Free Republic

Now that the smoke has cleared and we view the carnage, it's important to note that the last laugh should be on the Democrats. Republicans have until January 2nd, 2019 to make that a reality. With a little under two months left before the new Democrat majority in the House is sworn in, Republicans can push through every single element of President Trump's agenda. Fund the wall. Check. Increase the tax cuts to the middle class. Check. Make all the tax cuts permanent. Check. Ratify the new USMCA agreement. Check. Abolish birthright citizenship. Check. Finalize a limited DACA. Check. Did...

Close to the end of the year each year going back decades, The Economist magazine puts out an issue in which they take a look at the coming year and 2018 is no exception. As we had reported on ANP back on July 11th of 2017, back in 1988, The Economist put out a story in which the cover photo featured the mythical ‘phoenix’ rising out of the ashes of burning dollar bills and other paper/fiat money, wearing a gold medallion with the year ‘2018’ on it with their title, “Get Ready For A World Currency“. Reporting in their story...

French President Emmanuel Macron has reiterated calls for a European Union army, this time saying that it is needed to protect the bloc from China, Russia, and even the United States. The progressive leader, a proponent of greater EU federalisation which will result in the reduction in sovereignty for European nations, told Europe 1 Monday night that the bloc needs a “real European army”. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” Macron said, according to Agence France-Presse. (snip) “We will not protect the Europeans unless we decide to have a...

President Donald Trump urged supporters Monday morning that while there has been a historic turnaround for the United States under his administration, “it’s all fragile,” and they must get people out to vote. Trump supporters from around the country joined the president and top Trump team figures on a “Lead One Vote to Victory Telephone Town Hall” conference call Monday. The president pointed to what he called perhaps the finest economy America has ever seen, posting massive October jobs numbers despite multiple bad hurricanes. “They’re only going to get better,” he said of the economic numbers. “We have a tremendous...

Because President Trump is an Alt-Right, White-Supremacist, Nationalist Racist who wants to bring black slavery back in America, he dispatched a tweet proudly declaring record support among black voters. “New Fox Poll shows a ‘40% Approval Rating by African Americans for President Trump, a record for Republicans.’ Thank you, a great honor!” See, the thing you don’t understand about Alt-Right, White Supremacist, Nationalist Racists is that while their entire mission is to bring back black slavery, they also really want to be popular among black voters. Such disgusting white privilege! Of course the Great White Media immediately pounced on the...

The blue wave is now a bygone figment of a liberal Hollywood fantasy. Voter excitement is clearly with the Republican Party and President Donald Trump! There is a Red Wave Rising! One pundit, Michael E. Newton, has been tracking the 2018 mid-term election data to date. He addresses people’s questions about mid-term voting to date: Newton explains that because Democrat and Republican voting may have gotten closer each day, doesn’t mean that the Democrats are really catching up in early voting. It just means the Republican percent of gains over 2016 are not as great as they were yesterday: What...

More than 29 million Latinos are eligible to vote nationwide in 2018, making up 12.8% of all eligible voters....Between 2014 and 2018, an additional 4 million Hispanics became eligible voters....2014 Midterm Election Percent of Eligible Voters Who Voted - White 45.8% - Black 40.6% - Asian and Hispanic 27%.

A high-stakes competition is emerging among energy exporters proposing multi-million-dollar crude terminals along the U.S. Gulf Coast to handle a gusher of shale oil coming from West Texas oilfields. On Monday, private equity firm Carlyle Group became the latest to place a bet, proposing with the Port of Corpus Christi what it said would be the first onshore U.S. export facility able to load the world’s largest crude tankers.

More voters credit President Trump than former President Obama for the current state of the economy, according to a new poll. The Harris Poll, conducted with Harvard University’s Center for American Political Studies, found that 47 percent of respondents said they believe President Trump is responsible for the current economy, compared to 21 percent who said they believe Obama is responsible. Among those surveyed, 15 percent said they think Republicans in Congress are responsible for the state of the economy, versus 10 percent who said the same of Democrats in Congress. Trump has frequently touted the success of the stock...

Vote against all Republicans. Every single one. By Max Boot Columnist October 31 at 3:31 PM “I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.” — Joe Biden I’m sick and tired, too. I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox...

On a yearly basis, wages and salaries jumped 3.1 percent, the biggest increase in 10 years. Wage increases have been the missing link in the economy since the recovery began in mid-2008. Average hourly earnings have been rising steadily but have stayed below the 3 percent level as slack has remained in the labor market.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff on MSNBC Tuesday night claimed “the consequences are gonna be grave” if the Republicans win the midterms, and added he thinks President Trump’s “hyping of the caravan … had devastating consequences this week.”

The White House and Republican members of the House committee responsible for tax policy promised Wednesday to work on a 10 percent middle-class tax cut in the next Congress. “We are not done yet,” the Trump administration and the House Ways and Means Committee Republicans said in an unusual joint statement. “We are committed to delivering an additional 10 percent tax cut to middle-class workers across the country. And we intend to take swift action on this legislation at the start of the 116th Congress.” The joint statement follows previous middle-class tax cut promises from President Trump that took his...

President Trump indicated Wednesday the U.S. government would start paying down the $21.6 trillion in debt it's accrued over the last 80 years. "We're going to start paying down debt, we have a lot of debt," Trump said during a Wednesday discussion at the White House on the economy. "We're going to start paying down debt." Trump didn't elaborate, but he made the comment in the context of a discussion about how to improve some of the trade and economic agreements the U.S. has reached over the years. Trump said those past agreements have only helped to let U.S. wealth...

The closing campaign strategy of President Donald Trump and Republicans is often depicted as mainly an effort to galvanize the GOP's blue-collar white base through fear-mongering about immigrants and incitement of racial-cultural tensions around imagery of angry Democratic mobs and protesting African American athletes. But there's a second piece to the strategy that's also crucial: Trump and Republicans want college-educated white voters, particularly suburban women, to ignore all that unpleasant racial and cultural demagoguery entirely - and focus only on the economy. It is widely observed that Democrats are favored to take back the House because of a backlash against...

Mexico’s top security official has appeared to suggest there was some kind of conspiracy behind the two migrant caravans already in Mexico, related to the Nov. 6 U.S. midterm elections. Interior Secretary Alfonso Navarrete says “the fact that this is being done at a time when there are election campaigns in the country they’re headed for, that’s not a coincidence, that’s not chance, that’s the reason why.”

Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old seven-term congressman who built his campaign around pledges to crush corruption and crime, secured over 55 percent of the vote, an 11 percent lead over his far-left rival Fernando Haddad. “We cannot continue flirting with socialism, communism, populism and leftist extremism … We are going to change the destiny of Brazil,” said Bolsonaro in his late Sunday night acceptance speech broadcast from his home in Rio Highly divisive among Jewish voters, the Conservative lawmaker — whose middle name, Messias, literally means “messiah” — won the ballot after a drama-filled election that looks set to radically reforge...

President Trump on Sunday evening called Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro to congratulate him on his win. Trump and Bolsonaro told one another that they are looking forward to working "side-by-side" as "regional leaders of the Americas," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. Bolsonaro, the controversial right-wing populist who has been nicknamed "Trump of the Tropics," won 55.1 percent of the vote with 99 percent voting by Sunday evening in the U.S.

... Battle Creek’s Lindsey, an African-American, felt the pain too. “NAFTA just ripped us apart,” she said. And though she voted for Obama both times, Trump got her support in 2016. She said she’ll continue to vote Republican. Lindsey was among Kellogg Co. workers who lost their job because the company had moved work to Mexico following passage of the NAFTA, the U.S. Department of Labor later concluded. Trump’s message was tailor-made to those workers: His first campaign stop in his 2016 candidacy was to Birch Run, a village in nearby Saginaw County (which also flipped from Obama to Trump),...

The Trump administration is on the verge of a genuine diplomatic coup with its negotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), colloquially described as the “new NAFTA.” By all accounts, the new trade deal very much adheres to the “America First” line of President Trump’s administration: specifically, it favors American car companies and farmers, and even enters heterodox territory by offering terms favorable to American labor unions.This much is Trumpian to its core: that is, it revises NAFTA in ways that favor the industries and organizations geared at helping the so-called “Deplorables.” Those who support Trump’s orthodoxy-busting worldview should cheer.That...