Free Republic

The National Rifle Association on Tuesday said it's launching a $1.3 million television ad campaign to promote Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton's bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, a little over a year after the group ran radio ads defending Pryor's record on guns. The NRA said the 30-second spot will begin running in Little Rock and Jonesboro starting Wednesday and will run for at least four weeks. The ad touts the group's endorsement of Cotton and doesn't mention Pryor. The group is also spending six figures to run radio ads in the state and has been sending direct...

The Professor uncovers some old footage with an amazing story. Exploding pianos created by the legendary BD Shaw as part of his expert testimony. Flour and flash pot were put in a piano with terrible results.

So I was reading an online review of the book "“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” that was critical of the assertions made in said book that slavery was significant in the growth of the US economy. The next day I came to look at it again and found out it had been removed. The reason because apparently quite a number of people had found it racist and offensive. This is the review itself in its entirety before it was removed: “FOR sale: a coloured girl, of very superior qualifications…a bright mulatto, fine...

When a far left Democrat such as Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor uses his campaign advertising to offer quotes from John McCain to distinguish himself from U.S. Rep Tom Cotton, his conservative Republican opponent, it’s clear there is a trouble in Liberalville. Pryor ‘s latest ad features McCain’s quote that “anyone who calls it amnesty is not being intellectually honest,” fires back at a recent Cotton campaign ad, saying Pryor “voted for amnesty and citizenship for illegals.” “Mark Pryor voted the same way as John McCain and many other Republican senators,” Pryor’s ad defends. “Secure the border first.” Very McCainesque, indeed.

PPP's newest Arkansas poll continues to find an incredibly tight race for the Senate. Republican Tom Cotton is at 41% to 39% for Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor, 4% for Green Party candidate Mark Swaney, and 3% for Libertarian Nathan LaFrance. All four PPP surveys of this race in the last year have found the candidates within 3 points of each other one way or another. When supporters of the third party hopefuls are asked who they would choose between the two major party candidates, Cotton's lead remains 2 points at 43/41, suggesting this may be a race where their presence...

Republicans from Washington to Little Rock are privately distressed that Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., – a candidate once hailed as their most talented U.S. Senate recruit of the cycle – has lost his luster in his challenge to second-term Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor. The overarching problem: While Cotton’s resume is sparkling, his persona is flat. He speaks with authority, but lacks warmth. His wooden delivery is more often academic, lacking an everyday, common touch that’s still essential in a place with slightly less than 3 million people, the smallest state in the south. His slender frame and boyish haircut makes...

At the start of the 2014 election cycle, Mark Pryor's future in the Senate was widely considered as dead as the raccoons at the Gillett Coon Supper, an annual fundraiser and gathering spot for Arkansas pols. ....... A series of Pryor television ads focus on Medicare and Social Security, hitting his opponent for supporting Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which would alter the structure of the programs and increase the eligibility age. It’s a well-worn strategy used by Democrats in states and districts across the country and designed to portray their adversaries as extreme. But there are a couple of particular...

While some lawmakers have questions about what happened before or after the 2012 bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Rep. Tom Cotton said he wants to know what President Barack Obama was doing during the attack. "As a former soldier myself, I particularly want to know what happened during the attacks. Why didn't the president send reinforcements from Tripoli, or from our fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, or even from Italy?" the Arkansas Republican said Monday on "Fox & Friends." While conceding that support forces "might not have reached Benghazi in time," Cotton said, "You just don't know...

Tom Cotton’s campaign manager just placed a hit job on Nebraska airwaves against Ben Sasse. Cotton, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Arkansas as a Republican, apparently has no problem with his campaign manager moonlighting to attack another Republican. Cotton’s campaign manager, however, is using video of Ben Sasse’s daughters in an attack ad against Sasse. Even more bizarre, the clip of his daughters is just so random. It makes no sense in the advertisement. Cotton’s campaign manager, by the way, used to run Mitch McConnell’s campaign and his Super PAC that bought the ad is also managed...

REDMOND , Wash. A mother in Washington is upset after a teacher at her daughter’s middle school allegedly gave students an assignment that required them to pick cotton so that they could "see what it was like to be a slave." Carolyn Walker called Redmond Middle School to inform them that her daughter would not be doing the assignment and later found out the teacher gave her daughter an F. "My daughter is African American and for her to pick cotton when her grandparents were raised on a plantation to pick cotton, is not OK, it's not OK at all,"...

While maybe not the political “gaffe of the year,” Sen. Mark Pryor’s (D-AR) remark that his Republican challenger's military service gives him a “sense of entitlement” is certainly up there. Hence why Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) -- who is indeed running to unseat Sen. Pryor -- is now actively campaigning off his opponent’s verbal missteps. If for no other reason, this spot is effective because (as Matt Lewis also notes) it reminds voters that Pryor actually said that. And that’s important to emphasize. I’ve never served in the armed services, of course, but I’m fairly certain one does not return...

It's not likely the race for president in 2016 will pit former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and former Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol predicted. "I'm willing to go out on a limb," Kristol told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday. "I think there's no way there will be a Bush-Clinton race in 2016."

HOT SPRINGS, Ark.—On a recent late-fall Saturday, Barbara Deuschle, a local restaurant owner, was recounting her first impression of her congressman, Tom Cotton, who is now running for the Senate. It was back in August 2011, just before the young Republican lawmaker formally announced his first campaign for the House, and Cotton and his dad came to a party meeting to get to know the faithful. Cotton was a 34-year-old political unknown who had recently lived in Washington. "When he just parachuted down into this district, nobody ever heard of him," she recalls. "I said, 'Who are you? We'd never...

Senator Mark Pryor has tried to tar his likely opponent in next fall’s Senate election, Tom Cotton, as part of an intransigent group of Republican party that shut the federal government down and nearly forced the nation into default. Meanwhile, Arkansas voters disapprove of Senator Pryor more strongly than they ever did Democrat Blanche Lincoln, whom they voted out of the world’s greatest deliberative body in 2010. Cotton has avoided taking a strong stand on the issue, but regardless, the strategy doesn’t look like it will work for Pryor anyway: 39 percent of Arkansas likely voters, according to a new...

Cotton, wheat, rice, and now corn. If revised Chinese import estimates by the US Grain Council are even remotely correct, look for corn prices of $6.80 a bushel at last check to jump by at least 15% in a very short amount of time. As the FT reports, "Corn prices – and with them, the price of meat – are set to explode if the latest import estimates from China are correct. The US Grain Council, the industry body, said late on Thursday that it has received information pointing to Chinese imports as high as 9m tonnes in 2011-12, up...

HC-5, a drab, wood-paneled conference room in the Capitol basement, was quiet last Wednesday as Paul Ryan pushed for immigration reform. All eyes were on the Wisconsin Republican as he touted the economic benefits of bringing illegal immigrants into the work force. He assured his colleagues, who were clustered in cliques — moderates here, old bulls there — that stronger border security remains the leadership’s priority. As Ryan spoke, freshman Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who was behind him in line, listened carefully. He was calm and upright, and unlike a handful of conservative rabble-rousers in the back, he didn’t sigh...

Congressman Tom Cotton took to the House floor "to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs":"I rise today to express grave doubts about the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policies and programs," said the freshman congressman from Arkansas.

Squash grown 10,000 years ago in Peru By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Thu Jun 28, 6:09 PM ET WASHINGTON - Agriculture was taking root in South America almost as early as the first farmers were breaking ground in the Middle East, new research indicates. Evidence that squash was being grown nearly 10,000 years ago, in what is now Peru, is reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science. A team led by anthropologist Tom D. Dillehay of Vanderbilt University also uncovered remains of peanuts from 7,600 years ago and cotton dated to 5,500 years ago in the floors...

Kids say the darndest things. But sometimes they say shocking things. On Thursday, 9-year-old Brandon did the latter when he was asked why he wanted President Barack Obama to win a second term outside a campaign rally featuring First Lady Michelle Obama in Daytona, Fla. “Because if Mitt Romney win, we’ll be going back to the crop fields,” Brandon said, referring to the days of slavery. “We’ll be picking crops.” The father can be heard off-camera laughing. Obviously, no 9-year-old child would determine through their own reasoning that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would send African-Americans “back to the crop...

A recent Chinese-African cotton agreement could usher in a new era for the African cotton industry -- but not in the short-term, say industry experts. Under the agreement, signed in December with four key cotton-producing African countries -- Benin, Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso (known as the C4) - China stated it would provide machinery, expertise and materials in a bid to increase and improve the quality of local production. At the signing ceremony in Geneva, Chinese commerce minister Chen Deming suggested this was a step towards outsourcing production to Africa. "In [the] longer term, we may relocate some of...