Free Republic

Republicans on Sunday defended their party against Democratic complaints that Congress is being forced to consider nominees for Donald Trump’s administration without completed ethics reviews. “All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration in having not only lost the White House, but having lost the Senate,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I understand that,” he added, “but we need to sort of grow up here and get past that.” …

The liberal ABC-Disney Television Network generated outrage during its televised coverage of the Houston Texans’ victory over the Oakland Raiders Saturday night in the Wild Card round of the AFC Playoffs, but it had nothing to do with the football. Instead many viewers were annoyed at a promo for next Wednesday’s episode of ABC’s sitcom Black-ish, which features a predominantly African-American cast being decidedly anti-Trump in tone and nature. In the promo, which bills the episode as the “election through the eyes of Black-ish”, Lucy (a white character played by Christine Reitman) tells her predominantly African-American co-workers: “I voted for...

A move by Democrats to reestablish a rule that would require a minimum of 60 votes for any legislation to pass the Senate was repulsed by a 52-48 straight party line vote. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, recent vice-presidential running mate of Hillary Clinton, sponsored the 60 vote requirement and called the GOP's stance against it "unfair. For decades it had been the tradition in the Senate to permit the minority party to block legislation that couldn't obtain a super majority. Now just because former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) eliminated this tradition when Democrats held the majority in the...

Of all the tantrums being thrown by the Democrats in their inability to accept defeat and move on, perhaps the most absurd is the Great Russian Hacking Scandal. Did the Russians under express orders of Communist Party General Secretary... scratch that... President Vladimir Putin himself direct the hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign? Well, yeah, probably -- if we are to believe our (for the next two weeks) Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who regrettably is not able to show the actual evidence to the public for fear of "compromising sources"...

The Office of Government Ethics is raising alarm over the pace of confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's nominees, saying Saturday that they have yet to receive required financial disclosures for some picks set to come before Congress next week. In a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released Saturday, OGE Director Walter Shaub wrote that "the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me" and that the current schedule "has created undue pressure on OGE's staff and agency ethics officials...

Donald Trump is now the real, official, actual, no-more-doubt-about-it president-elect of the United States, after Congress certified the results of the electoral college Friday. Not for lack of Democrats' efforts, mind you. House Democrats objected to 10 states' electoral votes being awarded to Trump, but none of them were able to get a senator to join in their objection, as required. Hence, a quixotic effort failed. Again. All along Trump's path to the White House, nearly every political process has featured some kind of effort to thwart him by manipulating the rules and otherwise Doing Whatever It Took to stop him....

WikiLeaks released all the DNC, Hillary Clinton and John Podesta emails that were in play during the 2016 presidential election. Julian Assange claims he did not receive any of these emails from Russia, Russia-related individuals, or Russian agents. He received them all from a "private, non-state party." Assange was not provided any similar data regarding Trump and the RNC, so he had none to release. In the last election cycle, let's not forget, he released Sarah Palin's emails, which backs up his claim that he is non-partisan in his promulgation of political leaks. Whether you view Assange as heroic or...

It's not every day that the Wall Street Journal's right-leaning opinion section swoons over a Democratic politician. Gina Raimondo's outspoken championing of tax and regulator reform have made her the rare exception. Gushing over the Rhode Island governor in a November article titled, "An Island of Rationality in Blue-State New England," opinion writer Allysia Finley praised Raimondo's focus on regulatory and tax reform, painting her as a wonky, business-friendly Democrat at odds with a left-wing base committed to fighting battles over social justice issues. "This year’s election has spurred soul-searching within the Democratic Party," she wrote. "A debate rages between...

Trump’s unexpected win has Democrats coping with a vastly smaller job market for their skills. The job market is about to get even more crowded for Washington Democrats, as thousands of Obama appointees join the hundreds of Clinton campaign staffers looking for employment. There’s rarely been less demand for their services....

For eight years, the voices of what passes for morality on the left were utterly silent as the values of generations of Americans were flushed down the drain. Those Americans whose desires, experiences and values differed from the leftist elite were treated as worthless garbage, no longer necessary to the imminent liberal utopia, except as a source of revenue. Christianity was treated like a virus to be extinguished, or revised and controlled to accommodate leftist ideology. Speech that offended the shameless was branded as hateful, and those daring to openly object to the onslaught of vice and immorality were falsely...

CNN was gloating last night that this is a broken promise, but is it? Watch this short clip from late October, where Trump talks about Mexico “reimbursing” the U.S. for the cost of the wall. In Gettysburg, Trump appears to tweak his border wall plan: the U.S. will pay for the wall, then Mexico will reimburse the U.S. for the cost pic.twitter.com/Bw2kqCniIp— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 22, 2016 Congress fronts the money, then Mexico pays us back. That was his position this morning, too: The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall...

Yet another disturbing sign that the Democratic Party is abandoning Israel: Nearly 40 percent of House Democrats voted against a measure condemning the recent anti-Israel UN resolution, which passed because Team Obama refused to veto it. Worse, the 76 “no” votes included two of the top three Democrats in the House — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Assistant Leader Jim Clyburn. Even more significant: Rep. Keith Ellison, a leading candidate to head the Democratic National Committee, also voted no.

The Wikileaks publication of a raft of embarrassing emails hacked from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta may have undermined Hillary's chances to be elected president. For his part, Podesta has complained loudly about presumed Russian involvement, claiming that "intelligence sources say only the Russians have the kind of sophisticated techniques required." Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, refuted Podesta's claim saying that "a fourteen-year-old could've hacked Podesta's email account. His password was 'password.' His email could hardly have been less secure." Podesta labeled Assange's assertion "grossly misleading. My password wasn't 'password.' It was 'passw0rd' with a zero. The chance that some...

John HaywardJanuary 7, 2017 President-elect Donald Trump’s order for all politically-appointed ambassadors to leave their overseas posts by Inauguration Day is “breaking with decades of precedent by declining to provide even the briefest of grace periods,” according to the New York Times: The mandate — issued “without exceptions,” according to a terse State Department cable sent on Dec. 23, diplomats who saw it said — threatens to leave the United States without Senate-confirmed envoys for months in critical nations like Germany, Canada and Britain. In the past, administrations of both parties have often granted extensions on a case-by-case basis to...

The FBI may have been forced into a misstep when investigating whether Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee -- the agency never directly examined the DNC servers that were breached. Instead, the FBI had to rely on forensic evidence provided by third-party cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to mitigate the breach. “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed,” the agency said on Thursday in a statement....

Congress met today to put a stamp on Donald Trump's electoral college win, but local Rep. Barbara Lee and other House members disputed his victory. "Congress is convening for a joint session to certify the votes of the electoral college. Given the deeply troubling incidents of disenfranchisement and the overwhelming evidence of Russian interference, I am challenging the electoral vote certification," Lee wrote on Facebook about a half-hour ago. The representative was joined by several house members who opposed Trump's win due to voter-suppression tactics in states. "During this presidential cycle, hundreds of thousands of voters — primarily voters of...

Left without the power to filibuster, Democrats are settling on another strategy to derail President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees: Demand more information. It’s the same tactic that helped Democrats sink some nominees the last time they were in the minority, during the George W. Bush administration. But they may have dented their own cause by powering through President Obama’s picks and drawing a road map that Republicans will now employ to confirm Mr. Trump’s nominations. The first target for the strategy is Rep. Tom Price, the anti-Obamacare crusader whom Mr. Trump tapped to run the Department of Health and Human Services....

No One Cared About Hacking until We found Out How Corrupt Liberals Are By S. Noble - January 6, 2017 US major government and military organizations are hacked all the time by endless numbers of foreign and domestic actors. Nothing was done to fix our cybersecurity. But let a privates organization like the DNC get hacked or careless John Podesta’s emails get hacked and all hell breaks loose. John Podesta left his smart phone in a cab, he fell for a phishing incident and his password was ‘passwØrd”. Hillary put our state secrets on a personal server she kept in...

Democrats and left-wing activists are planning to vigorously attack President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees before Trump even takes office at Noon on Jan. 20. The purpose of this early resistance to the incoming Trump administration is not only to deprive Trump of political legitimacy but also to undermine his authority and make it impossible for him to govern. All this talk of a vast Russian conspiracy to hack U.S. computer networks to put Trump in the White House is also part of the leftists’ scheme. So was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s goofy fundraising campaign disguised as recounts in...

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Hillary Clinton's running mate in her failed bid against Trump, suggested that mental issues are behind Trump's "clown" comment. . . . "At the end of the day, the office of the president gets respect based on the performance of the person in the office – and I'm talking about from the public — I don't think this is going to play with the public," Kaine said.