Free Republic

For a freshman member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is remarkably swampy. During the 2018 election, her campaign funneled payments to Brand New Congress PAC, which in turn funneled payments to Brand New Congress LLC, which then made payments to her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, meaning the then-candidate effectively funneled money back to herself, according to Federal Election Commission filings compiled this week by GOP operative Luke Thompson. As if that weren’t shady and ethically dubious enough, Brand New Congress PAC, which carried Ocasio-Cortez’s fledgling campaign to victory, was co-founded by her current chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who served...

AOC Faces Ethics Questions After Reports Show Her Chief of Staff Cut Checks to Her Boyfriend Using a PAC Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) may have had her current chief of staff pay her boyfriend using campaign PAC money, according to a report from Luke Thompson, a National Review contributor. Thompson started down the trail of analyzing Ocasio-Cortez’s professional relationship with her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, after realizing that the congresswoman had Roberts listed as a staff member with his own house.gov email account. While you were having a nice Valentine's Day, @AOC decided to put her boyfriend on staff – drawing...

Last Friday, my mentions died for your sins. I posted a screen grab of Riley Roberts’s House Microsoft Outlook card, including his official house.gov email address, office phone number, and his designation as “Staff”. Roberts is the boyfriend of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Congresswoman was upset. Throwing caution to the wind, she stormed into my mentions, asserting this was just a way to give Mr. Roberts access to her official calendar.

Last Friday, my mentions died for your sins. I posted a screen grab of Riley Roberts’s House Microsoft Outlook card, including his official house.gov email address, office phone number, and his designation as “Staff”. Roberts is the boyfriend of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Congresswoman was upset. Throwing caution to the wind, she stormed into my mentions, asserting this was just a way to give Mr. Roberts access to her official calendar. Her Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, soon followed, reiterating the calendar claim and accusing me of doxxing Mr. Roberts by posting his publicly available LinkedIn profile (which he deleted) and...

The left’s hatred for President Trump runs so deep that liberals are hoping for — even actively working toward — the demise of America. Case in point: Democrats decry Mr. Trump’s use of the presidential power of the executive order (a power, it should be noted, that former President Barack Obama used 13 times) to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, which they hope to bottle up in court. To Democrats, the well-being of Americans (who, it should also be noted, pay their exorbitant salaries) is second to the goal of destroying Mr. Trump. Democrats have tied his hands in Congress, and...

All it takes is a look at the U.S. Congress to see how seriously fractured our nation is. Bernie Sanders no longer has the dubious pleasure of being the only openly socialist member as he has been joined by, most notably and loudly – thanks to the media – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has kicked socialism up several notches to resemble what took Venezuela down the drain in a few short years. The acceptance of socialism, mostly by the younger voters, can be blamed to a big degree on their education, especially at the college level, where pseudo-revolutionists from the flower...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently moved into a luxury apartment complex in Washington, D.C. that does not offer the affordable housing units that were a key plank in the New York congresswoman’s campaign platform. Ocasio-Cortez, 29, who said in November that she was concerned about being able to afford rent in D.C., now earns a $174,000 annual salary and is living in a newly built high-rise in the city’s Navy Yard area, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week. The freshman congresswoman, a self-described socialist, campaigned on a platform to expand affordable housing, and her controversial Green New Deal proposal...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared President Trump’s border barrier with the Berlin Wall – a Cold War symbol of Communist oppression that divided Germany for nearly three decades.“No matter how you feel about the wall, I think it’s a moral abomination,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a livestream video for her supporters last Friday, according to a report on Fox News.“I think it’s like the Berlin Wall. I think it’s like any other wall designed to separate human beings and block out people who are running away from the humanitarian disasters. I just think it’s wrong.”Twitter users were quick to give Ocasio-Cortez, a...

Team C.O.R.T.EZ (Confident Of Reelecting Trump EZ)

When former astronaut Mark Kelly said last week he would run as a Democrat to try to unseat a sitting Republican U.S. senator in Arizona, the news sent liberal activists scrambling to try to come up with a candidate of their own. Left-wing groups urged Rep. Ruben Gallego, a vocal member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to join the race to give liberals a more palatable option as they prepare for 2020. Across the country, those same liberal groups are eyeing next year’s elections with anticipation, hoping to prove that stunning primary season upsets in 2018, such as freshman Rep....

It would be easy to dismiss the Green New Deal as an impossible progressive dream, but that would be a mistake. The Green New Deal is not the bucket list of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow travelers, but a blueprint to turn America into a socialist state. It is the culmination of a 90-year campaign, begun with FDR and the first New Deal. “The first obligation of government is the protection of the welfare and well-being, indeed the very existence, of its citizens,” presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt said that in...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared victory when Amazon announced Thursday that it would not build a second headquarters (known as HQ2) in Queens, New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it a “lost economic opportunity” and blamed “a small group [of] politicians [who] put their own narrow political interests above their community.”The dispute between the two Democrats lays bare a divide over the plan to offer $2.8 billion in tax breaks for Amazon to establish a major presence in New York City. On one side, old hands like Cuomo; on the other, the newly insurgent, left-leaning wing represented by Ocasio-Cortez.“Today was the...

Socialism may be the chic belief among some progressive Democrats and independents. American voters, however, give a very tepid review of socialism according to new Fox News poll. It found that only a quarter of registered U.S. voters them gave thumbs up to socialism — the economic ideology praised by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. “Capitalism buries socialism,” said Fox News polling director Dana Blanton. “Despite the prominence of socialistic ideas and policy proposals in recent weeks, Americans are favorable toward the merits of the capitalistic system. And they’re bullish on the...

In the 116th Congress, if you’re a Democrat, you’re either a socialist, a baby killer or an anti-Semite. That, at least, is what Republicans want voters to think, as they seek to demonize Democrats well in advance of the 2020 elections by painting them as left-wing crazies who will destroy the American economy, murder newborn babies and turn a blind eye to bigotry against Jews. The unusually aggressive assault, which Republican officials and strategists outlined in interviews last week, is meant to strangle the new Democratic majority in its infancy. It was set in motion this month by President Trump,...

Aside from trying to be cute, AOC seems to be asking questions that may have some Dems and Reps scurrying for cover. Seems to me good questions about means for Congressional corruption. I have no idea what these hearings are. Two thoughts: Looks to me like the Trey Gowdy style of exposing things. Lots of questions, no action. Would love to see AOC's balance sheet two years from now.

Congratulations, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez! You just killed 25,000 jobs for urban Democrats in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse areas in the entire world! Congresswoman AOC, the thought leader of the Democratic party, was the loudest and feistiest political opponent when Amazon announced it would build (half of) its second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, promising to create 25,000 jobs and generate some $27.5 billion in tax revenue over the next 25 years. Amazon employs a range of people from unskilled workers to tech geniuses and would have pumped large amounts of money into the city economy. It...

A few years ago at the height of the global warming scare I wrote a book which set out to answer one of the key questions of our time: if climate change isn’t really a problem why do so many people act as though it is? The answer, I discovered, is that environmentalism is just a fashionable mask for the usual leftist obsessions with state control and wealth redistribution. That’s why I called the book Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. Not everyone who believes in man-made climate change is a full on Commie. Some are merely...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the Democrat Party. By definition, she is crazy. Take her very seriously. Jeff Bezos did not. He had, after all, bought off the equally crazy mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, to get the city to pay for a second Amazon "headquarters" there. Now the deal has fallen through. Fingers are pointed by the political and media class, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spiking the ball. She should. She killed it. New York City is a socialist mess with an underbrush of rules and taxes so thick that no one can navigate it without...

Beto O'Rourke says he would 'absolutely' tear down Trump's wall, along with 600 miles of existing barriers at the US-Mexico border Beto O'Rourke denounced President Trump's proposed border wall in an interview Thursday after Congress passed a spending bill allocating $1.4B for it The former congressman from El Paso said: 'Absolutely, I'd take the wall down' He asserted that the 600 miles of barriers currently at the border haven't made America safer, but have led to the deaths of 4,000 migrants 'We have walled off their opportunity to legally petition for asylum' O'Rourke said Beto O'Rourke said that he would...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) earned praise from “drug justice” advocates after criticizing a growing marijuana legalization and business model that is paving the way for white male investors to reap major profits after minorities spent decades in prisons for selling pot. She made her comments during a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing this week on banking services for the burgeoning cannabis industry as more states legalize the sale and use of marijuana. She suggested the growing industry was “compounding the racial wealth gap” by allowing wealthy white-dominated companies to gain a quick advantage in the industry. She complained that communities...