Free Republic

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A clip of the audio recordings revealing Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s illicit affair with a staffer has now surfaced online. Yellowhammer was given exclusive access to the content of audio recordings captured by Dianne Bentley, Governor Bentley’s ex-wife, during which Governor Bentley makes sexual advances on and recalls sexual encounters with Rebekah Mason, his former communications director who has since become his most senior external advisor. Mrs. Mason’s husband, Jon, also serves in the Bentley administration as Director of Serve Alabama, the Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Volunteer Service. ...

PINSON, Ala. -- At 8 a.m. on a Saturday, the rumble of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment was already audible in Ardell Turner's modest home in this rural hamlet north of Birmingham. Not far away, they once mined coal. Now state and local leaders are seeking prosperity through one of the nation's largest and priciest road projects. On planners' maps, the Northern Beltline will be a 52-mile, six-lane interstate that will effectively complete a loop around Birmingham, Alabama's largest city. More than a half-century after the Beltline's conception, work on a small segment began last year within a mile of...

On Tuesday, the Alabama State Senate voted by 27-6 to pass a bill that would prohibit abortion facilities from being within 2,000 feet of a kindergarten-to-8th-grade public school. Under the proposed legislation, existing facilities near a school, such as the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives located near the Academy of Academics and Arts in Huntsville, would be unable to renew their licenses without relocating further away. “My hope is that no more in the state would ever open that close to small children,” bill sponsor Sen. Paul Sanford, a Republican, declared. Aside from the nature of abortion, Alabama Women’s...

Plans pushed by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz under the immigration reform debate in 2013 that would have jumped the number of immigrants, including those from Muslim nations, were raised by the Trump campaign Tuesday. Under the Cruz plan, yearly legal immigration would have gone from 740,000 to 1,675,000. He said his idea was to actually help kill the bill not boost the numbers. "I was introducing a whole series of amendments, in part to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Democrats. So, for example, the Democrats claimed they were supporting high-tech workers, so I introduced an amendment on that,...

Conservative Review has reached a new low for conservative publications by advocating a BLACKLIST to destroy those with a different opinion -- those who support Trump. Mark Levin is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Review. His response has simply been that he is not the columnist in question (Amanda Carpenter) so he is not responsible for the articles content. This is not good enough Mark Levin! As editor-in-chief you approved the publication of an enemies list to destroy those with a different opinion. Personal destruction is a tactic of the totalitarian left that shocks the conscience of those who value freedom...

When candidate Donald Trump announced his candidacy to run for President last year we knew immediately there would be a seismic shift in the political landscape. Those who have followed politics in the last 8+ years suspected the 2016 race would inevitably boil down to Globalists -vs- U.S. Nationalists.

Donald Trump revealed part of his foreign policy advisory team and outlined an unabashedly non-interventionist approach to world affairs during a wide-ranging meeting Monday with The Washington Post's editorial board.

WASHINGTON — Several conservative opinion leaders are circulating lists of prominent Donald J. Trump supporters, including some from Alabama, and vowing to “blackball” them from the conservative movement in the years to come.

*snip* Trump surged as the Republican Party’s frontrunner on his campaign platform of deporting illegal aliens, promoting trade deals that prioritize the interests of American workers, and rejecting the party elites’ desire for increased military adventurism. Ted Cruz, by contrast, wrote an op-ed urging Congress to fast track Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). No fast-tracked trade agreement has ever been defeated. Sen. Graham’s energetic endorsement of Cruz – and Cruz’s refusal to disavow the endorsement of a man who many believe betrayed the American people with his unyielding push for mass migration – will no doubt raise questions as to whether...

That Donald Trump and the GOP establishment have not been getting along may be the understatement of the year. George Will -- a respected writer and intellectual leader of that establishment -- is one of the many suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome who often misconstrue or seem to almost deliberately misrepresent what Trump is saying. In return, Trump has not always been very nice to them. Regarding the current Supreme Court vacancy, Will said on this weekend's Fox News Sunday: "If Trump is president, we'll have to guess who will be the nominee." He said substantially the same thing in...

It has been an annual rite in Washington since the modern budgeting system began in 1974: The president sends his budget to Congress and lawmakers hold hearings on it. But not this year. The chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees announced, for the first time since their panels were created more than 40 years ago, that they would not have hearings on the president’s budget or allow administration officials to testify. They decided this before President Obama released his budget, refusing to contemplate any budget from Obama — sight unseen. This declaration, like the Senate Republicans’ vow that...

Sometimes the two parties just aren’t that far apart during campaign season, and in a populist moment such as the one we’re experiencing right now that axiom is being proven true on the subject of free trade and job outsourcing. Currently, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders seem to be in a battle to see which one of them can sound the most like Donald Trump when it comes to offshoring American jobs, but Clinton is being hit with yet another vignette from her long history of paid speeches. Fox News dredged up an old clip of her from 2005 speaking...

MIAMI, FL– Influential Alabama Senator Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who has emerged as the preeminent thought leader of the conservative nation-state movement, told voters that “now is the time for the GOP” to unite behind Donald Trump’s realignment of the Republican Party, and “embrace this opportunity to win working Americans on a platform of rising wages, American jobs, and the national interest.” Sessions said that Trump is the only candidate who will be able to stop Obamatrade and enact trade deals that prioritize the interests of the American people. Sessions delivered a clear warning to Ohio voters in particular. “The...

National Review, a once-venerable conservative publication, has officially gone off the rails entirely, publishing an article calling Sen. Jeff Sessions a “prostitute” for endorsing billionaire Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. That abominable attack on perhaps the most revered conservative in the U.S. Senate ran in a National Review piece arguing that anyone who endorses Trump is a “rat” that is “scurrying” and is also a “sellout.”

Republican presidential candidates sought to outdo each other in Thursday’s debate when it came to reforming the H-1B visa, a controversial program through which Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Apple and Hewlett-Packard import skilled help from India and other countries with vast pools of low-cost tech talent on tap. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said the H-1B hurts American-born workers and said that he would end it outright. Marco Rubio said the program needs to be better policed, while Ted Cruz simply said the U.S. needs to update its immigration laws for the 21st century. “I know the H-1B very well...

At Thursday night’s Republican debate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), John Kasich, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) all parroted talking points about trade that do not seem to match their prior legislative records and statements on the critical issue. While Donald Trump has articulated his vociferous opposition to President Barack Obama’s trade agenda in practically every GOP debate, tonight marked the first debate in which all of the other candidates were asked about their previous support for trade globalism. Breitbart News reported extensively on debate moderators’ prior failure to cover the issue in previous debates. According to Pew polling data, by...

Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Thursday said he supports President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement — but referred to it as “PTT." “I’m a free-trader. I supported NAFTA, I believe in the PTT because it’s important those countries in Asia are an interface against China,” Kasich said at the Republican presidential debate in North Charleston, S.C.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump on Thursday said he would rip up all existing free trade agreements if he wins the White House. Trump argued that he would greatly improve U.S. relationships with nations such as Mexico and China while lowering trade deficits. "I’m going to rip up those trade deals and we’re going to make really good ones,” he said during a campaign stop in Portland, Maine. He lashed out at 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney for saying that a Trump presidency would ruin free trade for the United States. “Ruin free trade?” Trump said. "If I’m losing $505 billion...

Somebody please tell Donald Trump: A trade deficit isn’t a loss. You could even argue it’s a gain. The Republican presidential frontrunner has been railing against “bad trade deals” since declaring his candidacy last summer. And he’s amplified the criticism, if that’s possible, in recent weeks. “If you look at China, and you look at Japan, and if you look at Mexico … they’re killing us,” he said during the latest Republican debate on Fox News. “With China we’re going to lose $505 billion in terms of trade …. Mexico, $58 billion. Japan, probably about… $109 billion.” Trump is talking...

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Ohio lost 112,500 jobs in 2015 resulting from the United States' trade deficit with countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. That places Ohio sixth, in terms of the percentage of jobs lost to trade with TPP countries, among the 50 states and the District of Columbia ranked in the report released Thursday by the liberal Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The lost jobs represent nearly 2.2 percent of employment in Ohio, according to the analysis. The total number of lost jobs includes those directly and indirectly impacted...