Free Republic

Mike Huckabee had a pretty good record as governor. It’s too bad he can’t run on it. Better known in recent years for saying occasionally outrageous things as a commentator, Huckabee governed Arkansas for more than a decade as a pragmatist, devoting his attention to basics such as roads, schools and health care. On those issues, though, Huckabee generally took positions too liberal to suit a Republican presidential prospect in 2016—posing a conundrum for him as he plunges this week into the 2016 presidential race. “Mike Huckabee was the consummate conservative populist,” says Jay Barth, a political scientist at Arkansas’s...

Call The Rush Limbaugh Show program line between 12 Noon & 3PM Eastern Time, at: 1-800-282-2882 E-mail Rush: ElRushbo@eibnet.com or Fax Rush at: 212-445-3963 Write a letter to Rush and mail it to: The Rush Limbaugh Show, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Join This Ping List Now! E-mail Rush: ElRushbo@eibnet.com Fax Rush at: 212-445-3963, Write a letter to Rush and mail it to: The Rush Limbaugh Show, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.< Join This Ping List Now! Click Here To Join This Ping List! < AND NOW... amidst billowing clouds of...

Students at the University of Washington in Tacoma are getting an object lesson in the value of a dollar. As economic dominoes fall in the wake of a municipal minimum wage hike to $15 per hour in Seattle, university students find themselves digging deeper into their pockets to cover higher prices resulting from the mandate

The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision on last week allowing a Chicago-area gun and magazine ban to stand. Such bans are justifiable, according to the court, merely on the basis that they “may increase the public’s sense of safety.” The case, Friedman v. Highland Park, was filed in 2013, and sought to invalidate a city ordinance that banned “assault weapons or large capacity magazines (those that can accept more than ten rounds).” [..] Remarkably, the majority went on to suggest that even if the ban’s incursion on Second Amendment rights had no beneficial effect on safety...

On Sunday, two Islamic gunmen enraged by a Muslim cartoon contest opened fire at Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas. The were immediately killed by good guys with guns. On Monday, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America launched a new gun control push, complete with a PSA asking mothers to call other mothers and talk to them about locking up their guns.

Reports on the terrorist attack on the "Draw Muhammed" art competition in Garland, Texas indicate that the two jihadis, armed with "assault rifles" and wearing "protective gear," were very quickly neutralized (within seconds of initiating their attack) by a Garland traffic cop armed with only a handgun. The bad guys rolled up at the site, exited their vehicle, and immediately opened fire on a police car at the entrance. They were able only to wound an unarmed security officer before the traffic officer engaged them and terminated the threat (and, in the process, their worthless lives).

4 minutes that may change your attitude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PzT8vEvYPg&feature=share

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants you to eat more insects. Why? It’s better for the environment and your health, he argues. “Keeping meat consumption to levels recommended by health authorities would lower emissions and reduce heart disease, cancer, and other diseases,” Annan told The Guardian Sunday. “And of course there are alternative sources of protein. For example, raising insects as an animal protein source,” Annan said. “Insects have a very good conversion rate from feed to meat. They make up part of the diet of two billion people and are commonly eaten in many parts of the world.”

Over 500 organizations are calling on Congress to repeal a Medicare cost-cutting board that is part of ObamaCare. The panel at issue is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and is charged with coming up with ways to cut Medicare spending. Legislation to repeal the board sponsored by Reps. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) and Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) has 222 co-sponsors, including 19 Democrats. While some opponents of ObamaCare have called the IPAB a “death panel,” the board is banned by law from recommending changes that would ration care or require seniors to pay a higher share of costs. Its reforms...

Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn May 4, 2015 For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. Opinion Journal Video Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jason Riley on what prompted the violence and what comes next....

Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller. Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what? Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is slated to announce Tuesday that he will make a second bid for the Republican nomination. The challenges are formidable for the man who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses. In that earlier race, Huckabee, 59, a former Baptist preacher, struggled to expand his reach beyond evangelical voters, and ran out of money in subsequent contests. Huckabee is a gifted communicator. Polls have consistently shown that he has relatively high name recognition and popularity among Republicans. Early this year, he quit his television show on Fox News, so that he could more deeply explore the possibility...

It was announced over the weekend that the 10 p.m. curfew in Baltimore was being lifted in a move intended to bring a sense of normalcy back to the city. The curfew had been implemented last week in the wake of destructive riots and looting that occurred after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died from a spinal injury while in police custody. Now that the smoke has cleared and the clean up of the city continues, it has been revealed that approximately 200 businesses were destroyed in the riots, causing untold millions of dollars in...

North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr apparently is easy to underestimate. The former Wake Forest football defensive back (he played at 6’1’’, 200 pounds as a sophomore in 1975, according to the university’s Athletic Media Relations Department) served five terms in the House and is now in his second term in the Senate. He is the Tar Heel State’s senior senator and, more importantly, chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, a particularly meaningful position given terrorist threats to the United States. But Burr, who lost or dropped a couple of bids to join his party’s Senate leadership, has...

Opponents of giving the Obama administration broad authority to negotiate a trans-Pacific trade deal, including Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, are pushing a new argument: It could trigger a flood of immigrants into the country. Sessions’ argument – essentially, that the administration could use the authority to expand immigration – was dismissed as an “urban legend” by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, whose panel oversees trade. But with extremely close votes expected in both the House and possibly the Senate on whether to grant President Barack Obama increased powers in trade talks, leading Republicans and members...

Hill Republicans have all but surrendered the fight against President Barack ObamaÂ’s executive actions on immigration. A handful of GOP firebrands are still agitating to use CongressÂ’ power of the purse to reverse ObamaÂ’s move to shield millions of immigrants here illegally from deportations. But top Republicans say theyÂ’re not about to go there again: They tried that earlier this year with the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill but were forced to capitulate on the eve of a department shutdown, having won no concessions on immigration. Better to let the issue play out in the courts, the GOP reasoning...

There is still a long way to go until the 2016 election. On radio, we talked about the real possibility that twelve (and maybe as many as fifteen) different candidates could wind up running for the Republican nomination. We’re going to learn a lot about each of them through the process, but in the meantime, we can continue to endlessly speculate about how each one will handle certain hypothetical situations. Who is the best communicator? Who is the best on policy? Who can raise the money? What are the particular candidates strong points, and what are their weak points? If...

Do you know how to get lots of people to hate you in America? In the age when people seem to bend over backwards to let you know that they’re offended, it’s actually pretty easy. You just need to be successful at anything or you can try to be successful at anything or you can even tell OTHER PEOPLE that they CAN BE successful. Having money will also definitely do it. So will being white, male, Christian, conservative or Republican. For that matter, all you really need to do is have an opinion of some sort and somebody who holds...

Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz is glad he isn't a part of the nation's political elite."You may have heard I'm not exactly the most popular person with congressional leadership," the cheerful Texas senator said Friday to a group of conservative business leaders.Cruz, the first major Republican to officially declare his candidacy for the White House, said that because of his role in the 2013 government shutdown over Obamacare he wasn't well-liked among the party's heads. And as a result, campaign donations dried up. "Checks from Washington, D.C., went to zero because that's the way they impose discipline," he said. "I have...

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has weighed in on Sen. Ted Cruz’s effort to strike down a District of Columbia law aimed at combating workplace discrimination, seemingly supporting Cruz’s effort.Last week, the House voted to block the District’s Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act and the Texas Republican urged the Senate to take similar action. Paul appears to support the effort to block the law, which conservatives said could violate religious freedom.“Sen. Paul has always been strongly opposed to the government usurping the constitutional rights of American citizens, and will continue to fight to preserve our nation’s religious freedom,” a Paul spokesperson...