Free Republic

GOP infighting broke out again Monday as West Virginia Republican Senate candidate Don Blankenship compared Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to a “Swamp captain” and “the Russians.” As Politico reports, Blankenship, who owns a lot of coal in the state, was incarcerated for a year after a 2010 explosion in one of his mines and the GOP establishment has not embraced his Senate candidacy — reportedly campaigning against Blankenship with a series of attack ads purchased by a political action committee (PAC) named Mountain Family PAC. Blankenship defines his war as one with McConnell, whom he encourages to stay in...

There's an odd dichotomy playing out in our politics in which the conventional wisdom -- prodded by wild current events, history, developments like this and a pattern of off-year and special election results -- is sliding in one direction (a blue wave), whereas public polling has been moving in the opposite direction. Last week, we brought you Quinnipiac's latest national survey, which confirmed a downward trend for Democrats. Their 'generic ballot' lead over the GOP had tightened from ten points to six...to just three. That outcome wasn't too much of an outlier, we argued, and now a few brand new...

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters marched Saturday in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, demanding a new election and a new national electoral system in the biggest opposition rally in years. Prime Minister Viktor Orban was re-elected for a fourth term last week. His right-wing populist Fidesz party won a supermajority in the national assembly, with preliminary results showing that Fidesz and tiny ally the Christian Democratic party won 134 seats in the 199-seat legislature.

This will be a weekly post. Count is now 32. Mitch is back in session, with just one cloture vote per day, then off for the long weekend.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage acknowledged Thursday that he was the source who first revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak back in 2003, touching off a federal investigation. Armitage told the CBS Evening News that he did so inadvertently. "I feel terrible," Armitage said. "Every day, I think, I let down the president. I let down the secretary of state. I let down my department, my family, and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson." In a column published on July 14, 2003, Novak, citing two senior...

Washington (United States) (AFP) - US House Speaker Paul Ryan's shock retirement announcement marks the latest victory in a populist, anti-establishment revolution that brought its champion Donald Trump to power and is remaking the Republican Party. Whether that spells longterm GOP success in policymaking, diplomacy and at the ballot box remains unclear. Trumpism is ascendant in Washington, but is a permanent Republican shift away from conservative orthodoxy and the establishment underway -- or is the party makeover temporary?

Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t pull any punches on Thursday, telling a Chicago audience that in America today “truth, facts and reason” are under siege, and “racist and white supremacist views” are finding an ear in the media and the White House. Clinton returned to her hometown to both receive an award and help raise money for a political action committee aimed at bolstering African-American women in politics — and to blast her take on Donald Trump’s America. “We are living in challenging times. We’re living through a war on truth, facts and reason, watching as racist and white supremacist views...

The retiring of 43 representatives assists the conservative goal of replenishing, refurbishing and renewing this nation The RNC response to Paul Ryan deciding to leave the House and return to Wisconsin is upside-down. RNC Spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, appearing on Fox Business April 12, 2018, noted that with Ryan’s departure another aisle straddler should take the speakership if republicans retain the majority in the House. She got it wrong.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan is getting pressure to throw his name into the mix to replace outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, but he is not yet willing to say whether or not he intends to make a bid for the speakership in the coming months. “What’s important is not who the next speaker is, but what the next speaker does,” Jordan told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s time to start delivering on what we told the American people we would do.”

David Hogg, the self-professed anti-gun genius, has been caught red-handed promoting an election fraud scheme. Recently, Hogg announced that he would be taking a “gap year” putting off college “to work on the midterm elections and help educate new voters.” Well, it seems that educating new voters includes showing them how to engage in election fraud. Now, Hogg’s in a public meltdown as he sees his fame and glory get flushed down the drain. Thanks to a savvy Twitter user who screen captured Hogg retweeting instructions by the George Soros funded-group called HeadCount. It pretty much sounds an awful lot...

Since President Trump was elected in 2016 with the help of white evangelicals, we have been told that in voting for him, we compromised our ethics and can no longer be taken seriously. The latest alleged evidence for this is found in reports that black evangelicals are leaving white evangelical churches because of the latter's support of Trump. What are we to make of this?The charge of white evangelical hypocrisy has been leveled most recently by Michael Gerson, writing in the Atlantic's April edition. The title and subtitle of his major, nearly 7,000 word article read: "The Last Temptation: How evangelicals, once...

We can defeat the Establishment Republicans' plans to fail by ... ironically ... electing another Republican majority!! It would be FAR more conservative, with a number of moderate-liberal republicans gone, and more Trump republicans elected. AND a new Speaker!

ASHINGTON, DC – President Donald Trump announced his 12th wave of judicial nominees for 19 lifetime federal judgeships on Tuesday, including two short-listers for the U.S. Supreme Court. The president nominated three people for the U.S. courts of appeals: Justice Britt Grant currently serves on the Georgia Supreme Court, and is nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Grant is the former Georgia solicitor general who previously served in the Bush 43 White House and litigated at the powerhouse law firm Kirkland & Ellis. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School and clerked for Judge...

It’s easy to vote illegally in Nevada. All a non-citizen has to do is go the DMV and ask. The DMV uses the same form regardless of whether you’re getting a driver’s license, ID card or driver’s authorization card. The latter are for those, like illegal aliens, who can’t meet the proof of identity requirements for the other documents. At the bottom of that form is a voter registration application. The voter registration form asks if you’re a citizen and if you’re old enough to vote. What’s to stop someone from lying? Nothing and no one. You could get a...

Rick Scott, Florida’s popular governor, has a good chance of ousting a Democratic senator this fall. . . snip Conservatives feel good about Scott taking his record to the voters this November. Ron DeSantis, a Republican congressman who is running to succeed Scott as governor, told me this weekend that Scott will also be able to pummel Nelson, the Democratic incumbent senator, for his votes against Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and against the Trump tax cut. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, says Scott can use the state’s prosperity to appeal to many voters who wouldn’t...

With Hungarians set to go to the polls on Sunday, a spokesman for the Prime Minister has warned organisations sponsored by billionaire financier George Soros are working to blackmail the country into accepting mass migration. Labelling a leaked European Union paper a “Soros report” designed to force Hungary to bow to EU pressure to accept mass migration and other diktats, Zoltán Kovács said Hungarians would never accept the demands. Remarking that changes proposed to the Dublin regulations which govern the movement of asylum seekers within the bloc would soon make Hungary taking migrants mandatory, Kovács recalled how, “In recent weeks...

This will be a weekly post. Count remains at 29.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acknowledged this week that the 2018 midterm cycle could prove especially difficult for the Republican Party in the face of increased Democratic voter enthusiasm. In an interview with Kentucky Today, published Tuesday, McConnell admitted: “This is going to be a challenging election year." “We know the wind is going to be in our face,” he continued. “We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5.”

Liberal candidate Rebecca Dallet has won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, according to Decision Desk. Dallet defeated her conservative opponent for the open seat, Michael Screnock easily, and her victory will cut the conservative majority on the court from 5-2 to just 4-3. Dallet’s win is yet another example of liberal voter enthusiasm in state and local elections held during the age of Trump. And in Wisconsin specifically, it’s a rare victory for a Democratic Party that’s been beaten again and again in recent years. (The race was technically nonpartisan, but Dallet was the Democrat-backed candidate, and Screnock the...

LOST RIVER, W.Va. -- The tale of the enigmatic flowing river that seemingly disappears underground only to reappear elsewhere, which explains away the naming of this town, is the stuff that holds visitors or children spellbound. Lost River is one of four unincorporated towns along West Virginia state Route 259 that attracted America's frontier families for its rich resources. Surveyed by then-16-year-old George Washington, this area has never had much population; it's had the commerce to keep enough people there not long enough to make it boom but just long enough to make it stick with tourists. Today, it attracts...