Free Republic

The moral sentiments of the population determine what political leaders are willing to do. The moral sentiments of a country may be consistent with reality or may be based on Utopian *fantasies, but, either way, they control public policy. To illustrate, lets examine the concepts “earn” and “deserve”. In reality, material products and human services are the product of human labor. Food and shelter, for example, do not exist in nature ready for your use. Medical care does not exist in nature. Humans must work to create these things. This is not a situation that was devised by mean people....

State Sen. Frank Wagner, a Republican candidate for governor, said Monday he'd like to turn much of U.S. 58 into an interstate as part of his plan to juice transportation construction in Virginia with an increase in the gas tax. The increase, part of a tiered plan that would charge more per gallon when prices are low, then roll back the rate when prices rise, wouldn't just affect rates in Hampton Roads or Northern Virginia, which have regional taxes. It would be statewide in implementation and effect, Wagner said. Wagner is charting an unusual course in this GOP primary: running...

Every time Senator Lindsay Graham opens his mouth, crazy things fly out. Is there something wrong with this guy? It's not for nothing that a MorningConsult poll released Tuesday pegged him at the third-most unpopular senator, trailed by only John McCain and Mitch McConnell. But there are methods to the madnesses of McCain and McConnell. In Graham's case, the loathing is justified, given his out of control statements, signalling an unserious mind, unmoored from reality.

Republican Ron Estes defeated his Democratic rival in a high-profile special congressional election in Kansas Tuesday that had been seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But the narrower-than-expected outcome may worry Republicans across the country as they try to decipher how much Trump's low approval ratings might hurt his party's candidates. Trump and former Rep. Mike Pompeo, who vacated the seat to become CIA director, had both won the district by nearly 30 percentage points in November. But Estes appears to have dramatically underperformed that margin, with early returns showing him leading Democrat James Thompson by just about...

Kansas state Treasurer Ron Estes held off a stronger-than-expected challenge from Democratic civil rights attorney James Thompson Tuesday night as the GOP won the first special congressional election since President Trump's inauguration. The election was held to fill the House seat vacated by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a former three-term representative of Kansas' 4th district. With 94 percent of the precincts reporting, Estes had won 52 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Thompson. The Republican's margin was just under 6,500 votes. By contrast, Pompeo's narrowest victory, in 2014, was by just under 70,000 votes. The race had been...

Arizona Sen. John McCain won’t rule out running again in 2022. McCain, 80, told The Arizona Republic he won’t be making any decisions on a potential seventh Senate campaign for at least three years, leaving the door open for another run. First elected in 1986, McCain is one of the most senior members of the Senate, and as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he still wields a significant amount of power and influence.

Anonymous sources within the FBI have revealed to The Times that they have new evidence indicating that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is an agent of the FSB (formerly the KGB). An unknown portion of these voters may have had their minds controlled by a Russian space-beam, agents close to the investigation say. The allegation that 62 million Americans appear to be employed by Russian intelligence services has rocked the Bureau, and it is reported that multiple agents have taken their own lives, given that realizing just how deep this Russian hacking conspiracy runs blew their minds – literally....

The Republican National Committee, together with President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, raised more than $53 million in the first quarter of 2017, according to party and campaign officials, fueled by the same class of online donors who flocked to Mr. Trump last year. Of that, the RNC raised $41.3 million in the first three months of the year—more than double what its Democratic counterpart raised in the quarter after former President Barack Obama was elected in 2008—while Mr. Trump’s campaign raised $3.3 million and a joint committee between the two raised more than $9 million. Frequent fundraising emails bearing...

Liz Peek, columnist for The Fiscal Times and FOX News, told the GOP Congress to cancel their vacation until August to get tax cuts through this year. https://youtu.be/pP2L8qbGS8Q

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/john-kasich-donald-trump-gop-2020

It took weeks of debunking, exposing, and analyzing to cut through the grease of what many of us have known all along: Republicans love Obamacare, at least the core elements that destroyed insurance in America. They just enjoyed using Obamacare as a talking point for elections while in the opposition. This revelation should serve as a teachable moment, demonstrating to conservative voters once and for all that Republicans don’t share our values on almost any issue, let alone health care. The entire GOP is a massive scam PAC designed to use conservative issues as a flag to raise money, accrue...

Minnesota House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman refuses to apologize for her comments. The DFL’s leader in the state House of Representatives is not apologizing for a crack about white men during a floor speech that led at least one Republican colleague to demand on Tuesday she resign from her leadership post. “I hate to break up the 100 percent white male card game in the retiring room, but I think this is an important debate,” House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman, of Brooklyn Park, said during a House session on Monday evening. Hortman then praised several speeches by female colleagues, including...

The decline of California’s Republican Party, as underscored by the most recent voter registration data, is a truly remarkable, even historic, phenomenon. And it’s not over yet. Republicans dominated the state’s politics for much of the 20th century — personified by Ronald Reagan — but began to fade as the century closed. The new registration report shows Republicans declining to just 25.97 percent of the state’s 19.4 million potential voters, 9 percentage points below the party’s nearly 35 percent share in 2000. A popular theory is that when then-Gov. Pete Wilson and other Republicans embraced Proposition 187, a 1994 measure...

President Trump’s attacks on conservative members of his own party come as his allies beef up an array of groups to promote his agenda, amassing firepower that could end up trained on fellow Republicans. At least four separate organizations are now seeking to drive public support for Trump and his priorities — a marked shift from the first two months of his administration, when the White House had limited outside air cover. The immediate goal: to lean on Democratic senators in the run-up to a vote expected this week on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. But down the road, some...

Students and residents in Charlottesville, Virginia, protested Republican Rep. Tom Garrett’s first town hall Friday with a massive sign stating “no dialogue with white supremacy” and chants including “say it loud, say it clear: immigrants are welcome here.” Garrett met with protests both inside and outside of the building at the University of Virginia where he hosted the town hall, reports NBC 29. Both Showing Up for Racial Justice and UVA Students United organized the protests. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) “[W]e refuse to give him a platform to spout his politics of racial terror and white supremacy,” the Charlottesville chapter of Showing Up...

WASHINGTON—Mike Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has told the Federal Bureau of Investigation and congressional officials investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia that he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution, according to officials with knowledge of the matter. As an adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and later one of Mr. Trump’s top aides in the White House, Mr. Flynn was privy to some of the most sensitive foreign-policy deliberations of the new administration and was directly involved in discussions about the possible lifting of sanctions on...

A top aide to President Donald Trump is leaving his administration. Two senior White House officials said Thursday that Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh is leaving her job. The officials were not authorized to speak before a formal announcement is made and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Last week Donald Trump said he was going to "come after" Congressman Mark Meadows, the head of the House Freedom Caucus, if he didn't support the American Health Care Act. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer later said the president was joking. No one is laughing now. The House Freedom Caucus, the collection of libertarian-leaning conservatives who helped sink the Trump-backed American Health Care Act last week, appears to be as much of a political enemy for the president as the Democratic Party. The fissures appearing beneath Mr Trump's feet as he tries to lead the Republican Party are not...

President Donald Trump declared war on members of his own party on Thursday by threatening the political careers of conservative Republicans who helped torpedo healthcare legislation he backed, but was quickly told the lawmakers will not bow to "bullying." In a Twitter post, Trump took aim at the Freedom Caucus, a bloc of the most conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, indicating he would try to defeat them in next year's congressional elections if they continued to defy him. "The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We...

Amid Democratic opposition, Republican leaders are retreating from President Donald Trump’s very popular campaign promise to build a border fence to block illegal immigration, drug smugglers, and criminals. A top GOP leader, Sen. Roy Blunt, told reporters on Tuesday that GOP leaders do not want to include Trump’s spending for the border wall in the spring budget, which is due by April 28. “All of the committees, the leaderships of the House and Senate, are working together to try to finalize the rest of the FY17 [budget spending] bill,” he added. “My guess is that comes together better without the...