Free Republic

Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said the deadly school shooting on Wednesday should be a rallying moment for the nation on guns, but he predicted Congress would not live up to the task, and suggested the President should take the lead. "Do I think they can do anything on guns? I hope they prove me wrong and they can because I have no confidence in them," Kasich said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "We need leadership out of the executive," he said. "This is a great opportunity for common sense steps that can be taken. ... Mr. President,...

Tuesday on the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) criticized President Donald Trump for the remarks he gave in Ohio a day earlier. During those remarks, he called some Democrats “treasonous” for not applauding the positive economic news at his State of the Union address. Partial transcript as follows: Mr. President, last fall I had the honor to stand in this chamber and deliver remarks on the subject of a great and growing concern to me, the stewardship of our democracy at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. I stand again today to sound the same...

John Kasich continues putting John Kasich above all other interests. While many politicians use their current positions as launching pads onto the next, John Kasich has spent a fair duration of his second term as Ohio’s Governor campaigning for President. He continued his sanctimonious tour this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Claiming he wants to give people hope, Kasich continued feeding his own ego and pontificating for applause from the New York audience.

A bipartisan pair of senators are urging President Trump to not allow a GOP memo accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI of abusing their power to be publicly released. GOP Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Democratic Sen. Christopher Coons (Del.) — both members of the Judiciary Committee — said Trump "should heed the warnings" from the DOJ and FBI, where top officials have taken issue with the forthcoming report. "The president’s apparent willingness to release this memo risks undermining U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts, politicizing Congress’ oversight role, and eroding confidence in our institutions of government," the senators said in...

The White House appears to have banned Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) from participating in immigration reform negotiations due to recent strain between Graham and the Trump administration, as well as other Republicans in the House and Senate. Tensions first rose when Graham advocated for an immigration deal that failed to address President Donald Trump’s main concerns regarding chain migration and border security alongside Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). The situation worsened when the Republican senator criticized chief of staff John Kelly as never having “closed a deal before, politically” and top policy adviser Stephen Miller as being an “outlier” on immigration,...

U.S. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) compared President Donald J. Trump’s animus towards the media to totalitarian dictator Joseph Stalin's propaganda on ABC News' ‘This Week’.While discussing a series of speeches the soon-to-be-retired Senator will be giving over the next few weeks, host George Stephanopoulos read aloud an excerpt from one.  STEPHANOPOULOS: We’ve gotten some excerpts of what you’re planning to say, taking on the president’s comments about calling the press the enemy of the people. And I just want to read a portion of what we’ve had.It’s a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses...

America is not owned by Americans and their children but is instead held by people all over the globe, according to a statement from amnesty advocate Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I’ve always believed that America is an idea [which is] not defined by its people but by its ideals,” Graham said in a press statement January 12 which sought to criticise President Donald Trump for describing some foreign countries as less pleasant than America, or as “shitholes.” Graham continued: The American ideal is embraced by people all over the globe. It was best said a long time ago, E Pluribus Unum...

Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol accused President Donald Trump of trying to “shut down” the Russia investigation Tuesday, despite the White House’s continued cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller. “The president hates the investigation. He fears it, and he wants to shut it down or curb it as much as he can,” Kristol said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “It may be that he intends to fire Mueller,” Kristol added. “Trump is trying systematically to discredit the FBI … and he’s doing so by attacking individuals, by attacking the whole organization, by saying the whole thing is a...

War with North Korea can be avoided if the Trump administration uses sanctions modeled after President Barack Obama's much-excoriated Iran deal and if everyone just avoids "irresponsible" war predictions that risk "millions of lives," Ohio's Republican Governor John Kasich wrote on Monday. Kasich—who battled Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination last year—outlined a plan for stronger U.S. sanctions against North Korea in an opinion column in The Washington Post published Monday evening. He slammed Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and other politicians for "predicting odds on the probability of war" against North Korea when there is still...

With tensions continuing to build between the United States and North Korea, there’s growing talk by politicians and TV pundits that we are on the brink of war. In truth, we shouldn’t be anywhere close. This increasingly hot war of words — including loose talk about the probability of war — does nothing to bring us closer to where we need to be on North Korea, especially when military options short of war remain on the table. In fact, with millions of lives at stake, waging a war of words is a distraction from the serious task at hand. Any...

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)  is still acting like a thorn in President Trump's side - even on Christmas weekend. Speaking to ABC's "This Week," Flake condemned the president's rallies as bastions of resentment. "When you look at some of the audiences cheering for Republicans, sometimes, you look out there and you say, 'those are the spasms of a dying party,' " Flake said on ABC's "This Week.""When you look at the lack of diversity, sometimes, and it depends on where you are, obviously, but by and large, we're appealing to older white men and there are just a limited number...

Trump critic and Republican Sen. Jeff Flake suggested Sunday that the president’s words and actions have left him open to a primary challenge if he seeks reelection. “If he continues on the path that he's on, that is going to leave a huge swath of voters looking for someone else,” Flake, who is not seeking reelection in 2018, told ABC News’ “This Week.” He's probably inviting a Republican challenge.” Flake also said Trump’s continued path could result in a “diminished base” and “a huge swath of voters in the middle that may be looking for something else” -- including a...

Let’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t. As for it - Earth - the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it. And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him...

There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice. I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams. Its...

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders isn't a big fan of the media. Which is, of course, her right. The relationship between any White House and any press corps tasked with covering that White House is almost always fraught and fractious. But, on Monday, Sanders made an accusation that went way, way beyond the pale of the usual give and take between White House and press corps. Here's what she said: "There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people. Something that happens regularly. You can't say -- I'm not done. You can't say...

soyboy in Pensacola Florida has his Doug Jones campaign promo ruined by black hyped #RoyMoore supporter!

It’s the contempt that’s so contemptible: President Trump’s contempt for the Constitution to which he swore an oath, for the F.B.I. that’s allegedly in “Tatters” (sic), for the majority of Americans (including his base) who will be worse off from a fat tax cut for the richest, for the shared wonder inspired by our public lands, for America’s allies, for the science that explains why it’s getting warmer, for due process, for truth, for informed debate, for the press, for the values anchored by liberty that the United States has attempted to represent to the world. That’s a lot of...

Just thinking...PJ Boy is probably busy registering for Obamacare 2017, but I'm wondering how he's coping with electoral reality. Didn't see him at the Javits Center on TV election night.

Myself white, male, and affluent/privileged in many ways grounded in those first two accidents of my birth—I am deeply burdened by the question that lies before us about the essential nature of men, of whiteness: Can these revelations about how many powerful men are monsters be traced to predispositions of being born a male, to some code engrained in whiteness (even as we know race is a social, not a biological, construct)? I am afraid of the truth about being male, about the flawed consequences of being a creature driven by testosterone even with the capacity for reason, compassion, and...

Great nations and proud democracies fall when their systems become so corrupted that the decay is not even noticed — or the rot is written off as a normal part of politics. President Trump has created exactly such a crisis. He has not done it alone. The corrosion of norms and values began long before he propelled the nation past the edge, and his own party is broadly complicit in enabling his attacks on truth, decency and democratic values. In fact, Republicans are taking full advantage of the bedlam Trump leaves in his wake. They are using a twisted process...