Free Republic

To many Democrats, ObamaCare is a four-letter word. Most Democrats in competitive elections are seeking to avoid the topic, opting not to tout the controversial law on their campaign websites. In a review of battleground races, The Hill found that out of 50 Democratic candidates with active campaign websites, only 11 mention the healthcare law by name, either as "ObamaCare," "Affordable Care Act," or "ACA." Fourteen more mention the law, but not its name, and half the candidates omit it entirely from their websites. President Obama has trumpeted that more than 8 million people have enrolled in ACA-related plans. Meanwhile,...

The movement to change how presidents are elected is gaining steam and proponents of the long-stalled popular vote initiative are predicting victory by 2020. Eleven states/jurisdictions have enacted the National Popular Vote (NPV) bill, giving the proposal 165 electoral votes — 61 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to trigger the new voting system. Legislatures that passed the law include California, Illinois, New Jersey. Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed a popular vote bill into law last week. All of these states, as well as the nation’s capital...

The American Center for Law and Justice is suing a Maryland community college after a student was denied admittance into a program because he said God is the most important thing in his life. Brandon Jenkins, a prospective student in the radiation therapy program at the Community College of Baltimore County, exceeded the minimum requirements for entry into the program, but after completing his exam and interview process, he received a notice informing him that he was not selected for the fall 2013 term. When Jenkins followed up with members of the CCBC staff to find out why he was...

RICHMOND, Va. – A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections. George acknowledged that the number of voters who actually cast multiple ballots is relatively small. In the case of Maryland and Virginia, he revealed that 164 people voted in both states during the 2012 election....

A liquefied natural gas facility in southern Maryland is generating intense criticism from environmental groups, in a fight that echoes the protracted battle over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Energy company Dominion Resources is hoping to invest up to $3.8 billion to upgrade the Cove Point LNG facility as an export terminal. If successful, it could become the East Coast's chief LNG export facility, sending billions of cubic feet of natural gas to Japan, India, and elsewhere. Dominion stresses that the project would have a huge economic impact close to home as well. "The local area of Calvert County gets...

A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

While Homeland Security is reconsidering their position on deporting illegal criminals with ‘trivial’ crimes, Maryland’s Governor O’Malley has taken it one step further. He announced that the Baltimore City Detention Center will no longer comply with a federal policy that requires the jail to detain illegal immigrants for deportation. O’Malley said the Detention Center will now consider the severity of the charges a person is facing when reviewing I.C.E. requests to hold immigrants through the ‘Secure Communities’ program. The federal program ‘Secure Communities’ was intended to catch and deport dangerous criminals by coordinating with local jails. We are a government...

<p>"Rep. Paul Ryan and the Wall Street Journal are for throwing in the towel. Legalize them all and start them on the path to citizenship.</p> <p>A full and final capitulation. Let’s get it over with.</p> <p>To understand why and how the Republican Party lost Middle America, and faces demographic death, we need to go back to Bush I.</p>

A Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland is defending comments he made Monday in which he suggested his opponent, an Iraq war veteran, was not up to the task of a “real job.” Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler drew ire from a veterans’ group after he made the comments about his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, at an event held by the Tech Council of Maryland.

The former hedge fund of one of the Democratic Party’s most important donors was involved in a scheme to defraud foreign investors out of tens of millions of dollars, according to documents filed in a Texas court. Farallon Capital Partners L.P., a fund run by Farallon Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar hedge fund founded by Democratic donor Tom Steyer, became a limited partner in a project to build a large shopping mall near Seattle, Wash., in the mid-1990s after it guaranteed a line of credit for the project.

Maryland has given up on its Obamacare website, but not before spending $90 million of taxpayer funding on technology, according to a cost breakdown released Friday.Of the $90 million, exchange board Chairman Joshua Sharfstein said that the marketplace spent $55 million on the website itself, The Washington Post reports. Officials opted in late March, after six months of struggling with the inoperable system, to give up on fixing the website and start over again with a model of Connecticut’s more successful exchange website.Maryland’s Obamacare exchange received millions in federal taxpayer dollars to build its Affordable Care Act website and was...

April 18, 2014 CUMMINGS’ “MCCARTHYISM” CHARGE IN LERNER HEARING IS BOGUSM.Stanton Evans Five plus decades after he left the national scene, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis) remains the target of inaccurate charges by leftward elements in Congress and the press corps.The latest example in this vein is the uproar over IRS official Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth Amendment before the House Government Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), concerning hostile treatment of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions,. Having proclaimed her innocence of wrongdoing, Lerner then refused to discuss specifics, pleading possible self-incrimination. This led Issa and his GOP...

Governor Cuomo has signed off on the National Popular Vote Compact, giving New York's 29 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. SILive: Count New York in. The Empire State has joined the National Popular Vote compact with legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. States that have signed on to the interstate agreement will award electoral votes for president to the candidate who receives the majority of the national popular vote. "With the passage of this legislation, New York is taking a bold step to fundamentally increase the strength and fairness of our nation's presidential elections,"...

After explaining how Maryland regulates out-of-state providers, the letter presents them with three options: Confirm that the institution enrolls students in Maryland, then pay an annual registration fee of $1,000 and a bond valued at five times the average cost of tuition; confirm that the institution is interested in enrolling students in Maryland, and pay the same fee; or decline any interest in enrolling students in Maryland, thereby barring those students from enrolling altogether. [...] According to the letter, recipients have until April 25 to respond—even if they don’t enroll students in Maryland. [One] provost therefore described the letter as...

A plan, now stealthily making its way through state legislatures with astonishing speed, would junk the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the popular vote. The plan involves an Interstate Compact where states would commit to select electors pledged to vote for the national popular vote winner regardless of how their own state voted. When enough states pass this law, sufficient to cast 270 votes which is the majority of the Electoral College, it will take effect. So far, nine states and the District of Columbia, casting 136 electoral votes, have joined. This is halfway to...

... Instead of asking Congressman Cummings about this damaging new report surrounding the IRS scandal, Schieffer ignored the entire issue, and focused on ObamaCare and equal pay for women for the entirety of the interview. The CBS host even falsely claimed that the GOP did not support equal pay for women: “Marsha Blackburn says Republicans are actually for equal pay for women. But yet, it was blocked in the Senate by Republicans…What is going on here?” Given that Schieffer had the opportunity to interview the ranking Democrat on the committee leading the IRS investigation, it would have made sense to...

April 12, 2014 True the Vote president calls Cummings damning emails ‘the tip of a very ugly iceberg’ by Michael Dorstewitz The explosive discovery by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that its ranking Democratic member coordinated with the IRS to target True the Vote came as no surprise to its founder and president. She called it “the tip of a very ugly iceberg.”Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee’s chairman, released emails earlier this week strongly suggesting that Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., was in direct communication with disgraced IRS supervisor Lois Lerner in an effort to target True the...

New IRS emails released by the House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote.

The heat in the IRS investigation just went up. Rep. Darrell Issa, head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter today to ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings in which he accuses Cummings of working to "obstruct the investigation" into IRS misbehavior. The bulk of Rep. Issa's letter is devoted to some recently uncovered emails which demonstrate that Rep. Cummings was seeking information on True the Vote, the voter integrity group based in Texas which became the target of much unwanted government attention. Cummings' staff contacted the IRS in August 2012 to inform them that they...