Free Republic

Charles Fruit thinks Nikki Haley would make a good president. He thinks she did a good job as governor in South Carolina, and he was impressed with her work as United Nations ambassador during the Trump administration. “She was just tough, and I like that,” the Mesquite, Nev., resident said. “She was common sense. She was well-spoken. She was respectable.” That’s why Fruit was upset to learn that he couldn’t really help her become the Republican nominee. Haley — the second most popular Republican candidate next to former President Donald Trump — is not participating in the Feb. 8 Nevada...

MSNBC and CNN refused to air former President Donald Trump’s Republican Iowa caucus victory speech Monday evening, while airing fellow candidates’ speeches. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow announced on-air that Trump had just began giving his speech but that the network decided not to air it because it did not want to knowingly broadcast “untrue things.” She said: At this point in the evening, the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech. We will keep an eye on that as it happens. We will let you know if there’s any news made in that speech if...

The claims made here are serious. The evidence already gathered and compiled is substantial. When the win forecast in pre-election polling for Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake did not materialize on Election Day, the tabulator and printer issues in Maricopa County were widely believed to be the culprit. These widespread issues in Maricopa County were expected to form much of the basis of the Lake campaign's anticipated challenge to the election, though what additional claims form the basis of the suit was anyone's guess. The suspense ended on December 9, 2022, when Lake filed her formal election contest in...

Election officials in a rural Arizona county are gearing up for a slew of legal battles after they failed to certify the results of the 2022 midterm elections, facing criminal penalties and at least two lawsuits. Two Republican supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona, voted to delay the county’s election results until Friday — four days after the state-mandated deadline. The vote quickly spurred court battles from state officials as they scramble to complete the statewide canvass, which requires certified results from all 15 counties before being completed. “It’s astounding that Cochise County officials failed to certify the election results,” Alex...

Database latency -- a geeky term, but that’s how they did it! A policeman pulls over a speeder. The police computer reports that three hours ago a similar vehicle and person held up a liquor store -- so the police are on alert. No database latency. County election managers change the zip code of 31,000 voters on September 3. Ballots go out that week. Those 31,000 are undeliverable. Someone collects those valid ballots. On September 15th, those addresses are quietly changed back. National Change of Address Database (NCOA) will not pick up those address changes. They didn’t happen because there...

The Jan. 6 committee, which includes Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kingzinger, will air their Thursday hearing during primetime. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via REUTERS)

PHOENIX (AP) — Ten months after Donald Trump lost his 2020 reelection bid in Arizona, supporters hired by Arizona Senate Republicans were preparing to deliver the results of an unprecedented partisan election review that is the climax of a bizarre quest to find evidence supporting the former president’s false claim that he lost because of fraud. Nearly every allegation made by the review team so far has crumbled under scrutiny. Election officials in Arizona and around the country expect more of the same Friday from the review team they say is biased, incompetent and chasing absurd or disproven conspiracy theories....

If you’d have asked me even six months ago what the chances of the United States being on the verge of a civil war I would have said probably under 1%. Today I think that number is much closer to 25% and maybe even higher. Why is that? Simple. Democrats, media and academia… I grew up on the Navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was a small base but there were a million things to do. Horseback riding, year round sports, a bowling alley, four pools that I can remember, game rooms, gyms, motocross, hiking, scuba diving, surfing,...

House Democrats reacted furiously to President Trump’s Friday move to commute the prison sentence of political operative Roger Stone -- demanding an investigation and even legislation to stop similar commutations happening again. “President Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of top campaign advisor Roger Stone, who could directly implicate him in criminal misconduct, is an act of staggering corruption,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement on Saturday. She went on to promise that Congress would “take action” to prevent future such commutations: “Legislation is needed to ensure that no President can pardon or commute the sentence of...

There was a lot of testimony during this past week's impeachment inquiry about foreign interference in our 2016 election, including the president's assertion that Ukraine was involved. But the president's own intelligence agencies say it was the Russians who "hacked" the 2016 elections. Special counsel Robert Mueller spelled it out in his report. Now the Justice Department has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for interfering with our presidential and congressional races, we decided to take a closer look at one of them - the case against 12 Russian military officers accused of breaking into the Democratic Party's...

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, joined “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Wednesday to recap another day of House Democrats playacting at their partisan, anti-Trump impeachment hearings. “I think we learned that the Democrats are quite convinced they need to keep going with this Watergate cosplay in Washington,” Davis said. “We learned no new facts. We heard the same stuff we’ve heard over and over again. We saw the same playacting.” Davis said the only thing he has learned from the House Intelligence Committee’s theater is how committed Democrats are to the farce of impeachment they have been pursuing for three...

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since,...

As House Democrats plan to hold public hearings in their Trump impeachment inquiry this week, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is warning supporters of the president to expect something similar to what took place last year during then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings. "I really think that the model for what’s gonna happen this week is the Kavanaugh hearings. I mean, if you recall, here comes Christine Blasey Ford, she has her charge, and what were we told? She didn’t want to come forward," Limbaugh said on his radio show. "Then, it didn’t have the impact they...

This is not just an impeachment. It's the endgame for Trump's relentless assault on the institutions, norms, and practices of America's liberal democracy for the past three years. It's also a deeper reckoning. It's about whether the legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being removed from office. I'm talking about what political scientists call "regime cleavage" -- a decline in democratic life so severe the country's very institutions could lose legitimacy as a result of it. It is described by one political scientist as follows: "a division within the population marked by conflict about...

The accomplishments of Martin Luther, prince of the heresiarchs - Part One: Why Luther is the heresiarch par excellence This is a special two-part series for this month of the Protestant revolt based on a conference delivered by Don Pietro Leone Monselice* on the theological work of the man who caused so much hurt and pain to Holy Mother Church, the "prince of the heresiarchs", as Don Pietro appropriately calls him. _____________________________________ [FIRST PART] In Nomine Patris et Filli et Spiritus Sancti. Amen         In these times of great ignorance and radical confusion, and when even Catholics of the highest...

FROM THE OP -ED BY NEAL KATYAL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES That’s why our founders wrote the impeachment clause to be broader than criminal activity. Many crimes are not impeachable (jaywalking, for example). Other activity isn’t necessarily criminal but is obviously a basis for impeachment (not defending the United States against a foreign attack).For our founders, the touchstone of presidential unfitness to serve was always abuse of the public trust. They viewed the president as having a fiduciary obligation to the American people — just like trustees — and if the president violated that duty, he should be impeached....

The Democrats who were looking to cast Robert Mueller as the star in a TV special, "The Impeachment of Donald Trump," can probably tear up the script. They're gonna be needing a new one. For six hours Wednesday, as three cable news networks and ABC, CBS and NBC all carried live the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the Mueller report was thoroughly trashed. The special counsel stood by his findings. His investigation was not a "hoax" or "witch hunt," he said. He admitted that he had found no Trump-Russia conspiracy. He denied he exonerated Trump of obstruction...

Last month, both Maine and Nevada did what was in the best interests of their states: They rejected bills that would have enrolled their states in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an unwise effort to override the Electoral College. In Maine, it was killed by legislators in the state House after it passed Maine’s Senate. In Nevada, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoed the bill that had been passed by members of his own party in the Legislature. The National Popular Vote compact, which is an agreement between states, requires a participating state to award all of its electoral votes...

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum this week questioned the outcomes of their 2018 gubernatorial races -- suggesting that they, rather than their Republican opponents, should be in the governor seats. Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee who lost to now-Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the state’s gubernatorial race in November, hinted on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that both he and Abrams got enough votes to win their races, and that Abrams' may have been influenced by her opponent already being in office. “Stacey juiced as many Dems as she could out of the state...

Donald Trump’s backers warn that Washington Beltway’s Plan A is to secure his removal or resignation. In case that fails, Plan B is to ensure he withdraws from the 2020 contest. New York: Many, if not most, genuine loyalists of the 45th President of the United States are in the world’s most famous metropolis. They are clustered within Manhattan, the location where the worldwide Trump Organisation is headquartered, and which has been home to four generations of what since 20 January 2017 is the First Family of the world’s most powerful country. While some of the few who are personally...