Free Republic

Maryland’s Obamacare insurers are asking for a 30 percent average rate increase for 2019, with some plans seeking hikes as high as 91 percent. The proposals Monday come a few days after Virginia insurers also called for double-digit rate increases. Democrats have pounced on the rate hikes to say they are examples of how President Trump’s health policies are leading to high premiums. Maryland Obamacare insurers CareFirst, BlueCross, and BlueShield plan to raise rates for an HMO plan on the law’s exchanges by 18 percent, and 91 percent for an extended network, or PPO, plan. Kaiser Permanente, the state’s other...

Connecticut’s legislature has passed a bill that would give the state’s Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. The state Senate voted 21-14 on Saturday to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which includes 10 states and the District of Columbia. The state House passed the measure last week, 77 to 73. The compact requires its members to cast their Electoral College ballots for the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The agreement goes into effect once states representing at least 270 electoral votes — the number needed for a candidate...

The groundhog had traffic stopped in the road. Cop claims it "wasn't acting normally" and blew it away.Video here.

A police officer was seen shooting a groundhog in the middle of Liberty Road in Carroll County, upsetting some onlookers. A video posted by one woman shows the officer killing the groundhog after it charges at him. "This just happened. And I’m soooo distraught," wrote Justyna Olkowska on Facebook. She said she was disturbed to see "Sykesville police shooting [groundhogs] in [the] head in broad daylight." "Like I cannot believe I just witnessed this. If you’re not an animal lover, you won’t understand my pain," she wrote. "I may be wrong and he might have been doing his job but...

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh blamed the City’s surging murder rate on local businesses. “First of all, most of this City’s retail businesses are open too late,” she lamented. “Keeping your doors open after dark is asking for trouble. This is a time when people should be at home with their families and not be forced to go out to buy things.” “Second, their prices are too high,” she continued. “If merchandise didn’t cost so much people wouldn’t be forced to commit crimes just to be able to afford groceries and liquor. It shouldn’t surprise us that people would use the...

California’s “jungle” primary system has Democrats worried that Republicans could win some of the Golden State’s congressional seats in midterm elections, a top House Democrat said Friday. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., speaking to USA Today, said Democrats have a shot at winning in more than 50 congressional districts nationwide — enough to take control of the House from the GOP. Democrats need to win 24 seats to flip the House, according to the New York Times, while maintaining the 194 seats they currently hold. But California’s primary system, in which the top two vote-getters face off in the...

Secretly Taped Audio Reveals Steny Hoyer Pressuring Progressive Candidate To Leave Race And Support The Party Choice. Well well well!The DNC and RNC are criminal enterprises. This recording needs to spread far and wide! From The Intercept: Progressive candidate Levi Tillemann met with Congressman Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the Colorado primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that the Republican incumbent had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to...

A far-left congressional candidate in Colorado secretly recorded a meeting he had last year with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D.-Maryland) who attempted to pressure him into dropping out of the race against the establishment candidate preferred by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As you can see in the April 26 video below, Hoyer definitely gave off 2016 vibes of the establishment Democrats rigging the primary system in favor of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Yes, I said "see" because The Intercept entertainingly combined cartoons with the secretly recorded audio.

Liberal groups demanded the resignation of a top House Democrat on Thursday after he was caught on a secret recording trying to strong-arm a progressive candidate to nix his congressional campaign and clear the way for party leaders’ preferred pick to win. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, told Levi Tillemann, a Democrat running in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, to drop out because “a judgment was made very early on” that opposing candidate Jason Crow, an Army veteran, was the party’s choice to take on a vulnerable Republican. The recording, which Mr. Tillemann released to the...

Historian wants DNA test for academy's John Paul Jones By EARL KELLY, Staff Writer Who's buried in John Paul Jones' crypt at the Naval Academy? This isn't a trick question. Some say the grand state funeral at the Naval Academy on April 24, 1906, for the father of the United States Navy may have been held over the wrong body. According to Washington College history professor Adam Goodheart, who wrote about Jones in the April issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jones' body may have been dumped in a landfill, used to fertilize vegetables or simply lost forever. He said modern-day science...

Only six states do not have some sort of right to keep and bear arms amendment or clause in their state Constitution. They are California, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and  New York. California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York show the lack of a state constitutional protection with their highly restrictive firearms laws.Two outliers on that list are Iowa and Minnesota. State constitutional protections of the right to bear arms provide protection when the federal Constitution fails to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court has been reluctant to protect Second Amendment rights for a decade. Getting to the U.S....

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Florida Republican Congressman Ron DeSantis, along with 10 other GOP members of the House, sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday, detailing formal criminal referrals against James Comey, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch and Andrew McCabe. While Sean Hannity and other conservative radio and TV talk show hosts played the letter up as if it is a momentous event, the truth is that it makes referrals that are already being acted upon by the Attorney General. Sessions has already and repeatedly made it clear that...

Washington, DC – Rep. Ron DeSantis (FL-06) today sent a letter, along with several colleagues, to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and US Attorney John Huber, asking them to investigate several Obama-era officials for potential violation(s) of federal statutes. These officials include former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Counsel Lisa Page, among others. Read the criminal referral here. The following members have joined DeSantis in this call for equal application of the law:...

President Donald Trump will speak at the Naval Academy commissioning ceremony next month in Annapolis, city officials confirmed Wednesday. It will be Trump’s first time speaking to the academy’s graduating class, as last year Vice President Mike Pence gave the address. Graduation will be held at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium at 10 a.m. May 25 with a Blue Angels fly-over to begin the ceremony. The City of Annapolis will be cooperating with the secret service to provide security for Trump’s visit, said Susan O’Brien, city spokeswoman. The city is not yet confirming which roads will be closed for the...

Former MSNBC host Ed Schultz opened up in a recent interview about why he believes he was fired in 2015. Schultz, who’s now anchor of a show on RT, told National Review‘s Jamie Weinstein that he believes it was because he supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which was problematic, he charged, because the network was “in the tank for Hillary Clinton.”He described how MSNBC chief Phil Griffin was a "watchdog" who closely managed which stories were covered, and relayed one incident where his story about Sanders’s launch of his campaign was bumped in favor of other news. Sanders gave his official campaign...

WASHINGTON, DC -- A naked man has been arrested after attacking Metro riders Thursday morning at the Dupont Circle station in D.C., according to multiple reports. At 5:45 a.m., the man reportedly was acting aggressively toward Metro riders. Specifically, Steve Chenevey of Fox 5 tweeted that the man assaulted someone on the train, exited the train at Dupont and then "did naked calisthenics on the platform." The man reportedly ignored orders from responding police officers, prompting an officer to use a stun gun on him. He was then taken into custody. Two victims had minor injuries, according to the Washington...

The Maryland Transportation Authority is exploring phasing out all cash toll booths across the state. Today, tolls are collected three ways: by cash, or electronically, by either an E-ZPass transponder or by video tolling — when the state uses a license-plate photo and mails drivers their bill. Transportation officials say that the transition to all-electronic, high-speed toll collection will: save drivers time on their commute, save the state money, reduce accidents at toll plazas, and reduce CO2 emissions as less fuel is being burned, according to a national study by the University of Central Florida. Drivers in Maryland could start...

Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017. In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education... That put the Baltimore ahead of only Detroit and Cleveland, and sometimes ahead of Milwaukee and Fresno, Calif. — areas of...

A city government that would drag everyone down to its level.It’s like the old saying of city government goes: if at first you don’t succeed, tax something that is succeeding. Members of the Washington, D.C. government have suggested a way to prop up its failing Metro system while hamstringing its competitor. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently proposed a nearly 400 percent tax increase on ridesharing services, increasing the fee that users pay from 1 percent to 4.75 percent. This would increase the tax on a $10 trip from ten cents to forty-seven cents. Local officials are proposing to use this tax...

Design-bid-build may still be the No. 1 project delivery method for U.S. construction, but other processes are rising that could challenge DBB’s stake in how some projects are carried out.One such arrangement, public-private partnerships (P3), is gaining steam with talks from Washington, D.C., about employing the method for President Donald Trump’s $1.3 trillion infrastructure spend. While more states and local entities are successfully turning to P3s to tackle major infrastructure overhauls and new projects, the method still runs up against a perception problem. Some elected officials are hesitant to employ P3s because they don’t want to let a private firm...