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Faulty work done at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County is being blamed for a military plane crash that killed 16 service members in 2017, an investigation found. On July 10, 2017, a U.S. Marine Corps KC-130 Hercules crashed near Itta Bena, Miss., killing the 15 Marines and a U.S. Navy sailor who were on board, AJC.com previously reported. It suffered a catastrophic failure at 20,000 feet, crashed and scattered debris over a wide area of farmland. A report of the investigation conducted by the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing was obtained by the Macon Telegraph, and it concluded that...

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MI) won her runoff election last night over Democrat Mike Espy in Mississippi, so Republicans have a solid 53-47 majority. No longer will we have to deal with the Murkowski-Collins question when it come sot tight votes of judicial and Supreme Court nominations. We can run the table on paper, but we have a Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) problem. Yeah, Mr. Flake, the perpetual pain in the rear end of the Senate GOP, isn’t budging from his position of blocking Trump’s judicial nominees until a vote on a bill to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the...

Let's revisit this post from election week, in which I highlighted a number of notable Republican victors in the media's much-discussed "year of the woman."  Since that piece went live, a number of the tentative outcomes have changed: Young Kim narrowly lost in California, Martha McSally narrowly lost in Arizona (though could end up in the Senate anyway), and despite winning comfortably, Cathy McMorris Rodgers stepped aside from leadership, with Liz Cheney taking her place as the top-ranking Republican woman in the House.  A number of female incumbents from competitive districts also lost by a hair, such Mimi Walters and...

Incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won her closely-watched runoff election Tuesday night in Mississippi, becoming the first woman elected to represent the state in the upper house of Congress. Despite having made a series of controversial statements, Hyde-Smith successfully fended off a serious challenge from Democrat Mike Espy in a deep-red state President Trump won by 18 points. The victory by Hyde-Smith also means there will be 24 women in the Senate next year, setting a new record. Twenty-three women now serve in the Senate. Hyde-Smith, a cattle farmer, had served as the state's senator for seven months after...

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has won Mississippi’s Senate runoff, defeating Democrat Mike Espy despite controversy over recent comments. Hyde-Smith had 56 percent of the vote to Espy’s 44 percent when the Associated Press called the race with more than three-quarters of all precincts reporting. The result means Republicans will hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate next year. The runoff for the remainder of Thad Cochran’s term was held because neither candidate got a majority of the vote in a crowded race Nov. 6.

A federal judge is delaying ruling on a request to make public any criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange..... Assange has instructed his lawyers to sue "The Guardian" newspaper in the UK for publishing a claim that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort..... Special Counsel Mueller's office claims that Manafort is lying to them, Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller's probe after being convicted in his first criminal trial. Meanwhile, President Trump tweeting Tuesday evening that: "The Mueller Witch Hunt is a total disgrace"..... GENERAL MOTORS WILL BE MAKING MORE CARS IN MEXICO.... That's the upshot of GM's restructuring...

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has defeated Democrat Mike Espy in Tuesday night's special Senate election in Mississippi, a contest tainted by race-related controversies, NBC News projects.

Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican who was appointed to the Senate this year, faces Mike Espy, a Democrat and former congressman, in a special election runoff on Tuesday after neither candidate won a majority on Election Day. The election was held to fill the seat of Senator Thad Cochran, who retired earlier this year for health reasons.

Final election tonight in Mississippi for the US Senate and a few House races.

Voters in Mississippi on Tuesday will decide a U.S. Senate special election runoff marked by racial controversy and capped by a last-minute visit by President Donald Trump to shore up the beleaguered Republican incumbent. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white former state lawmaker who was appointed to the seat in April, is still favored over black Democrat Mike Espy in the reliably Republican state, which has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1982. But she has been engulfed in a political storm since a video surfaced showing her praising a supporter at a Nov. 2 public event by...

Don't be fooled, Mississippi. Democrat Mike Espy is no southern Democrat — he’s a radical liberal with a track record of supporting tax hikes and stifling economic growth with job-killing policies.Espy, who is running in the runoff election for the U.S. Senate against Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, has been able to keep a low profile during the chaos of the 2018 midterms, and now has an outside chance of becoming the next senator from Mississippi. That would be a disaster for the entire country, just as it was the last time we sent him to Congress.Espy was a registered lobbyist for...

The signs were made public late last night, leaving no doubt this was a racist stunt by Mississippi Democrats to help drive voter turnout. MSM cable outlets have covered the ‘discovery of nooses’ in breathless fashion, but have conveniently failed to mention the signs left alongside. (Photos of the signs at link)

Liberals are preparing for Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris’s possible expulsion from the Senate Judiciary Committee by highlighting she is a black woman. In the event that Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith wins the Mississippi runoff election on Nov. 27, the makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee will shift in favor of the GOP, with a seat currently held by a Democrat flipping red. Consequently, Harris, the most junior Democratic member of the committee, will likely be squeezed out. “Not only would it be unconscionable to remove the only African American woman from the committee, but Senator Harris also is the most...

Mike Espy who is seeking to unseat appointed U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., and serve the last two years of the six-year term vacated when Republican Thad Cochran retired for health reasons ... A Democratic Senate hopeful in Mississippi cashed in $750,000 after lobbying on behalf of an African despot currently on trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Mike Espy, a former lobbyist and U.S. agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton, is running against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed as a temporary successor to longtime Republican Sen. Thad Cochran after his retirement in April....

Looking to bolster its Senate majority, the GOP wheeled out its biggest gun Monday in Mississippi as President Trump rallied to bolster Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith ahead of Tuesday’s run-off election. In Tupelo, Mr. Trump said he needs Ms. Hyde-Smith in Washington and urged voters to keep her there. “I’m here to ask the people of Mississippi to send Cindy Hyde-Smith back so we can make America great again,” Mr. Trump said, after some praise for Tupelo’s most famous son, Elvis Presley. “Don’t empower the radical Democrats to return us to the failure of the past.” As expected, Mr. Trump basked...

BILOXI, MS (WLOX) - President Donald Trump will make his second appearance in South Mississippi. This time, it’s for a rally in support of incumbent candidate Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and preparations are a little more intense this time around. While the Secret Service and White House are in charge, Executive Director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum Matt McDonnell and his team have to do the leg work. “It’s definitely not something we encounter on a frequent basis,” he said. McDonnell went through a similar process in 2016 when Trump appeared as a candidate, but things have changed, and the...

Major League Baseball is requesting a return of a $5,000 donation to a Mississippi Republican candidate for U.S. Senate following her controversial comments and actions ahead of Tuesday's runoff election. Cindy Hyde-Smith has drawn scrutiny for saying at a Nov. 2 campaign event that she would attend a public hanging if invited. Further digging into Hyde-Smith's past has revealed a photo of her wearing a Confederate military-style hat in 2014 along with questions about the white private school she attended in the 1970s.

Ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election, a new poll from RRH Elections with Bold Blue Campaigns and JMC Analytics & Polling of 684 likely voters in Mississippi shows appointed Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) with a significant lead in the runoff election to hold her Senate seat. The survey shows Hyde-Smith leading former Rep. and Clinton US Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy (D) by a margin of 54% to 44%, with just 1% undecided at this late date. The survey was conducted November 19-21 and 23-24, 2018 with 684 Live Response calls by Bold Blue Campaigns and JMC Analytics & Polling, and has...

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) reportedly co-sponsored a resolution in Mississippi's state Senate in 2007 that among other things honored a Confederate soldier for his efforts to "defend his homeland." CNN's KFile reported Hyde-Smith co-sponsored a resolution honoring Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, a then-92-year-old Mississippi resident whose father, Thomas Jefferson Nicholson, served as a soldier in the Confederate army. The resolution, which can be found online, refers to Nicholson Pharr as "the last known living 'Real Daughter' of the Confederacy living in Mississippi" and to her father's work to "defend his homeland and contribut[e] to the rebuilding of the country" during...

A federal judge struck down Mississippi’s controversial law banning most abortions after 15 weeks about eight months after the Republican governor approved it. The law, called the Gestational Age Act, was considered to be the most restrictive in the U.S. It banned abortions after 15 weeks and only allowed for exemptions if the pregnancy threatened a woman's life or "major bodily function" or if the fetus would be “incompatible with life” outside of the womb. Exemptions would not be granted for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest. Doctors who violated the ban would have faced mandatory suspension or revocation...