Free Republic

This one was one that you just couldn't let go - that libertarian champion and former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, Texas, doesn't have a basic understanding of economics. That was the claim made by CNBC senior analyst and commentator Ron Insana on the June 14 broadcast of "Closing Bell." At issue was a June 14 Washington Post article by Robert O'Hara and Dan Keating that suggested there was a conflict of interest in Paul's investments and his policy stances, as in he is a proponent of the gold standard and other uses for the precious medal. "Rep. Ron...

If I had my druthers, the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine would be but a small news brief in American newspapers. But since we police the world, we must always monitor our global police scanner, where not only Israel's conflicts, but those of North and South Korea, the nation of Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and pretty much everywhere else is the United States' business because we insist on making it so. What many Americans bizarrely consider national "defense" is actually an aggressive and enduring offense, and yet we are always surprised when other nations get offended. Last week,...

Behind the scenes the insider Republican establishment is now in an uproar as the odds are high that Rand Paul wins the Republican nomination for senator from Kentucky. This would be a major embarrassment to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and raises a big question about 2012: Why is Sarah Palin getting so much attention, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) so little, from the national media and pundit classes? Certain pundits appear strangely infatuated with Palin, but it seems to me that if Ron Paul runs for president in 2012, he could win a plurality of delegates in a multi-candidate field....

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...

Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demonstrates his fundamental misunderstanding and hostility towards the truly free market. But a closer, honest examination of his policies and actions in office reveals that, much like the previous administration, he is very much a corporatist. This in many ways can be more insidious and worse than being an outright socialist. Socialism is a system where the government directly...

The Tea Party is still in the infanct stage of development, and as such we are still learning exactly what the movement looks like. A recent poll by POLITICO/TargetPoint confirmed what many already thought about the Tea Party demographics. First, what unites the Tea Party is an intense anger against the growth of government and policies of the Obama administration. Three-quarters of Tea Party members believe that President Obama is driving a "socialist agenda." The bad news for Republicans is that this anger extends to them as well. Three-fourths of Tea Party members said they wished to send a message...

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...

A woman who calls herself a "hardcore street activist" and "psycho babe" of internet radio is accused of locking her daughters out of her house because they wouldn't do what they were told. Christie Czajkowski, 37, is charged with five felonies in Taney County: -Two counts of felony child abuse -Two counts of endangering the welfare of a child -One count of resisting arrest On Thursday, Taney County Judge, Tony Williams, reduced her bond from $50,000 to $10,000. Two hours after her bond reduction hearing, Czajkowski posted bond and left the jail. KSPR talked to Czajkowski about the charges ...

Recently I ran across a video interview in which Sarah Palin enthusiastically declares "I support Michael Steele…I think he's doing a great job. Michael Steele is an outsider. The machine, I think, is tough to penetrate--I think it's been good to have an independent outsider trying to create some change in the Republican Party." Michael Steele has from the first day of his tenure been a spokesman for the RINO, pro-abortion, amoral, 'money is god' elite minority that presently controls the Republican Party. The statement that Steele is an outsider is an outright lie. He has for some years now...

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...

(snip) VAN SUSTEREN: Governor Palin, if you were vice president today, what would you be telling a President McCain about what to do about immigration, if anything? PALIN: I support his position on immigration. It all comes down to securing the border. And he who has actually proposed some solutions, the Obama administration does not want to listen to Senator McCain or any other Republican, and that, of course, leads to a greater problem that we have in Washington, D.C. And it's that lack of the new administration's ability and enthusiasm for listening to those on the other side of...

On her blog, Elizabeth Wright offers an excellent analysis of the mass hysteria that is the Sarah Palin phenomenon. Wright is a black conservative who specializes in debunking the sense of victimhood that so many black leaders love to employ to their advantage. She argues that the many wannabe conservatives who are Palin fans are employing the same tactic. They invoke the liberal sense of victimhood in her defense. That of course is the essence of the Palin cult. It consists of people who feel that they're being put upon by their betters. It never occurs to these characters to...

There was a shooting just outside the Pentagon today, at a security checkpoint. Two cops were injured; breaking reports say the suspect, J. Patrick Bedell, has died. The suspect, believed to be a U.S. citizen, walked up to a security checkpoint at the Pentagon in an apparent attempt to get inside the massively fortified Defense Department headquarters, at about 6:40 p.m. local time. “He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting” at point-blank range, Keevill said. “He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face.” The Pentagon officers returned fire with...

For the most part, CPAC ran smoothly, but there's one thing they don't do well, and that's straw polls. In 2008 Romney stacked it by purchasing many, many CPAC tickets for his friends. I don't know how they did it previously, but this year voting was cut off at noon on Friday, before probably half of the attendees were credentialed. As a result, only about 25% of the attendees voted (2,500 out of 10,000), so those who like work for a living and could only come for the big events on Saturday, didn't get counted. But ALL the Ron Paul...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A straw poll of US conservative activists saw Texas congressman Ron Paul emerge as the preferred Republican presidential candidate to run against President Barack Obama in 2012. Some 31 percent of the more than 2,000 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) attendees who participated in the poll voted for the outspoken libertarian. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate in 2008, came in third with 7.0 percent, some way behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (22 percent), who had won the CPAC poll for the last three years. There were boos among the crowd as the...

HOUSTON — Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, reeling from her remarks that questioned whether the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, on Friday blamed the ensuing firestorm on a “coordinated attack” that she speculated came from the campaigns of her better-known GOP rivals.

Debra Medina (TX Gov. Candidate) On Glenn Beck Tomorrow * Posted by Jared Law on February 10, 2010 at 9:14am in 9.12 Project Candidates Glenn Beck just announced that Debra Medina (R-TX) is within a few points of Kay Bailey Hutchison, and what I took from the way he worded it was that he is suggesting that she MAY be the real deal, and that she MAY be the candidate that the Tea Party Movement (9.12 Project Included, one must assume) has been looking for. There has been so much discussion of Debra Medina here on The 9.12 Project Network,...

An unexpected feature of this year's gubernatorial race is the revival of certain political notions identified with early American history. Republican candidate Debra Medina in particular has made nullification a major aspect of her campaign, both in her two debates with U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Gov. Rick Perry and on her Web site, which includes, under the label "Restore Sovereignty," the message that the U.S. Constitution "divides power between the federal and state governments and ultimately reserves final authority for the people themselves. Texas must stop the over reaching federal government and nullify federal mandates in agriculture, energy,...

(CNN) - The newest member of the Senate will soon hit the 2010 campaign trail for Arizona Sen. John McCain. A McCain source confirms Sen. Scott Brown, R-Massachusetts, will campaign with the 2008 Republican presidential nominee in early March. McCain is facing a primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth. (snip) Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will also hit the campaign trail for McCain at the end of March.

The head weasel at the RNC tells that I have a choice to make. To whit: 'Will Barack Obama continue to have Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid majorities in Concress to ram through his radical leftist agenda of curtailed freedoms and government expansion, or... ...will our Party's commonsense conservative candidates prevail next November and roll back the left-wing gains that are threatening our prosperity and liberty?' Well, you have to admire their sheer nerve and effrontery in making this sort of play for my wallet. The letter mentions New Jersey and Virginia as signal victories, but they somehow forgot to mention their...