Free Republic

Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two hawks on U.S. policy toward Russia, said they will lead the push in the upcoming Congress for sanctions on Moscow that are stronger than those the Obama administration announced Thursday. "The retaliatory measures announced by the Obama administration today are long overdue. But ultimately, they are a small price for Russia to pay for its brazen attack on American democracy. We intend to lead the effort in the new Congress to impose stronger sanctions on Russia," the senators said in a joint statement Thursday. The Obama administration issued an executive order Thursday...

A big-money group that included some of Hillary Clinton’s top allies tested the effectiveness of attacking her 2008 rival Barack Obama for his admitted use of cocaine and his connections to Islam, hacked documents released Friday show. In the early stages of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, a group known as Progressive Media commissioned a poll that asked more than 800 likely swing state voters about a number of possible lines of attack against Obama, but also against Clinton and the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain. The poll results and emails discussing the questions were among a batch of documents...

Nevada’s departing senator would have fought Trump with a ruthlessness perhaps no other Democratic leader has. Harry Reid was searching for someone to take a stand. It was a Tuesday morning in early December, three days before his three-decade congressional career would effectively come to an end, and Reid had summoned about 20 of his staffers to his Capitol office just off the Senate floor. Although it’s reserved for the leader of the Senate’s minority party, it’s still a ­magisterial space, with soaring ceilings and mosaic floors. As a cold rain pelted the windows, the Nevada senator sat in a...

Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism, entertainment, literature and the Clinton campaign continue to suggest that Mr. Trump won the presidency by appealing to the bigotry of his supporters. As Bill Clinton recently said, the one thing Mr. Trump knows “is how to get angry white men to vote for him.” This stereotyping of Trump voters is not only illiberal, it falsely presumes Mr. Trump won because of his worst...

Hillary Clinton intends to keep her campaign organization together for the next four years and run again for president in 2020. “She’s convinced that, sooner than later, the voters will come to their senses and realize they made a horrible mistake by putting [Donald] Trump in the White House,” a source close to Hillary told Ed Klein Confidential. “She’s sure the voters will beg her to get in the race and she says, ‘I’m going to run again in 2020.’” Not all her advisers agree. In fact, several of them believe Hillary is in a bad way—deeply depressed, drinking too...

President Barack Obama defended his vision of America on David Axelrod's The Axe Files podcast, claiming he is confident "that if I had run again and articulated [this vision], I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it." The interview was the latest in Obama's post-election and pre-exit analysis, and he told his former senior adviser that despite Donald Trump winning, "what I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open and full...

When Susan Allen was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2012, she became the first openly lesbian Native American woman to win office in any state legislature. But framing that achievement as one for the lesbian community alone obscures another aspect of Allen’s identity, and one that is directly connected to her Native American ancestry: Allen also identifies as “two-spirit.” While Americans are increasingly familiar with the elements that make-up our modern LGBTQ abbreviation, other, often older queer identities like two-spirit remain unappreciated to the point of erasure. But if Allen and other two-spirit folks have their way,...

Jill Stein is continuing her push to investigate the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, with lawyers for the former Green Party presidential candidate asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to probe the issue. "We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the integrity of our nation’s election system generally, and our nation’s voting machines specifically, based on the information we discovered in the course of this representation," reads the letter from Stein's counsel dated Friday. "The attempted recount process has uncovered that voting machines relied on in these states and across the country are prone...

A thousand explanations have emerged since Election Day of how Hillary Clinton lost. The Russians and the FBI, two popular culprits, may have contributed in their own way to her defeat, but Clinton's own campaign deserves tons of blame. Since Election Day, remarkable reports have come out, alleging jaw-dropping errors by Clinton's team. We're trying to keep a running tally. The latest in the growing list of Clinton's reported campaign mistakes involves her chief primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Here's the gist: Clinton's campaign reportedly ignored advice and counsel from Sanders' people during the general election,...

Hillary Clinton spent much of last summer arguing that Ronald Reagan would never vote for Donald Trump. At the Democratic National Convention, a series of speakers — including Barack Obama — argued that the patron saint of the conservative movement would recoil at Trump’s authoritarian ethos. At a September press conference, the Democratic nominee suggested that the Gipper would be incensed to see the Republican nominee praise Vladimir Putin while disparaging the American president. One of her super-PACs’ final campaign ads cast Reagan’s ghost as a Clinton surrogate. The point of all this nostalgia for the man who killed off...

Bill and Hillary Clinton haven't committed themselves to attending Donald Trump's inauguration, which looms less than a month away, after a bruising campaign that left the Democratic nominee and her former-president husband with bloodied reputations at Trump's hands. So far Jimmy Carter, age 92, is the only former president who has said he will be there on January 20. George H.W. Bush, just four months younger, has said he will not come to the inauguration, and cites his old age as the reason why, according to Politico. George W. Bush won't make up his mind until January, his spokesman Freddy...

ROCKVILLE, Md. — Democrats’ belief that new information revealed after Donald Trump’s election — as when the reports of Russian interference spurred calls on the left for a revote or, failing that, for “faithless” electors to abandon Trump — would change voters’ minds has taken another hit. A Pew Research survey Wednesday showed a whopping 97 percent of all voters would cast the exact same vote they did on Election Day, including 99 percent of Trump voters and 96 percent of Clinton voters. As with the recount that saw Clinton lose votes and the Electoral College vote that saw her...

On December 3, the Michigan Democratic Party held a committee meeting, open to the public and party members, to vote on delegates to represent Michigan at the Democratic National Committee. Unfortunately, rather than learning from Hillary Clinton’s presidential election loss, and sincerely welcoming Bernie Sanders supporters into the party after scolding them for more than a year, the Democratic establishment has continued treating progressives as second class citizens. Michigan was one of the most closely contested races during the Democratic primaries. Sanders pulled off an upset victory there after polling suggested Clinton was likely to win. The most recent turmoil...

Lawmakers are loath to say anything remotely critical, fearful they might set off the president-elect or his horde of enforcers. "People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks," Rep. Mark Sanford said. In early December, Rep. Bill Flores made what seemed like an obvious observation to a roomful of conservatives at a conference in Washington. Some of Donald Trump’s proposals, the Texas Republican cautioned, “are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies," though he quickly added that there...

The Alabama governor's office confirmed Wednesday that he had interviewed suspended Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore to potentially replace Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Sessions, Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, would leave an vacancy in the U.S. Senate if he is confirmed next year. Local news station WVTM confirmed with the Gov. Robert Bentley's (R) office that Moore was under consideration to fill Session's seat. Moore was formally suspended for the remainder of his term as chief justice in September, on the grounds that he ordered lower court justices not to give same-sex couples marriage licenses. The U.S....

President-elect Donald Trump's campaign manager says Trump unnerved Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by promoting women who have accused her husband of sexual misconduct. Trump brought three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or rape to the second presidential debate, along with a fourth woman who blames Clinton for representing her accused rapist in court. All four gave statements of support of Trump while seated alongside him during a press conference before the debate. “Listen, this is somebody who’s very scripted,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said of Clinton on Fox News Radio’s “Hemmer Time” Wednesday...

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/adriana_cohen/2016/12/adriana_cohen_lax_vetting_endangers_europe_again?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is expected to be named special adviser to the president on overhauling federal regulations, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Icahn, who has spent the past four decades battling big companies as an activist investor, already has been wielding influence in President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team. He is playing a central role in selecting the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the people said. Interested candidates have reached out to him, and he is interviewing others at the request of Mr. Trump, the people said.

We've gone beyond virtue-signaling to toxic brew of all-you-people-need-to-shut-up-and-listen-to-why-you're-the-problem ranting. MTV—which famously took years to feature black musicians on its regular programming—has come full circle since its launch in 1981. It has released a short video titled "2017 Resolutions for White Guys." Among the suggestions, some of which were articulated by white folks who seemed plucked from the junior versions of Prairie Home Companion and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: "Try to recognize that America was never 'great' for anyone who wasn't a white guy"; "Blue Lives Matter isn't a thing"; "stop bragging about being 'woke'; "feel free to take Kanye...

In a typical year, Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign would go down as one of the most startlingly deficient endeavors in political history. But a postliminary campaign by Clinton allies to shape why the heavily favored and first major party female nominee lost to an eccentric billionaire reality television star is already bending the storyline in their favor through a concerted media offensive meant to undermine the president-elect, his tactics and the ultimate outcome. The Clinton campaign's stunning and largely unforeseen loss has only hardened its own resolve to win the post-mortem of how it happened. In the six weeks...