Free Republic

How unhinged has Howard Dean become? So bad that an MSNBC host had to gently walk him back off the ledge. On Chris Hayes' MSNBC show tonight, Dean claimed that Scott Walker says Barack Obama was "born in Kenya." It took Hayes two attempts to break through Dean's blather, but eventually he was able to politely point out: "I should note, you mention the Kenya thing, he has not been asked that." View the video here.

Neatly hidden in his new budget that slashes hundreds of millions of dollars from the public university system, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has proposed that universities no longer be required to report the number of sexual assaults on campus to the Department of Justice. It also includes language to, “Delete the requirement that any person employed at an institution who witnesses a sexual assault on campus or receives a report from a student enrolled in the institution that the student has been sexually assaulted report the assault to the dean of students.” No explanation for the deletions is given.

You might recall the name Mark Salter for the role he played as a speechwriter for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) when he ran for president in 2008. In the years that followed his involvement on that failed presidential bid, Salter eventually evolved into a commentator and political analyst. Following McCainÂ’s failed campaign, Slater spent much of his time attempting to rehabilitate the image of his friend and former employer. In 2011, Salter wrote a meandering, discursive essay on how George W. Bush had failed to meet the expectations of posterity when he chose Dick Cheney as his running mate....

The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes. Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old...

A reversal so predictable that even a dummy like me saw it coming.But is it a reversal? Per Jamie Weinstein, maybe the headline should be “Scott Walker still stands by path to citizenship for illegals.� Here’s the key bit, which comes at exactly a minute in. WALLACE: The question [in 2013] was, ‘Can you envision a world where if these people paid a penalty that they would have a path to citizenship?’ and you said, ‘Sure, that makes sense.’WALKER: I believe there’s a way you can do that. First and foremost, you have to secure that border, or none...

Gov. Scott Walker still hasn't spoken with President Barack Obama about the president's love for America, but the possible contender for the Republican nomination now has an opinion on the subject. Wisconsin's governor tells "Fox News Sunday" that Obama or "anybody else who is willing to put their name on the ballot certainly has to have the love for country to do that." ...

A task force appointed by President Barack Obama to reform policing in the U.S. is recommending that the Department of Justice scrap an FBI database that gathers and maintains information on certain “immigration violators.” The recommendation, handed down by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in an interim report on Monday, pertains to FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. NCIC is used by local law enforcement officers during traffic stops and other encounters with the public. The database, developed in 1967, allows officers to find out if the individuals are wanted for crimes in other jurisdictions. An...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker delivered his budget address in February, presenting a $68 billion, two-year spending plan that he said would “assist small businesses and farmers.” .... watch Walker’s speech

Say "1964." and those of us old enough might remember the appearance on Ed Sullivan's show of some little British group called the Beatles. But Chris Matthews recalls something else: the decision of the Republican party to nominate Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, and his ensuing wipeout by LBJ. On his MSNBC show tonight, Matthews suggested that Republicans are in a similarly reckless mood, and might well nominate a true conservative, electoral consequences be damned. And, oh yeah, Chris contended that the GOP would do so out of racist motives. View the video here.

Five days after an open letter was posted online, the number of people at University of Wisconsin -- now including not only faculty, but staff, students and alumi -- demanding that UW System president Ray Cross oppose Gov. Scott Walker's plan to restructure UW in his budget rose to 484. Some 88 of them were at, or graduated from UW-Madison, where faculty were scheduled Monday to vote on a resolution asking Cross to delay restructuring. Seventy-four University of Wisconsin faculty members from campuses across the state signed an open letter to UW System president Ray Cross, “insisting in the strongest...

Walker demonizes unions, the poor and voters of color in order to appeal to whites. Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s drive for an anti-labor “right to work” law covering private-sector workers is deeply rooted in the racism of the Deep South’s former slaveholding states. They are yet more evidence that he is following a template known as the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” which plays to white voters’ racial resentment, even though his budding presidential campaign is based in snow-encrusted Wisconsin. This emerging strategy is reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s original “Southern strategy” of 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kickoff event....

ities: The problem with socialism, Margaret Thatcher once noted, is you eventually run out of other people's money. In progressive Chicago, that's hit home as Moody's has cut its credit rating to two grades above "junk." Chicago's finances are staggering under the weight of an unfunded pension liability that Moody's Investors Service has estimated at $32 billion, eight times the city's operating revenue. Chicago has a $300 million structural deficit. And Illinois law requires the city to up its 2016 contributions to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million. "This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still...

President Barack Obama took a stab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Reuters on Monday, on the eve of Netanyahu’s controversial speech to a special joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning. Obama said that Netanyahu “made all sorts of claims” about the interim nuclear deal with Iran that turned out to be untrue. Yet Obama mischaracterized Netanyahu’s remarks, and misrepresented Iranian compliance with the terms of the interim deal. Obama’s full comment on Monday was: “Netanyahu made all sorts of claims. This was going to be a terrible deal. This was going to result in...

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice shut down an attempt to force the Internal Revenue Service to search for Lois Lerner’s missing emails at off-site storage facilities. The IRS never looked for Lerner’s backup email tapes at the West Virginia storage facility where they were being housed. Treasury deputy inspector general Timothy Camus told Congress that the IRS never asked IT professionals at the New Martinsville, W.V. storage site for the backup tapes. Camus only found the backup tape for Lerner’s missing 2011 emails about two weeks ago. But the Obama administration knew that emails were stored at off-site facilities,...

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told a large group on Capitol Hill on Monday that the threat of a nuclear Iran must be taken seriously and said it was important that Americans hear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Wiesel was joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) in a jam-packed Senate auditorium for a discussion on the dangers of Iran and the rising tide of anti-Semitism across the globe. “To be Jewish in this world is to always be concerned,” explained Wiesel when asked about Iran. “When enemies make threats, take them seriously.”...

Susan Rice told AIPAC It was "neither realistic nor achievable" to expect Iran to stop enriching uranium: "We cannot let a totally unachievable ideal stand in the way of a good deal. I know that some of you will be urging Congress to insist that Iran forgo its domestic enrichment capacity entirely," Rice told AIPAC, as the crowd broke in to chear. "But, but, but as desirable as that would be, it is neither realistic nor achievable."

President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, on Monday recalled her first visit to Israel, speaking at the AIPAC policy conference. […] Washington would like to see a “viable, sovereign Palestinian state living side by side with a Democratic, Jewish state of Israel,” she added. […] A nuclear Iran is a threat to Israel and is also an “unacceptable threat to the United States,” stressed Rice, who then stressed, “I want to be very clear: a bad deal is worse than no deal, and if that is the choice there will be no deal.” […] Referring to the interim...

Hacked emails indicate that Hillary Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearingsSNIPIn March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his email hacked by "Guccifer" -- the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush's paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the "clintonemail.com" domain. The content of some of those emails was published by RT.com. Examining the registry information for "clintonemail.com" reveals that the domain was first created on January 13, 2009 -- one week before...

"....Claire Yunker, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health Services, said in a statement that Walker’s proposal is aimed at preventing fraud and abuse in the existing system and creating a more coordinated care regimen. But Daniel Idzikowski, executive director of Disability Rights — a group that advocates for people with disabilities — said his organization was not consulted about Walker’s plan that the Legislature will debate over the next three months. It would drastically restructure Family Care, which administers personal care and long-term care services to elderly, disabled and injured Wisconsinites through Medicaid, he said. “By and large that...

The Daily Beast has retracted an article claiming that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker cut all provisions requiring the state’s universities to report sexual assaults. Before finally admitting she “screwed up,” the source of the post tried to defend herself on Twitter. As reported by Politico: The post, published Friday, cited a report from Jezebel that wrongly interpreted a section of the state budget to mean that all assault reporting requirements were to get cut altogether. In fact, the University of Wisconsin system requested the deletion of the requirements to get rid of redundancy, as it already provides similar information to...

......UW officials say that Walker's proposal to end funding for the bioenergy program would cripple broader energy-development research that is receiving $25million annually from the federal Department of Energy."I can't honestly say how we would replace it at this point,"said Michael Corradini,director of the Wisconsin Energy Institute at UW-Madison,which derives 90% of its funding from the bioenergy program...In 2007,Wisconsin landed the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center—the first federal research center the state had attracted in decades. The center received an initial five-year,$125 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.It was part of a $375 million package by the administration...

Hillary Clinton and her close advisers are telling Democratic donors that she will enter the presidential race sooner than expected, likely in April, a move that would allay uncertainties within her party and allow her to rev up fundraising.

Hillary Clinton reportedly plans to announce her candidacy for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination in April. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday Clinton and her close advisers decided on the move to allay uncertainties and boost fundraising. [Snip] Clinton had been expected to put off an announcement until summer, but donors had been holding back, thwarting fundraising efforts. A source told the Journal John Podesta played a big role in the decision. She is expected to skip the step of forming an exploratory committee. Money appears to be the issue.

Think of a mistake that we made in international affairs. At the time that we were making it, a phalanx of foreign policy experts was standing behind it. It might be a lonely orphan idea today, but last year you could have thrown a rock at a roomful of PhDs without hitting a single person who disagreed with it.

PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Scott Walker likes to tell a story about shopping at Kohl's. Under instructions from his wife Tonette, Walker has learned how to pile on the discounts and coupons whenever he goes to the popular Wisconsin-based department store. If he sees a shirt on the rack with a tag that reads, "Was $29.99, Now $19.99," Walker explains, he goes to the cash register with a flyer from the newspaper and gets another ten or 15 percent off. Then he pulls out his Kohl's credit card and there's another ten percent. And another newspaper flyer that might be...

You may have noticed that the media likes to run critical stories about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — sometimes without doing much checking first. As the Walker for president talk gains steam, you can expect to see more media attempts to break him in. That’s to be expected. But for now, that might be less important than the media he does have in his corner. Consider how rapid Walker’s rise has been. As late as November, he usually polled in the single digits. Public Policy Polling had Walker at 5 percent last March, compared to 25 percent in its latest...

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker compared labor unions to ISIS his audience cheered. At the end of the speech he got a standing ovation, reported FOX News in an article entitled “Walker draws standing ovation in CPAC address”. His wealthy audience hated labor unions that much. In fact, the 1% despises unions much more than they hate ISIS. Islamic extremists in the Syrian desert pose no threat to anyone in the U.S., while labor unions pose a direct threat to the profits of the super rich. Conversely, the average U.S. worker has much more to fear from Scott Walker than...

Scott Walker wants you to know he now opposes “amnesty” — even as he says he supports a policy that amounts to “amnesty.”

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) —Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Sunday that his "view has changed" on immigration and he no longer supports reforms that would allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States.</p> <p>The Republican, who surged to the front of 2016 presidential primary polls in recent weeks, admitted the flip-flop from a stance he'd taken in 2013 during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."</p>

Potential 2016 presidential candidate Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) spoke with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" about his growing popularity, his record as governor and some of the controversies he's faced. Wallace noted that Walker has taken some heat recently for refusing to say whether or not President Obama loves this country and whether or not he's a Christian. "I am not going to take a manufactured media crisis and take and follow that path instead of going to the path that I think Americans want, which is leaders who will stand up and tell them where they stand on...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress this week. We should listen closely as he raises legitimate concerns about Iran — giving him and his country the respect worthy of a close ally. Instead, President Obama and some Democrats have chosen to use this visit as a political football. This is exactly what Americans dislike about Washington. Lost amidst the petty squabbling in our nation’s capital over protocol is the simple fact that the U.S.–Israel relationship is in crisis, perhaps the most serious crisis in our history. While implementing policy that rewards Israel’s enemies, the...

February was crucial month for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, but in surviving his national baptism by fire he has solidified his place as a force to be reckoned with for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. In being thrust in the spotlight by a less-than-friendly media, his detractors on both the right and left hoped he would prove to be "not ready for prime-time" and be chased from the race before it really began. As we head into March, Walker is not only still on his feet, but may be building a wave of momentum that can carry him not only to...

Warren, who is closely aligned with progressive union groups, ripped Walker in a tweet Saturday for what some saw as a comparison between union members and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria: "If Scott Walker sees 100,000 teachers & firefighters as his enemies, maybe it's time we take a closer look at his friends.” In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Walker said, “If I can take on 100,000 protestors, I can do the same across the world.” Walker, a possible 2016 presidential candidate for the GOP, tried to walk back his comments after his...

Rand Paul has won the CPAC straw poll for the third year in a row — but the real winner was Scott Walker. Paul got 26 percent of the vote in a field of 17 in the annual presidential preference survey, while Walker was a close second at 21 percent. That means one in five young attendees here on the convention floor found the balding, unhip and often monotone governor of Wisconsin to be exciting and inspiring. Almost as inspiring as “Fonzie” himself — Rand Paul.

How desperate is the media for Scott Walker attack pieces? So desperate it’ll pick up material from a third-rate Gawker blog that even most of the left thinks is a joke and run with it. The Daily Beast has retracted an article from one of its college columnists that claimed that the Wisconsin governor’s budget would cut sexual assault reporting from the state’s universities. The post, published Friday, cited a report from Jezebel that wrongly interpreted a section of the state budget to mean that all assault reporting requirements were to get cut altogether. In fact, the University of Wisconsin...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is doubling down on claims that the strongest foreign policy move in his lifetime was former President Ronald Reagan's decision to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers. In 1981, almost 13,000 air traffic control employees walked off the job when contract negotiations between the federal government and the controllers union stalled. Reagan claimed the strike was illegal and demanded the air traffic controllers return to work; when some 11,000 did not, he fired them. Walker, who has long idolized Reagan and previously lauded the former president's standoff with air traffic control, on Saturday called it "the...

Thousands of Wisconsin union workers rallied at the Capitol Saturday to protest a “right-to-work” proposal that would outlaw the mandatory payment of union dues, but the crowd was much smaller than those in 2011 against Gov. Scott Walker’s law stripping public sector unions of much of their power. Speakers at the event jeered Walker’s comment Thursday that fighting against protesters during the 2011 debates prepared him to battle terrorists as president. Walker has not yet announced his presidential campaign, but is expected to do so later this year. “What we are doing here today is the heart and soul of...

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon for the Sirius XM Patriots network, Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker said he does not support amnesty and the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake, who previously reported Walker supports a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants took him “out of context.” Towards the end of the interview, Bannon noted that “Amnesty is about the sovereignty of the country.” But, he asked Walker, “the Washington Post said earlier that you’re pro-pathway to citizenship.” “See now that’s where they take it out of context,” Walker said in response. “I’ve not said...

Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace submitted newly-minted 2016 GOP frontrunner Scott Walker to thirteen minutes of sustained questioning about his record and his (mis)statements Sunday morning, the most notable moment of which came when Walker conceded after several minutes of interrogation that he’d “changed” his views on immigration.

Before the end of March, Wisconsin will likely become the 25th state to allow workers the choice of whether or not to join a union. With the pending enactment of a so-called “Right to Work” law, Wisconsin will join Indiana, Iowa and Michigan as the only Midwestern or Northeastern states without compulsory union membership. It could also power Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to the Republican nomination. It could be said that Walker’s campaign for the nomination began in 2011, when he pushed Act 10, a law stripping public sector employees of many collective bargaining rights, through the legislature. The proposal...

The D.C. Establishment hopes if you drag out disclosure about a scandal long enough, it loses a bit of its “wow factor” along the way. That would seem to be the view of the Obama administration regarding many of its wanton acts of mismanagement.

So, it’s now become clear that the Clinton Foundation violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, which had been drawn up to avoid conflicts of interest when President Obama tapped Hillary Clinton to become his secretary of state. Because the Clinton Foundation often received donations from foreign states and Hillary Clinton didn’t want her tenure in Foggy Bottom to drain the Foundation of the funds upon which it came to rely, Obama administration lawyers hashed out an agreement in which foreign states could donate, but only if they had donated before and only if they did not provide additional...

Governor's Islamist Terror Comparison Shocks Wisconsin Protesters Scott Walker’s CPAC account of 2011 protests in state’s capitol unnerve those who were present as some accuse him of painting working people as the enemy Ed Pilkington 27 February 2015 Participants in the massive political protests in Wisconsin in 2011 have reacted with a mixture of shock, disbelief and anger to remarks by Governor Scott Walker which compared his handling of the peaceful demonstrations to his stance on Islamist terrorism were he to become president. Walker, who is enjoying a surge of support among the conservative wing of the Republican party amid...

<p>PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) -- Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is telling an influential anti-tax group that he opposes Common Core education standards, putting him at odds with fellow presidential prospect Jeb Bush a day after Bush endorsed the standards to the same audience.</p>

Follow the money. It all ends up in the hands of a very few. Pearson Foundation is getting the contracts because of its partnership with the Bill Gates Foundation. Greed, secrecy, deceptions, and lies …. and to think Democrats accuse Republicans of the very things, while Democrats are the ones using government to get richer. The deceptions run very deep. It’s time for exposure.(The saga begins...) on one summer day in 2008, when Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman (known as the architect of Common Core), knowing they needed tens of millions...

Big Government Sucks.” That’s the slogan of the hordes of young people at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The lesson from this year’s CPAC was that if you wanted to win over this energetic crowd it behooved you to be succinct and rebellious — like that three-word slogan — when taking the stage. Chris Christie used tough talk. Scott Walker used down-home exuberance. Ted Cruz called out every party save for the Tea Party for talking the talk but not walking the walk. And they received tepid passing grades from CPAC’s most energetic demographic. Jeb Bush, however, missed the mark,...

Socialists, Democrats, Communists and liberals rely on people being kept in the dark about their policies. Things are so much easier for them that way. When the media never asks inconvenient questions, any chance of the truth getting out is generally non-existent. But when the bottom publically falls out of one of their fake “benefits” it becomes impossible for these people to keep us in the dark. When the Berlin Wall was coming down the Communists were still telling people to go back to work at their useless factories where they were making useless commodities no one wanted; but the...

A would-be Republican presidential nominee has changed his mind on marijuana. Sen. Ted Cruz said he supports Colorado’s state rights to keep marijuana legalized without federal interference during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity at Thursday’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “I actually think this is a great embodiment of what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called ‘the laboratories of democracy,’” Cruz said. “If the citizens of Colorado decide they want to go down that road, that’s their prerogative. I personally don’t agree with it, but that’s their right.” Cruz’s comments at CPAC bring him in line with...

CPAC Reagan Dinner Governor Mike Pence (R-IN) delivered the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s (CPAC) annual Ronald Reagan Dinner. http://www.c-span.org/video/?324558-20/indiana-governor-mike-pence-r-cpac-reagan-dinner-remarks