Free Republic

Last month, a local California newspaper left more than 19 million voter records exposed online. Gizmodo confirmed this week that the records were compromised during an apparent ransomware attack. The Sacramento Bee said in a statement that a firewall protecting its database was not restored during routine maintenance last month, leaving the 19,501,258 voter files publicly accessible. Additionally, the names, home addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of 52,873 Sacramento Bee subscribers were compromised. “We take this incident seriously and have begun efforts to notify each of the individuals on the contact list and to provide them resources to help...

Just a month ago, as friends and families prepared to gather for the holiday season, the men and women at the U.S. Census Bureau were busy releasing their latest annual estimates of population changes across the United States. With the hustle and bustle of the season, many Americans missed the important new data. The new census estimates detail how states have grown since the last full census in 2010. The estimates provide some fascinating insight on what we can expect from the quickly approaching 2020 Census. For those of us wonky enough to follow the annual trends in state-by-state migration,...

My group of respondents is made up of people I have met over the course of the last year while reporting from eight counties that were pivotal in the 2016 presidential election. Some I met through friends or political or activist organizations, but most I encountered at county fairs or festivals, churches, bars or restaurants. My sample skews somewhat toward Trump voters and supporters, but there are also plenty of Democrats. As I expected, most of my respondents had either only good or bad things to say about the president’s first year. Among the positive one-word responses were: “diligent,” “decisive,”...

A federal judge in Alabama has thrown out a lawsuit against the state’s voter ID law, finding that the law doesn’t prevent anyone from voting because “nearly the entire population of registered voters in Alabama already possess a photo ID that can be used for voting.” For those who don’t, obtaining a qualifying ID can be done “with little to no effort and no cost.” In 2011, the Alabama legislature passed a photo ID requirement for both in-person and absentee voting. The law was enacted in an effort to strengthen voter confidence and to reduce the potential for voter fraud...

Too many elected Republicans are too intimidated by the insults from Democrats. MOST ‘Dreamers’ don’t even speak English! Many haven’t shown the slightest interest in assimilating! Whatever are you thinking??? Amnesty for all??

I’m just an old W. Texan and really don’t understand the World today. But I think we saw where our country is headed last Tuesday in Alabama and I’m just glad I don’t have that long to go. We’re in deep Pasture patties.

‘Eleven of California’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100% of the age-eligible citizenry.’ ‘California has the highest rate of inactive registrations of any state in the country. Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country’ (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a federal lawsuit against Los Angeles County and the State of California over their failure to clean their voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) (Judicial Watch, Inc.et al. v. Dean C. Logan, et al....

Yet another fake article from a satire site name Reagan Was Right went viral after it was copied by a "real" fake news website. It was titled "UPDATE: Alabama Election Officials Found 5,329 More Dead Folks Who Voted For Jones" and promptly got stolen by Conservative Stamp, a fake news website that was only registered a few weeks ago. The original story opened: Election fraud was the defining factor surrounding Democrat Doug Jones' surprise upset over conservative Roy Moore in the special election. Ladies of Liberty reports that the small town of Bordalama, Alabama was beset by fraudsters who apparently...

Wednesday during a segment on HLN’s “SE Cupp Unfiltered” critical of former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, Mediaite managing editor Colby Hall took on the “constituents of Alabama.” During the panel’s criticism of Bannon, Hall said it was time to “sort of look down our nose” at Bannon’s receptive audience at a rally he spoke at on Tuesday in Fairhope, AL. “I think it’s time to sort of look down our nose at the constituents of Alabama who apparently think a pro wrestling-mantra like Steve Bannon – like, he was literally channeling Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage...

The Post identifies the participants as “Trump voters,” which is ostensibly true. But they are an unrepresentative sample. What better way to find Trump voters who regret their vote than to talk to non-Republicans. The majority of Trump voters are Republicans, but only a third of the Trump voter focus group participants are Republicans, which may explain why only one participant said she was still fully supportive of the president. The headline says, “Trump voters” but the piece focuses only on women, with the opinions of one man tacked on at the end. The Post doesn’t explain the gender breakdown...

Liberals ecstatic over this month’s election must not forget: Even after this demagogue is finished, a new one will rise in his place. For many, if not most, Americans, the only pleasure to be had from Donald Trump’s presidency is to imagine his premature eviction from the White House. Impeachment, the 25th Amendment, pick your poison. My own scenario places Trump on Richard Nixon’s Watergate resignation timetable, fleeing next August to Mar-a-Lago as federal bloodhounds close in on him, his son, or his son-in-law (or all three) and his party’s Vichy regime on the Hill at last mutinies in the...

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or...

You might be forgiven for thinking ― given all that has happened since Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency in November 2016 ― that buyers’ remorse would be rampant in contemporary America. But it is not. It is true that Donald J. Trump started his presidency capturing only a minority of the popular vote; and that he is significantly less popular in polls taken today than he was on election day. But very substantial pockets of support remain. They remain among members of his electoral base. They remain among life-long Republicans, not all of whom greeted...

Duane Miller realized at the “very last minute” last November that he was going to vote for a candidate he didn’t much like, Donald Trump. He did not even really vote for Trump, to hear him describe it. Instead, he voted against Washington fecklessness and corruption, which he saw as embodied by Hillary Clinton, in his eyes the ultimate establishment candidate, who was doubtlessly going to win anyway, he thought. “I thought there was no way that Trump could beat Hillary, right up till the end,” said Miller. “Right up to the night before.” That was almost a year ago,...

“Forget about the white men’s vote! But I think I myself could have perhaps done a better job in reaching out and reassuring women and white voters in general, and I think I was on my way to winning as I say in the book, until Jim Comey’s letter, aided and abetted by the Russian WikiLeaks information weaponisation,” Clinton told The Economist Asks.

We’ve all read the stories, heard anecdotes, and seen it spewed over the media—that Trump voters are all the same. They all have the same motivations, right? Not really. In fact, the Trump coalition’s views on economics and government are quite diverse. You notice GOP consternation about Trump bashing congressional Republicans from time to time—that’s not by accident. Most voters view Trump as an independent rather than the head of a major party. In fact, new polling shows that Trump is actually more popular than the GOP leadership in some key counties for the 2018 midterms. Not really a shocker...

With a cardboard cutout of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in front of him, U.S. Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack speaks Sunday at the Central Iowa Democrats' fundraiser at Iowa State University's Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center in Ames. DES MOINES -- Rural Iowa shifted its political direction in 2016 and caught Democrats off guard. The conversation of how to earn back those votes is dominating the conversation among Democrats these days. It was the focus by speakers at a recent fundraiser held by Democrats from Polk County, which is dominated by the city of Des Moines...

This week, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) signed legislation authorizing tax money to be used to fund abortions for poor people. This reversed a position he announced last April against such funding, but honors his 2014 campaign pledge "to ensure that poor mothers have the same ability to terminate unwanted children that their richer sisters have." Rauner brushed aside Republican arguments that individuals morally opposed to the murder of unborn children shouldn't be forced to finance it through taxes, saying that "individual matters of conscience cannot be permitted to impede the collective will of the people. I was elected on...

The region, which includes the cities of Barcelona and Girona, has its own language and many who live there want it to become its own republic and break away from Spain. But Madrid refuses to recognise the validity of the referendum and has ordered police to close polling stations and seize ballot boxes. Barcelona’s mayor has called for Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to step down in the wake of the violent police response. Ada Colau says that ‘if this is a democracy, the police action should be stopped immediately so we can later have a dialogue, which is what...

Progressives will make political gains when they stop assuming voters respond to nuanced arguments and ideas Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon recently told the audience at a rally for theocratic loon Roy Moore, who just won the Republican primary for Jeff Sessions’ vacated Alabama Senate seat, that “they” — meaning the Republican establishment — “think you are a pack of morons.” Accusations of "elitism" against Republican leadership are the newest incarnation of a trademark conservative attack on Democratic politicians and liberal media commentators — all of whom, we are to assume, squeeze their nostrils together whenever they walk...