Free Republic

Olympia is buzzing this week after it was learned that one of Gov. Jay Inslee's appointees to the Housing Finance Commission 'omitted' (some say lied) on his application, failing to list a 2005 domestic violence conviction that gave him a year in jail. Noe Castillo Jr. was appointed to the commission last November by Inslee, but had to wait til now to be officially confirmed by the Senate Housing Stability and Affordabability Committee before it became official. According to Senate Republicans, Castillo Jr. did list a 2002 Assault -4- charge on his application, but omitted a 2005 domestic violence conviction....

The woman who presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway says physically assaulted her in October is married to the CEO of a $43 million environmental charity and manages volunteers for a nonprofit that boasts 'empathy' as 'a priority skill' for 'living and working together in this radically different world.' DailyMail.com is picturing Beth Inabinett, 63, for the first time. She faces a March trial for second-degree assault in Montgomery County, Maryland. Inabinett could also be charged with a federal crime, according to a Justice Department official. The case stems from an incident during a birthday party at a restaurant near Washington, D.C....

The Democrats swept to power in Congress by campaigning in a way that has been successful for Democrats for generations. “Republicans will take away your health care,” they said, after having focus-grouped it. Now we are preparing for a 2020 campaign in which Donald Trump and Republicans can as easily advertise to the public: “Democrats will take away cows, and your car.” What happened to Democrats? Back in November, it looked like Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic House caucus had found the perfect plan for their party in the era of Trump: Avoid talking about impeachment and stick to simple...

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...

MUNICH — Speaking on German soil 75 years after the U.S. and its allies prepared for D-Day, Joe Biden described America as "an embarrassment" and its trade policies "self-defeating." "The America I see values basic human decency, not snatching children from their parents or turning our back on refugees at our border. Americans know that’s not right,” the former vice president and potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate told the Munich Security Conference. "The American people understand plainly that this makes us an embarrassment. The American people know, overwhelmingly, that it is not right. That it is not who we are."...

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...

President Trump and former Vice President Biden are in a dead heat in a hypothetical 2020 matchup among Texas voters, according to a new poll from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling firm. According to the poll, Biden trails Trump 46 percent to 49 percent in the hypothetical matchup, falling within the poll's margin of error. Five percent of those polled said they were "not sure" who they would choose.

If you’re a 2020 GOP primary voter who’s been holding out for a pro-abortion, pro-amnesty liberal who endorsed Barack Obama, praised Hillary Clinton and compared Donald Trump to the Nazis — Bill Weld’s your man! And if you’re Donald Trump, concerned that a primary challenge could cripple your re-election bid the same way it did for George H. W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, former Governor Weld really is your man. He’s the ideal candidate for Trump to run against. Weld, the Libertarian Party nominee for vice president in 2016, will be speaking at the Politics and Eggs breakfast in Bedford,...

RICHLAND COUNTY, SC S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster on Thursday fired the entire Richland County elections board, three months after the agency failed to count more than 1,000 votes in the 2018 election and a day after a chaotic board meeting that highlighted the agency’s dysfunction. “South Carolinians’ confidence in the lawful and professional oversight of elections must never be jeopardized,” McMaster said in a news release. “The repeated actions and behavior of these officials are wholly unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. To regain and maintain Richland County voters’ confidence at the ballot box, the entire board must be replaced with...

And how do some Democrats respond to all of this? Well, you saw it during the State of the Union this month. They just sat there, gurning at the camera. For Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), she summed up the excellent economic news for the country and minorities with these three words: “blah, blah, blah.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has a net worth approaching $100 billion, has slammed tax policies like the one put forth by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying they miss the larger picture and could create tax dodging.

Publicly supporting President Trump is becoming incredibly dangerous... Many people know of @randalthom of #FrontRowJoes fame... While Randal was live-streaming at the Amy Klobuchar event someone was on his farm murdering his Husky “Donald J Trump”...

Today, Democrats introduced SB 770, which would eliminate private health insurance and create a state health care system for all. The goal is to have the system in place by 2023. The bill is nearly 90 pages. Oregon has a super-majority of Democrats. Republicans can't stop anything.

SANTA FE — Two proposals moving through the House are aimed at making it easier for New Mexicans to register to vote. Both proposals, sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, passed the House Judiciary Committee on Monday and are heading next to the House floor. One measure, House Bill 84, would automatically register people to vote when they get their driver’s license or ID at the Motor Vehicle Division, unless they opt out or are ineligible. The other proposal, House Bill 86, would allow people to register to vote on Election Day or at early voting sites. Under the current system, the...

The worst thing about Ilhan Omar's anti-semitism is that she's speaking for a lot of Democrats.

<p>Sen. Kamala Harris got rapped for getting her rap eras mixed up when she told radio interviewers that she listened to Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur while smoking pot in college — even though she graduated in 1986, years before they hit the scene.</p>

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz may be able to avoid a 50-state scramble for presidential ballot access by seeking the Libertarian Party’s support. Members of the large national third party, which took more than 3 percent of the vote in 2016, are intrigued by Schultz and might be willing to give him the party nomination in 2020, meaning he would not have to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures as an independent. Schultz has branded himself a “centrist independent” as he teases a potential challenge to President Trump. But he has Libertarians swooning over his concern about the national debt...

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, said 2020 Democratic hopeful Beto O'Rourke has disqualified himself from becoming president by questioning whether the Constitution was still relevant. "Anybody who questions the validity of the Constitution — whether it works in the modern era — should never be president," Crenshaw said in a Washington Examiner interview. This week, O'Rourke, who has just vacated his Texas seat in the House of Representatives after an unsuccessful Senate bid, mused about the relevance of the Constitution. "I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work? Can an empire like ours ... still be managed...

Isn’t this guy supposed to be the “centrist” in the race, the fake progressive trying to muscle in on Bernie’s turf?Or is that the point of this answer, to yank the left’s nobs by showing that his zeal for upending the American order is such that he’s willing to go full reboot to do it?I thought the worst we’d have to fear from these tools is 70 percent tax rates. Throughout the two-hour interview — which was often interrupted by bystanders urging him to run for president — O’Rourke boomeranged between a bright-eyed hope that the United States will...

NYU Psychology professor Eric Knowles and doctoral student Sarah DiMuccio queried 300 men on Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to discover whether they had or would search for terms such as "erectile dysfunction," "how to get girls," "penis enlargement," "testosterone," and "Viagra," among others. They discovered a high level of concern about masculinity "was strongly associated with interest in these search topics." They then correlated the geopgrahic dispersion of these search topics in 2016 with how such areas voted in that year's election, finding "that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches...