Free Republic

Top House Democrats on Sunday raised the prospect of impeachment or almost-certain prison time for President Donald Trump if it’s proved that he directed illegal hush-money payments to women, adding to the legal pressure on the president over the Russia investigation and other scandals. “There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House intelligence committee. “The bigger pardon question may come...

The final votes are being counted from the 2018 election. They confirm that the Democrats crushed Republicans. Let's start in the seat count. Republican Rep. David Valadao of California's 21st District conceded on Thursday to Democrat T.J. Cox. Cox's victory combined with other election results means that Democrats have picked up a net gain of 40 seats. As has oft been repeated, this is the largest Democratic House gain since 1974. It's a larger gain than Democrats had in the wave elections of both 1982 and 2006. We can go back even further and see how unusual it is that...

Rep. Nancy Pelosi is digging in amid the fight over funding for President Trump's long-promised border wall, signaling she won’t accept a deal on DACA in exchange for wall money. Congress on Thursday approved a short-term spending bill to avoid a partial government shutdown, punting the immigration debate and other issues until later in the month. Speaking to reporters at her weekly press briefing Thursday, Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely next House Speaker, said that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border are “two different subjects.” She later said that she and...

Former Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) penned an op-ed Tuesday calling for the Senate to be abolished and for elections to be publicly funded. Dingell, who represented Michigan in the House for over 59 years, wrote for the Atlantic a series of suggestions to address the "unprecedented cynicism about the nobility of public service itself." The former lawmaker noted that in 1958 a survey from the University of Michigan found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” In 2017, the same study conducted by the Pew Research...

TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s newly elected agriculture commissioner is vowing to conduct a “deep dive” into the state’s concealed weapons permit program once she is sworn into office. Nikki Fried, who appeared on South Florida news programs on Sunday, said she has already begun talking about possible changes to the program with employees in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Her push to revamp the program comes amid a likely legislative battle over whether the program should be moved to a different state agency. Earlier this year it was revealed that there were lapses in the program that is currently...

--snip-- Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote. Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.

House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned California’s ballot-counting process after Democrats were able to flip several GOP-held seats.The state’s election system “defies logic to me,” he said during an interview with the Washington Post’s Paul Kane. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have, I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.”“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he continued. “This election system they have — I can’t begin to...

After losing close governor’s races in Georgia and Florida, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are joining other black leaders to oppose one of President Donald Trump’s picks for a lifetime federal judgeship. Abrams and Gillum say in a joint statement Tuesday that the Senate should reject Thomas Farr’s nomination to a district court in North Carolina. The Democrats say Farr has a “discriminatory ideology” that threatens the voting rights of nonwhites. …

Latino comedian and actor Paul Rodriguez said he’s been the target of death threats ever since he voiced support for President Trump earlier this month. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, I’m not in the closet anymore,” Mr. Rodriguez... Mr. Rodriguez, who also chairs the California Latino Water Coalition, said he’s faced a lot of backlash since he praised Mr. Trump for his support for major water projects in California in a Nov. 5 interview with the same outlet. “Even as I did that interview I knew it’d have repercussions … but I stand by what I say,” Mr. Rodriguez said...

Of course the Democrats are still mad for Beto: He is who they are. Some of my conservative friends are mystified by the apparently enduring appeal of Robert Francis O’Rourke, a.k.a. “Beto,” the faux-Hispanic progressive from El Paso who failed to unseat conservative stalwart Senator Ted Cruz in spite of a flood of money and a tsunami of media adulation. “He lost, didn’t he?” they ask, perplexed. There is an answer to this riddle: snobbery. The Democratic party is the political home of snobbery, a word and a concept often misunderstood. Snobbery does not refer to the cultivated preferences of...

President Trump’s decision late Friday to ban transgender Americans from serving in the U.S. military was blasted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who called the move “cowardly” and “disgusting.” The Trump administration issued a memorandum that bars people with a history of “gender dysphoria,” which would require medical treatment, from being admitted to the U.S. military “except under certain limited circumstances.” Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, immediately released a statement slamming the memorandum and condemning the Trump administration. “This latest memorandum is the same cowardly, disgusting ban the President announced last summer. No one with the strength and bravery...

CNN's Jake Tapper reacts to President Trump taking offense to a question about nationalism and white nationalism at his post-midterm election press conference on Wednesday. PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, the reporter who asked the question, is a black woman. Tapper said it "boggles the mind" that Trump could believe that a black woman could be racist. (snip) JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: "...The word ('nationalist') has baggage. A lot of people have not used the word... If you want to make the argument, make the argument. The idea that any reporter asking that question, in particular an African-American woman...

A gentleman from Hawaii by the name of Gerald, called into Rush's show yesterday and gave a list of the many ways the Democrat Party is killing Americans. I added one or two and posted them in an easy to read list. The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, They have done abominable works, There is none who does good. Psalm 14:1 The Democrat Party is so foolish, it has become the party of fools, and those who follow the doctrine of the foolish party are fools themselves. Thus, today is National Democrat...

Two professional colorists have combined their skills with photographs and fascination with the American Civil War to create a remarkable series of color photographs from the era. British colorist Jordan Lloyd, 27, met fellow colorist Mads Madsen, 19, from Denmark when he started posting on Madsen's subreddit 'Colorized History'. Initially it was Madsen who was colorizing images from the Civil War era, but Lloyd eventually got interested and now the two work together restoring the images, improving their technique by giving each other critiques. Madsen has been interested in the Civil War since he was 12, and was especially fascinated...

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) most ardent supporters would probably concede, albeit grudgingly, that he faces very long odds in the 2016 presidential race. So why run? Because there’s value in having a national platform for bold, progressive ideas that might otherwise be ignored. Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday, for example, on Sanders’ new plan to make public college tuition-free in the United States. The plan will provide tuition-free higher education to students at four-year colleges, the statement said, and is modeled after the way many European nations handle the costs of college. “Countries like Germany, Denmark, Sweden and many more...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

We have been, and are being, manipulated by globalist social engineers who have foisted on us a humorless demand that we live our lives their way...or else

President Barack Obama announced new executive orders Tuesday to make huge swaths of the Pacific Ocean off limits to fishing, energy exploration and other economic activities.The move would create the world’s largest marine sanctuary, and is part of a broader push to tackle global warming and halt offshore energy development. This effort will be led by Secretary of State John Kerry and White House adviser John Podesta.

Get in their face and punch back twice as hard, a legendary community organizer demanded of his constituents, before becoming America’s most passive chief effective, feigning discovery of scandal after scandal only after being informed by the media. Back in April, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang punched back twice as hard at one of the latest cliches the left uses to avoid having argument — “Check your privilege,” a disguised form of racism, as the privilege implied is based on skin color. As Kurt Schlichter wrote a couple of weeks ago in his epic deconstruction of the phrase at Townhall.com:

Proving that communism has worked no better for students at a University of California-San Diego cooperative living space than it did for the billions of citizens of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the aptly-named “Che Cafe” is quickly running out of cash. In the cleverly titled article, “In the Red,” The UCSD Guardian noted that the Che Cafe–a student-run co-op named after mass-murdering dictator Che Guevara and governed by the communist philosophy–has become a “money pit consistently plagued with safety issues.”