Free Republic

It often looked like Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t survive his first year as president. The mere fact of his election so infuriated seven southern states that they seceded from the Union before he was sworn into office. Rumors of an assassination plot caused him to sneak ignominiously into Washington for his inauguration, disguised in a cap and cloak that for weeks became objects of derision by cartoonists. A horrible first year for one of the nation’s greatest presidents might serve as a source of inspiration for Donald Trump who’s had his own rocky start —except. Except just about everything. Lincoln constantly...

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump campaigned as the master deal-maker, a guy who could come to Washington, knock a few heads and get the government working again. But on the anniversary of his inauguration, America awoke to a government shutdown — a dramatic testament to dysfunction, partisan gridlock and failed leadership. There was a lot at stake: for the public, for House Republicans who fear losing their majority, for Senate Democrats whose incumbents will now have to defend their votes and the shutdown to constituents, and for Trump, whose approval ratings have languished below 40 percent. Rodell Mollineau, a Democratic strategist...

What will happen to the federal government’s environmental protection work if Congress can’t pass a funding bill on time? Right now, it’s hard to say. [snip] Agencies conducting research on climate change will feel the effects of a shutdown. During the 17-day government shutdown in 2013, research on melting ice, rising seas, and global weather ground to a halt. Much of climate field research requires extensive careful planning, and research sites like the polar ice caps are only accessible at certain times of the year. Stopping work in these areas proved especially disruptive for data collection: It created gaps in...

Constitutional Carry is on the move in Alabama. Senate Bill 3 would eliminate the need for a carry permit for law-abiding adults.From dothanfirst.com: Senate bill 3, sponsored by senator Gerald Allen, would repeal the permit requirement for the carrying of firearms.It would allow any law-abiding adult who can legally possess a firearm to carry a handgun for self-defense in Alabama without having to first obtain a permit to do so. The NRA-ILA confirms the essence of the bill. It does not eliminate the shall issue permit system that is now in place. Alabamians would still be able to obtain permits...

WASHINGTON - The world’s most powerful government shut down on Saturday after President Donald Trump and the U.S. Congress failed to reach a deal on funding for federal agencies, highlighting America’s deep political divisions. For the first time since October 2013 - when a similar standoff that lasted 16 days kept only essential agency operations intact - federal workers were being told to stay at home or in some cases to work without pay until new funding is approved. The shutdown began a year to the day after Trump was sworn in as president. His inability to cut a deal...

This will be a weekly post. Confirmation count remains at 23 confirmed. However, Chuck Grassley moved 17 judges out of committee to the floor this week. Expect to see McConnell begin plowing through them.

Senator Rand Paul turns on DJT. and this is not the first time.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday granted review in the legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s permanent policy restricting entry into the United States from the residents of eight terror-prone nations, in what will be a historic case on presidential authority, national security, the role of the courts in immigration, and the Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty.This travel policy has gone through three versions since President Trump was sworn into office, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the case they accepted Friday should permanently settle all legal challenges to his authority on this subject. Congress delegated broad authority to the...

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) today led a group of 65 lawmakers in a letter to Chairman Devin Nunes of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence urging the immediate release of the four-page FISA Memo document to the public, as well as any relevant ancillary information. In the letter, Rep. Gaetz states, “the audience of this document should not be limited to Members of Congress — the American people deserve to know the information it contains.” Cosigners of the letter include: Congressmen Brian Babin (TX-36), Don Bacon (NE-02), Jim Banks (IN-03), Jack Bergman (MI-01), Andy Biggs...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a life-long diabetic, was treated by paramedics for low blood sugar at her home in Washington on Friday morning but was able to go to work afterward, a court spokeswoman said. The 63-year-old Sotomayor, one of the nine-member court’s four liberal justices, was diagnosed as a child with type 1 diabetes and has openly discussed her experience with the chronic illness in the past. She was named to the court in 2009 by Democratic former President Barack Obama. “Justice Sotomayor experienced symptoms of low blood sugar at her home this morning....

Cindy Garcia has had a long, exhausting and life-changing week. And by all appearances, the whirlwind is going to continue. On Monday morning, she watched immigration agents escort Jorge Garcia, her husband of 15 years, through the security gates at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, deporting him to Mexico after nearly three decades living and raising a family in Michigan. Video of Cindy Garcia and the couple's two adolescent children sobbing as they said goodbye grabbed national headlines. Supporters held up the family's experience as an example of the far-reaching effects of President Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigration. Observers across...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday set up a major showdown over presidential powers, agreeing to decide the legality of President Donald Trump’s latest travel ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries. The conservative-majority court is due to hear arguments in April and issue a ruling by the end of June on whether the policy violates federal immigration law or the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on religious discrimination. Trump’s policy, announced in September, blocks entry into the United States of most people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The Supreme Court on Dec. 4 signaled it was likely to...

The Supreme Court said Friday it will take up the latest version of President Trump’s travel ban, and in particular asked to hear arguments on whether the president showed illegal animosity toward Muslims.

Do animals get bigger as the climate they live in gets colder? According to a rule established in 1847, they do – which has had biologists concerned over what climate change might do to animal body size. But now an analysis of the weights and geographical locations of nearly 274,000 individuals from 952 bird and mammal species has challenged the idea. Bergmann’s rule, formulated in 1847 by German anatomist Carl Bergmann, states that an animal’s body size is negatively related to the temperature of its environment: smaller individuals of a species are found in hotter regions of the species’ range,...

The Pentagon scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change, an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality at an agency that has long avoided the issue’s politics. A summary document released Friday morning makes no mention of “climate,” “warming,” “planet,” “sea levels” or even “temperature.” All 22 uses of the word “environment” refer to the strategic or security landscape. The 11-page memo, signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, is the first update to the policy in a decade. It’s unlikely the Department of Defense will release a full National Defense Strategy report; instead, the...

Columbia University and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund today launched an online tracker of the Trump administration's crackdown on climate science. The project, called the Silencing Science Tracker, has so far assembled 96 entries of federal restrictions or prohibitions on climate science since November 2016. The database is built from media reports, and it's searchable by agency, date and type of action. More than half the entries are listed as censorship, either from government restriction or researchers who are self-censoring. Other instances include targeted personnel changes, budget cuts and other federal actions aimed at minimizing or hindering climate research....

The big explosive scandal is the one that hardly anyone talks about. It's not Russia collusion. It's not even Uranium One. It's the eavesdropping on Trump staffers by Obama staffers. This eavesdropping was partially legitimized by the Steele dossier. It was accidentally uncovered and since then it's cost multiple people their jobs, not the people responsible, but those who learned about it. Now the reckoning may finally be here. #ReleaseTheMemo has begun trending on Twitter. The document also apparently outlines “several problematic” issues with how FISA warrants were “packaged, and used” state several sources with knowledge of the report. That's...

With shutdown theater in high gear, some stories get buried. The government runs out of money at midnight tonight, but there was another story that was trending on social media last night. The House Intelligence Committee voted to release a four-page memo on FISA abuses that have disturbed lawmakers to their core. Some were saying the actions described were akin to the KGB. The vote to release the memo to all members was along party lines, and House Republicans seem adamant that the information should be released to the public. The consequences of these abuses have some members of Congress...

1. 2018 will be a very rough year for President Trump — and almost-catastrophic for the Republican Party, which has morphed into the Trump Party; 2. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll said it all: While 66 percent of the American people rate the economy as either “good or excellent,” only 36 percent approve of the job President Trump is doing; 3. Normally, a president’s approval rating tracks the rating of the economy: When the economy is struggling, so is the POTUS’ ratings. Conversely, previous presidents generally had their approval numbers go up when the economy went up; 4. But Trump’s behavior...

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