Free Republic

Ted Cruz was on with Mark Levin tonight discussing his Senate floor speech where he called out Mitch McConnell for lying to Republicans about the Ex-Im bank. Listen:

Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric isn’t making him a lot of friends among his fellow candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but it’s winning him converts in California. “If I walked into a poll booth right now, and I had to cast my vote, I would vote for Donald Trump,” said Robin Hvidston, the executive director of the Claremont-based We the People Rising, a grass-roots organization pushing for stronger enforcement of existing immigration laws and the enactment of stricter immigration laws. “I wouldn’t have said that three weeks ago. ... Both parties are so ingrained in political correctness and both...

This strategy isn’t entirely new. They started talking about targeting tea partiers in primaries in late 2013 and followed through in last year’s midterms... The difference last year was that they stuck to open seats rather than going after incumbents. Evidently they’ve decided now that “progress” towards the dream of renewing the Ex-Im bank and passing a gigantic amnesty ensuring all the cheap legal labor they could possibly want isn’t happening fast enough. It’s simply not sufficient to fill vacancies in the House with corporatist business-class Republicans. To move their agenda, they need to start replacing some of the people...

documents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)... confirm that the IRS used donor lists to tax-exempt organizations to target those donors for audits. The documents also show IRS officials specifically highlighted how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may come under “high scrutiny” from the IRS. The IRS produced the records in a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking documents about selection of individuals for audit-based application information on donor lists submitted by Tea Party and other 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations....Lois Lerner, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, is mentioned four times in the report...In 2009, Barack Obama “joked” about having the IRS...

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

Unraveling the axis of stupid: How Iran deal sends neocons, exceptionalists and Fox News xenophobes to dustbin of history Let Know Nothings, Tea Party and Trump crowd rail against the deal. They rail against reality, modernity, history Is there a way to summarize neatly what the document the White House just sent to Congress puts on the table? My candidate is a true delight to write: This signals the beginning of the end of American exceptionalism, however long the final act may drag out. This Iran deal, sealed a week ago, makes me think of those cruises people take up...

Donald Trump’s planned tour of the Laredo Sector of the Texas -Mexico border has been canceled by the national AFL-CIO-controlled union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC).

President Obama defended the IRS Tuesday in an interview with “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, saying the tea party-targeting scandal was actually Congress’ fault for passing “a crummy law” and that the real problem is the agency doesn’t have enough money. Mr. Obama, who has overseen a series of scandals at the IRS, the Veterans Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and now the Office of Personnel Management, was asked why government didn’t seem to be working on his watch. But the president said he’s not to blame, using the IRS as an example of how what...

Even before Donald Trump found himself on defense for disparaging Sen. John McCain's military service, Sal Russo wasn't too impressed with the real estate mogul's presidential prospects. Russo knows a thing or two about populist uprisings and anti-establishment candidates. The former Reaganite spent eight weeks advising billionaire Ross Perot's third party campaign in 1992. In 2002, he consulted for a conservative challenger to moderate Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan in California's Republican gubernatorial primary (his candidate won the nomination). A few years later, Russo founded Tea Party Express, a group he still runs. On Saturday, Trump came under fire for...

I've always liked Wes Clark. I interviewed him in 2005, when the topic of torture was new and fresh in our minds and he told me how disappointed he was in Dick Cheney. Our cell phone connection was horrible, but he called me back from the airport. I say this because when I watched this segment I was as totally shocked as Digby was. I hope he rethinks his position after he listens to what he actually said. He's talking about bringing back WWII Japanese style internment camps to America, which has always been a blight on US history.

Can Donald Trump merely be an undisciplined bomb thrower driven by a massive ego? Or is there more going on with Trump than most of us would suspect? Is he so ego-driven that he would abandon his prior liberal positions on social issues and link arms with those on the far right? Trump is not an idiot. He knows he can't win with his self-destructive performance. I think what he's doing is preparing a pathway for the person he wants to win, Ted Cruz. It's a brilliant plan really. Trump's attacks bring down the moderate opposition for the Republican nomination...

Donald Trump “fired up the crazies” in his state when he held a rally in Phoenix last weekend, Arizona Sen. John McCain said in a recent interview. During that appearance (and others last weekend), Trump was joined by the father of Jamiel Shaw, who was killed by an undocumented immigrant. Trump has tapped into “some anger” in the state over the conditions at the border, McCain told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in an article published Thursday. “It’s very bad,” the Republican senator said. “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because...

The National Taxpayers Union Foundation reports that Senator Ted Cruz (from Texas) has, during his time in the U.S. Senate, supported measures that would reduce government spending by $169.4 billion a year.Demian Brady, NTUF director of Research, is quoted by Breitbart as saying: Senator Cruz supported significant spending reductions like repeal of the Affordable Care Act and abolishing the IRS and income tax in favor of a sales tax. Combined with very minimal spending increases, these make for a legislative slate big on savings. And that’s not all. Cruz also wants to repeal ObamaCare which would reduce government spending by...

Soon opening, the Barack Hussein Obama II Memorial Park Much like when Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, who commanded the garrison at Arlington House, appropriated the grounds of General Robert E. Lee's mansion on June 15, 1864, for use as a military cemetery. Meigs intention was to render the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return. Much like the punishment that was placed upon General Robert E. Lee and his property to serve as a constant reminder that he was on the wrong side of the war, this Memorial Park is being named in honor of the...

Remember the beginnings of the Tea Party? Tens of thousands of conservative folks, energized and concerned enough to speak out and actively engage in politics. Or Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project? Rand Paul’s filibuster, which had people from both parties standing glued to the TV for hours? The media complex lowballed the number of those massive crowds and painted them as racists and extremists. The Republican establishment essentially turned their backs on the Tea Party and at times even joined in the ridicule, revealing a glimpse of embarrassment toward their own ranks. Even John McCain called fellow Tea Party-backed lawmakers “wacko...

Jeb Bush ought to be running away with the Republican nomination. He isn't, and his persona as a national candidate looks increasingly — how shall I put this? — Romneyesque. Bush is supposed to be the safe, establishment-approved choice, which is where the Republican Party usually turns. He and his allied super PAC have raised a phenomenal $114 million thus far. The hot mess that is Donald Trump ought to be sending GOP primary voters toward Bush's column in droves. But the scion-in-waiting hasn't yet consolidated the establishment's support. Instead, Bush made news for announcing an economic strategy that sounded...

One evening several years ago, John Mary was up late reading a local blog when he came across a comment from a man who said he lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. The commenter had been watching his kid mow a relative’s lawn, he wrote, when a couple approached the boy and asked if he could cut their grass sometime. The commenter recognized the man. It was Senator Thad Cochran, he wrote, and the woman with him sure as hell wasn’t his wife. The gossip stuck with Mary, a 62-year-old from Hattiesburg, about 70 miles north of Gulfport. But he didn’t think...

With his angry rants against undocumented immigrants, Donald Trump is a stark reminder of the GOP’s terrible problem with Latino voters. In short, Latinos don’t like—or trust—the Republican Party. But Trump also illustrates a second, more complicated problem. As long as his rhetoric has a place in Republican politics—as long as it has defenders—it won’t just alienate Latinos. It will offend and turn off voters who have conservative ideas and beliefs but won’t sanction or support anti-immigrant sentiment. Before looking at this other side to the “Latino problem,” it’s worth examining the first one. In the past two presidential elections,...

In a move that is difficult to describe as an accomplishment, there were so many haters in Arizona that Donald Trump had to move his anti-immigrant hatefest from the Biltmore Resort and Spa to the Phoenix Convention Center. By this morning, 9,000 haters had tickets in their hands. His campaign chairman, Corey Lewandowski, bragged, “We received 4,000 RSVPS in 2¹/₂ hours.” By this morning, Trump was claiming 15,000: Donald J. Trump ✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump Today I will be rallying with with 15,000 patriots in Arizona for border security! Let's Make America Great Again! https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ 11:48 AM - 11 Jul 2015 The...

How do you solve a problem like The Donald? That question is currently consuming the minds (and fueling the nightmares) of leading Republican power brokers. And you gotta have some sympathy for their plight. Actually, I take that back. It's entirely possible to have nothing but schadenfreude for what the GOP is going through. There is certainly a chickens-coming-home-to-roost character to Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the polls over the past couple of weeks. This is a party, after all, that has spent close to the entirety of the Obama administration stoking right-wing populism, encouraging conspiracy theories about the president...