Free Republic

With polls showing a surge by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in early-voting states, billionaire Michael Bloomberg is weighing a presidential bid as an independent, third-party candidate, the New York Times reported Saturday. Bloomberg, the popular former mayor of New York City, has sent up trial balloons before. But this time he seems concerned enough about the rise of candidates on the fringes of both parties - and Hillary Clinton's weakness in Iowa and New Hampshire - to assemble advisers and set down plans. In fact, Bloomberg is reportedly even studying up on past third-party runs by H. Ross Perot...

Former GOP presidential candidate George Pataki is predicting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's "legal issues" will force an outside candidate to jump into the 2016 White House race as a white knight. "People talk about the problems in the Republican Party, but I think Democrats have a bigger problem," the former New York governor told host John Catsimatidis on "The Cats Roundtable" on New York's AM-970 on Sunday. "Hillary Clinton is cratering, the scandals just keep coming. She has grave legal issues that could totally prevent her from continuing her campaign, and the alternative is a self-avowed socialist who has never...

Let me be clear - I am pro-life. I support that position with exceptions allowed for rape, incest or the life of the mother being at risk. I did not always hold this position, but I had a significant personal experience that brought the precious gift of life into perspective for me. My story is well documented, so I will not retell it here. However, what I will do with the remaining space is express my feelings about life, and the culture of life, as we just marked the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I build things. There is...

On the 43rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, many GOP presidential contenders were not silent. While Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton continue to defend the horrors of abortion, Republicans Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson took to social media. Recognizing the tragedy of over 58 million lives lost, these candidates explained why they stand for life. Donald Trump, however, has been silent on abortion, the March for Life, and Roe v. Wade all day. He is the only GOP front runner to avoid making a statement. Issues concerning Trump’s pro-abortion past continue...

MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews said that “I do believe in reparations, if he could figure out what it would be” in a discussion on Democratic presidential candidate Senator Sen. Bernie Sanders ’ (I-VT) position on the issues on Wednesday.

Blizzard warnings have been issued for the Baltimore and Washington D.C. metro areas, and blizzard watches extend northward to the Philadelphia and New York City metro areas as Winter Storm Jonas begins to take shape. The storm is expected to deliver heavy snowfall to at least 15 states, and heavy ice accumulations, strong winds and coastal flooding will add to the storm's impact as it carves a path from the nation's heartland through the South and onward to the East Coast now through Sunday. As of Thursday morning, just over 73 million people – or roughly one in every four...

The nation's capital is now under a blizzard watch, the first watch of its kind issued in advance of Winter Storm Jonas. Now is the time to prepare for Winter Storm Jonas, which is expected to kick into high gear Friday and pummel parts of the East through the weekend with heavy accumulations of snow and ice. Strong winds will likely add to the threat of power outages and may also bring serious coastal flooding along parts of the Atlantic coast. The National Weather Service issued the blizzard watch late Wednesday morning for Washington, D.C., and nearby Baltimore. The watch...

A DC couple was brutally beaten at a Metro station in Washington DC after watching a movie Saturday night. Police are looking for several youths in a spree of recent Metro beatings. The youths sucker-punched the couple and kicked their faces. This is the fourth such attack in the last month on Metro passengers. The media has mostly covered up this story. The young couple said they would have likely found another way home if they would have heard about the number of recent beatings.

CLARKSVILLE, Md. — Big improvements to Maryland Route 32 will cover more than 20 miles from Clarksville to Eldersburg. Gov. Larry Hogan and Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman announced Thursday that a stretch of Route 32 will get a much-needed expansion. After nearly a decade of pleading with state officials, the traffic and safety nightmare on Route 32 is finally being addressed. Hogan is committing $152 million to widening the highway and making safety improvements. "Governor, there are citizens who have died on this roadway. There are friends of all of us who have died or have been hurt, and...

Forget the primaries .. We know those deadlines are meaningless if Hillary is "replaced" because she is indited at any time before November. (The democrats don't follow election law anyway in past elections, so why would they care this time? But that is being cynical, right?) Lautenburg in NJ was stuffed into the ballot for an Senate seat illegally after the primaries. Missouri elected a dead man to the Senate when he died before the election. California's most infamous "Mexican-American" representative was elected to the House only after she changed her name to a Spanish-sound. Three other Senate seats were...

This survey was conducted by Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies from January 11th through January 16th, 2016. A total of 819 registered voters in Maryland who vote regularly were interviewed by telephone, utilizing both landlines and cell phones. A cross-section of interviews was conducted in each jurisdiction within the state to reflect general election voting patterns. This survey also includes an over-sample of 402 Democratic primary voters (MOE: ± 5%) and 301 Republican primary voters (MOE: ± 5.8%). Snip Republican primary election were held today, for whom would you vote for President: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz,...

Some of House Speaker Paul Ryan's guests for the State of the Union address were sisters from the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order dedicated to caring for the elderly poor. The order is suing the federal government over the HHS Mandate, because the sisters do not want to provide contraception to their employees via their insurance plans. (The group does not qualify as a "religious employer" because they employ and serve people of all faiths.) Naturally, Planned Parenthood took offense to this. Never missing an opportunity, @SteveKingIA & @SpeakerRyan used tonight's #SOTU address to send an...

Every once in a while our society surprises me and that's what happened in Baltimore recently. When the first police officer in the Freddie Gray case went to court it ended in a mistrial. That was surprising enough in and of itself. I'm fairly sure that when the city, led by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, decided to put the officers on trial they were fairly sure that any jury they seated would bring back a conviction. That's probably why they fought so hard against moving the case out to an area where they might find a slightly...

On the eve of the next Democratic debate, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his support for legislation that would reverse a 2005 law granting gun manufacturers legal immunity that he once supported. Sanders' changed position came after days of attacks from rival Hillary Clinton, who had attempted to use his previous vote to undercut his liberal image. ...

As polls tighten and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders looks more like a serious contender than a novelty candidate for president, the liberal media elite have suddenly stopped calling him socialist. He’s now cleaned-up as a “progressive” or “pragmatist.” But he’s not even a socialist. He’s a communist. Mainstreaming Sanders requires whitewashing his radical pro-Communist past. It won’t be easy to do.

A jury convicted a man of 31 offenses Friday for plotting to fly illegal drugs, a cellphone and other contraband aboard a drone into a maximum-security state prison. Thaddeus C. Shortz, 25, of Knoxville, could face more than 50 years in prison for crimes that include contraband, drug, conspiracy and firearm convictions. His sentencing wasn’t scheduled. The Allegany County Circuit Court jury deliberated about two hours and 15 minutes after two days of testimony. The panel of eight men and four women convicted Shortz on all but four of the charged offenses. He was acquitted on two counts each of...

A proposed bill in New York seeks to require that all smartphones sold in the state can be decrypted or unlocked and proposes hefty fines for vendors failing to comply.The proposed law marks the latest effort by lawmakers to make it easier for law enforcement to access and read encrypted data stored on smartphones. Should the proposed bill successfully pass through New York's state assembly and senate, Apple and Google could face fines of $2,500 per device sold in the state after January 1, 2016, if a retailer knowingly sold a smartphone that could not be unlocked or decrypted by...

In one of his few early openings during Thursday's Republican presidential debate, Ben Carson said marital infidelity by a candidate's spouse - Bill Clinton - was indeed a legitimate question on the campaign trail. Asked about front-runner Donald Trump's recent claim that Clinton's checkered sexual past was 'fair game' for discussion as long as he campaigns on her behalf, Carson said he agreed. Carson was also asked by Fox Business News debate moderator Maria Bartiromo whether Hillary Clinton was an 'enabler' for her husband's misconduct, which brought a roar from the Republican audience. 'There's no question that we should be...

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley is being investigated by the Anne Arundel County state’s attorney office for purchasing furniture from the state at a discount after serving two terms as governor, a spokeswoman with the state’s attorney’s office said. The investigation stems from the O’Malley family taking dozens of items with them when they moved out of the Annapolis mansion last January, pieces of furniture that O’Malley’s administration had deemed “excess property,” according to state records.

IBD warned over a year and a half ago that President Obama wasn't about to spend his post-presidency building houses, like Jimmy Carter, but that there were discernible signs that he would seek to become secretary-general of the United Nations. In the West Point speech he gave in May 2014, IBD pointed out that the president denied the reality of the American global decline he has engineered. "Think about it," he told the assembled cadets. "Our military has no peer." It was disturbingly similar to Carter's pathetic 1979 "malaise" speech, in which Carter boasted of "the outward strength of America,...