Free Republic

This will be a weekly post. Count is now 29.

nly Seven Days into the Mississippi Senate Race, Establishment Goes Berserk Jackson, MS – It was reported yesterday in the Washington Examiner that establishment Republicans in Washington are prepared to block Chris McDaniel from getting his party’s nomination for US Senate. One GOP operative who favors Roger Wicker was quoted anonymously in the story, disparaging conservatives as “lunatic[s].” “Here we go again, it was bad enough when Hillary Clinton referred to conservatives who supported Donald Trump as ‘deplorables,'” said Chris McDaniel. “But now the mask is off and you have hate-filled GOP establishment operatives who are calling conservatives lunatics.” McDaniel...

ITTSBURGH — About four years after having to overcome negative ads from his own party to win a state Senate seat, Scott Wagner was first to speak at a major GOP committee dinner as the party's endorsed candidate for the state's highest office. Aboard a chartered plane from Harrisburg on his way to the Republican Committee for Allegheny County's annual Lincoln Day Dinner, Wagner said he started building relationships with Republicans statewide after his historic 2014 write-in campaign. The Spring Garden Township resident and owner of Penn Waste was forced to run as a write-in after the state party endorsed...

Will Democrats really get behind a do-over in 2020? Many have speculated that a late substitution of Joe Biden for Hillary Clinton might have saved the White House for Democrats in 2016, and at the very least it’s tough to argue that they could have done worse. Biden, for instance, would have known to campaign in the blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and would have been better positioned to connect with working-class Americans outside the urban-coastal progressive bubbles.The Democratic Party, however, wants to double down on those progressive bubbles in the future, so Politico reports that Biden’s...

Billy Galvin has been at the Statehouse longer than Josh Zakim has been alive. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Except for the possibility that Galvin, the veteran secretary of state, may for the first time in his long political career face serious Democrat primary opposition. And the question is: Does Galvin face a bridge too far? The challenger is Josh Zakim, 33, a Boston city councilor, who is seeking to oust Galvin. If the name is familiar it is because the Zakim Bridge is named after his father. Ordinarily, a bridgeless Zakim would be no big deal....

The election season got started this past Tuesday in Texas, and the primary results are being analyzed for clues about what they mean for November. The results confirmed that the Democratic enthusiasm is real, but it's probably not strong enough to turn Texas blue. The number of votes cast in Democratic primaries nearly doubled those from four years ago. However, the 1,037,779 Democratic voters fell half a million short of the GOP's 1,543,674 votes. Primary votes don't translate directly into general election results, but there's nothing in the data to suggest a big blue wave sweeping over Texas. However, not...

GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Fighting to stave off another special election embarrassment, the White House is strengthening its final-days offensive in western Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump has long been scheduled to rally voters on Saturday behind Republican congressional candidate Rick Saccone, a state representative whose underwhelming campaign has some Washington-based Republicans fearing the worst. It will be the president's second visit to the district on Saccone's behalf. Daughter Ivanka Trump appeared with Saccone in a separate visit last month as well and praised him as "a champion" for Republican priorities. The national GOP confirmed late Wednesday that Trump counselor Kellyanne...

RUSH: So going into the primary yesterday, we were told that this was going to be where we would all learn that the end for Trump is just months away. It was going to be the perfect storm built by the perfect recipes. Here we have a classic red state. And this red state has the kind of people in it that the left has never been able to beat. And they don’t like ’em. These are Texans. And they hunt, and they fish, they have guns, they drive big cars, they talk big, they live big, and they are,...

President Trump's national approval rating is still historically low — 39.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average and 40.2 percent at FiveThirtyEight — but "as state-by-state polling of Trump's approval rating shows, the national mood really isn't so national," Nathaniel Rakich notes at FiveThirtyEight. "Voters in different corners of the country differ in how deep their anger runs — and at whom it's directed. ... To take control of the Senate, it doesn't much matter how Democrats perform elsewhere if they can't win both Nevada and Arizona and defend red-state Democrats in places like Missouri and Indiana." According to a new...

Republicans are learning an uncomfortable reality about the political environment for 2018: Tax cuts, conservative culture-war staples, and even Nancy Pelosi herself probably won’t be enough to overcome the deep hole that President Trump has put them in. With the White House awash in scandal and struggling to articulate its agenda, the political mood has turned so grim that Republicans are in danger of losing an upcoming special election in the heart of Trump country. That’s the lesson to draw from the surprisingly competitive campaign Democrat Conor Lamb is running in a Pittsburgh-area district Trump easily carried by 20 points,...

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) received more votes in the 2018 Republican Primary election than the entire turnout of voters in the Democratic Primary. The results shed a new perspective on the media-hyped “blue wave” stories from the weeks leading up to election day. In the Republican Primary of 2018, Senator Cruz received 1,317,450 votes in a race with four challengers. His Democrat opponent, U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke only received 641,311 votes against two opponents. Figures from the Secretary of State’s office show that just over one million voters turned out in the Democratic Primary in general across Texas. Cruz...

President Donald Trump is filling the upper ranks of his administration with appointees who share his disbelief in the scientific evidence for climate change — giving them an opportunity to impose their views on policies ranging from disaster planning to national security to housing standards. At the Interior Department, decisions about Pacific island territories threatened by rising seas are in the hands of an assistant secretary who has criticized “climate alarmists” for “once again predicting the end of the world as we know it.” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s top advisers include a former talk radio host who has dismissed much...

President Donald Trump had a successful year in seating appeals court judges, but it is lower-level federal courts that have blocked much of his policy agenda, including withholding funds from sanctuary cities and restricting travel from some nations. Trump came into office in January 2017 with 108 vacancies on the federal bench. Despite rapidly moving to fill the seats, he now has 178 current and known future vacancies, according to the Judicial Crisis Network. The conservative group reports 146 current vacancies on federal courts and 32 known future vacancies, meaning judges who have announced they will retire. Of the total...

More than 1 million voted in Senate Democratic primary, providing a measure of party’s energy WASHINGTON—The 2018 fight for control of Congress began Tuesday, as Texas Democrats flooded the polls for the year’s first primary election and showed that the national wave of Democratic enthusiasm will buffet even traditionally Republican states. Statewide turnout in the Senate Democratic primary race provided a measure of the party’s energy: More than 1 million voted in the primary, almost double the number in 2014. But Democrats still lagged behind the 1.5 million who voted in the GOP Senate primary.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday his administration is preparing “strong” measures to prevent Russia from meddling in November midterm elections. Yet, he again suggested others might have been involved in attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump claimed he is not concerned about a repeat of the last national election. “We’re counteracting it very strongly,” he said of Russia’s tactics, some of which were detailed last month in court documents prepared by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III. The president — seemingly out of the blue, as he often does — also touted a potential alternative to hacks of...

Seventeen Democrats voted to proceed on a bill that would roll back major portions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Senators voted 67-32 to end debate on a bill that takes aim at a number of the protective barriers Dodd-Frank put between consumers, banks and the greater economy in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession. Michael Bennet of Colorado Tom Carper of Delaware Chris Coons of Delaware Joe Donnelly of Indiana Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota Doug Jones of Alabama Tim Kaine of Virginia Angus King of Maine Joe...

The Senate cleared two more of President Trump’s judicial nominees on Monday after confirming two others last week, helping the president make good on his promise to fill the federal bench with conservative jurists. Karen Gren Scholer was confirmed to the Northern District of Texas Monday by a vote of 95-0. The Senate also voted 85-11 to confirm Tilman Eugene Self III to the Middle District of Georgia. Mr. Trump has placed 27 judges on the federal bench since taking office last January, when he faced an unprecedented amount of judicial vacancies. Fourteen of the 28 judicial picks took seats...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has alarmed the Republican establishment and world leaders by threatening tough steel tariffs, a message that might be meant not just to shake the world trade order but to help defend a congressional seat in Pennsylvania.

Hidden from the media narrative of Russian cyber sabotage is the content of the DNC leaks, and how the leaks revealed the arrogance and corruption of the Democratic Party elite. Amidst the blame Russia hysteria, the actual content of the the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacks has been consigned to the memory hole. In a veritable tidal wave of false narratives, the mainstream media has succeeded in drowning the legacy of the leaks in (not terribly convincing) accusations of Russian culpability. Erased from this narrative is the fact that the highest levels of the Democratic Party—supposedly neutral arbiters of the...

BANGKOK — A Belarusian escort with close ties to a powerful Russian oligarch said from behind bars in Bangkok on Monday that she had more than 16 hours of audio recordings that could help shed light on Russian meddling in United States elections. The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, said she would hand over the recordings if the United States granted her asylum. She faces criminal charges and deportation to Belarus after coming under suspicion of working in Thailand without a visa at a sex-training seminar in the city of Pattaya. Ms. Vashukevich, who described herself as close to the Russian aluminum...