Free Republic

After hours of debate on the massive government spending package, the Senate adjourned until Saturday, pushing a fight that dominated Congress for days into the weekend. The Senate is expected to vote Monday on the $1.1 trillion package, which has already passed the House, Sens. Mitch McConnell and Barbara Mikulski said late Friday. Members from both parties in the Senate are trying to make last-minute changes to the bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a procedural move Friday that would set up a vote on final passage in the Senate no later than Monday. In a surprise development, the...

In my home state of Maryland, there were rampant reports of fraud during early voting in November. A number of voters who cast ballots for Republican candidates witnessed the computer system automatically flipping their votes in favor of the Democrat candidate. Evidently, this turned out to be a national phenomenon. In other states, voters did indeed cast votes for Republicans, only to see the mandate overturned by the D.C. Oligarchy led by Barack Obama, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell. It is hard to exaggerate what has just occurred in Congress. Democrats were completely repudiated and defeated in November. Then, Obama...

There has been an apparent first in the fight against Ebola this week. According to flight records, the private jet company contracted by the State Department to transport Ebola patients flew two air ambulances to West Africa on the same day. Until Wednesday, Phoenix Air had flown only one Ebola-fighting mission at a time. A second Gulfstream jet featuring the ability to treat infectious patients in flight had been held back in case of an emergency with the first aircraft. But last month, the Georgia-based operation finished customizing a third jet to handle the specialized medical equipment.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Frank Walsh still pays dues to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but more than four years have passed since his name was called at the union hall where the few available jobs are distributed. Mr. Walsh, his wife and two children live on her part-time income and a small inheritance from his mother, which is running out. Sitting in the food court at a mall near his Maryland home, he sees some of the restaurants are hiring. He says he can’t wait much longer to find a job. But he’s not ready yet. “I’d work for...

GOP members have released their draft amendment to defund President Barack Obama’s national amnesty. “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available, including any funds or fees collected or otherwise made available for expenditure, by this division or any other Act, or otherwise available to the Secretary of Homeland Security, for any fiscal year may be used to implement, administer, carry out, or enforce the [amnesty] policies,” says the short amendment. The new anti-amnesty language is being pushed by Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon, South Carolina’s Rep. Mick Mulvaney and Virginia Rep. Dave Brat, who unseated the GOP’s pro-amnesty majority...

A congressional deal to avert another government shutdown contains a provision to stop the District of Columbia from allowing the sale of marijuana, angering supporters of a pro-pot initiative that D.C. voters approved overwhelmingly in November, The Washington Post reports. The anti-pot measure — a budget "rider" slipped into a $1.1 trillion catchall spending bill that would keep the government running past Thursday — could prevent the nation's capital from joining Colorado and Washington as legal weed havens. The measure does not overturn the results of Initiative 71, the legalization referendum that passed on Nov. 4 with more than 60...

Lawmakers in this state and around the country are pressuring this state to repeal the sweeping gun control measures passed last year, but Governor-elect Larry Hogan promises he will keep the law in place. (snip) During this fall’s gubernatorial campaign, Democrats repeatedly attacked Hogan for his position on gun control, specifically regarding the National Rifle Association’s endorsement of Hogan. “This endorsement is based on Hogan’s support for and commitment to the Second Amendment. Larry Hogan respects the rule of law and the Second Amendment rights of Maryland’s law-abiding citizens,” an NRA news release said. Hogan repeatedly promised throughout the campaign...

After weeks of promising bipartisanship and refusing to make policy announcements that might rile Democratic lawmakers, Maryland Gov.-elect Larry Hogan has picked his first political fight, coming out swinging against environmentalists and their powerful allies in the General Assembly. Mr. Hogan vowed Monday to roll back proposed new regulations that would limit phosphorus runoff from farms, siding with Eastern Shore farmers who rely on phosphorus-rich chicken manure for fertilizer and against environmentalists who blame it for choking the life out of the Chesapeake Bay. The regulation, known as the “phosphorus management tool,” or PMT, has been hotly debated in the...

A mom and her two children are dead after a private jet crashed into their Maryland home today, a disaster that also killed the three people aboard the plane, authorities said. The jet crashed in Gaithersburg, about a mile north of the Montgomery County Airpark. The plane exploded, setting fires and damaging three houses, fire officials said. The plane sliced through the roof of one home, and the main part of the fuselage and the tail landed against a second house. One of the wings "catapulted" into a third house, where the majority of the fire damage occurred, Robert Sumwalt...

Protesters seem to be attracted to holiday lighting festivities like moths. As Twitchy reported, a mob of Ferguson protesters crashed the tree lighting in Seattle, surrounding and terrifying young children gathered on stage to perform holiday music. Demonstrators in Philadelphia booed a children’s choir as they tried to sing Christmas carols. And in New York City last night, protesters convened but missed out on their dream to burn down the tree at Rockefeller Center. Thursday night was the lighting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore, Md., and once again, the promise of families enjoying holiday festivities was too much for...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Wednesday criticized grand jury decisions to not indict white police officers in the deaths of black men in New York and Ferguson, Mo. "They tell us, at least, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Well clearly a black man's life is not worth a ham sandwich when you put these stories together. And that is the frustration," Steele said on MSNBC. Earlier in the day, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a New York police officer in the choking death of Eric Garner over the summer. Video captured by...

President Obama on Tuesday urged the lame-duck Congress to approve roughly $6 billion in emergency funding to fight the deadly Ebola virus, saying “we cannot beat” the disease without a greater financial investment from lawmakers. “The urgency remains. If we are actually going to solve this problem for ourselves, we have to solve it in West Africa as well,” he said after a tour of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “Let's get it done,” Obama added. “This can't get caught up in normal politics.” Obama's visit to the National Institutes of Health was meant to promote the...

ANNAPOLIS — Maryland Gov.-elect Larry Hogan reassured an auditorium packed with political leaders Monday that his Republican administration will “put aside partisanship” to steer the state in a better direction. But seasoned political hands are raising doubts that the Democrat-dominated General Assembly will meet him halfway. “I stand before you today full of hope, hope for Anne Arundel County, hope for our state and hope for our future,” Mr. Hogan said in a speech at the inauguration of Anne Arundel County Executive Steven R. Schuh, a fellow Republican who took charge of the county that is home to Mr. Hogan...

Protesters took to the streets Monday morning, causing traffic delays in Northwest D.C. Traffic is stopped in the area of 14th and D streets in Northwest D.C. because of a protest.

Democrats hope to take back control of the Senate in 2016, but their plans could be complicated by potential retirements. The two Democratic senators most likely to retire are Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who represent both sides of the party’s ideological spectrum. Boxer, whose fourth term expires at the end of 2016, has a paltry $149,000 in her campaign account, less than almost every other senator facing election next year. As the nation’s most populous state, California is expensive to cover with advertising. If Boxer decides to run for reelection, she would face a major fundraising...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...

Washington superlawyer Cleta Mitchell represents True the Vote, one of the groups illegally targeted by the IRS in the scandals that have exposed the agency as a partisan operation. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht has been harassed by federal law enforcement authorities representing three different federal agencies. They represent the price of politics in the Age of Obama. As John notes below, yesterday the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee released emails that show Democratic staffers communicating with the IRS about True the Vote. It appears that Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat and therefore the Congressman to whom these...

Published on Jul 18, 2013 The House Oversight Cmte. hears from IRS officials about the targeting of tea party & other conservative organizations. Lawmakers take a closer look at IRS headquarters in Washington and the Cincinnati office that dealt with tax-exempt applications.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan went on a fiery tirade about Ferguson on Saturday — threatening that if the demands of protesters aren’t met, “we’ll tear this goddamn country apart!” Farrakhan stated in his speech — given at Morgan State University, a black college located in Baltimore, Md. — that violence was justified in response to the decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson and peaceful protests are only in the interest of “white folks.” “We going to die anyway. Let’s die for something,” the radical figure told the crowd to roaring applause. He even said the parents of...

Organizers of a post-Thanksgiving protest on behalf of workers at a Walmart in downtown Washington, D.C. identified only one of the participants as actually working at that store. The admission underscores the fact that few Walmart workers have been involved in the protests. "Thirty striking workers from Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland took part in today’s protest, and Melinda Gaino, one of the striking workers, works at the H Street Store," said Julie Anderson, a spokeswoman for the 1.3 million member United Food and Commercial Workers union, which organized the event. Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg claimed the number was far...