Free Republic

BISMARCK, N.D. - The first of what is expected to be many polls looking at the U.S. Senate candidates for North Dakota was released Tuesday, showing incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., with a narrow lead over Rep. Kevin Cramer, R, N.D. Heitkamp leads Cramer 43 to 40 with 17 percent of voters still undecided, which is unsurprising as the election is still months away. The poll was conducted online by Gravis Marketing with 385 respondents and a margin of error of 5 percentage points. Heitkamp trails among Trump supporters by a wide margin but has a lead among white voters....

appears that Republican At-Large U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer might have just been playing hard to get when he announced in January that he would not challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in November. Today, he has reversed himself, putting the race into the Toss Up column.

A new interview with Mitch McConnell this week showed the first cracks in the wall of his optimism about the midterms. While not going down a path of gloom and doom, he no longer sounds positive of breaking a long-standing trend of the party in power losing ground in such scenarios. He’s not coming out and saying the GOP’s majorities in both chambers are toast, but he seems to think they’ll be losing seats. (The Hill) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says in a new interview that he expects to see GOP majorities in the House and Senate shrink...

Every day on the football field or the baseball diamond, kids and grownups give each other a high-five to celebrate the victory or a good play. But Democrats in the United States Senate used the fun move to celebrate camaraderie and a job well done on something dark and disgusting. After the vote to defeat the bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, Democrats on the Senate floor gave each other a high-five. How members of the Senate can explain their actions is beyond most Americans — as fully two-thirds of Americans believe late-term abortions on viable unborn babies ought...

Though federal employees won’t get a paycheck during the governmment shutdown, members of Congress will — unless they specify otherwise. Ten Democratic senators on Friday introduced a bill that would withhold pay for members of Congress during the government shutdown. The legislation comes from Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), along with Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “It’s wrong that members of Congress would still get paid in...

Rep. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, announced Thursday he will not challenge sitting Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in the Senate race this fall. During an interview with KFYR radio, Cramer said he and his family decided the best decision was for him to just run again for his House seat. The move is seen as a blow to Republicans who hope to pick up the seat in the traditionally deep red state. 10 Senate seats most likely to flip in 2018 Senate candidate: Obama's birth certificate is a 'phony document' Joe Arpaio, controversial sheriff pardoned by Trump, enters Arizona...

Jeffrey Michels disappeared from an Air Force base in northern North Dakota on a summer day in 1977—and was found last week in Florida living a double life, Fox News reports. Michels, 64, was arrested Oct. 12 on desertion charges filed against him after he went missing from Minot Air Force Base near the Canadian border. Police say the former airman had taken the name Jeffrey Lantz, married, and had kids, per WFTV. In 1998, "Lantz" applied for a business license and started a construction company, Atlantic Development Corporation. Michels, originally from Ohio, was nabbed after the Facebook group Veteran...

Tax reform is done. It’s about to be law. It’s the largest revamp in three decades, but not a single Democrat voted for it. Not even Democrats from states that Trump won by wide margins. It’s a big gamble for both sides. If it doesn’t produce the economic results the GOP has been pushing, they’re sunk. If it does maintain economic growth, and any patriotic American should hope so (we’re booming at four percent right now), then Democrats have to explain why they voted against the middle class, working families, more money in Americans’ pockets, and just overall relief. Why...

Congressional Republicans say they reached agreement on a final tax bill that will provide a new 20-percent deduction for pass-through income from farms and small businesses. The agreement, which the House and Senate are expected to take up early next week, also calls for doubling the estate tax exemption and will include key expensing provisions that farm groups sought to preserve and expand, lawmakers said. They said the agreement also would allow deduction of state and local taxes, including income and property taxes, up to $10,000, a concession to lawmakers in high-tax states that could also benefit farmers. Senate Agriculture...

Planned Parenthood loses 27 more facilities in 2017 and is down to 597 in the US. Prior to 2002, there was no easy way of verifying exactly how many Planned Parenthood medical facilities existed in the United States. Planned Parenthood published a number every year and we had to believe its number. But, by 2002, the network of STOPP contacts across the United States had grown so much that we could verify a lot of PP’s claims. In addition, the Internet had become very useful and helped us track everything. As a result, we began doing an annual survey of...

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, posted to Facebook her call on Franken to resign Click here to see the list of Senators calling on Franken to resign. A top Senate Dem says he expects Franken to resign Thursday shortly after Franken’s office said he would be making an announcement Thursday. Democrat Senator Ron Wyden tweeted,”I expect that Senator Franken will announce his resignation tomorrow. It is the right thing to do given this series of serious allegations.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — More than a dozen states banded together Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a California law requiring any eggs sold there to come from hens that have space to stretch out in their cages. In a lawsuit filed directly to the high court, the states allege that California's law has cost consumers nationwide up to $350 million annually because of higher egg prices since it took effect in 2015. The lawsuit argues that California's requirements violate the U.S. Constitution's interstate commerce clause and are pre-empted by federal law. A federal appeals court...

MANDAN, N.D.—Mandan isn't Charlottesville. Or Standing Rock. The crowd gathered along Mandan Avenue outside the main gate of the refinery where President Donald Trump spoke here on Wednesday, Sept. 6, was small, largely quiet and mostly polite. Trump supporters outnumbered protesters 2-to-1 in the block closest to the gate by the time the president spoke mid-afternoon. Marty Beard of tiny Stewartsdale southeast of Bismarck was the first to arrive at 8:30 a.m. He wore a bowler hat and a long beard befitting his name. "I want to show my support for the president and let him know that there are...

North Dakota's Cara Mund claimed the crown as Miss America 2018 during Sunday night's competition at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall. Miss America 2017, Savvy Shields, former Miss Arkansas, placed the crown on the 23-year-old teary-eyed successor's head as the new Miss America accepted applause and cheers from the audience and judges. Miss North Dakota emerged victorious through a series of swimsuit and talent contests, onstage speeches and two rounds of interviews by judges. In one of her onstage interviews, Mund said President Trump, a Republican, was wrong to withdraw the U.S. from the climate accord aimed at reducing greenhouse gas...

President Donald Trump will speak Wednesday at a Mandan refinery, the White House said Monday. Trump’s speech, which is expected to be focused on tax reform, is scheduled for just after 3 p.m. Wednesday at the Andeavor refinery. Few other details about the president’s plans were known Monday. Air Force One is scheduled to arrive at Bismarck Municipal Airport at 2:40 p.m. Wednesday. The visit comes a week after the Republican president gave his first major speech on tax reform in Missouri, according to Reuters. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., who last week confirmed Trump’s visit, said the president is making...

North Dakota coal companies are hoping to have a hand in solving the nation’s supply problem of rare earth elements. Europium, dysprosium, erbium, terbium, neodymium, holmium, scandium, lutetium, and yttrium, are just a few of these valuable materials. “They’re used in pretty much all of our modern electronics,” said Steve Benson, associate vice president for research at the Energy and Environmental Research Center in Grand Forks. Magnets, hard drives, alloys, batteries, catalysts in cars, lasers, even coal’s cleaner energy cousins wind turbines and solar panels rely on rare earth elements - and could, in turn, rely on lignite coal. And...

On Wednesday, April 12, the Williston Police Department of Williston, North Dakota, auctioned off 149 firearms that had been collected over the last couple of decades. From myndnow.com: Hundreds of people attended the Williston Police Department's first gun auction.   In total, 149 guns forfeited to the department through criminal investigations were up for bid. "I used to have a federal firearms license and I used to have a side gun business. If I do stay here, I'm going to do it again and that's why I came here. To get an education," says Gary Silva, an auction attendee....

The Texas attorney general led a 15-state coalition Monday defending President Trump’s revised immigration order, amid lawsuits opposing the plan to halt immigration from six countries. In a friend-of-the-court amicus brief to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, 13 other state attorneys general and Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, laid out constitutional and federal statutory provisions defending Trump’s authority. The attorneys general also defended Trump’s “lawful actions” to revise the executive order, which was blocked last month by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit. “The president’s revised immigration order is constitutional, lawful, addresses the 9th Circuit’s concerns and...

With the snows melting in icy North Dakota, the mounds of frozen garbage left by far-left Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protestors are finally being cleared. What should the police find in all those acres of debris? A dead body, not surprisingly, nestled among all the garbage-barge-like flotsam and jetsam such Occupy-inspired campout protests always leave in their wake. The body was of a California man who hung out at protests as an 'activist' and who had been reported missing by his stepbrother last October. It was found in the Cannonball River where it had been left among all the detritus...

Families come under siege as anti-cop agitators move into pipeline campsThere reached a point when the Dakota Access protest became less about debating the merits of pipeline routes and more about mixing it up with cops. That’s when the danger spiked for officers and their families. While protesters were fueling worldwide outrage and fundraising over allegations of police brutality, an aggressive cohort of agitators was terrorizing the families of law-enforcement officers with threats of death, rape and arson. “There were threats made to us, mostly that they were going to come burn down our houses or rape us while our...