Free Republic

On MSNBC this afternoon prior to Hillary Clinton's press availability about the controversy swirling around her private email server, NBC correspondent Kasie Hunt revealed Democrats "knew" about Clinton's use of a private email when she was Secretary of State. Video at link...

On Monday, 47 United States Senators sent an open letter to the Iranian regime warning that any deal cut by President Obama could be revoked by Congress. “The next president,” the letter stated, “could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen, and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.” This sent the Obama administration and its media allies into a tizzy of rage. After all, it is one thing for the president of the United States to send secret love letters to the ayatollahs; it is quite another for GOP members...

Gun ownership among Americans at a record low, survey finds By Tribune wire reports contact the reporter The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it's ever been, according to a major American trend survey that finds the decline in gun ownership is paralleled by a reduction in the number of Americans who hunt. According to the latest General Social Survey, 32 percent of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That's a significant decline since the late...

Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. You can read the full letter here. The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. (snip) If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages...

The conventional wisdom inside the beltway and on the sets of cable news outlets is that the Democratic Party has grown, perhaps inexorably, more liberal over the course of the Obama era. It is not hard to find liberal Democrats who believe that the Obama presidency failed to meet their expectations. As it happens, though, a new McClatchy-Marist survey found that a plurality of Democrats agree that it is time to move on from the Obama era of Democratic governance. According to that survey, 47 percent of Democrats agree that “It’s more important to have a Democratic nominee for...

"Democrats in South Carolina are not a group that is easily impressed, but recently former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley really impressed them… as in a standing ovation impressed."

This Is How Hollywood Has Been Fooling You All Along When it comes to contemporary Hollywood films, there's often more than meets the eye. We're not just talking about an elaborate use of special effects and CGI, its those smaller more finite details that are so often easy to ignore. On the set of any movie, along with the crew, actors and stunt doubles you'll also have 'extra's' - people like you and I paid to simply be a warm prop, background fodder if you will. A crowd milling about in a scene or a customer in a shop. Extra's...

While I was lamenting the fact that Barack Obama’s term will be over in 2016, and to bad he couldn’t run for office again because he would surely win, a friend suggested that maybe Michelle Obama could run up against Hillary Clinton. Talk about an epiphany, I was estatic that he made this suggestion and for a moment I imagined the possibility. After all, Bill Clinton was president and now Hillary is running, so why not Michelle Obama? Since we can be sure Michelle is supportative of her husband’s accomplishments and goals, we can also feel confident she would...

One of Washington’s most discussed articles over the past week was Matthew Yglesias’s Monday piece in Vox contending that this country’s combination of a presidential system and increasing ideological polarization is a recipe for eventual breakdown (the article was headlined “American democracy is doomed”). New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait thinks Yglesias overlooked something important. In a Tuesday post, Chait argued that the major threat to our political stability is that American conservatives are considerably farther to the right than are conservatives in, say, western Europe. “[T]he shape of our presidential system is not the only thing that separates the...

Mayor Danny Jones of Charleston, WV makes lewd comments in front of children about gun rights groups on election night. video only on link

As the US debt limit is expected to be surpassed by mid-March, 2015, early negotiations between Congress and the White House are beginning to focus on the Obama Administration and the expected inclusion of funding for President Barack Hussein Obama's future vacations and WH sponsored golf outings. Mitch McConnell has brokered an arrangement with the WH to include money in the 2015-16 budget for these expenditures, which are expected to be more than double the amount spent in 2014. McConnell has already indicated a willingness to cooperate with the WH on budget issues and has stated that there will be...

If you picked up a Star Tribune last weekend, you might have read two seemingly unrelated stories. On Saturday, news of a $1.9 billion surplus, with the state budget growing to $42.5 billion for the next two years (“Surging surplus raises the stakes, Feb. 28). On Sunday, a solid piece of investigative journalism about political cronyism on the Iron Range (“Range agency deep into DFL politics, pockets,” March 1). What if these two stories were related? Researchers at Indiana University published a study last year that explored the impact of public officials’ corruption on the size and allocation of state...

The FBI and the IRS are investigating a social services group that was shut down last fall after a state audit found its CEO spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on trips and other perks. Minnesota Public Radio News reported Friday that the federal investigation into Community Action of Minneapolis was revealed in documents filed in Ramsey County District Court. The documents were filed by court-appointed receiver Michael Knight, who is going through Community Action's books. "There are ongoing investigations by the FBI, the IRS and the DOC (Minnesota Department of Commerce) that are draining time and...

You can judge a man by friends, the old saying goes. And Congressional Democrats are telling The Hill that they would prefer John Boehner to any conservative insurgent, should a coup attempt to remove him from his speakership. Mike Lillis writes: Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they'd rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise. Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process — already limping along —...

Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s (D-MD) decision to retire at the end of her term has sparked a predictable succession feud among Democrats in that deep blue state, but the coming internecine squabble has the potential to engulf the entire party. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), a six-term member of Congress and the former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wasted no time in declaring his intention to run for Mikulski’s seat. On Friday, he received a powerful endorsement from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. “I enthusiastically endorse Chris Van Hollen for the United States Senate,” Reid said in a statement....

• Republicans are particularly confident in their ability to survive an apocalypse Many Americans have experience with natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes but each time that one hits an area of the country it is apparent that few people take disaster preparation as seriously as the government tells them to. When people are often so woefully unprepared for a hurricane or earthquake, what hope is there if civilization as we know it were to collapse? Research from YouGov shows that Americans are relatively optimistic about their fate in the event of an apocalyptic event. People tend to say...

In Soviet Russia for a period of four years a great terror overcame the communist party in what later became known as the great purge. It was the culmination of years of social engineering ending in the consolidation of Stalin’s brand of communism having ultimate power. We are seeing something very similar happening in the democrat party today. After six years of “change” the Chicago progressives want to consolidate their power for the 2016 run at the presidency.

There is no Plan B for 2016. I’ll say it, happily: Democrats should be worried about Hillary Clinton, and moderately panicked about the immediate future of both their party and their cause. This is not, of course, because Hillary’s latest scandale du jour is in any practical way going to “disqualify” her; and nor is it because leftward-leaning voters are likely to recall anything more from this rather awkward period in time than that the Clintons are as perennially sleazy as they ever were. Rather, it is because the last few days have underscored just how tenuous the Left’s grip...

Scandal: Which is worse — keeping classified information in a personal journal at home or doing government business and transmitting classified data on a private email account managed from the Clinton family home? This adds a new level of premeditated secrecy and deceit to the actions of the presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. It also adds a new level of hypocrisy to the most transparent administration in history's pursuit of former CIA Director and commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus, who had an extramarital affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, pleaded guilty, after a lengthy...

Honestly, it may be their best remaining play. They can’t claim that private e-mail is good practice when the State Department itself is on record as saying it isn’t. They can’t claim that it’s basically as secure as government e-mail when even lefty sites are reporting that that’s wildly untrue. On the merits, in terms of national security and as evidence of the creepy lengths to which President Claire Underwood will go in the name of evading accountability, it’s a total disaster. The only move left on this chessboard is to ignore all that and simply insist that voters won’t...