Free Republic

Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is a familiar name in Venezuela – and some are wondering if a decade-old feud will play a role in the bilateral agenda. The longtime chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil became persona non grata among socialist Chavistas in the late 2000s, when he confronted then President Hugo Chavez as they negotiated compensation arrangements after the oil industry was nationalized. “I don’t know if Tillerson will personalize his relationship with Venezuela or implement an institutional policy,” said Venezuelan analyst Luis Salamanca to FoxNews.com, also pointing out that the U.S. has nothing...

Sixty years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren warned our nation that we had a choice. Either “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate,” or “our civilization will stagnate and die.” There was no third option. Today, we face this choice again. Recent attempts to shame professors for unpopular views and to curtail the due process rights of those accused of misconduct are cause for alarm. Especially when academic freedom is endangered at places such as Yale — long celebrated as a leader on freedom of expression — we know that the erosion of...

Sen. Jeff Flake has vocally criticized his party’s freshly elected president, raised little money, and backed a moderate approach to an immigration overhaul. In other words, the first-term senator from Arizona has all but begged a Donald Trump-like Republican to run against him. Now, his friends and allies fear that’s exactly what will happen — with no guarantee that the incumbent lawmaker will win. To many GOP officials, no Republican senator is more vulnerable in a primary next year than Flake. The 54-year-old, according to one strategist who reviewed polling data last month, is less popular among likely GOP primary...

Unlike many things that Trump said during the course of the campaign, he wasn't exaggerating about the massive impact he can have on the federal judiciary. The chart below, which comes from the must-have quarterly PowerPoint slide decks of GOP lobbyist Bruce Mehlman, makes that point starkly.

U.S. Rep. Sam Johnson announced Friday morning that he will not seek re-election to represent his Plano-based seat in Congress. Johnson, a Vietnam War veteran, made the announcement over email Friday. "After much prayer, I have decided I will not seek re-election to serve the Third District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018," he wrote. "This will be my final term in the appropriately named 'People’s House.'" A fighter pilot, Johnson flew combat missions in Korea and Vietnam, and he was an instructor at the Air Force Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call that institution “Top...

Donald Trump has narrowed his short list for his first Supreme Court pick down to roughly a half-dozen finalists but the president-elect and his top advisers are already thinking about a second selection, as they seek to quickly remodel the high court with a reliably conservative bent. Trump’s team wants to make filling the seat held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia one of the earliest acts of his presidency, according to multiple transition officials, in hopes of scoring an energizing and unifying victory for the conservative movement. . . And as Trump weighs perhaps the most enduring personnel decision...

A coalition of 25 student groups at the University of Maryland have issued a letter to the school’s administrators containing 64 demands to help “marginalized student populations” feel more welcome on campus. Among the demands is a ban on public screenings of the film “American Sniper.” The group, who call themselves ProtectUMD, sent the letter in the wake of President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory, according the Diamondback student newspaper Monday. In response to Trump’s election, the student coalition demanded additional support and protection for minority groups — particularly the Muslim, illegal immigrant, pro-Palestinian, and LGBT communities. The Muslims students especially wished...

Actress Lena Dunham says she has never had an abortion, but wishes she had because it’s a sign of “bravery” and “self-knowledge.”

As Donald Trump’s shock election victory reverberated around Silicon Valley late on Tuesday night, some high-profile technologists were already calling for California to secede from the United States. The broader west coast is a stronghold for the Democrats, and significantly more politically progressive and racially diverse than large swathes of central US. California is also the biggest economy in the US and the sixth largest in the world with a gross state product of $2.496tn for 2015, according to the IMF. The campaign for independence – variously dubbed Calexit, Califrexit and Caleavefornia – has been regarded as a fringe movement....

A WikiLeaks figure is claiming that he received leaked Clinton campaign emails from a “disgusted” Democratic whistleblower, while the White House continued to blame Russian hackers Wednesday for meddling in the presidential election and asserted that Donald Trump was “obviously aware” of Moscow’s efforts on his behalf. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in the report by the Daily Mail that he flew to Washington for a clandestine handoff with one of the email sources in September. He said he received a package in a wooded area near...

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp has emerged as President-elect Donald Trump's leading choice for agriculture secretary, sources close to the transition tell POLITICO. The first-term Democrat from North Dakota and member of the Senate Agriculture Committee has been a vocal advocate for farmers and broke from her party on several controversial policy issues, including the labeling of genetically modified foods and environmental protection for wetlands and waterways. A special election to replace Heitkamp would almost certainly turn her seat over to a Republican, so the choice would give Trump a chance to appear conciliatory to Democrats, albeit with a lower-profile Cabinet role,...

The Afghan migrant raped Maria Ladenburger and then drowned her in the river. Express.co reported: “ An Afghan migrant has admitted the rape and murder of a medical student, who also worked voluntarily at a refugee center. Maria Ladenburger, the daughter of a high-ranking EU official, was returning from a party in the university city of Freiburg in Germany when she was assaulted on a cycle path. She was raped and then drowned before her body was found in the River Dreisam. The shocking incident happened on October 16 but details have only been released after an arrest on Friday....

Though increased national attention and a late cash influx has buoyed Foster Campbell's bid for Louisiana's open seat, experts say Republican John Kennedy has the race all but locked up.

President-elect Donald Trump said he had narrowed his choices for a potential Supreme Court nominee to “three or four” candidates and that a decision would be coming “pretty soon,” Politico reports. Said Trump: “They are terrific people, highly respected, brilliant people and we’ll be announcing that pretty soon too.”

President-elect Donald Trump is set to meet Friday with North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a red-state Democrat, which could put Senate Democrats at a further disadvantage if she were to join the Trump administration. Heitkamp told CNN Thursday she has no inkling of what the meeting may be about, but said she was open to discussing serving in a Trump administration. News of the meeting set off a panic among top Democrats, some of whom began to privately make the case that Heitkamp should stay in the Senate rather than give up a seat that would likely be a GOP...

The first polling is out for the soon to be open 6th district seat held by future Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. In a Landmark Rosetta Stone poll of 500 voters. Former Secretary of State Karen Handel leads at 21.7%, followed by State Rep. and Tom Price’s wife Betty Price at 10%. State Senator Judson Hill, who officially announced his bid, has 8.4%, and State Senator Brandon Beach at 4%. 55.7% are undecided. There are several caveats to consider when considering the results. First of all, not all potential candidates are listed. Others, including Sen. John Albers and...

In 2000, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but carried fewer than 700 counties. In 2012, President Obama squeezed even more advantage from the biggest places: He carried 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including the District of Columbia), winning them by nearly 12 million votes combined. That allowed him to win comfortably, although he carried only about 600 of the remaining 3,000 counties, and lost them by nearly 7 million votes combined. This year, Hillary Clinton pushed that model just past the breaking point. Pending final results, she now leads in 88 of the nation’s 100 largest...

The North Carolina governor's race was too close to call early Wednesday, with Republican incumbent Pat McCrory and Democratic challenger Roy Cooper neck-and-neck in an election that mimicked a referendum on the state's rightward political shift, including the law McCrory signed limiting LGBT rights. With some cast votes yet to be reported, Cooper was only about 3,700 votes ahead of McCrory out of more than 4.6 million counted, according to totals posted by the State Board of Elections.

Republicans Scott Angelle and Clay Higgins have advanced to Dec. 10 runoff for Louisiana 3rd Congressional District seat.

As of early Wednesday morning, Clinton had 58,909,774 total votes compared to Trump’s 58,864,233, according to CBS News and CNN. The tallies will continue to change but Clinton holds a 47.6 percent lead compared to Trump’s 47.5 percent.