Free Republic

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suggested that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) cares more about illegal immigrant children than the unborn in the United States after Pelosi went to the U.S.-Mexico border on Saturday and said America should view the border crisis as a "humanitarian opportunity." Palin said her sister sent her the Breitbart TV report about Pelosi's comments over the weekend. According to Palin, Pelosi was "either speaking such gibberish, considering her track record, or confessing one heck of a great conversion." "Yesterday, Ms. Pelosi spoke highly of illegal immigrants storming our U.S. border, including the children being...

TRENTON — Democratic state Senate President Stephen Sweeney has been traveling all over the state, pitching his "Sandy Bill of Rights" bill — a tour many see as laying the groundwork for a run for governor. Republican lawmakers who never dared challenge Gov. Chris Christie this month openly opposed a series of tax and fee hikes in his budget, including a tax on e-cigarettes first proposed by the governor. Nobody knows if the Republican governor will prepare a White House run in the next year. But already, lawmakers from both parties have been staking claims and thinking of a post-Christie...

Some Congressional leaders are coming out in support of creating an emergency refugee program that they believe would help deal with a massive surge of child immigrants coming to the U.S. from Central America. Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCain said that establishing refugee application programs in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador is “key” to help stem the tide, according to Reuters. Since October, 52,000 Unaccompanied Children, or UACs, have been apprehended at the U.S. border. That is up from 6,000 in 2011. Another 39,000 parents with children have been apprehended as well. The surge has strained resources at the border...

The tea partyers made a serious blunder in Mississippi, costing them a runoff win: They carelessly slipped their magic passion potion to the opposition. The hard rightÂ’s strength comes from the nearly religious fervor that propels its small numbers to the polls at times when the larger numbers are snoozing. In Mississippi, the right woke up the larger numbers. Hold that thought, will you? What had been a race between an old Southern pork-master Republican and an insurgent small-government firebrand was turned into something bigger, much bigger. One sensed Chris McDaniel might be in trouble when Sen. Thad Cochran asked...

Minority leader Nancy Pelosi visited the border on Saturday. The former Speaker made a statement to reporters, “I wish I could take all those children home with me… We’re all Americans in this hemisphere, North and South Amrerica.” KGBT reported:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Breitbart reported: Saturday at a press conference from the Rio Grande Valley, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) discussed her tour of a border holding facility and addressed the humanitarian crisis of thousands unaccompanied minors flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border, which she called a “humanitarian opportunity.” Pelosi explained, “We are all Americans — north and south in this hemisphere,” and urged America to...

Last fall, not long after the federal government’s partial shutdown ended, The New Yorker’s David Denby alleged that shutdown point man Ted Cruz seemed to be pursuing the presidency “by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power.” There’s nothing as pointed or nasty as that in “The Absolutist,” Jeffrey Toobin’s 8,400-word New Yorker profile of Cruz, but Toobin does paint Cruz as an extremist – more of a Goldwater figure than a Reagan figure – as well as a hypocrite regarding judicial activism....

It’s not exactly the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manilla,” but the ongoing Rand Paul-Dick Cheney pugilism certainly packs a punch. The libertarian ophthalmologist and the warlord emeritus have been pounding each other for months, and while it’s tempting to just kick back with popcorn and behold the entertainment, we do need to acknowledge the bout’s deeper meaning. Because this is really about something quite serious. Republicans are profoundly split these days over foreign policy: between the non-interventionists who are increasingly wary of American military involvement abroad; and the neoconservative hawks who blundered us into Iraq and want us to keep flexing...

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s not the tactics themselves that bother them as much as the attention those tactics are receiving from conservative voters. Says Red State’s Leon Wolf, “If any of these bastards want to avoid the fallout they should go on the record.” According to these conversations [with two Republican Senate staffers], some $800,000 was raised for Cochran by his Senate colleagues after the McDaniel victory in the primary’s first round, largely under the rubric of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This wasn’t seen as a particularly controversial matter at the...

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has just unleashed his latest endorsement for re-election. It comes from former Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and 2008 presidential candidate, has a strong following of social conservatives and activists drawn to his populist political message. "He's been your governor, university president, America's secretary of education. He brought the automobile industry to Tennessee," Huckabee explains in the ad. "Lamar Alexander is now a remarkable senator that Tennessee needs to return to office." (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Alexander has released a series of endorsements in recent days, including that of country music star Kix Brooks and former...

The Republican Party continues to enjoy a vibrant battle between its establishment stronghold and small-government insurgents sometimes described as the Tea Party. Republican establishment political strategist Karl Rove responded to older-than-Methuselah, longtime-incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran’s runoff victory in Mississippi this week with a Wall Street Journal column about how Tea Party groups had “taken a beating” this primary season. The column explained that entrenched incumbents with huge war chests and the backing of the party establishment have won more often than challengers, which is undoubtedly true. It is worth noting that Rove did not mention the tremendous victory local and...

Sarah Palin and right-wing Republicans are calling "shenanigans" over the Mississippi U.S. Senate race this week. (Full disclosure: Whenever someone uses that hokey phrase, I chuckle and think of the "South Park" episode when third-graders denounced ripoffs at a local carnival). Anyway, here's what happened in the Magnolia State, which isn't quite as funny. Establishment GOP U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran bucked the odds and history after a narrow primary loss to Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel. On Tuesday, the six-term incumbent edged McDaniel in a runoff, buoyed by heavy turnout from African-Americans. The Cochran campaign openly courted these traditionally Democratic...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)President Obama, tired of waiting for Congress to act on immigration reform, is currently exploring ways to address issues with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. During an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained that the Obama administration was getting impatient with Congress. “[W]e’re not just going to sit around and wait interminably for Congress,” he explained. “We’ve been waiting a year already. The president has tasked his Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson with reviewing what options are available to the president, what is at his disposal using his executive authority to...

When news broke that Eric Cantor had lost his primary, Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee for the Virginia Senate seat, immediately tweeted congratulations to David Brat. The rest of the Republican party establishment, the non-sentimental lot that it is, fell into line and pledged to support the winner. Cantor had been defeated. There was no talk of starting a third party or sitting the election out. Sure, there was some anger and disappointment, but rank and file Republicans moved on. Contrast with the news of what happened last night. Long before it became clear that Thad Cochran, a long-time Republican...

Liberal bias in the media is so pervasive that partisan propaganda themes created by Democrats, for the purpose of electing Democrats and advancing their partisan agenda, take on a quasi-reality. Years ago, after seeing the umpteenth reiteration of a too-familiar theme, I remarked that the New York Times should create a standing headline -- "Republicans Divided" -- and run it as a regular column. If more than 80 percent of journalists are Democrats, as evidence clearly demonstrates, then what the media report about politics (and everything else) must be viewed skeptically: Is this true? Are all the facts as described?...

In order to understand their surroundings, human beings depend on their brain’s ability to organize, identify, and interpret a barrage of sensory information that allows them to perceive, among other things, a potential threat. There has been a gross misperception among a large number of people who observe American politics that the greatest threat to this country, and more specifically its democracy, is the rise of extremists in the conservative movement. As a rule, the first extremist group that comes to most people’s mind is the Koch brothers’ tea party movement that they errantly bifurcate from establishment Republicans and it...

It was the Republicans in Washington and their allies in Mississippi who distributed fliers to Democrats in Mississippi calling conservatives racists, klansmen, Nazis, etc. It was a concerted effort by the GOP to beat their own base at any cost. And here’s the kicker — there will be no consequence if they have their way. That begs the question of whether there should be. Should the Republican establishment in Washington get away with tarring its own voters as racists? Should the Republican establishment in Washington get away with comparing its own base to Klansmen? If there is no penalty for...

Chris McDaniel, the arch-conservative state senator who unexpectedly lost his primary runoff election yesterday to unseat Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, is dead right: The race was decided by non-Republicans. And not just that, but a certain type of non-Republicans taking advantage of the state's open-primary system: African-Americans, or, as McDaniel referred to them in his defiant non-concession speech, “liberal Democrats,” which appears to be the de-racialized code word of choice for some conservative Republicans when talking about black voters. The evidence is in the maps and numbers. Turnout was up statewide compared with the June 3 primary in which McDaniel...

Tea Partyers keep blowing elections, but they're still remaking the GOP in their own extremist image. Last night was rough for the Tea Party. Sen. Thad Cochran beat the odds and the expectations and defeated Chris McDaniel in the runoff for Mississippi’s GOP Senate nomination. In Oklahoma, endorsements by Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz did little to help T.W. Shannon, who was easily defeated by Rep. James Lankford in the race for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Tom Coburn. Both seats were all but certain to stay in Republican hands no matter who won, but the tea...

He’s not on any campaign payroll, but you could call him an informal adviser. Several of the GOP’s potential 2016 presidential candidates have, over the past few years, sought the advice of former president George W. Bush in Dallas. Although the former president has deliberately kept a low profile since he left Washington in January 2009, his door is always open for ambitious Republican politicians. He has welcomed a succession of likely 2016 candidates to his office in Dallas for private conversations about life, politics, and the all-consuming quest they will confront if they decide to seek the nation’s top...

Tea Party leaders and activists urged Chris McDaniel to run as a write-in candidate against Senator Thad Cochran in November. Cochran won the primary on Tuesday thanks to Democrats who turned out to support the incumbent Mississippi senator. TIME Mag reported: Chris McDaniel was defiant in defeat, but hasn’t signaled he’ll mount a long-shot write-in bid Tea Party activists in Mississippi and beyond urged state Sen. Chris McDaniel to mount a write-in campaign against Republican Sen. Thad Cochran on Wednesday, following McDaniel’s stunning defeat in a primary runoff vote Tuesday. “When the Republican Establishment acts like Democrats, what is the...