Free Republic

After Donald Trump won the presidency again, Rebecca Carlson was counting on this being the year things turned around for her 1,300-acre farm in northern Michigan. The farm has been in her family for generations but has struggled over the past several years amid the rising cost of fuel, fertilizer and other operating expenses. Then, last year, bad weather wiped out much of her crop. But the return of Trump, she thought, would help reverse things. Her farm had been awarded a grant worth $400,000 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the costs associated with hiring...

As avian flu drives egg prices to record levels and increasingly poses a risk to humans, moves by the White House to cut spending and restrict communications have hobbled public health officials’ response, with the new administration yet to outline a clear strategy on how it plans to stem the spread of the virus. Widespread funding cuts across the government and new restrictions on funding for National Institutes of Health grants have also created uncertainty among infectious disease researchers and local health officials, who are unsure about what resources they will have to work with going forward. Meanwhile, cuts to...

<p>Across the rural communities and industrial towns of western Michigan, semitrucks hauling thousands of pounds of food are pulling up to church parking lots and community centers where growing lines of people are waiting for a few boxes of free groceries.</p>

With six kids under the age of 15 to support, Stephen Booth, a police officer for the Air Force in Kansas, doesn’t have room in his budget for a missed paycheck. But like millions of other government employees across the country, Booth is bracing for his pay to stop indefinitely at the end of the month as Congress careers toward a government shutdown. House Republicans left Thursday unable to reach a compromise within their ranks over a new budget, including funds for the Defense Department, with a handful of conservative holdouts demanding additional spending cuts. Unless Congress acts, the federal...

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chris Murphy, who is helping lead Senate talks on gun control, said lawmakers don’t plan to bring any bill to the floor that would ban assault weapons or include comprehensive background checks but are actively working on legislation that would include a range of other measures.“We’re not going to put a piece of legislation on the table that’s going to ban assault weapons, or we’re not going to pass comprehensive background checks,” Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." “But right now, people in this country want us to make progress. They...

WASHINGTON — White House officials were scrambling Thursday to figure out how to counter the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry, with one source familiar with the situation describing a sense of “total panic” over the past week at the lack of a plan to address the new reality. There appears to be rising “anxiety, unease, and concern” — as one person close to the White House described the mood in the West Wing — that the whistleblower’s allegations could seriously wound the president and some of those around him. “There’s not a lot of confidence that there’s no there there,” this...

LINK ONLY...................... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/fbi-said-to-lack-white-house-approval-to-talk-to-kavanaugh-ford

For almost an hour on Tuesday, the White House press corps stooped to a new low of embarrassment and clownishly liberal behavior, lobbing over a dozen questions at Navy Rear Admiral Dr. Ronny Jackson to insinuate that President Trump must be mentally ill to the point of AlzheimerÂ’s Disease. This was all despite JacksonÂ’s insistence that heÂ’s in great health. Whether it was Bloomberg, CBS News Radio, CNN, or The Washington Post, the long knives were out as the liberal media engaged in their own PickettÂ’s Charge to save their narrative that TrumpÂ’s mentally ill and thus must be removed...