Free Republic

It's not every day that the Wall Street Journal's right-leaning opinion section swoons over a Democratic politician. Gina Raimondo's outspoken championing of tax and regulator reform have made her the rare exception. Gushing over the Rhode Island governor in a November article titled, "An Island of Rationality in Blue-State New England," opinion writer Allysia Finley praised Raimondo's focus on regulatory and tax reform, painting her as a wonky, business-friendly Democrat at odds with a left-wing base committed to fighting battles over social justice issues. "This year’s election has spurred soul-searching within the Democratic Party," she wrote. "A debate rages between...

The Latest on President-elect Donald Trump (all times EST): 12:15 p.m. President-elect Donald Trump says he'll ask Congress to investigate leaks to the media on U.S. intelligence alleging Russia meddled in last year's election by hacking Democratic emails. Less than an hour before he was to be briefed Friday by the directors of the FBI and CIA and the Director of National Intelligence on their findings, Trump tweeted that he was "asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it." NBC aired a report Thursday that said...

When you first hit the road from Seattle on your way to Mason County there are lots of signs that the economy is buzzing, like construction cranes, shiny new buildings and hybrid cars. But when you wind around past Olympia into Mason County, you're more likely to see a pickup truck with a gun rack than a Prius. And the average wage in Mason in 2015 was about half as much as in King County. The political contrast is also dramatic. Whereas Seattle is Hillary Country, in Mason County voters bolted on a 13-point swing from Barack Obama in 2012...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/how-trump-won-the-white-working-class

I'm told this will be released in e-book on 1/17, hardcover 2/27. I will be at CPAC this year, and it looks like I'll be on Fox and Friends Monday morning talking about the "Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents from Washington to Taft," which was already scheduled for release on Jan. 9.

Brad Lander is a city councilman in New York. But that’s not preventing him from setting his sights nationally, as he casts about for a new staffer who will take the fight to President-elect Donald Trump. According to the job posting, the Brooklyn Democrat is looking for a communications director to “resist the threats of the Trump regime to American democratic values and vulnerable constituencies.” Other responsibilities include more ho-hum tasks such as organizing press conferences and talking to reporters. Lander, who is Jewish and represents a swath of northern Brooklyn including Park Slope, has been out front since the...

As we face the new year and the realities of politics in a post-Obama world, the Democrats understandably feel the need to act as if some things are still normal. That is, even if they suspect that Donald Trump and the Republicans will soon turn the U.S. into a one-party state in all but name, the Democrats need to avoid admitting as much—to themselves or anyone else—to prevent their fears from become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This means that, in the hope of being able to win elections in the future, Democrats are trying to think through the various reasons that...

Suggesting that turnabout is fair play, the Senate's new top Democrat said Tuesday night "it's hard for me to imagine" Democratic senators' supporting a Supreme Court nomination submitted by President-elect Donald Trump. In a measured but blunt interview on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York took on Trump over a number of issues, calling him a "fake" populist who was "dumb" to continue squabbling with the U.S. intelligence community. But it was the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February that led to Schumer's strongest...

The new Congress was sworn in on Tuesday, and the first thing it did was prepare to repeal Obamacare. Senate Budget Committee Chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced a budget resolution Tuesday that includes "reconciliation instructions" that enable Congress to repeal Obamacare with a simple Senate majority. Passing a budget resolution that includes those instructions will mean that the legislation can pass through the budget reconciliation process, in which bills cannot be filibustered. That means Republicans will only need 50 of their 52 members in the Senate, and a bare majority in the House, to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care...

If Politico’s correct about the new administration’s Supreme Court strategy, Ted Cruz might have a long, long wait for a phone call. Donald Trump’s first major act as President will almost certainly be to fill the opening left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which has remained open for a year while Republicans blocked efforts at a lame-duck appointment of Merrick Garland. However, the focus of Trump’s strategists is not this opening, but the next one to come — likely from the liberal wing of the court: While Scalia’s seat is the only current opening, Trump’s advisers are plotting...

The Democratic Party has a “religious illiteracy” problem that prevents them from reaching out to evangelicals, according to a former Democratic staffer. Michael Wear, a former Obama White House staffer, explained three reasons why the Democratic Party fails to reach out to evangelical voters or voters with different theologies. Wear, speaking with The Atlantic, pointed out that many young Democrats don’t know how to discuss or deal with religious topics. This “illiteracy” contributes to why Democrats fail to reach out to evangelicals, Wear explained. “It’s tied to the demographics of the country: More 20- and 30-year-olds are taking positions of...

KIEV, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Republican U.S. Senator John McCain promised on Saturday continued support for Kiev in the face of aggression from Moscow, as he spent New Year's Eve on the front line in Ukraine's eastern conflict zone. McCain was one of a bipartisan group of 27 U.S. senators who sent a letter to President-elect Donald Trump in December, urging him to take a tough line against Russia over what they termed its "military land grab" in Ukraine. "I send the message from the American people - we are with you, your fight is our fight and we will...

Put this in the category of be careful what you wish for. The instant that Trump won the White House, the chatter about impeaching him has been non-stop. The reasons many legal scholars, ethics experts, and political analysts give boil down to this. He has business dealings with foreign governments, most notably Russia, his family management arrangement still presents business conflicts, his possible violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from buying influence with federal officials or receiving special treatment, and influence peddling and gift taking from foreign governments. These are all sticky points that Trump hasn’t done much...

Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two hawks on U.S. policy toward Russia, said they will lead the push in the upcoming Congress for sanctions on Moscow that are stronger than those the Obama administration announced Thursday. "The retaliatory measures announced by the Obama administration today are long overdue. But ultimately, they are a small price for Russia to pay for its brazen attack on American democracy. We intend to lead the effort in the new Congress to impose stronger sanctions on Russia," the senators said in a joint statement Thursday. The Obama administration issued an executive order Thursday...

A big-money group that included some of Hillary Clinton’s top allies tested the effectiveness of attacking her 2008 rival Barack Obama for his admitted use of cocaine and his connections to Islam, hacked documents released Friday show. In the early stages of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, a group known as Progressive Media commissioned a poll that asked more than 800 likely swing state voters about a number of possible lines of attack against Obama, but also against Clinton and the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain. The poll results and emails discussing the questions were among a batch of documents...

Nevada’s departing senator would have fought Trump with a ruthlessness perhaps no other Democratic leader has. Harry Reid was searching for someone to take a stand. It was a Tuesday morning in early December, three days before his three-decade congressional career would effectively come to an end, and Reid had summoned about 20 of his staffers to his Capitol office just off the Senate floor. Although it’s reserved for the leader of the Senate’s minority party, it’s still a ­magisterial space, with soaring ceilings and mosaic floors. As a cold rain pelted the windows, the Nevada senator sat in a...

Donald J. Trump won the white working-class vote over Hillary Clinton by a larger margin than any major-party nominee since World War II. Instead of this considerable achievement inspiring introspection, figures from the heights of journalism, entertainment, literature and the Clinton campaign continue to suggest that Mr. Trump won the presidency by appealing to the bigotry of his supporters. As Bill Clinton recently said, the one thing Mr. Trump knows “is how to get angry white men to vote for him.” This stereotyping of Trump voters is not only illiberal, it falsely presumes Mr. Trump won because of his worst...

When Susan Allen was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2012, she became the first openly lesbian Native American woman to win office in any state legislature. But framing that achievement as one for the lesbian community alone obscures another aspect of Allen’s identity, and one that is directly connected to her Native American ancestry: Allen also identifies as “two-spirit.” While Americans are increasingly familiar with the elements that make-up our modern LGBTQ abbreviation, other, often older queer identities like two-spirit remain unappreciated to the point of erasure. But if Allen and other two-spirit folks have their way,...

Hillary Clinton spent much of last summer arguing that Ronald Reagan would never vote for Donald Trump. At the Democratic National Convention, a series of speakers — including Barack Obama — argued that the patron saint of the conservative movement would recoil at Trump’s authoritarian ethos. At a September press conference, the Democratic nominee suggested that the Gipper would be incensed to see the Republican nominee praise Vladimir Putin while disparaging the American president. One of her super-PACs’ final campaign ads cast Reagan’s ghost as a Clinton surrogate. The point of all this nostalgia for the man who killed off...

ROCKVILLE, Md. — Democrats’ belief that new information revealed after Donald Trump’s election — as when the reports of Russian interference spurred calls on the left for a revote or, failing that, for “faithless” electors to abandon Trump — would change voters’ minds has taken another hit. A Pew Research survey Wednesday showed a whopping 97 percent of all voters would cast the exact same vote they did on Election Day, including 99 percent of Trump voters and 96 percent of Clinton voters. As with the recount that saw Clinton lose votes and the Electoral College vote that saw her...