Free Republic

Mixed martial arts' Ronda Rousey's mind may be focused on her upcoming bout but she has already weighed in on the 2016 presidential race ahead of her weigh in for a fight on Saturday. The undefeated UFC champion, 28, has said that she is supporting Vermont's senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination and the White House. Rousey told Maxim that she voted for comedian Roseanne Barr for president in 2012, and is supporting the democratic socialist this election because he does not take corporate money for his campaign.

A whistleblower has emerged in the controversy of Governor Jerry Brown’s use of state oil experts to study his own family’s private land. Jennie Catalano, a mapping specialist for the California Department of Conservation, says she faced retaliation after complaining about being required to do personal work for Brown. It is illegal for politicians to use state resources for personal benefit. Brown says he used the same resources available to any Californian. The Associated Press confirmed the whistleblower complaint, which is separate from the original legal action by Kern County farmers alleging that Brown colluded with oil companies over the...

Monday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Democratic 2016 Senate candidate Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said Republican presidential candidate Sen. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was the Miley Cyrus of the Republican Party because he is “twerking every right-winger in sight.”

At the Florida Democratic Party Convention, held October 30-November 1, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed, “The Florida Democratic Party is back and better than ever.” Also back, it would seem, is the national party’s misguided emphasis on gun control. Speaking at a convention event held at the Walt Disney World Yacht and Beach Club Resort, Wasserman Schultz launched into an anti-gun screed aimed at getting members of her party to more fervently pursue gun control. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Wasserman Schultz demanded, “Democrats! We must close the gun show loophole! Democrats! We must require background checks...

President Barack Obama this afternoon addressed the Fall Summit of Organizing for Action, the retooled Obama for America campaign machine that's been squatting on the Twitter handle @barackobama for the duration of his administration, leaving the leader of the free world stuck using @POTUS. The president might have been in a serious mood, but he did manage to hit the audience with one zinger that really hit home: Mark Knoller@markknoller Pres Obama says his agenda won't be completed in next 14 months, "but I'm not going anywhere" pledging to keep working on it. Seriously? The president who during his first...

Convinced that Americans are grossly under taxed, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is on a crusade to regain the seat he lost to current Republican Senator Ron Johnson in 2010. "The evidence is overwhelming," Feingold asserted. "Americans are suffering from a surfeit of income that they are squandering on purchases that are detrimental to their well-being. They are over-eating and over-drinking. They are living in single-family homes when they should be living in high-density apartments. They are driving cars when they should be riding public transit. The list of obnoxious and self-indulgent expenditures is lengthy and nauseating." Feingold touted his...

Photo courtesy AP Images Hillary Clinton has one key part of the electorate already in the tank for her candidacy — millionaires and CEOs. In Congress, Democrats represent the richest and most unequal districts in America. While liberal pundits attack the GOP as the party of the rich, the real plutocrats are on the other side of the aisle.How can this be? The Democrats rail against the abuses of the "one percent" and run on a platform of reducing income inequality, but the rich continue to support them. Liberals attack unregulated markets, call for unrealistic "green energy" proposals, and...

Put aside all the daily campaign controversies, and the 2016 election will hinge on one thing: Will the coalition of voters who twice showed up in large numbers to elect President Obama turn out to vote for Hillary Clinton, the assumed Democratic nominee? Horse race polls, favorability ratings, those will all fluctuate many times between now and next November. But if Clinton can't find a way to engage unmarried women, millennials and minority groups — it's going to be over for her. That's why this Democratic poll released on Monday, taken by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research on behalf of...

Congressman Seth Moulton, D-MA, has added his voice to the 2016 presidential race, endorsing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Everyone in the race has strengths and weaknesses, and I don't agree with any of them on every issue," Moulton wrote in a letter to supporters Sunday. "But none of those differences are big enough or deep enough to risk losing the presidency to the likes of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. "It comes down to this: who will fight hardest for working people, defend and expand the middle class, and protect our freedoms?" Moulton wrote. "The answer, for me,...

It all goes downhill after 30 — at least when it comes to happiness. “Adults over 30 are less happy than their predecessors,” concludes a study published online Thursday in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, which examined happiness data from more than 50,000 adults, gleaned from the General Social Survey, carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan, independent research organization, which has collected information about American adults since 1972. From 2010 to 2014, adults over 30 had an average happiness score of just 2.18, compared with 2.24 a decade ago. That’s significant considering happiness...

Congressional Democrats led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are quietly working to repeal the "Cadillac tax," a 40 percent excise on certain expensive health-insurance policies enacted as part of the so-called Affordable Care Act, which grows less affordable by the minute. The Cadillac tax was never going to be long-lived. It was a lie from the beginning, a part of the great fiction that allowed Democrats to claim that Barack Obama's signature health-insurance initiative would add "not one dime" to the deficit, as the president repeatedly insisted. But the tax was and is bitterly opposed by important Democratic constituencies:...

And Republicans across the country should take note. According to all the polls leading up to last Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Kentucky, Republican businessman Matt Bevin wasn’t supposed to have a chance. This was the same Matt Bevin who had launched a lamentably unsuccessful primary campaign last year against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and was treated by much of the press in the state (OK, technically the commonwealth) as a loose cannon who couldn’t be taken seriously. But Mr. Bevin pounded away at ObamaCare. And if you’re wondering why, since that’s ostensibly a national issue, you might recall that...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-04/democrats-lost-the-war-for-staying-power

Washington (AFP) - The Internet was supposed to facilitate better exchange between the public and news media. But vile and hateful comments changed all that. In the face of rising vitriol -- attacks, bigotry and general nastiness -- news organizations are increasingly throwing in the towel on online comments. Last month, Vice Media's Motherboard news site turned off reader comments, saying "the scorched earth nature of comments sections just stifles real conversation." It instead began taking "letters to the editor" to be screened by staff. Vox Media's online news site The Verge said in July it was "turning off comments...

For the most part, Republicans trounced Democrats in state and local races across the country. It was a great night for the GOP, especially Matt Bevin's surprise win in Kentucky. Most had written him off in the weeks prior to Election Day, citing the inability for both him and his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Jack Conway, from getting any sort of traction with the electorate. In the end, Bevin beat Conway by almost ten points. The Republican State Leadership Committee, who serves at the frontlines of state and local races, noted their massive victory during their conference call yesterday....

ABC NEWS Updated 15 mins ago Louisiana State Police charged two law enforcement officers in the shooting death of a 6-year-old boy and the wounding of his father. Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, and Derrick Stafford, 32, were charged with second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder in the shooting in the city of Marksville on Tuesday, Col. Mike Edmonson said during a news conference late Friday. Jeremy Mardis was killed and his father, Christopher Few, was left in critical condition. The shooting happened when the two city marshals allegedly opened fire on a vehicle following a pursuit, said Edmonson.

Startling election losses on Tuesday have given new urgency to top Democrats in Washington planning to coordinate campaign resources, according to people involved in behind-the-scenes conversations. The discussions, which involve members of Congress, the Democratic National Committee, and party organs like the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, center on how to better coordinate political planning ahead of next year’s elections, when Democrats hope to climb out of a deep hole created by midterm and off-year elections. At the same time, interviews with top party officials from across the country and across the ideological spectrum reveal...

The Democratic presidential contenders opened a televised forum in the early voting state of South Carolina Friday night with an attack on front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who's seen her numbers rise after a summer slump. [...] The forum marked the start of a weekend of wooing African-American voters in South Carolina. Clinton used the campaign swing to expand on her criminal justice policy, rolling out a series of new proposals that would reduce mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders, grant greater discretion to judges and retroactively eliminate the five-year minimum sentence for possession of crack cocaine. ...

Democrats and their anti-gun allies sure know how to sell firearms. Barack Obama probably should get an award. For the sixth month in a row, we've seen record gun sales (via Stephen Gutowski/Free Beacon): The Federal Bureau of Investigation processed a record number of background checks in the month of October, indicating that gun sales were at an all time high for the sixth month in a row.The FBI's National Instant Background Check System processed 1,976,759 firearms related checks in October. That is a 373,290 increase in checks over last year and a new record for the month. It...

Today, three Iowa politicians signed a pledge calling for “a World War II-scale mobilization” to fight climate change. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Rep. Dan Kelley, and State Senator Rob Hogg, a leading candidate for US Senate, all Democrats, signed a document calling on the US government to reduce emissions 100 percent by 2025 by “enlisting” tens of millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects—creating full employment in the process. It’s likely the most ambitious pledge to fight climate change put forward this election cycle, even if right now, it's a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention...