Free Republic

What is up with the ubiquitous Mitt? He’s flitting about—as would any public office aspirant trying to gain voter interest in their candidacy—making the scene on radio and T.V., while enthusiastically endorsing the go-along-to-get-along hack candidates backed by the Progressive RINO Establishment; champions of crony capitalism, electoral criminality (remember Mississippi), and fraternal loyalty to the ruling class: still neglecting to embrace a concise articulation of the Constitutional Conservatism they rightly view as a threat to their established Inside-Beltway political racket pecking order. The elitist, morally relativistic, self-serving behavior of the establishmentarians illustrates a resistance and incapacity to communicate with their...

As Congress hurtled toward a government shutdown in the fall of 2013, Rep. Paul Ryan looked around at fellow Republicans who were agitating to shutter national parks, federal agencies and Head Start programs. "This can't be the full measure of our party and our movement," Ryan writes of that moment in his new book, released Tuesday. "If it is, we're dead and the country is lost." Such moments of raw frustration pepper Ryan's "The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea," a book as much about his front-row seat as Republicans' favorite budget wonk as it is about his political future....

<p>Gov. Rick Perry (R) seems to be enjoying the spotlight that has come with pushing back to his recent indictment.</p> <p>The latest move: His new political action committee unveiled a T-shirt featuring Perry's mug shot. The back of the shirt features the mug shot of District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, whose character Perry has repeatedly tried to attack while making her the poster child of his pushback.</p>

The Speaker of The House tried to ram through a bill containing a smorgasbord of odds-and-ends spending desired by the governor and various special interests. It got shot down once in the GOP caucus. It got shot down on the House floor Friday in a late-in-the-day revolt. Speaker Tillis and his allies took the hardball route this week. They loaded up the legislation with even more pork, and threatened non-compliant conservatives with a potential ouster from the GOP caucus. Once that shenanigan went public, things continued to go south for the speaker. He took some tough questions during a Monday...

A tea party-backed candidate asked a Mississippi court on Thursday to declare him the winner of the June 24 Republican runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran or order a new election. Certified results of the June 24 runoff show Cochran defeated McDaniel by 7,667 votes. But McDaniel says his campaign found thousands of irregularities, including about 3,500 people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and June 24 runoff. Mississippi voters don't register by party, but such crossover voting is prohibited.

Sen. Lamar Alexander made headlines Monday, as a new report from a Washington, D.C., quarterly showed that he sided with President Barack Obama on votes more than any other GOP senator from the South last year. The study, conducted by Congressional Quarterly, ranked lawmakers on how they sided with the president on issues he took a clear position on in 2012. It found Alexander aligning with Obama 62 percent of the time, according to a Tennessean report. Of 251 roll calls taken in the Senate last year, Congressional Quarterly found the president announcing his own position on 79 of those...

But I Voted For Obama For "Free Stuff",And I Am Entitled!.So how do these 65.9 Americans feel now that they are indirectly responsible for the horrific events of the last 2 or 3 weeks?,Was the free-stuff worth watching thousands of children suffering and dying trying to cross the border?,Was voting for a liberal worth what happened in the Ukraine along with god knows how many innocent people have died in the mid-east?And now here we are 5.5 years into the Obama Administration and thanks to these 65 Million"Selfish/Greedy" Americans, we are beyond a Nation In Fear!And to think we were...

Less than a week after allegations of fraud prompted election officials in Afghanistan to delay the results of that country's presidential runoff election, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Friday for the two remaining Afghan candidates to allow the results to be audited. "There's ample evidence of fraud," said Graham, according to the Wall Street Journal. "There needs to be an audit that is recognized by the Afghan people as legitimate and by the international community as legitimate." A failure to end the standoff, McCain warned, "could put not only the political environment in Afghanistan into a...

Yes, you. You are a [censored]. A [censored] A RINO [censored]. And I've got news for you, you sick [censored]. I will never vote for you. Ever. I don't give a [censored] how the primaries turn out. I will sooner vote for that [censored] [censored-reference to the current POTUS] before I vote for you. You are a [censored], [censored] [censored]. You like killing babies. You are the reason Romneycare (and Obamacare) exists. You wanted to raise taxes. [censored], you did - too! You backed TARP. You love Big Government. In short... you [censored]. Hence, why I will never vote for...

Former GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who this week referred to Tea Party lawmakers as "hobbits," publicly criticized Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey Sunday during an unusual unscripted debate on the Senate floor. McCain, who appeared to be having a great 'ol time during a back and forth with Democrat Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin, referred to Toomey and those who share his views as "terrible." (snip) "...the terrible obstructionists on this side of the aisle, the terrible people, their flawed philosophical views about the future of America..."

As rain splatters the windows of Sen. John McCain’s second-floor office on Capitol Hill, the 74-year-old Arizona Republican leans back, clasps his hands, and recalls the Nineties. Brinksmanship, he says, cost the party then, and it could cripple Republicans this summer — especially if Rep. Michele Bachmann gets her way. Over in the House, “I am told that it is very difficult,” McCain says. “There are Republicans who are committed, like Michele Bachmann, to vote against raising the debt limit under any circumstances.” Bachmann, he warns, is acting “sort of like Senator Obama did.”(snip) Yet as poorly as Obama has...

Coming off her week-long One Nation bus tour that was widely seen as a test-run for a presidential campaign, Sarah Palin says she’s starting to see that running for president might not be the best fit for her. “Not only do I love my freedom of not having a title and being a declared candidate — that is liberating — I know you can make a difference as an individual,” she said. “Hopefully, I can inspire others to know that you don’t need a title. You don’t need to be in office to effect positive change.”

(snip) Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it. (snip) "I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," [Pawlenty] said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions." Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. (snip) Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. John McCain is calling Sarah Palin an "outstanding candidate" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but says it's too early to endorse her.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. John McCain says he shares Sarah Palin's opinion that Republican congressional candidates could suffer at the polls if they stray from the tea party's anti-spending, anti-tax message. (snip) The Arizona Republican said that when Republicans gained majorities in Congress in 1994, "they betrayed our base, particularly in the area of fiscal responsibility" and were repudiated in the next two elections. McCain said, "What Sarah is saying is, 'We've got to get fiscally responsible Republicans in.' "

National Democrats have asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether Arizona Sen. John McCain violated campaign finance laws when his campaign paid to run ads for Republican House candidates in Arizona — charges the McCain campaign said are “baseless.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee filed a FEC complaint Tuesday against McCain and his campaign committee, Friends of John McCain, because of recent ads backing Ruth McClung, the GOP nominee in Arizona’s 7th District, and Jesse Kelly, who is running in the 8th District. The complaint also asks the FEC to investigate whether McClung, Kelly and their respective campaign committees...

(snip) ...as McCain again said he supported his former running mate former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin. "I haven't seen anyone since Ronald Reagan that with certain individuals and large groups of individuals who really have this passionate belief and support for her," he said, "It's really a remarkable thing to observe." (snip) "I couldn't be more proud of the campaign she waged," he said. "I couldn't be more proud of her or her performance and her continued performance. So, I think, you begin to think about legacy and I think that Sarah Palin will play a very big role in...

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that Sarah Palin is considering a run for president in 2012. "She's obviously toying with the idea," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

John McCain shocked voters and pundits alike by picking Sarah Palin as a running mate in 2008, and McCain's daughter reveals the choice caused plenty of behind-the-scenes drama too. In her new book "Dirty Sexy Politics," Meghan McCain says Palin brought "stress, drama, complications, panic and loads of uncertainty" to the campaign. "She was not just an overnight success or even a political Cinderella story," McCain writes in an excerpt obtained by ABC News. "She was a sudden, freakishly huge, full-fledged phenomenon. It seemed too much. And it seemed too easy." Speaking out about the former Alaska Gov. for the...