Free Republic

After a yearlong fight, House Republicans land a blow against the politicized National Mediation Board (NMB). After assuming office in 2009, President Obama appointed two pro-union members to the three member NMB, the federal agency that oversees union-employer relations in the transportation industry. Effectively controlling the board, Obama’s Democrat appointees rewrote long-held election law to make it easier for unions to organize transportation workers. While the National Labor Relations Board’s nefarious activity has received much publicity, Obama’s regulatory overreach began with the NMB. Since the National Railway Act’s was ratified in 1926, a union needed to receive a majority of...

Two weeks ago when discussing the latest lunacy surrounding America's exponential curve #1 also known as its debt balance, we suggested what the GOP election strategy should be: "[if] the debt ceiling becomes a sticking point at the election, Obama's chances of reelection plunge. Which makes us wonder - will Republicans grasp that the paradox of defeating Obama is precisely in giving him a carte blanche on all the stimulus programs he wants? Because if Congress approves another $200, 300 or even $400 billion in stimulus pork (the only thing better than one Solyndra? One thousand Solyndras!) the Treasury will...

Washington - Republicans in Congress are launching bids to nullify Obama administration rules that would speed up union elections and set new air pollution standards for the nation's oldest and dirtiest power plants. The rarely used tactic requires a simple majority for passage. Both have a chance at clearing the Senate, but a vote would force some Democrats to take a public stand on two volatile issues in an election year.

The Barack Obama budget document just released is not a budget. It is a work of literature. It is Barack Obama’s published apologia for a second presidential term, in which—as the budget and its tax proposals make clear—he will reset the historic balance in America between the public sector and the private sector. This reset will require large wealth transfers—from individuals and companies to the government, and from the government back to the people. The Obama budget is described everywhere as a “political document,” but it is more than that. Mr. Obama hasn’t assembled these ideas just to get elected....

It's not just the economic numbers that are looking up for President Obama. A new New York Times/CBS News poll puts his approval rating at 50 percent, his highest mark since May 2010 (except for a brief bump after Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in May). That's a couple of points better than the RealClearPolitics average as displayed in the chart, but the uptrend is clear. Now, let’s assume the economy continues to grow—not gangbusters, but something along the lines predicted by economists in the recent Wall Street Journal survey. We’re talking slow-but-steady 2.5 percent GDP growth and a...

Whitney Houston died at the age of 48. Most articles about her death said something like, "Houston struggled with drug and alcohol problems for years ..." But Houston also struggled with something else that black Republicans and black non-Democrats can understand: ridicule and ostracism for "selling out," or "acting white," or not being "black enough." Ebony, the black monthly magazine, wrote about the then-27-year-old: "Black disc jockeys have chided her for 'not having soul' and being 'too white.' ... She was booed at the Soul Train Music Awards. ... It's enough to drive a good Christian girl to drink, drugs...

The US Government continues actions that will result in its own demise. That might seem fitting, except that its failure will seriously harm the citizenry. Government decisions and actions have assured an economic collapse that will result in another depression. Federal debts and promises are too large to be honored, a conclusion based not on economics but on simple arithmetic. The government collapse will likely trigger the economic collapse, although the order could be reversed. Arguably, we are already in a depression which has been disguised by juicing GDP via excessive government spending. This spending has been funded increased government...

Oh my gosh! I am so very mad I am still shaking. I called the RNC today to get the definitive answer on the Florida delegate count. I was transferred to a young man named Josh and what ensued was the most infuriating, while enlightening, conversation that I have had in a long while. I first asked my question about the delegates. His convoluted answer was basically that they couldn't impose two punishments, so the one punishment imposed was taking away half of their delegates. I asked him about that rule, was that in writing somewhere. He then proceeded to...

Dear Friend, In this video commentary, I discuss how the latest polling shows a huge GOP surge. Tune in!

Rick Santorum — a man who lost his last election in his home state by eighteen points — is suddenly threatening the frontrunner status of Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination. He, not Newt Gingrich, is emerging, at least for the moment, as the conservative alternative to Romney, having won decisively in three state contests this week. I say “for the moment,” because only a dopey pundit like me would assert that this race is over, as I did immediately after the Florida primary. Nevertheless, things are looking good for Santorum. Events, again “for the moment,” are swinging his...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Republican Party will host presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during its convention later this month. Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro said Tuesday that Gingrich will address the twice-annual gathering in Burlingame on Feb. 25th. Del Beccaro calls Gingrich one of the most dynamic figures in GOP politics in the last 50 years....

Participants in a recent shale gas energy conference held in Hobbs, New Mexico, referred to a whirlwind trip to Lea County, NM, as “exhausting” but “enlightening.” Bradford County Commissioners Doug McLinko, Mark Smith, and Daryl Miller, Susquehanna County Commissioner Mary Ann Warren and Pennsylvania state Rep. Tina Pickett were among local elected officials to partake in discussions and serve as guests on informative panels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acpxp93P1M0&feature=g-all-u&context=G277ceb8FAAAAAAAACAA

Among five specific economic proposals, both Republicans and Democrats are in favor of giving tax breaks to corporations that bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas and pressuring China for fairer trade. They are sharply divided about increasing federal income taxes on upper-income Americans, increasing federal spending to help the long-term unemployed find jobs, and increasing federal spending on the development of alternative energy sources. The majority of independents favor all proposals. The findings are from a Gallup poll conducted Jan. 23, 2012, to gauge support for specific economic proposals Obama was expected to raise during his State of the Union...

On Saturday night, at precisely 9:19 and 30 seconds, my iPhone, my iPad, my computer and, for all I know, my toaster were informed that Herman Cain had endorsed Newt Gingrich. The ping-ping of the devices suggested that something momentous had happened--alerts from both The Post and the New York Times--but in fact it was just additional evidence that the Republican Party has become a circus: One clown endorsed another. It’s hard to know who is the more ridiculous figure — the grandiloquent, bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich, or the beguilingly ignorant Cain, a man who has never held elective...

Whatever happened to the good old days, when the MSM glorified "speaking truth to power"? We all know the answer: that epoch ended on January 20, 2009. Nowadays, opposing power, particularly in the person of the president, far from being something to be praised, is downright illegitimate in some liberal media eyes. Take the latest "Lean Forward" promo by MSNBC, in which Ed Schultz actually claims that those "standing up to the president" are nothing but "bullies." View the video here.

There are many things obvious to ordinary Americans that cannot be mentioned publicly in the polite political company of the Republican and Democratic establishments or among their press agents in the mainstream media, who obligingly pirouette around the truth. For example, both the Republican and Democratic establishments are composed of hopelessly corrupt, procrastinating control freaks, who seek fame and fortune through over-spending money they didn't earn and enthusiastically crushing any spontaneous outbreaks of democracy among U.S. citizens, for example, the Tea Party.

HARRISBURG — A Chester County entrepreneur won the endorsement Saturday from Pennsylvania’s Republican Party in what could be a bruising, four-way primary election for the nomination to contest Democrat Bob Casey’s re-election bid for U.S. Senate. The endorsement was won by Steve Welch after an extraordinary show of power by Gov. Tom Corbett, who began calling state party officials to tell them of his support for Welch less than two weeks ago. (snip) The endorsement of Welch will be viewed by grassroots party members “as a poke in the face,” Rohrer said. Welch has been criticized by his rivals for...

TOWANDA - While Bradford County has experienced extensive gas drilling for a few years, what will it be like after the drilling has gone on for decades? The three Bradford County commissioners and other local officials had a chance to get a sense of what could happen when they traveled last week to participate in a two-day conference in Lea County, N.M.

In the next few weeks, the Idaho Revenue and Tax Committee may vote on a bill to raise the state's cigarette tax $1.25 per pack. That would take Idaho from the lowest tax among its neighbors to the second-highest. As we have argued before, high excise taxes drive commerce across state lines as consumers seek lower prices. That negatively impacts small businesses in high-tax states, especially those close to the border with lower-tax states. Recently in South Carolina, for example, lawmakers imposed a 50 cent per pack increase, bringing the state's tax rate 20 cents higher than neighboring Georgia. In...

Jacksonville,FL- After last night’s Republican Presidential debate, the candidates’ respective spinmeisters made their cases to the media as to why their guy won the debate. One of Governor Mitt Romney’s spokesmen was Florida Representative Will Weatherford, and during the course of his remarks in the “Spin Room�, he shed a very dim light on the ongoing redistricting process in the Florida Legislature. Over the past several weeks, many Republicans have voiced their disappointment towards the Republican legislature after the release of the preliminary redistricting maps. Much of the ire concerns the proposed boundaries of Congressman Allen West’s 22nd Congressional District...

It is a cliché to speak of “spineless Republicans”-google spineless republicans and you will see. They talk “conservative” when they campaign; but once in office, they go along with the progressive agenda.That agenda is to grow the federal government until it controls every aspect of our lives. Why don’t they oppose the progressive agenda? Rush Limbaugh says they don’t oppose it because they want to be invited to the right parties and praised in the liberal media. But on this, our Rush is wrong. Rush is a man of Principles; but he doesn’t understand the Constitution.So he doesn’t see that...

Voters continue to trust Republicans more than Democrats on the number one issue of the economy, but they now trust Democrats at least slightly more on five of the 10 most important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. The two parties are nearly tied on five of the 10, though. This is the first survey since May 2009 in which the GOP doesn't have an edge on a majority of the issues. Economy 40% - democRATS 47% - Republicans Health Care 44% - democRATS 42% - Republicans Education 42% - democRATS 40% - Republicans Iraq 43% - democRATS 42% -...

Realizing that most Americans certainly won’t care what I think, nevertheless, I am hereby endorsing Newt Gingrich for President. Of the remaining candidates for the Republican nomination, Gingrich is the only one who will fight to restore our country with the same degree of passion he gives to winning the presidency. This past week, I have been appalled at the Republican Establishment’s coordinated attacks on former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Their “schlock and awe” campaign has been unkind, unfair, untrue, and unprincipled.

GOP voters are sending a clarion call to the party establishment, but it seems GOP leaders are not getting the message. The statement being sent to the GOP elite isn't about Newt, and it goes beyond even Romney. It is about a deep dissatisfaction that has been building for years within the Republican rank and file. With the proclamations of Bob Dole and others against Newt Gingrich recently, it is clear the GOP establishment fears a Gingrich nomination. In truth, however, it is the GOP establishment's own ineffectual leadership that led to the recent surge of the former Speaker of...

"Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him, via the establishment's attacks,” fmr. Gov. Sarah Palin said on FOX Business. They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history, and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years." CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO

Link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-26/-stop-newt-republicans-confront-base-unwilling-to-take-orders.html

Check out this video on Obama's misstatements in his State of the Union.

It's one thing for Al Sharpton to spout racialized politics on his MSNBC show every evening. It's even another when one of his guests attacks Mitt Romney with the lamest of Rosa Parks/racism analogies. But when MSNBC itself produces a promo featuring Sharpton lumping Republican tax policy with the racism that kept blacks in the back of the bus and denied women the vote, the network has taken a very ugly turn. Yet that's just what the latest "Lean Forward" Sharpton promo does. View the video here.

Link only: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/newt-gingrich-trent-franks-_n_1229973.html?ref=mostpopular

Eric Bolling, host of 'Follow the Money' 10pmET on the Fox Business Network, is having Sarah Palin on his show tonight - he usually pre-records his interviews with Palin and just tweeted this: WOW!Gov Palin on Gov Chris Christie's "Newt-embarrassment": "Chris made a rookie mistake...got his panties in a wad" 14min"FollowTheMoney" intv 10p

Wow. One million signatures. Who could have guessed that one of the two entrenched American political parties — the one that claims the president of the most powerful nation on earth as one of its own and marshaled some $23.4 million in campaign spending for last year's wave of recall elections — would ever have the money and logistical wherewithal to gather 1 million signatures to recall a member of the other entrenched American political party? What a victory for democracy. Or should I say Democrat-acy? With the notable and laudable exception of the effort to recall Sen. Scott Fitzgerald...

Reporting from Washington - Like an estranged married couple trying to reignite the spark, lawmakers again will pair off in bipartisan couplets at the president's State of the Union speech on Tuesday - making another show of goodwill after a year of bad blood. As of Friday more than 160 members of Congress had agreed to mix it up in the House chamber for the Tuesday speech, eschewing the traditional seating chart: Democrats to the left of the rostrum, Republicans on the right. The spectacle of bipartisan co-mingling at last year's speech was striking. Gone was the visual of half...

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich has moved to capture some Republican voters who lean toward Ron Paul and other Republicans who were Jack Kemp followers by naming two gold bugs to the Gingrich future team of advisers. The former House speaker says he intends to appoint investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, famous in the Reagan era for his red suspenders and gold-standard advocacy, and Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, as President Gingrich’s Gold Commission - if and when of course Mr. Gingrich wins both the Republican nomination and the general election in November. Mr. Paul, a Texas...

"It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood," In Newt's neighborhood, you won't see an illegal alien anywhere, save for when the lawn care service comes by. You won't see five or more beat up old ladder trucks parked in his neighbor's driveway and on the lawn. You wouldn't notice a parade of fifteen men arriving after long hours of hopeful waiting at the day labor site. You won't notice the house on the other side suddenly abandoned, appliances and plumbing stripped out during the overnight Gingrich for a starter absolves those who have been here over 25 years. The only...

Given the abundance of options at the network, it's saying something to name Martin Bashir as the most noisome of MSNBC hosts. But so he is, in my book. Witness the low stunt Bashir pulled to open his show today, on the afternoon of the South Carolina primary. Bashir superimposed photos of the Republican candidates in front of a Confederate flag image. Lest their be any doubt as to the message Bashir meant to send, the screen graphic read "Rebel Yell." Oh those racist Republicans. View the video here.

As the city of Troy, NY, awaits jury selection in the first trial involving two Democrats and their alleged roles in a "massive"voter fraud scheme, new details have emerged from the investigation. Details involving two other veteran political operatives that have already pleaded guilty. According to a recent Fox News report, Anthony Renna, a Democrat guilty of second-degree forgery, and Anthony DeFiglio, a Democrat guilty of first-degree falsifying business records, are trying to drag all local politicians, regardless of party affiliation, down with the ship. Thus far, eight people have been charged in connection with the ballot fraud investigation, four...

One of the simplest rhetorical truths is that the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate. Yet, amazingly, we still see experienced conservative politicians with access to advanced polling operations and an array of advisors use the Lexicon of the Left. And this election cycle is no exception. I could almost cringe when I hear – as I did repeatedly during Monday’s South Carolina GOP debate – Republicans talk about “capitalism.” “I believe in capitalism….” “Barack Obama doesn’t believe in capitalism…..” Capitalism this and capitalism that – look at me with my plump wallet, walking stick...

There now appears to be an inevitability surrounding Mitt Romney and the Republican nomination for president. Are the American people prepared to sit through another term of George H.W. Bush? The chances are that Romney would be the last Republican president, as the Party may fly apart under his rule. The country would then have to face another round of the Left-dominated Democratic Party in charge and the inevitable collapse that would bring about. The forces arrayed against the conservative challengers from the Romney money machine, the Party establishment, and the so-called conservative and mainstream media appear too formidable to...

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=8642

GOP Debate

On the Sunday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett visited Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to give a political speech, in support of her boss (Barack Obama) and congressional Democrats: "Teachers, and firefighters, and policemen, whose jobs are now in jeopardy because Congress--well let me be specific--because the Republicans in Congress," Jarrett told the crowd. According to the CBS affiliate in Atlanta, at this point, "Before she could finish her sentence, people in the congregation were laughing, and applauding." At the Sunday service, Jarrett also brought up Osama bin Laden's death in order...

"On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning...

There's a storm brewing in Florida. But rather than a storm conjured by Mother Nature, this tempest is of the man-made political variety. From NPR's report of his comments that Islam is not a religion but a "theocratic political ideology" that poses a threat to America to his response emailed to the Weekly Standard following criticisms over the controversial Marines' video telling the “over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks” who have never been “shot at by the Taliban” that “war is hell” so “shut your mouth,” it’s pretty safe to say that Florida's Republican House Rep. Allen West isn’t afraid to...

Tuning in Morning Joe today, I half expected to discover on the set some professional mourners imported from North Korea, keening and crying over the political demise of Jon Huntsman. Huntsman had had the Morning Joe crowd from hello. The overwhelming winner of the bien-pensant MSM primary was amazingly popular—except with actual Republican voters, who didn't dig his moderate positioning and a tone that some found . . . well, how do you say "supercilious" in Mandarin? Taking today's cake was Joe Scarborough finding Huntsman's "moderate temperament" Reaganesque, and claiming that in rejecting Huntsman, Republicans have "turned their backs" on...

Democrats have taken the lead in a generic congressional ballot for the first time since being washed out of office by Republicans in the 2010 election, according to a Democracy Corps survey released Friday. ... Fifty-three percent said they were increasingly displeased with Republicans in Congress, and the same amount said they were turned off by the increasingly contentious GOP presidential primary.

[First posted Feb. 2009,-but the pundits are still pumping out the false distortion that Republican voters are divided between foreign policy conservatives, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. And the media falsely painting evangelicals as only 'social conservatives'.]When it comes to politics in America the media attempts to distort reality. This was certainly the case during the Republican primary campaign and remains so.One of those media distortions was with respect to the large block of Evangelical Christian voters who overwhelmingly vote Republican.We are constantly told that conservative Republicans are divided into three camps. Foreign policy conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and social conservatives. I submit that...

The fat lady is in the green room and is going through her warm-up routine. After all, this contest is over, right? I mean, it’s not, but it is. At least, that is the prevailing wisdom. Just as the mainstream media helped talk the nation into a recession in 2007-2008, it is helping Mitt Romney on his way to the Republican nomination. This election cycle is proving a version of the old adage that if something is repeated often enough it will become the truth. In this case, it is Mitt Romney’s “inevitability.” For months, the words “Mitt Romney” and...

When did the GOP go from being merely stupid to downright suicidal? In the final scene of Thelma & Louise, when Detective Hal Slocumb realizes that the two desperate demoiselles are about to drive off the edge of the Grand Canyon, he runs after them in a futile attempt to stop their senseless suicide. When I first watched that scene, twenty years ago, my primary emotion involved the tragic loss of that '66 Thunderbird. Now I think I finally understand the impotent despair the film's screenwriter, Callie Khouri, was attempting to convey when she sent Slocumb on his hopeless sprint....

Despite his advanced age, it appears Warren Buffett has never heard the admonition, “Practice what you preach.” And it seems that some of his apologists haven’t, either. As you may know, Buffett has long been urging the government to seize more money from the rich, with the rationale that they have an obligation to pay more. In response, many traditionalists have told him to put up or shut up: If he truly believes in what he says, there’s nothing stopping him from writing a check to Big Brother as large as his socialism-espousing mouth. And now Buffett has a response:...