Free Republic

A panel of pollsters is predicting that Democrats will win back 23 seats in this year’s midterm elections, enough to win back the house majority. Hill.TV’s “What America’s Thinking” canvassed its panel of pollsters on how many seats Democrats will gain. The average answer for the first-ever Poll of Pollsters was 23 seats, the show announced Friday. That’s exactly the number that Democrats need to flip control of the chamber from Republicans. (What a coincidence) “I feel like if 2016 taught us nothing, it is we should not make predictions. So I’m doing this under duress I’ll have you know,”...

Conservative columnist George Will is making the argument to vote against Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. In a piece published Friday in the Washington Post, Will says that President Trump's "zero tolerance" policy at the border was "the most telegenic example of misrule" and it provided “fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which” independents and moderate Republicans should vote. That principle he says is that the number of Republicans in office must be “substantially reduced.” "The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of...

More Americans see themselves aligned with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau than President Trump in the two leaders' conflict over trade policy, a new poll finds. A Global News/Ipsos poll released Saturday finds that Trudeau enjoys a 20-point advantage over the U.S. president among Americans when it comes to which leader respondents think is better handling the discussions over tariffs and other trade issues. Fifty-seven percent of U.S. respondents told the poll they support Trudeau's actions, compared to just 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

President Trump tweeted yesterday that the news coverage by the “usual suspects” (read WaPo, CNN, ABC, CBS, NYT etc.) of the Singapore summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un has been so negative, so dishonest and so distorted, that he said: enough is enough. He further tweeted that the biggest enemy America is now facing is the fake news media. Pretty shocking words coming from the leader of the free world, don’t you think? The liberal left and the “destroy Trump” media are now going berserk. According to them, this makes for an unprecedented assault on freedom of the press,...

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders hit back Wednesday night against a report that she was considering leaving her role, saying she “loves” her job and is “honored” to work with President Trump. Sanders was replying to an earlier CBS News report that both she and deputy press secretary Raj Shah have considered leaving their positions in the administration. “Does @CBSNews know something I don’t about my plans and my future,” Sanders asked in a tweet. “I was at my daughter’s year-end Kindergarten event and they ran a story about my ‘plans to leave the WH’ without even talking to...

Is Ben Shapiro a Neo-Con? From his article today.... Trump Got No Serious Concessions From Kim. Trump Legitimized Kim. Trump legitimized Kim. There are no two ways about it. Here’s the triumphal video Trump Delegitimized America’s Actions In The Korean Region More at link https://www.dailywire.com/news/31740/trumps-big-north-korean-moment-either-masterstroke-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=061318-news&utm_campaign=position1

Israel began sharing an intelligence trove on Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions Tuesday, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced accusations his televised unveiling of it lacked evidence a 2015 accord had been violated. The IAEA, the United Nations atomic watchdog, said it would evaluate any new relevant information, but cited its assessment from three years ago that it had no "credible indications" of an Iranian nuclear weapons pursuit after 2009. ... Some analysts and proponents of the nuclear agreement also said Netanyahu had presented previously known details and failed to produce evidence that showed Iran was not abiding by the accord....

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden downplayed on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dramatic presentation in which he accused Iran of "brazenly lying" over its nuclear ambitions. "To the best of my knowledge -- out of government, not getting the briefings -- I think this is fundamentally old news," Hayden told CNN's "New Day." On Monday, Netanyahu gave a presentation in English in which he claimed Israel has evidence that Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic Republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound. Hayden told "New...

The feud between Jimmy Kimmel and Sean Hannity shows no signs of letting up, with both TV hosts launching attacks through their shows and Twitter on Thursday and Friday. In the latest installment, Hannity resurfaced a clip from over a decade ago of Kimmel donning blackface as part of a skit for The Man Show.

MAPLE PARK, Ill. — Snow and sleet were falling on Eldon Gould’s 500 acres this week, but he was already looking ahead to planting season; depending on ground conditions and the temperature, that could be just several weeks away. But now the prospect of steel and aluminum tariffs was adding to the list of worries and uncertainties that come with every corn and soybean season. “It’s the retaliation risk,” Mr. Gould said from his kitchen table in Maple Park, in a region of northern Illinois where farmland runs on for miles. “The world’s already awash in grain,” Mr. Gould said,...

It has largely slipped under the radar screens of partisan hatred in Washington, but has anyone noticed that in the last couple of months Donald Trump has become . . . a Democrat? Of course, for most of his life, Trump was a Democrat, a faithful fundraiser for Chuck Schumer and Hilary Clinton, and comfortably liberal in most of his positions. But once he decided to run for president as a Republican, he underwent a total transformation, becoming an arch-conservative. And during his first year in office, he governed like a conservative Republican, slashing taxes and regulations, appointing conservative judges,...

After months of speculation, the 2018 midterm elections are officially underway with initial primaries in Texas. There’s more evidence of a Democratic surge previously seen in Virginia and in special elections around the country, but also the reality that some of the swarm of Democratic candidates aren’t even going to make it to the general election. While operatives on both sides of the aisle treat primaries like the plague, they can be a proving ground for candidates (particularly first-time ones) and an opportunity to ramp up their campaigns before moving on to more competitive general elections. Some of the Democrats’...

WASHINGTON — Over the past week, congressional Republicans have gotten a glimpse of the President Trump they hoped to never see. On gun safety and, more significantly to many of them, trade, the president has loudly broken with longstanding party orthodoxy and reminded Republican leaders on Capitol Hill that they can never be 100 percent certain of what they are going to get with the onetime New York Democrat. Despite such worries, Mr. Trump’s first-year actions on policy and personnel — particularly judicial nominees — provided substantial reassurance to congressional Republicans. They concluded that Mr. Trump was really one of...

Republicans are learning an uncomfortable reality about the political environment for 2018: Tax cuts, conservative culture-war staples, and even Nancy Pelosi herself probably won’t be enough to overcome the deep hole that President Trump has put them in. With the White House awash in scandal and struggling to articulate its agenda, the political mood has turned so grim that Republicans are in danger of losing an upcoming special election in the heart of Trump country. That’s the lesson to draw from the surprisingly competitive campaign Democrat Conor Lamb is running in a Pittsburgh-area district Trump easily carried by 20 points,...

...White House exits, Bannon and Sessions at Gridiron press dinner and jokes they were late because Jared couldn't get through security Trump attended the annual dinner on Saturday for a night of bipartisan ribbing Though he skipped last year, Trump arrived with large entourage this time Journalists and lawmakers took part in musical numbers teasing both parties The event is closed to cameras but some of the remarks have emerged Trump delivered self-deprecating remarks to the audience of about 660 President Donald Trump has taken the opportunity to poke fun at himself and trade barbs with the press at an...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he thinks it's great that China's president now holds that office for life and muses that maybe the U.S. will do the same someday. Trump's remarks were met with laughter and applause during a luncheon for Republican donors Saturday at his South Florida estate. CNN said it obtained a recording of the remarks. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently consolidated power. Trump told the gathering: "He's now president for life. President for life. And he's great." Trump added, "I think it's great. Maybe we'll give that a shot someday." Trump criticized his Democratic presidential...

To date, four people have pleaded guilty to charges brought against them by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team. Two were ancillary characters: a businessman who apparently sold bank account numbers to Russian trolls and a lawyer who’d worked with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime partner Rick Gates. Two were closer to the campaign. One is campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose connections to Russia-linked characters helped spur the initial investigation in July 2016 into whether President Trump’s campaign had aided Russian interference efforts. And then there’s Michael Flynn, a campaign aide who wound...

President Trump on Tuesday signaled an openness to modest gun-control measures following what he called an “evil massacre” at a South Florida high school last week that left 17 dead and prompted passionate calls from teenagers for reform. Trump directed the Justice Department to draft a ban on devices known as “bump stocks,” molded pieces of plastic or metal that can attach to a legal semiautomatic gun and allow it to fire up to 100 rounds in seven seconds, similar to an illegal machine gun. In private, he has indicated that he might do more, telling advisers and friends in...

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence said he believes there could be "other shoes to drop" in the Russia probe, which took a dramatic turn on Friday after new charges against multiple Russian nationals and entities were announced. "I think there are other shoes to drop here — notably finances," Clapper said during a CNN interview Friday night. "I think that's going to be another profound thing that's going to come out about this." "What were the financial relationships between the Trump Organization before the election and the Trump campaign," Clapper said. He clarified that he isn't personally...

My father told me that one of the running jokes throughout most of the Soviet dominion over Russia was this assessment of the two newspapers by the non-Communist citizenry: "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda" or in English "There is no truth in News, and there is no news in Truth." But this was said carefully and to people who would not report you to the Central Committee."