Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Congress is sending President Obama a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the budget year, without overturning the president’s immigration policies. The House on Tuesday voted 257-167 for the measure that Obama is expected to sign. Without action, funding for the department would have expired Friday at midnight.

Say "1964." and those of us old enough might remember the appearance on Ed Sullivan's show of some little British group called the Beatles. But Chris Matthews recalls something else: the decision of the Republican party to nominate Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, and his ensuing wipeout by LBJ. On his MSNBC show tonight, Matthews suggested that Republicans are in a similarly reckless mood, and might well nominate a true conservative, electoral consequences be damned. And, oh yeah, Chris contended that the GOP would do so out of racist motives. View the video here.

Jeb Bush reminded a CPAC audience what a conservative isn't; Ted Cruz of Texas reminded them what a conservative is. Friday, Governor Jeb Bush began to speak before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., when a sudden shuffling of feet signaled the exodus of conservative Tea Party activists from the Patomac Ballroom of the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. Bush now knows what New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio feels when an army of police officers turn their backs to him at every speech. William Temple, a Tea Party organizer from Brunswick, Georgia, led...

Republicans, and conservatives that file into Tea Party meetings and rallies, Constitution Classes, and Libertarian gatherings, say time and time again that they are so tired of having to battle the failures of President Barack Obama. His failed policies are nearly more than they can digest. He fails to understand economics, his failed Obamacare program is destroying health care in America, he fails to understand the underlying reasons behind why the government shutdowns occurred, he has failed in the Middle Class and he has failed to bring anybody out of poverty. Failure after failure after failure after failure. He even...

“Catch me if you can.” That’s what President Obama seems to be saying to the Republican-led Congress, to the Judicial Branch, and to every single American, regardless of political affiliation. He is daring all of us to try and stop him from implementing, on his own, the final act of his “fundamental transformation” of the country in the two years he has left in office. What’s worse is that we are letting him get away with it.

....The answer is that Republicans’ opposition to immigration reform actually represents a winning strategy, not a losing one. Here’s why. Republicans win or lose largely depending on white voters. Whites still make up the vast majority of voters – some 75 percent in 2014 – and whites tend to favor the Republican Party by large margins. Republican congressional candidates garnered 60 percent of the white vote in 2014. All told, 89 percent of all Republican votes in 2014 came from white voters. Put simply, the Republican Party doesn’t really need the minority vote...

The first instinct of many upon reading this headline will be to dismiss it. Presumably, “Republican powerbrokers” can be understood to mean Jeb Bush’s stable of handwringers for whom nothing is more frightening than an outspoken conservative who governs like one. But if we step back and suspend disbelief, it is not hard to see where Walker’s critics have a point. First off, who are Walker’s critics? Well, outside of the political press and the nation’s editorial boards, which have determined that the Wisconsin governor is a “panderer of the first order” because the media is not the target...

As potential Republican candidates gather this week in Washington, D.C. for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), HRC released a new microsite, 2016: Republican Facts, that will serve as an online resource for documenting the record and rhetoric of potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates, and where they stand on key LGBT issues. Some three years after the RNC “autopsy” concluded that candidates need to “demonstrate they care” about LGBT Americans, candidates instead appear to prefer avoiding LGBT issues entirely. The New York Times reported recently that despite a looming Supreme Court Ruling on marriage equality, “notably, from those who are...

The Democrats have presenting themselves as the party of the poor since FDR. The media of course has been lapping this up for at least that long. Despite all of the big government programs pushed by the Democrats, particularly the so-called Great Society programs of LBJ, poverty hasn’t declined. All the Democrats big welfare programs have done is create a stagnate dependent class. Unmotivated and unwilling, these people have been largely living on the dole for decades going on generations. The Democrats have long bought their votes with promises of at least maintaining welfare benefits, if not promising to increase...

Take their February survey and report back.

Fellow Republicans, you are sadly mistaken if you believe that the results of the November 2014 elections are a sign from the American people that the coast is clear to continue operating as you have in the past. You should not read into the results as predictive of the 2016 presidential elections. If you want to avoid a very short-lived honeymoon at the top you will have to govern in accordance with the realities that exist in America today. One of those realities is that the prohibition of gay marriage is a form of discrimination that our court system is...

One of the least interesting news manias of the week has been former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani discussing his opinion that President Obama doesn't really love America (or you, or me, or him). Obama has been the very living embodiment of American government power for the past 7 years, and not too reluctant to use it against enemies, and just random citizens, both foreign and domestic—whether it comes to foreign policy, spending, taxing, regulating, and arresting. Thus, I doubt any alleged lack of love for the U.S. of A matters in any way that Giuliani or the people delighted to...

With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to 'prove' global warming's trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called "the most extraordinary scandal of our times" - that of the "seasonally-adjusted" seasonal raw global temperature data - is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed "expect there to be congressional hearings...

Liberals have been wailing over the past two decades on why poor whites vote for the Republican Party. In 2012, the New Yorker Magazine published an article on poor Republicans, that was full of all the crude stereotypes about poor whites. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/poor-white-and-republican After all, the Democrats are offering free stuff to the poor, such as free health care, free welfare payments, free food stamps, and other free goodies. In the opinion of the Democrats, poor whites are voting against their economic interests by voting for the Republican Party. Liberals have coined the term "Trailer Park Republican" to describe poor whites...

During a speech at the Democratic National Committee meeting on Friday, President Obama openly mocked Republicans for obstructing his policies, and took credit for an improving economy. Obama claimed that Republicans are shifting their rhetoric to appeal to more middle class Americans, but that their policies remained the same. “There is this old saying, you can’t just talk the talk … you gotta walk the walk!” he said. “We’ve been walking the walk.” Obama rehashed a lot of his second term agenda in the speech, calling for more tax hikes on the wealthy to support government programs for the middle...

The United States’ political parties have always been amalgams of factions rather than vehicles for any single interest. Partly because of the pressures of the electoral system and partly because of the republic’s vastness, forging either of the two major parties into a political monolith has been impossible; the need to cater to a wide base of Americans tends to keep the parties broad and relatively inclusive. This embedded pluralism of the U.S. party system has diminished somewhat in the current era of polarization but it has not evaporated entirely. The parties are still relatively broad churches. This is clearest...

Mike Lupica ought to stick to sports. When he wanders into politics he says silly stuff, as on today's Morning Joe. With HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell being interviewed about Obamacare, Lupica unctuously wondered out loud: "how did something that was this noble an idea become something over time that the other party uses against this president constantly? And is there a way, over the last two years of his presidency, for him to throw some sort of Hail Mary pass and make this look like the triumph he thought it was going to be?" View the video here.

The safest bet you can possibly make at the beginning of a presidential election cycle is that the "objective" national media will savage the Republican contenders with "investigative" journalism. Not just one Republican contender, but all the Republican contenders. It's a bit amazing to look back at 2012 and remember that every Republican candidate was punched in the kisser by "journalism" if and when he or she inched into the lead. Sarah Palin never declared, but she was slimed in 2011 by NBC star Savannah Guthrie, who casually tossed out author Joe McGinniss's claims that she was a bad mother,...

I need to mention a fact that many freepers will find painful and upsetting. In the 20th Century, Country Club Republicans had greater influence in selecting Republican nominees for President, than grassroots Republicans. There are only 2 notable exceptions when the establishment candidate did not win - 1964 and 1980. In 1964, the Republican establishment was deeply divided. Three Republican candidates from extremely wealthy, Old Money, WASP families were on the ballot. They were Governor Nelson Rockefeller from New York, Governor William Scranton from Pennsylvania, and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. from Massachusetts. Lodge did not formally enter the...

President Obama is putting Republicans on notice that he plans to run through their cynical politics and opposition during his final two years in office. While speaking at a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco, the president said: "And one of the things I am absolutely determined to do over the next two years is not just consolidate the gains that we’ve made, not just move forward on new initiatives like free community colleges for young people around the country who need to be trained for the 21st-century economy, but part of my goal is also to restore a sense of...