Free Republic

Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal appear in a commercial that will air Sunday to promote NewRepublican.org, a project focused on outlining a positive GOP agenda for the future. The former Florida governor and the current Louisiana governor, both potential 2016 presidential candidates, support a super PAC that is the brainchild of Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. “If you believe that every parent ought to be able to choose their child’s school, and that the economy should be driven from the bottom up, not the top down from Washington, then you’re thinking like a New Republican,” Bush says to the camera at...

President Obama gave House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi rosary beads blessed by Pope Francis during lunch Tuesday at the White House, according to an NBC News reporter. Carrie Dann @CarrieNBCNews Pelosi says she received a rosary blessed by Pope Francis from Obama at lunch today 12:24 PM - 1 Apr 2014 Obama met Pope Francis at the Vatican for the first time last week. Pelosi, a Catholic, has been criticized for her support of abortion — a practice which she has called “sacred ground” — by other Catholics. Last year, a Vatican official in Rome said that the California lawmaker...

Democratic lawmakers and campaign finance reform advocates quickly bashed Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision to strike down total limits on individual campaign contributions, warning of future corruption in elections. Meanwhile, Republicans largely cheered the ruling from the narrowly divided court, which found it unconstitutional to impose caps on the aggregate amounts that one person can donate to campaigns, parties and political action committees. Calling himself “all for freedom,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday commended the ruling, saying “donors ought to have the freedom to give what they want to give.” And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had filed...

Our English-speaking media were very clear after the 2012 election that the Republican Party was demographically doomed, since all the voters "of color" were shifting toward President Barack Obama and the Democrats. They echoed the mantra of GOP moderates, stating the only way to political viability was through "comprehensive immigration reform." What these analysts did not do was explore the messaging Hispanic voters are getting from Spanish-language media. Has the conservative message been rejected by Spanish-language voters -- or is something being kept from them? We've seen a disturbing set of reports on how hand in glove these Spanish networks...

Leland Yee should be making national headlines. A Democratic state senator from San Francisco, a statewide candidate until this week, and a rising member of Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein’s Democratic political machine, was arrested on Wednesday by the Justice Department for wire fraud, corruption, and his alleged involvement in illegal gun deal between Chinatown gangsters and Islamist militants. **SNIP** Yet four of the most prominent news outlets in America — CNN, USA Today, Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times — made no mention of the Leland Yee scandal within two days of the story breaking. When Politico finally ran a...

Bruce Rauner, the billionaire Republican nominee for Illinois governor, is doing all he can to turn himself into a career politician named Mark Kirk. Fresh off a closer-than-expected primary victory over three underfunded opponents, Rauner is avoiding social issues at all costs and hewing to a throw-the-bums-out message against the unpopular Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. Rauner has on his staff four Kirk alumni in his effort to replicate the moderate GOP senator’s path to blue-state victory. And like Kirk — and unlike Republicans in almost everywhere else in the country — Rauner avoids bashing President Barack Obama, who remains popular...

In a Tuesday morning puff profile on Hillary Clinton loyalist and Media Matters founder David Brock, The Politico actually manages to blame conservatives for an anti-Obama attack designed and launched by — wait for it — Mrs. Clinton’s camp. “For Brock, the attacks on Obama bear some similarities to the types of attacks on the Clinton White House,” the site tells us. “Obama has faced a range of attacks from the right, including the belief, championed in some conservative quarters, that he was not born in the United States.” Dun-dun-dunnnnnn! But the funny thing is, if we rewind The Politico...

Former Rep. Ron Paul says that America’s reaction to Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine should be,“so what?” “Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?” the Texas Republican and libertarian icon wrote in a USA Today op-ed Monday. ...Over the weekend, Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia,which the Russian government has moved to approve. American politicians have called the vote a sham and the administration has said it does not recognize the results of the vote,placing sanctions on some Russian officials in response. Ron...

After veteran reporter Joseph Williams lost his job, he found employment in a sporting-goods store. In a personal essay, he recalls his struggles with challenges millions of Americans return to day after day. My plunge into poverty happened in an instant. I never saw it coming. Then again, there was no reason to feel particularly vulnerable. Two years ago, I was a political reporter at Politico, and I spent my days covering the back-and-forth of presidential politics. I had access to the White House because of my reporting beat, and I was a regular commentator on MSNBC. My career had...

Darrell Issa seen plowing ahead with IRS probe amid new evidence By JOHN BRESNAHAN and LAUREN FRENCH | 3/7/14 2:00 PM EST Updated: 3/7/14 3:53 PM EST Not even a trove of new evidence will stop Darrell Issa from going after Lois Lerner’s testimony. The House Oversight Committee Chairman is plowing forward with plans to hold the former IRS official in contempt of Congress - possibly as early as next week - despite word from the tax agency that it plans to hand over a broad set of documents spanning Lerner’s entire career at the IRS. Republicans have long sought...

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul asked for some advice from Texas GOP rising star George P. Bush on how to reach out to Hispanic voters — and got a simple recommendation: Show up, Politico reported. “Really I wanted to get advice from him, as much as anything, about how the party grows in Texas and states with large Hispanic populations,” Paul, who's considered a possible GOP candidate for president in 2016, said after stumping for a state senate candidate in Dallas. Bush, whose mother is from Mexico, has pushed for expanding the GOP reach to Hispanics. Paul said Bush recommended...

Politico wonders why the GOP wants Americans to work “all the time,” using the recent CBO projection that ObamaCare will reduce the workforce by 2.5 million over the next 10 years as a springboard. The article’s author, university professorBenjamin Kline Hunnicut, wrote that Republican reaction to the CBO projection was predictable: “Pundits filled the airwaves, Cassandra-like, to paint ObamaCare as the ultimate job killer. Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back.” Hunnicut then asked: “Anyway, isn’t...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after a low-key initial response to Friday’s explosive allegations about his involvement in a bridge-closing scandal, mounted an aggressive defense late Saturday afternoon, attacking The New York Times and a former political ally in an email to friends and allies obtained by POLITICO. “Bottom line — David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein,” the email from the governor’s office says, referring to the former appointee who reignited the controversy.

The House Republican leadership is trying to sell their colleagues on a series of broad immigration principles, including a path to legal status for those here illegally. Speaker John Boehner’s leadership team introduced the principles at their annual policy retreat here. Top Republicans circulated a tightly held one-page memo titled “standards for immigration reform” toward the tail-end of a day that include strategy conversations about Obamacare, the economy and the national debt. n the private meeting where the language was introduced, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Republicans that the standards are “as far as we are willing to go.” “Nancy Pelosi said...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Texas gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis brushed off criticism about her life story from Bristol Palin, saying that nothing Palin accused her of was true. Davis was responding to a blog post from the daughter of former Gov. Sarah Palin, who wrote last week amid questions about the timeline of Davis’s personal biography, slamming her for allegedly leaving her kids behind with her ex-husband after finishing law school. “Gosh, children are sooo inconvenient, huh? I’m glad my mother didn’t put motherhood on the shelf when she was elected to City Council, then became our mayor, then governor,” Palin wrote, addressing her...

In his hunt for reelection, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is leading his Democratic opponent Mary Burke, according to a new poll released Monday. The Marquette Law School poll has the Republican governor ahead 47 to 41 percent among registered voters. The same poll has 54 percent of respondents saying the state is heading in the right direction, compared to 40 percent who say it is not. With the election still nine months away, Burke will have to play catch up to familiarize voters with her stance on issues; 70 percent of respondents say they have not heard enough about her...

On Friday, Politico was set to release a puff piece on Michael Savage, the polarizing host tapped by Cumulus to replace iconic talker Sean Hannity on its affiliates. In the process of putting together that puff piece, Politico contacted Hannity for comment. After attempting to manipulate Hannity’s comments repeatedly, Hannity withdrew them. Now, they appear exclusively at Breitbart News. Hannity has moved to Premiere Radio Networks, a division of Clear Channel, shifting stations in many markets. As reported by Breitbart News last year, Hannity parted ways with Cumulus last year to move to Premiere, retaining his major markets and reportedly...

Sen. Rand Paul blasted former President Bill Clinton on Sunday, saying that if Democrats want to hit Republicans for the "War on Women" they should take a look at the former president's "predatory behavior" against Monica Lewinsky. "The Democrats -- one of their big issues is they've concocted this, 'Republicans are committing a war on women,'" Kentucky Republican said on NBC's "Meet The Press." "One of the work place laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn't prey on young interns in their office. I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a...

It has been over two-months since Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple dropped a bombshell on Politico with a meticulously researched report that alleges Politico's influential Playbook editor, Mike Allen, rewards advertisers with glowing coverage. The response from Politico thus far has been to dismiss, downplay, and ignore Wemple's reporting as "nonsense."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Turning to Obamacare for a moment. From The Politico: "A vast majority..." This is a tear-jerker, folks. Prepare to get really sad and maybe even shed some tears here. "A vast majority of top congressional aides say in a new survey that they are concerned about the effects of Obamacare on their staff, ticking off worries about changes to their benefits, higher costs and whether they’ll have access to local health care providers." Now, these are the people... Let me remind you, this is congressional staff. These are people that earn anywhere from $95,000 to $170,000 a...