Free Republic

Compost continues at Link

President-elect Donald Trump said in a weekend interview that he is nearing completion of a plan to replace President Obama’s signature health-care law with the goal of “insurance for everybody,” while also vowing to force drug companies to negotiate directly with the government on prices in Medicare and Medicaid. Trump declined to reveal specifics in the telephone interview late Saturday with The Washington Post, but any proposals from the incoming president would almost certainly dominate the Republican effort to overhaul federal health policy as he prepares to work with his party’s congressional majorities. Trump’s plan is likely to face questions...

Writing at the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan bemoans the fact that conservatives have flipped the meaning of “fake news” from a term used by the mainstream media to attack stories that are troublesome for progressives to a label to call out the media’s false narratives:

One out of every 40 people in America lives in New York City. The area's population is 8.4 million, more than in 39 other states. For every vote cast for Donald Trump in the city last Tuesday, more than four were cast for Hillary Clinton; she earned 79 percent of the vote. In the wake of Trump's victory, thousands of protesters crowded the streets of Manhattan (where Trump got fewer votes than he did on Staten Island, where the population is a third smaller) outside Trump Tower. It's hard to know how many were there, but let's assume it was...

President-elect Donald Trump faces a growing backlash against his decision to name campaign chairman and former Breitbart News head Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist at the White House, a choice critics say will empower white nationalists. A chorus of advocacy groups, commentators and congressional Democrats denounced Bannon as a proponent of racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic views as Trump began his first full week as president-elect. Trump named Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor on Sunday while also appointing Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to be his chief of staff.

Now on Drudge

This has got to be one of the most disgusting pieces of journalism from the 2016 campaign. The Washington Post spent several months following a seriously mentally ill woman around Pennsylvania to wrote a magazine-length October hit piece to smear Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters as bat-bleep-crazy. snip “1. Sorry to keep ranting, but this piece by Washington post is just so offensive in so many ways. Awful journalism” “2. Intentional 1 dimensional marginalized figure dealing with mental health served to upper middle class readers to self-affirm views… And only will further isolate the already marginalized; turning...

The morning after the vice-presidential debate, Cathy Frasca woke at 5 a.m. and hand-wrote a four-page letter to Donald Trump that said: “It is obvious that you could easily lose this election.” The 89-year-old grandmother urged Trump to release his taxes, ignore the controversies that Hillary Clinton tries to start, stop tweeting at 3 a.m. and remember that “Bill Clinton is not running for election, so please avoid using precious time to discuss his sex life.” Instead, Frasca wrote, Trump should tell voters about how he will improve the country. “You know what to do but time is running out,”...

Even before The Washington Post reported on a 2005 recording of Donald Trump making crude comments about exploiting his celebrity to sexually assault women, Hillary Clinton's campaign was on the upswing. Her strong performance in the first presidential debate had pushed her national polling numbers up fairly quickly. Not as quickly as after the party conventions, mind you, but even before a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released on Monday, she led by about five points. Then the new poll came out. As always, one poll could be an outlier. This poll has a relatively high margin of error of...

For more than a year, Donald Trump took the hardest line on immigration — vowing to deport 11 million illegal immigrants en masse and pillorying his GOP primary rivals as favoring “amnesty.” But 11 weeks before the election, Trump is suddenly sounding a lot like the opponents he repeatedly ridiculed. The nominee and his campaign aides are now talking openly about requiring illegal immigrants to pay back taxes and potentially allowing those without criminal records to stay in the country — lines that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida repeatedly used in the GOP presidential primary. Trump also says that any...

We can't have President Trump, and she could do more to advance conservative ideas than he would. With the theatrics and tumult of the Republican National Convention behind us, many Republicans remain steadfast in their opposition to Donald Trump to be president of the United States. The reason is simple: Their conscience says he does not reflect their principles, nor those of our Republican Party. Trump’s isolationist approach, bombastic rhetoric and ignorance of issues are not things we can be proud to support. The president is the commander in chief, a role model for our children and America’s top ambassador...

Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post.

The first email I opened had the subject line, “Trump Bull****.” The message was pretty simple: “You sorry mother******! I hope the worst for you and yours!” The next email had the unambiguous subject line, “Traitor of the people and what was the Conservative party/now the conjoined twin of the Progressive left.” This missive carried a religious message: “God calls me to pray for my enemies and you are my enemy. Your thinking causes you to be a traitor to the citizenry. Imagine the disgrace U R.” What was the heinous offense that I committed that made me, according to...

The Hillary Clinton campaign has been engaged in an aggressive effort to accomplish one crucial political goal: Knocking off Bernie Sanders’ halo. One common thread running through many Clinton attacks on Sanders — whether it’s questioning his record on guns or suggesting his single payer dream isn’t going to happen — has been to try to portray Sanders as a conventional politician (after all) who is not quite as pure as the scenes of his rapt, transported crowds suggest and is promising more than he can deliver. SNIP What this really represents, I think, is Obama essentially taking sides in...

This post is in follow up to "ken5050" posting about "what kind of coffee maker do you use?" Posted on ‎4‎/‎14‎/‎2015‎ ‎1‎:‎23‎:‎50‎ ‎PM by ken5050 I started saving my grounds as a compost for my herb garden. I'm not sure if it will over power them or be balanced. So I googled the topic and not surprisingly someone else has already thought about it. Please check out the following and share what you do with them. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Uses+for+Coffee+Grounds

“When the Israeli prime minister argues that his speech will stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, he is not only misleading Israel, he is strengthening Iran,” Amnon Reshef, former head of the army’s armored corps, said at a news conference Sunday. -- -- -- TEL AVIV — Hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set off Sunday for Washington, a group of 180 retired Israeli generals and former top security officials warned that his upcoming address to a joint meeting of Congress on Iran’s nuclear program will cause more harm than good. It will not only damage Israel’s special relationship with...

Early presidential polls are not predictive of much, but they do reflect current sentiment. In that regard, the latest CNN/ORC poll should cause the punditocracy to rethink its take on the Republican race. For starters, at 6 percent and 4 percent respectively, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) are not front-runners, nor arguably even top-tier contenders. The media infatuation with Paul reflects, one suspects, their enchantment with his systemic criticism of the police and fondness for anti-interventionism. Neither is in keeping with dominant GOP opinion, so it should not be all that surprising that he has sunk in...

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has tried to curb soda consumption, ban smoking in parks and encourage bike riding, is taking on a new cause: requiring New Yorkers to separate their food scraps for composting.

A large majority of Americans say the federal government should focus on investigating possible terrorist threats even if personal privacy is compromised, and most support the blanket tracking of telephone records in an effort to uncover terrorist activity, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll. Fully 45 percent of all Americans say the government should be able to go further than it is, saying that it should be able to monitor everyone’s online activity if doing so would prevent terrorist attacks. A slender majority, 52 percent, say no such broad-based monitoring should occur. The new survey comes amid...

The story behind the story is that “tax reform,” as we know it, is dying. During the 1980s, no major piece of legislation better symbolized bipartisan consensus than the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which was regarded by both liberal and conservative experts as the best tax law since World War II. The basic idea was simple: Reduce tax rates and recover lost revenue by ending (or limiting) tax breaks. The struggle between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner over the “fiscal cliff” indicates that this beneficial consensus has collapsed. Just the opposite is occurring. ... many politicians support...