more detail as the program unfolds. Lugar has issued a very lengthy and quite telling statement. Lugar is comparing his defeat to the end of reason, the end of the Republican Party, the end of compromise, the end of people working together. Lugar is saying that his defeat is a bad thing. It's gonna lead to partisanship and rancor. It's gonna lead to the end. The Senate is gonna descend now. It's not gonna be nearly the august body it has been. Not because he's not there. He's not that...

Mitt Romney was not his first choice for president, but conservative political activist Scott Magill has come to accept that Romney is now his only choice. So Magill is looking for reasons to get jazzed about the candidate he once dismissed. His list so far: Romney is a Republican who would sign into law legislation passed by a GOP-led House. Romney has started to hit the right talking points. If elected, Romney would have to listen to the conservative base - or risk its wrath at reelection time. Also, and perhaps most important, Romney is not Barack Obama. The conservative...

I saw this posted on Real Clear Politics, and it's worth a listen by the Romney people. It's an audio of Mark Levin on "The Speech Romney Should Give." Governor Romney gave a speech to a group of wealthy supporters and made the classic moderate Republican mistake of dissing "true believers" -- i.e., conservatives. Somebody on Team Romney needs to have a discussion on conservatives with the candidate. The Governor is clearly a smart guy, a good man and he would be head and shoulders a better president than his soon-to-be opponent. But if this attitude persists it can either...

The entire GOP establishment has unleashed on Newt Gingrich this week, and it looks like it is slowing his momentum in the polls. Almost all of the anti-Newt Gingrich material hitting the media is coming from conservative institutions: National Review, The New York Sun, and the Washington Times. Just look at the Drudge Report from last night and early this morning.:(Snip for graphic) The number one news source for many populist and conservative readers, looks like an anti-Gingrich pinboard. There are twelve anti-Gingrich links leading the site, with video of Gingrich trashing Reagan,

"In short, the electoral experience of the last 50 years does nothing to undermine the common-sense notion that most political battles are won by seizing and holding the ideological center. In the last two presidential elections, more than 44% of voters described themselves as "moderate," and no conservative candidate could possibly prevail without coming close to winning half of them (as George W. Bush did in his re-election). The notion that ideologically pure conservative candidates can win by disregarding centrists and magically producing previously undiscovered legions of true-believer voters remains a fantasy. It is not a strategy. At the moment,...

Vaughn Ward wonders when the Tea Party Express passed him by. The Republican challenger to Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Walt Minnick in Idaho figured to at least have a shot at an endorsement to switch the seat from a vote for Nancy Pelosi and Democratic control of the House. Instead, the Tea Party Express endorsed Minnick, and left a lot of head-scratching behind in Idaho afterward: When the Tea Party Express last week endorsed Idaho Rep. Walt Minnick — the only Democrat to receive the backing of the conservative grassroots group — one of his Republican challengers said he was...

Regardless, Gov. Rick Perry has fared relatively well, perhaps because of his anti-Washington rhetoric and his careful immigration stance, a recent poll indicates. It shows more than half of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservative, and a surprising 23 percent say they might participate in Tuesday's GOP primary. Among those, Perry leads Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison by 2 to 1, according to the poll, commissioned by an Austin consultant for a national group of Hispanic legislative leaders... Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, said the poll hints at a little-noticed facet of Perry's political persona: He doesn't frighten Hispanics...

Warning: We are bound to see shenanigans as the Desperate Democrats try to cling to power in November of 2010 and 2012. It will happen. All the big liberal media will be in on it, and they will lie and smear GOP candidates, starting with the ones who look the most like Ronald Reagan. We will not find out for sure when it's happening. It will be hidden and covered up. The New Media have to keep a sharp eye on people trying to infiltrate conservative groups. Bottom line: You will have to use your smarts to figure out what...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A straw poll of US conservative activists saw Texas congressman Ron Paul emerge as the preferred Republican presidential candidate to run against President Barack Obama in 2012. Some 31 percent of the more than 2,000 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) attendees who participated in the poll voted for the outspoken libertarian. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate in 2008, came in third with 7.0 percent, some way behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (22 percent), who had won the CPAC poll for the last three years. There were boos among the crowd as the...

Marco Rubio and J.D. Hayworth have different styles and different backgrounds, and they're from opposite sides of the country. But both are hoping to win Senate seats by tapping into the energy of conservatives to defeat big-name, establishment-backed Republicans. Hayworth repeatedly and directly attacked McCain for working with Democrats on issues like immigration and campaign finance reform. "If you want to see how politicians undergo campaign-year conversions, you've got my friend," Hayworth said before pausing. "I hate using that term, because he uses it all the time — you have my senior senator, John McCain." Hayworth is more brash than...

In the first article of this series an assessment was provided for some of the most popular of the assumed conservative Presidential candidates for 2012. Now we come to Part 2.

A new Rasmussen poll finds that the tea party movement's popularity is growing, so much so that it garners more support than the Republican party on a generic Congressional ballot. The poll hints that the burgeoning discontent among conservatives within the GOP threatens to splinter the party at a time when the popularity of President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are waning as we head into an election year.

There seems to be some misconception by some, especially those on the left, that the big winners in Tuesday's elections in Virginia were moderate Republicans. Let's disabuse them of that notion. The charge is usually stated as a premise in a comment along the lines of "the right wing should not celebrate too much over these results, because had the Virginia guys been conservatives, they never would have won." Then, for the chaser, they throw out the Hoffman loss in NY-23 as the example of what happens to a conservative when he dares to run for office.

The race has now been called for Democrat Bill Owens. This is a huge win for conservatives. “Whaaaa. . . ?” you say. There are two big victories at work in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose. I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy....

'm writing about this for my USA Today column, but the Frank Rich hissy fit is a perfect example of the real story of the election. The story is not that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that the conventional wisdom is being shown to be ludicrous. For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ,...

Base sends GOP warning shot in NY-23 By: Jonathan Martin and Alex Isenstadt October 31, 2009 07:43 PM EST Republican Dede Scozzafava’s decision Saturday to drop out of the New York special congressional election gave conservatives a big win, but may present a challenge for Republicans heading into next year's mid-term elections. The long-term implications from Scozzafava’s Halloween surprise will depend on what lessons Republicans take from the race, where Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman now seems poised to consolidate center-right support and win the seat previously held by Republican John McHugh, who resigned to become President Obama’s Secretary of...

Although I am very happy with the events so far in New York and I support both Hoffman's run against a liberal GOP Candidate and the conservative statement to the GOP, I have some concerns. I think that Hoffman's campaign will encourage more independents to buck the GOP establishment. While I think that this is necessary in showing the GOP that the conservative grass roots don’t want the establishment’s compromising, weak spined, unprincipled moderates, when will conservative enough be conservative enough? There are few politicians that espouse the (small l) libertarian, small government philosophies that I believe in. I am...

With Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman running neck and neck with the Democrat in Tuesday’s special election in New York, some other disaffected Republicans are seeing the third-party route as more viable. And it could hurt the Republicans in those races. In Virginia’s 5th district, state Sen. Robert Hurt’s entry into the GOP primary has spurred little-known candidate Bradley Rees to switch to the Virginia Conservative Party. And in Ohio, another GOP primary contender said this week that he’ll run as a Constitution Party candidate. Both will go at the GOP nominees from their right flanks and try to expose...