Free Republic

As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well. Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states. Determining what exactly happened is one of the most pressing...

It certainly appears as if the political career and legacy of neocon traitor John McCain, is starting to crumble all around him. Having rode the wave of being a Vietnam POW almost all the way to the Oval Office but falling short, the twilight of McCain’s career has been marked nothing but scandals, and he has been reduced to little more than a talking head most recently associated with spouting baseless Russian connections against the President. Having failed miserably in each of his attempts to discredit Trump, including allegedly being the source who passed the fake Russian dossier to the...

Never one to miss a chance to slam President Donald Trump, Lawrence O’Donnell -- host of The Last Word, a weeknight program on MSNBC -- called the Republican occupant of the White House “the laziest, most ignorant president in history.” Of course, he had an entirely different opinion of former Democratic President Barack Obama, who “never once said something like this in the crusade to get that thing passed because he knew how to stay with it and get it passed.” The liberal host began the discussion by criticizing the American Health Care Act, the House GOP bill intended to...

Delusional David Gergen: Trump’s First 100 Days ‘Worst We’ve Ever Seen’ 3 shares David Gergen is clearly having trouble with reality. After the Republican ObamaCare repeal bill was pulled, the CNN analyst on Friday insisted that Donald Trump’s first 100 days are the “worst we’ve ever seen.” The worst? Worse than William Henry Harrison who died before his first 100 days were completed? Worse than Lincoln having to deal with secession in his first 100 days and being assassinated in the second 100 days? Worse that John Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs debacle? Gergen began, “A lot of presidents...

Amid a growing frenzy in Congress over the postponed vote for the American Health Care Act is the looming threat against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s very livelihood. As the health care bill continues to sink, many are beginning to wonder if it is a sign that Ryan should not be at the helm in the House as well. President Trump was asked today during a brief press gaggle if he felt Speaker Ryan should remain in his position if the AHCA failed to pass. Willing to remain publicly loyal to Ryan for now, at least, Trump said “yes.”...

WASHINGTON - FOX 5 was the first to report D.C. police were tweeting about an unusually high number of missing children. According to city officials, there is not an uptick in missing persons cases, but community members remain frustrated. On Wednesday night, a town hall-style meeting was held at Excel Academy Public Charter School in Southeast D.C., which was hosted by Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White. Hundreds of people packed the room for this meeting while there were many others who could not even get in the door. The heart of this forum – what is going on and what...

A holdover from the Obama administration who helped broker the Iran nuclear deal continues to work in the Trump State Department as a member of the “policy planning staff,” according to her biography on the agency website. “Prior to joining the Policy Planning Staff, she served as a Director for Iran and Iran Nuclear Implementation on the National Security Council Staff from 2014-2016,” Sahar Nowrouzzadeh’s bio states. “Sahar also previously served as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State and a Team Chief and Senior Analyst at the Department of Defense.” In an October 2016, Nowrouzzadeh was...

An obscure bureaucratic policy that allowed IRS officials to target conservative and Tea Party tax exemption applicants during the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns is still in place, meaning the same abuses may be continuing, according to a nonprofit government watchdog. The federal tax agency’s policy requires IRS officials to stop processing tax-exempt applications that are “likely to attract media or congressional attention,” the Cause of Action Institute said in a report made public Wednesday. The policy also directs IRS officials to prepare “sensitive case reports” for their supervisors and to ignore “the merits of the application” if it involved...

Rich was originally from Nebraska and was known as a rising star within the Democratic organization. His death came weeks before WikiLeaks leaked thousands of DNC emails, which hurt the party by creating the impression that leaders favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders from winning, which has caused some to wonder if WikiLeaks had been working with Rich before his sudden death. Rich, 27, was the Democrats' director of voter expansion data. Early Sunday morning, he was shot multiple times in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of the nation's capital. Police officers soon arrived on the scene, but Rich died shortly after...

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday defended the decision to give Ivanka Trump an office in the West Wing, saying that the first daughter is going "above and beyond" to comply with ethics standards. “Ivanka has decided to go above and beyond and act in certain ways to ensure she complies with certain rules, by maintaining the federal records act, getting a security clearance so that if she’s privy to any information that is classified, she has to abide by the same rules and regulations about being in room, how it’s handled, et cetera,” Spicer said during his...

<p>Pro-Trump actress Roseanne Barr went off on the liberal elites Monday after the dog-and-pony James Comey show in front of Congress.</p> <p>Barr rightly pointed out that the liberal attacks on Trump are actually attacks on American voters.</p> <p>Every single attack on @POTUS is really a disguised attack on American voters who rejected Obama-Clinton-Bush's bleeding of R treasury.</p>

SNBC's Mika Brzezinski ramped up her criticism of President Trump and his top advisers in an interview published Tuesday, advising all media outlets that they should no longer put Kellyanne Conway on the air. "I feel even more so that everyone should ban her," Brzezinski told Variety magazine in reference to her February announcement that Conway would no longer be booked on "Morning Joe." "I’m surprised that these little acrobatic games are played with her on live national television. I think it denigrates what we do. It’s clear she doesn’t bring anything to the table. It’s clear she doesn’t know...

John Huber will continue to serve as the U.S. attorney for Utah, at least for the time being. Huber was given a reprieve by the U.S. Justice Department and will stay on as an interim U.S. attorney for the state for the next four months. Huber was one of 46 U.S. attorneys who were asked by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions last Friday to resign. ... Huber joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office since 2002 and was appointed to become Utah’s U.S. Attorney in February 2015 with the support of Sen. Orrin Hatch. Huber was confirmed by the Senate in June...

With Democrats facing tough prospects in the midterm elections, will they also have to worry about primary challenges from their left flank? The path of Sanders' former staffers reflects the split in his movement, and the some are already galvanizing for the 2018 elections — and setting their sights on their own. The more radical strain, which led hundreds of Sanders delegates to walk out of the Democratic National Convention in protest last summer, is still present on the left and emboldened by the loss of Hillary Clinton and their belief that "Bernie would have won." A handful of groups...

Welfare reform has been a high priority for Republicans and conservatives for many years, and now that President Donald Trump is in the White House, the possibility of such reform is finally feasible. In what was quite possibly the opening salvo on welfare leeches, Trump was ready to sign a bill passed by Congress that would allow states to perform drug tests on those applying for unemployment benefits, WITI reported. Under President Barack Obama, states weren’t allowed to test applicants for drugs unless they were applying for a job that already had mandatory drug testing. However, there’s a new sheriff...

The accused White House fence jumper was on the White House south grounds for 15 minutes or more before he was caught Friday, a Secret Service source with knowledge of the matter told CNN Friday, and officials are investigating multiple failures that allowed it to happen. The source says Jonathan Tran set off several alarms, but was able to avoid other sensors. The source said "the response to the alarm was lacking, and found (the suspect) vulnerabilities in the system." Secret Service officials are conducting a formal Mission Assurance Review to the incident. They say the 26-year-old California man carrying...

AUSA Hankey was present for the Government. The Defense requested a trial date which was set by the Court. The Defense indicated it had rejected a plea offer. Event Scheduled Event: Non-Jury Trial Date: 05/30/2017 Time: 9:30 am Judge: SALERNO, ROBERT A Location: Courtroom 210

"The president of the United States, he represents the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and southern Maryland, but he also represents the rest of the country," Mulvaney said on a call to outline the budget plan. "And I can assure you that we did not write this budget with an eye toward what it would do to the value of your condo," he said. That was Mulvaney's response when he was asked about reports warning of the budget's possible downward effect on home prices.

A growing number of GOP senators are hoping the House fails to pass its bill to repeal and replace ­ObamaCare so they won’t be blamed for killing it in the upper chamber. Support for the House legislation has “disintegrated” in the Senate, according one Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss internal conference politics. It will require substantial revisions to win the support of moderate Republicans in the upper chamber — something that will likely make it unacceptable to conservatives. Given what looks like an unbridgeable divide in the Senate GOP conference, some are saying that it would be better...

Every once in a while — and perhaps especially now, if we’re really going to talk about a trillion-dollar infrastructure program — we need to revisit the basics: “This is probably a column-length question, but what are the solutions to traffic congestion in the D.C. region?” That reasonable question came in during the midst of last Monday’s online discussion about whether traffic conditions would be improved if everyone just went faster. (In fact, we would not all be better off if you’d just go as fast as the driver behind you wants.) What are we really hoping to achieve when...