Free Republic

"Bring out yer dead!" The left spent the last two years shouting the famous Monty Python line at the Tea Party, determined to infect the movement with cadaverous gloom. By mid-2011 the press had started a death watch. "Tea Party's heyday could be nearing end," warned the Hill. "Tea Party movement looks stalled," exhorted ABC News. A poll by CBS/New York Times (and when are they ever not reliable?) alleged that Tea Partiers were less popular than Democrats, Muslims, and atheists. Also Stalinists, Imperial Stormtroopers, and the Jersey Shore cast. Loony Tea Party ideas, declared serious people with pale faces...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Newt Gingrich's fast Florida fade is the latest indication that the Tea Party is losing its grip on the GOP, with the establishment poised to triumph once again. An official endorsement Saturday night from last year's Tea Party standout, Herman Cain; an all-but-official backing from longtime Tea Party darling Sarah Palin; and the support of an increasing number of Tea Party officials around the country have not lifted Gingrich back over Mitt Romney in the Florida polls. That weakened clout has been accompanied by the Republican establishment's full-throttle charge at Gingrich's past -- to great effect with...

In an appearance Tuesday at Washington, D.C.'s Politics & Prose bookstore, MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews told a standing room-only audience that his new book "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero" was important because it taught "leadership," and that's something many people today don't know about - especially under President Barack Obama, Jeff Poor at The Daily Caller reported.Chris Matthews on the Tea Party: "This crowd doesn't want to deal because they believe the word 'deal' is bad," Matthews said...

It wasn’t that long ago that Republican moneymen and operatives in Washington were moping around K Street like Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood, lamenting their party’s extremist image and casting about for a candidate with a chance of beating Barack Obama in 2012. Citing what he called the “near self-immolation” of House Republicans during the debt-ceiling fiasco, Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, worried in early August that a “large number of Republican primary voters, and even more independent general-election voters, will be wary of supporting a Republican candidate in 2012 if the party looks as if it’s...

The fight against illegal immigration has accelerated over the last year from Arizona to, most recently, Alabama. States across the country have taken the responsibility that federal government has relinquished. Regular polling reveals that a majority of Americans favor halting the flow of illegal aliens across the border. Despite the wishes of the American people, neither party has effectively stood for the defense of our borders and our sovereignty. In the 24 years since President Reagan signed an amnesty bill into law, the federal government has failed to protect the borders. The situation on the U.S.-Mexico border has become anarchy....

I was sitting in my office, checking my email, minding my own business, when I was suddenly assaulted by a most bizarre news item: Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) had blamed the Tea Party for S&P's downgrade of America's credit rating. No, Kerry didn't blame President Obama, or Congress, whether the current divided Congress or past Democrat or Republican Congresses, or even President Obama's favorite culprit: George W. Bush. He blamed "the Tea Party." My initial thought was that Kerry's allegation was fortunately so absurd that even the most emotional, robotic liberals would not buy this whopper. But then it happened:...

In one of those lapses of news judgment that with regrettable frequency make mainstream journalists resemble characters in Scoop, the media herd that gathered in Wisconsin to chronicle the great Democratic triumph in the state senate elections has gone back to the coasts — and missed what could grow into a much more consequential story than the failure of organized labor’s second attempt to punish the Wisconsin GOP: the outbreak of racial hate violence at the Wisconsin State Fair. A story that involved Scott Walker getting his just deserts, even if it didn’t quite work out that way, was infinitely...

America's economic panic is the fault of Tea Partiers, S&P, speculators, and Big Business. And it's up to Obama to convince us to put country first Barack Obama is being blamed right, left, and center — by almost everyone for one thing or another — including the credit downgrade, the market crash, a slouching economy, and the miasma of the Washington swamp. Critics and erstwhile admirers grumble among themselves — and, mostly anonymously, to the press. Columnists once ready to cheer Obama's rise now jeer his timid, professorial leadership; Maureen Dowd ridicules him as the "Withholder in Chief."The reaction is...

Forty years from now, politicians, writers, and historians may struggle to understand how America, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil. Should that dark scenario come to pass, they would do well to turn their attention first to New York City and New York State, which have been in the vanguard of middle-class decline. It was in mid-1960s New York—under the leadership of a Barack Obama precursor, Hollywood-handsome John Lindsay—that the country’s first top-bottom political coalition emerged. In 1965, Gotham had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country. But the...

The name for Tea Party members hated and feared most by Barack Obama and his cohorts is `patriot’. That’s why they hurl the names racist, bigot, bitter clinger and domestic terrorist at the Tea Party, and that’s why the Obama running dog mainstream media so desperately works to Even in the midst of all the Obama Regime destruction, America has something to celebrate: Tea Party Patriots are keeping Obama from completing his threatened Fundamental Transformation of America. No one elected to public office from either side has ever stepped forward to ask Obama who is he to fundamentally transform American....

Buffalo SwingA Medicare proxy war and tea-party squabbles shake up a special House election in western New York. For decades, the late congressman Jack Kemp was western New York’s conservative champion. A tough supply-sider and former Buffalo Bills quarterback, Kemp personified the region’s grit. Since Kemp left office, the area’s blue-collar factory towns and sprawling farms, which constitute much of New York’s 26th congressional district, have remained solid Republican territory: Sen. John McCain won here, as did George W. Bush. Until this week, NY-26 was widely expected to remain safely in GOP hands. Republicans enjoy a 26,000-voter registration edge, and...

Future historians will describe the Democratic Party's demonization of the Tea Party movement as a major political blunder that put them squarely on the wrong side of America's 21st Century financial crisis. When Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on a conference call that he'd been instructed by "the caucus" to use the word "extreme" when referring to the Tea Party, he carelessly revealed the previously obvious but unacknowledged truth.  Democrats have a coordinated plan to demonize the Tea Party movement (TPM) via their oft-repeated meme that implicitly characterizes law-abiding citizens as terrorists -- as with fundamentalist Islam or domestic militias,...

No More Tea?Tea partiers still have to argue their case. Has the wind gone out of the sails of the small-government movement? Is the Tea Party going through a hangover? You can find some evidence for these propositions. In Washington, Democrats such as former party chairman Howard Dean gleefully anticipate a government shutdown, and Sen. Charles Schumer thinks he can drive a wedge between Speaker John Boehner and “extremist” tea partiers. In state capitals, some new Republican governors are getting hostile receptions to their plans for cutting spending and curtailing the power of public-employee unions. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich...

Paul Johnson doesn't suffer from PDS like some others. Rather he sees Sarah Palin as a courageous leader and likes "the cut of her jib." The celebrated British historian and journalist Paul Johnson expounded on American exceptionalism, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin in a Wall Street Journal interview this past Saturday. He's optimistic about this "marvelous country" and its ability to overcome the forces working to undermine its greatness. Johnson specifically credits conservative women as key players in shaping a new direction for the country in 2012. Interviewed in his West London home the prolific author offered a buoyant,...

The Obama campaign and other liberals are looking to tap into the populist current of today's politics and turn the Wisconsin union fight into a national issue in the 2012 election. While the liberals can wield rhetorical pitchforks and light political torches, they should realize that it's their guys who are living inside the castle today. Specifically, public-sector unions -- by many measures the most entrenched special interest in American politics -- are not fighting against The Man, which is to say the entrenched powers of government. In this struggle, The Man is the government unions, which are sitting in...

How delicious is irony, how fickle fate?  Just a little more than two years ago, liberals were ecstatic about Barack Obama's election and Democrats' control of Congress.  Liberal pundits were all atwitter about the brand new Democratic Era that voters had ushered in.  America would finally become what America should have been years ago: a European-style social democracy.  Boy, did Democrats misread their mandate!  With very little hindsight needed, it's apparent to all but ideologically-blinkered liberals that the Democrats' gross overreach isn't what voters wanted or expected.  Voters wanted a redo of the Clinton years.  Instead, in the person of...

Half of Republicans are Tea Party supporters; 5% are "opponents" PRINCETON, NJ -- About 7 in 10 national adults, including 88% of Republicans, say it is important that Republican leaders in Congress take the Tea Party movement's positions and objectives into account as they address the nation's problems. Among Republicans, 53% rate this "very important."These results are from a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Jan. 14-16, prior to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.Although few Democrats (6%) are supporters of the Tea Party or even have a favorable view of it (11%), more than half say it is important...

A short two years ago, the Democrats basked in the glow of their dynamic new president, elected by their largest popular-vote margin since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, accompanied into office by a fiercely Democratic House of Representatives and a veto-proof Democratic Senate. A long two years later, after the party in power had delivered prodigious deficits and debt, relentless 10% unemployment, and the folly of Obamacare, the voters threw a little Tea Party and heaved scores of Democratic legislators and 400 years of seniority into the drink. What had seemed to many liberals the beginning of a Democratic electoral realignment—40...

WASHINGTON — Senator Scott Brown’s decision to buck his party leadership in recent days on the “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ military policy and on a nuclear arms treaty has set off a new wave of anger among some of the activists who helped elect him — and renewed talk among conservatives that he might face a primary challenge. Tweet 1diggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis Some Tea Party movement leaders who dislike Brown’s votes acknowledge that the Massachusetts Republican has demonstrated his independent and pragmatic streak, and by doing so may strengthen his chances at reelection in 2012. No primary challenger has emerged,...

America is choking on laws of our own making. Once a law is in place in the United States, it's almost impossible to dislodge. Our political class assumes that, after a law is forged in the crucible of democracy, it should be honored as if it's one of the Ten Commandments - except it's more like one of 10 million... --snip-- Sunset laws have been proposed from time to time, and they were a domestic priority for President Jimmy Carter. "Too many Federal programs have been allowed to continue indefinitely," he wrote to Congress in 1979, "without examining whether they...