Free Republic

Venezuelan politician German Mavare, leader of the opposition UNT party, died Friday after being shot in the head, an assassination that occurred in the western state of Lara, his organization said. latino.foxnews.com

If nations could have biographies, Venezuela's would read something like this: After a rocky adolescence, Vennie got his life straightened out, got an education, a good job, and lived a fairly comfortable life. However, in his dotage, he was suckered by a succession of con artists and blew through all his savings, ending his days penniless and bitter. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much what Hugo Chavez and his socialist caudillo successors have done to the country. By Latin American standards, Venezuela used to a prosperous and stable nation. Venezuela possesses one of the largest petroleum reserves in the...

About 100 Syrian refugees are being placed in a small city in Vermont, the home of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, and they are not getting an altogether warm welcome. In fact, when residents of Rutland, Vermont, found out about the secretly negotiated deal to seed their community with migrants from a Middle Eastern hotbed of Sunni radicalism, they were livid. They packed a local library for an “informational” meeting Thursday night. At least 20 of them stood outside with protest signs, demanding that their mayor explain why he negotiated the entire deal with the federal resettlement contractors behind closed doors...

Most, if not all, of those manufacturing jobs are gone because of better technology, not Mexico As the primary season progresses,... ...candidates continue to peddle some version of a promise to “bring back jobs and manufacturing to America.” Voters clinging to this hope need to steel themselves for a letdown. Here’s why. No matter how you measure it, 2015 was a record year for manufacturing... ...Manufacturing employment peaked nationwide in 1977. Since then... ...makes twice as much “stuff” in an hour as he or she did in 1977... ...In the 1930s, more than half of American household consumption was in...

Less than a year ago, ABC's George Stephanopoulos admitted that he had made $75,000 of undisclosed contributions to the charitable foundation/campaign operation of his former employers, Bill and Hillary Clinton. He then personally pledged he wouldn't moderate a Republican primary debate this year. But ABC News later issued a statement of support for Stephanopoulos, insisting it wouldn't take punitive action against him. It's bad enough that ABC never even considered removing this self-evident Clinton loyalist from his "objective" political coverage position. They even allow him to conduct softball interviews with Hillary Clinton, and won't even insist on reminding viewers of...

Hillary Clinton’s campaign team knew she was going to lose in West Virginia. As I’ve said in a previous post , the state hasn’t gone Republican since 1996 and Romney won every county in 2012. After the Democratic primary on Tuesday, 42 percent of Democrats want the next president to be less liberal, with 44 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters saying they’ll vote for Trump in November. It’s just a more conservative electorate across the board, which is why Clinton’s damage control regarding her remarks about putting coal miners out of business was so offensive. She doesn’t care; she...

Bernie Sanders supporters may be “feeling the Bern” for their own candidate, but nearly half are planning to give Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton the cold shoulder in November. A YouGov poll released on Wednesday showed that 45 percent of Democrats who preferred Sanders in the primary, do not plan on voting for Clinton in the general. Supporters of the Vermont senator are extremely divided; 18 percent said they plan on voting for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein of the Green Party, 15 percent would support the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, 9 percent were unsure, and 3 percent do...

Mike Lee(R-Utah) said Wednesday that he is not ready to endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump "I have not supported Donald Trump up to this point, I have not endorsed him," Lee said, according to The Washington Examiner. "I have some concerns with him. He scares me to death; so does Hillary Clinton . There is no easy choice right now." Lee had previously endorsed Ted Cruz , before the Texas senator ended his presidential bid earlier this month. At the time, he said Cruz had a "proven record of fighting for our conservative values and for the issues that...

Clinton Charity Aided Clinton Friends A $2 million commitment arranged by the nonprofit Clinton Global Initiative in 2010 went to a for-profit company part-owned by friends of the Clintons By James V. Grimaldi May 12, 2016 4:53 p.m. ET 36 COMMENTS HASTINGS, Neb.—The Clinton Global Initiative, which arranges donations to help solve the world’s problems, set up a financial commitment that benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons, including a current and a former Democratic official and a close friend of former President Bill Clinton. The $2 million commitment was placed on the agenda for...

Our overriding mission on Free Republic is to preserve, protect and defend (conserve) God, family, country--and all that that entails (refer to the Declaration, Constitution, and our Judeo-Christian American heritage for details). Our most immediate task we must undertake at this time is keep corrupt, godless, treasonous, America-hating communists like Hillary Clinton out of power. Our very survival as a free nation depends upon it. That means FR is going all in to defeat Hillary/Bernie, et al, by supporting our America-first nominee Donald Trump to the hilt. Very sorry if your favorite candidate did not win the nomination and sorry...

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough says the entire Democratic establishment is against presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation reveals that Bill and Hillary Clinton received at least $100 million from autocratic Persian Gulf states and their leaders, potentially undermining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary’s claim she can carry out independent Middle East policies. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/11/exclusive-persian-gulf-sheikhs-gave-bill-hillary-100-million/

The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened. Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisers when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides. The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to...

. The current outstanding student loan debt in the United States is roughly $1.3 trillion, and getting bigger by the second. The good news (for those not concerned about economic realities), Obama has just set the precedent that loans will be forgiven, the bad news, parents are now telling their kids to take out more student loans if they intend on going to college. But there is a twist. According to Bloomberg, a new survey by Discover Financial Services found that 48% of parents think their child should pay a portion (if not all) of the cost of attending college,...

Progressives have long been hostile to the idea of the words "under God" being included in the Pledge of Allegiance. Atheist groups, for example, have long sought to eliminate the two words from public places through the U.S. court system. At a recent campaign stop at Camden County College in New Jersey, Hillary Clinton didn't appear to be unsympathetic to the anti-under God crowd. When being introduced at the event, the person introducing her seems to purposefully leave out "under God" when reciting part of the pledge of allegiance. Hillary's response? She laughed.

South Carolina senator and former Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham has been a sharp and frequent critic of his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, but on Wednesday he changed his tune slightly. While saying that he still cannot support Trump for president, Graham however said that he sees some good ideas in Trump’s proposals and believes the former reality television star could win the White House in November. But it won’t happen unless he changes the way he presents himself to the public, Graham added, because “crazy loses to crooked.”

Hillary Clinton is anxious to compete in the Democratic primary in Kentucky, particularly after suffering a humiliating loss in West Virginia. Now she is relying on the golden voice of Morgan Freeman, to help turn out black voters in the state. In a new, minute-long ad, Clinton begins by telling voters of what she calls “systemic racism” in the United States. “We have to face up to the hard truths of injustice and systemic racism,” she says, recalling the wrongs suffered by African American voters in the justice system and at the hands of police officers.

Americans, collectively, are not as angry as watching cable TV would lead you to believe. But many poorer, less-educated folks who have been left behind in the 21st century—the ones who have seen their wages stagnate, their opportunities for upward mobility disappear and their life expectancies shorten—are looking to disrupt a status quo that has not worked for them. That’s what Sanders and Trump are both promising to do. And that’s the main reason why Bernie beat Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s West Virginia Democratic primary by 15.4 points. He carried every single county in the Mountaineer State, which by every...

"We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago," [Hillary] Clinton said. "I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president."

Wall Street Analyst Who Warned on GE Ahead of Crash Calls Clinton Foundation “Charity Fraud” Michael Krieger The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month. The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid. The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends. “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund...