Free Republic

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went OFF on what she derided as an “old boys club” that is the U.S. Senate following Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) revelation that he was a “no” on President Biden’s Build Back Better bill during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.... ...The Congresswoman then explained out the “people’s house” is often the lone true representation of American democracy, correctly pointing out how the U.S. Senate gives more legislative power to constituents in lesser populated states (seeing as every state gets two Senators) and that the Executive branch is often led by a President who wins the...

A slew of Hollywood celebrities took to Twitter to criticize President Donald Trump after he ended the policy of separating illegal immigrant adults from minors apprehended at the southern border. “We’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” Trump said on signing the order. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.” However, many prominent celebrities campaigning for an end to the policy did not seem satisfied. Actor Tom Arnold said that despite the order, Trump and Sessions remain “lying white trash child abusing monsters.”

The final Whig president of the United States was Millard Filmore in 1853.  He marked the death of the Whigs, and the rise of the Know-Nothings.  Today the GOP faces its own death, and the continued success of Donald Trump in the polls reflects the fact that the Republican Party is staring into its own grave. The Know-Nothing party was formed in reaction to Irish Catholic immigration, and pledged to restore “Native Americans” to political power (and by that I don’t mean Hiawatha, but WASPs).  Forming a party based on reactionary impulse is the death-rattle of a lost cause, and...

Third Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois September 15, 1858 MR. DOUGLAS' SPEECH. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I appear before you today in pursuance of a previous notice, and have made arrangements with Mr. Lincoln to divide time, and discuss with him the leading political topics that now agitate the country. Prior to 1854 this country was divided into two great political parties known as Whig and Democratic. These parties differed from each other on certain questions which were then deemed to be important to the best interests of the Republic. Whig and Democrats differed about a bank, the...

"Ideas may be cut loose from experience in two senses: either they have no roots in experience, or they are not submitted to the test of experience. Either way, they are free to be foolish." So wrote Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Introduction to her landmark book, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York, 1982, p. 10). Kirkpatrick's statement applies perfectly to the band of naïve idealists now in change of our government. The youthful dreamers guiding the Obama administration have almost no private-sector experience. Like Obama himself, the Cabinet and host of czars who direct policy have spent their lives in...

I would also remind any Conservative that America is in the hole it is today because we have forgotten so much of our history. We are right to demand that our representatives remember the founding documents, we are right to demand these documents be taught in school. Again, how is studying the Confederacy any less important? Is not the essential question right now, on so many issues, NOT States rights? And what was the fight from 1861-65 over again? Yes, States rights.

The one main benefit to the financial reform effort so far is that it helps further do away with the false paradigms of "left" or "right" and "Democrat" or "Republican" - fewer and fewer people are falling for those lies anymore. Try to get an ideological conservative to explain why Republicans love spending and so eagerly give welfare to banks. Try to get your local liberal to explain why it was a good idea to make backroom deals with abhorrent corporations and drill, baby, drill. Heck, even try to get a Tea Partier to explain choosing bailout-lover Sarah Palin to...

Sarah Palin, 55 percent unfavorable poll ratings notwithstanding, is a political phenomenon the likes of which American public life rarely has seen. There's something distinctive, something deeply personal, about the way her legions of strong supporters rush not just to defend her but to counter-attack any and all of her critics. Palin has a way of establishing a sense of connectedness with her backers -- such a strong, attitudinal sense that she is not just like them but one of them -- that she has created what amounts to a one-woman, conservative "identity politics" writ very, very large. Yet if...

Why in the hell is Karl Rove on my TV? Why is Karl Rove on my radio? Why is Karl Rove on anywhere? Unless he’s on trial or being interrogated, I can’t imagine of what possible use this George W. Bush relic could be to conservatives and yet he’s everywhere, hocking his book “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” a title as credibly right-wing as Stephen Colbert and as historically accurate as the movie “Titanic.” Craig Shirley and former Reagan official Donald Devine summed up Rove’s duplicity well in this week’s Washington Post: “From William...

Republicans will enact the health reform proposal they unveiled this week if they take back the House, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) pledged Thursday. Appearing on the Republican National Committee's (RNC) online town hall, Boehner and other House and Senate leaders said they sensed momentum behind GOP efforts to halt Democratic health reform legislation, which is set for a vote on Saturday. "If we get in the majority after the election, I plan to enact our healthcare plan," Boehner said during the town hall.

The media haven't done enough to tell us who Barack Obama really is. "After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is," wrote Peter Nicholas of the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday about Mr. Obama, with whom he's spent roughly 18 hours a day for most of this campaign.

RUSH: Now, on Charlie Rose Show last night on PBS. Are they doing their pledge drive yet? Is PBS doing their drive? Because, you know, "Without your Pledge, we cannot dust." He had on Tom Brokaw last night, ladies and gentlemen. Here's a montage. Now, this is last night. As you listen to this, keep in mind everything you've heard from Brokaw and others in the Drive-Bys can for the past six months, three months, two months or whatever. This is a montage of Charlie Rose and Brokaw trying to figure out who Obama is. ROSE: I don't know what...

A third of immigrants have not graduated from high school and 60 percent do not speak English fluently, the Migration Policy Institute found. These immigrants make up half the Los Angeles workforce. It said this left immigrants ill-equipped to fill California's fastest-growing occupations. The organization said that as the so-called baby boomers reach retirement age, a similar pattern will spread across the U.S. Ernesto Cortes, of the Industrial Area Foundation, a think-tank that specializes on social change said "The question is are we going to be a 21st century city or a Third World city with an elite group on...

The rest of the world gets uneasy every four years as Americans start to pick their next president. We don't have a vote. But we do have to live with the results. As the tenure of George W. Bush illustrates – this is not always pleasant. With the so-called Iowa caucuses out of the way, the murky U.S. political scene has become marginally clearer. Most Canadians would be hard-pressed to name all of the presidential candidates. We now know, thanks to an arcane and not particularly fair voting system in one of America's smallest states, which names we will never...

Immigration-limits groups are in the midst of a Labor Day campaign to pressure Congress and presidential candidates to pledge to cut the flow of foreign labor in order to protect American workers. The groups' plea — being made in a new television-ad campaign and an online petition — occurs as think tanks on both sides of the immigration debate ponder the role of immigrants in the labor force, and arrive at different conclusions about how necessary foreign workers will be over the next half-century. The new ad campaign is stark and blunt: It features a young couple sitting at a...

What an election: The one-time mayor of Ellis Island, grandson of Italian immigrants, has to make nice with the modern-day Know Nothings if he wants a shot at his party's nomination for the presidency. Mayor Giuliani gets immigrants. He's lived their dreams. He's governed their city. He's won their hearts and their minds and their votes. But now he must walk a razor's edge between advocating sensible immigration reforms on one side and demonizing immigrants as criminals and invaders on the other. Having transgressed from conservative orthodoxy irreparably on one issue, abortion, Mr. Giuliani has been pursuing a strategy of...

NEW YORK A feature piece in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine on Republican candidate for president, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, portrays his followers as including a wild mix of "wackos" on both ends of the political spectrum. Paul, a libertarian, has been gaining media and public attention of late. The cover line reads: "A Genuine Radical for President." The headline inside: "The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul." The article closes with the author, Christopher Caldwell, attending a Ron Paul Meetup in Pasadena. The co-host, Connie Ruffley of United Republicans of California, admits she...

Don't hang out 'no vacancy' sign at Kittery Maine needs immigrants to grow and prosper, which means being welcoming, not hostile. Cead Mille Failte is a Gaelic expression of Irish hospitality that literally translates to "one hundred thousand welcomes." As the son of Irish immigrants who were welcomed to Maine more than 80 years ago to find work, raise a family and practice their faith, I believe the only way to have a prospering Maine is to have a welcoming Maine. Maine's periods of great economic growth have coincided with its periods of high levels of in-migration. This is...

Supporters of a lax immigration policy love to hurl the charge of "Know-Nothingism" against their critics. But, oddly enough, it is the Senate immigration bill that duplicates a key element of the 19th-century Know-Nothing platform. Those long-ago nativists wanted to make immigrants wait 21 years to become citizens. The Senate bill effectively creates a comparable waiting period.

As Congress takes another pass at immigration, its supporters hail it as an all-American phenomenon. President George W. Bush calls it therapeutic: "Immigration helps renew our soul... Snip The bigotry of immigration opponents is a familiar shadow in our civic myth, like the devils and tempters in a medieval morality play. In 1798 John Adams signed the Alien Act, which gave the President the power to expel "dangerous" foreigners. Harrison Gray Otis, an Adams supporter in Congress, singled out "hordes of wild Irishmen" as particularly unwelcome. Other Congressmen mocked the French accent of Representative Albert Gallatin, who was born in...