Free Republic

The psychologist who helped pull off the biggest Social Security fraud in U.S. history was sentenced Friday to 25 years in prison. Alfred Bradley Adkins was part of the fraud ring orchestrated by Eric C. Conn, one of the country’s most prominent disability lawyers, and David B. Daugherty, a Social Security judge who rubber-stamped at least 1,700 bogus applications for benefits. All told, the scam would have cost the government at least $600 million in fraudulent lifetime benefits, according to the government’s conservative estimate. Some $93 million were already paid out before the scam was stopped, the government said. Judge...

Facing an estimated $200 million deficit, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) encouraged his state’s universities to cut unnecessary degree programs to help balance the state’s budget. In a speech to the Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship on Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky, Bevin suggested that the universities and colleges could "find entire parts of your campus...that don't need to be there.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised President Trump’s decision to rescind President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, calling it a move that “corrects that fundamental mistake.” “President Obama wrongly believed he had the authority to re-write our immigration law,” McConnell said in a statement Tuesday. “Today’s action by President Trump corrects that fundamental mistake.” 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – WDRB News is fighting what its attorney calls a “clearly illegal“ search warrant obtained by Louisville Metro Police that would allow officers to comb through the station’s newsroom and access computers, notes and unpublished material gathered for a recent news story about a suspect in a police shooting. Jon Fleischaker, an attorney representing WDRB, said it is the first time he has seen such an order in at least the last 40 years, when federal law prohibited law enforcement agencies from serving search warrants on news organizations except in extremely rare cases. “There are very serious...

Beginning Jan. 22, 2018, travelers from nine states will no longer be able to travel with only their driver’s licenses. Residents of Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington will have to use alternate ID forms (passport, military ID, or permanent resident card) to pass TSA security checkpoints—even for domestic travel.

To no one’s surprise, a just-released NBC News poll reveals that feckless Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has succeeded in becoming just as unpopular as his polarizing predecessor, San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi. The Survey/Monkey poll shows that 30% of those surveyed view Pelosi favorably, a statistical tie with Paul Ryan’s 31%. The two are also tied up in the unfavorable department, with 64% holding an unfavorable view of Pelosi, compared to 63% for Ryan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in even worse shape. A Harvard-Harris poll released last week showed the Kentucky Republican with a dismal approval rating...

The Republican Party of Fayette County’s headquarters on Southland Drive was vandalized either late Friday or early Saturday by someone who painted “Nazi scum” and “Die Nazi!” across the office’s front windows and door. It was the second act of vandalism at the office since Republican President Donald Trump’s election last November, when someone smashed the glass door with a small metal dumbbell. State and local GOP officials swiftly said that they don’t blame the Democratic Party for the malicious acts.

President Trump's recently removed chief strategist Steve Bannon has vowed to paint a target on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to a report Friday evening. "Mitch McConnell, I'm going to light him up," Bannon told the Economist. While Trump has been unsuccessfully trying to motivate the senator from Kentucky to take action on his policy agenda, the chairman of Breitbart News is taking a different approach to getting McConnell to cooperate with the White House. "In the White House I had influence ... At Breitbart, I had power," Bannon repeatedly told the Economist reporter.

The Social Security judge who rubber-stamped more than 1,700 bogus disability applications as part of the largest disability fraud ring in American history was sentenced to four years in federal prison Friday. David B. Daugherty left the Kentucky courtroom in handcuffs after Judge Danny C. Reeves rejected the government’s recommendation of a year in home confinement, and instead gave him the maximum time allowed on the charges he pled guilty to. The judge also ordered Daugherty to pay $93 million in restitution to the government, according to witnesses in the courtroom. Daugherty was part of the disability fraud ring orchestrated...

Nine percent. This same poll from PPP has Vladimir Putin’s favorable rating among Americans at 11 percent. McConnell’s less popular than Putin, than war, than famine — than even a Republican health-care bill. This makes three gruesome polls for McConnell in as many days. A poll of Kentucky published Monday, also by PPP, had him at 18 percent in his home state. A survey conducted by former Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio released yesterday put him at 27/44 nationally, down 25 net points since June. Now here’s PPP with a new national number so unspeakably awful it can’t possibly be...

After all of the GOP’s legislative successes this year, this is the thanks he gets? See Also: Trump’s campaign pollster: McConnell’s favorability collapses among Republicans, now -17 The man’s as popular in his home state as gonorrhea — if you trust PPP’s polling to be accurate, that is. Remember, they also had Jeff Flake polling in VD range in his own home state of Arizona. It’s unusual for an incumbent from a state dominated by his party to tank quite that badly absent a major scandal. But then, it’s also unusual for a party to tank quite as badly as...

Since 2007, John Culpepper had been anticipating this moment: the unveiling of a statue to the common Confederate soldier in his hometown of Chickamauga, Georgia. In November of last year, three days before Donald Trump won the presidency, it became a reality. Culpepper founded the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the self-described historic honor society that's been keeping the Confederate legacy alive for more than a century. Culpepper greeted visitors with smiles and handshakes as they filed into rows of white folding chairs behind the towering, shrouded statue. Most of them were his neighbors from Chickamauga, a...

The approval rating of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has plummeted to just 18 percent, a survey from Public Policy Polling has found. The poll, which surveyed 645 Kentucky voters, found that just 18 percent of respondents approved of McConnell’s current performance, compared to 74 percent who disapproved. Seven percent of people said they were not sure. McConnell, who is the longest-serving U.S. Senator in Kentucky history, having represented the state since 1984, was recently criticized by President Trump for failing to pass the healthcare reform bill through the Senate. “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell who has screamed...

The approval rating of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has plummeted to just 18 percent, a survey from Public Policy Polling has found. The poll, which surveyed 645 Kentucky voters, found that just 18 percent of respondents approved of McConnell’s current performance, compared to 74 percent who disapproved. Seven percent of people said they were not sure. McConnell, who is the longest-serving U.S. Senator in Kentucky history, having represented the state since 1984, was recently criticized by President Trump for failing to pass the healthcare reform bill through the Senate. “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell who has screamed...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that he doesn't believe that most news is "fake news," a view that President Trump often tweets about. "My view is that most news is not fake, but I do try to look at a variety of sources," McConnell said at a Chamber of Commerce event in Louisville, Kentucky. He was appearing with Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin to talk about overhauling the nation's tax code, a top White House and Senate priority. President Trump has tweeted about "fake news" over 100 times since January, according to the Trump Twitter Archive.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will check out the nation’s gold stash when he pays a rare official visit to Fort Knox on Monday -- while keeping an open mind for future film projects. “I assume the gold is still there,” the former Hollywood producer joked to an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, 40 miles (64 km) north of the U.S. Bullion Depository. “It would really be quite a movie if we walked in and there was no gold.” Fort Knox has been seared into the public imagination since the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” in which the British spy, played...

Most Republicans don't care much these days for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, making him now the most unpopular of the top congressional leaders. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

In truth, she didn’t — her party did. The Democratic Party has suffered broadly in the middle of the country in the last few years, largely on the backs of its pull left under the presidency of Barack Obama. Though progressivism fit well for Democrats in urban areas, it fell flat and was widely rejected in places like Madison County. It is not that voters liked or loved Republicans or found them more virtuous; it is that they found Democrats less aligned with their values, more likely to look down their noses at them, and not at all interested in...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in on the weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, castigating Donald Trump without naming him. 'We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis,' McConnell said in a statement. The choice of words, while careful, appeared to push back against Trump's claim on Tuesday that some 'very fine people' were among a crowd of white supremacists who rallied in the college town. McConnell's wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, stood next to Trump on Tuesday as he insisted both sides of the weekend's clash bore some responsibility for...

White nationalists are planning a rally in Lexington to oppose the planned removal of two Confederate statues from the lawn of the former Fayette County Courthouse, and they’re considering a lawsuit aimed at blocking the move, a leader in the movement said Tuesday. Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, said his group and others allied under the umbrella of the Nationalist Front are discussing plans for the rally. Heimbach said people in the Lexington area asked his group get involved. The group has members in Kentucky and plans to try to recruit more, he said.