Free Republic

I’m trying to restrain my anger and speak measuredly, but it’s damn hard to do so. (Nancy Pelosi’s latest trial balloon -- an investigation into the President’s handling of the Wuhan virus, was so preposterous it drove me into something I never do -- binge watching old TV serials, in this case “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”) The Wuhan virus spread throughout the world due to the Chinese government’s lies, and the acts of the head of the WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysesus who came to that position from the violent Ethiopian Communist party and covered up for China...

Amid the confusion, fear, and uncertainty surrounding the outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic in the United States, one thing is obvious: this country is astonishingly fortunate to have Donald Trump as our president. In predictably trite, small-minded fashion, the liberal media and clueless Democratic politicians have treated the pandemic as nothing more than an opportunity to score shallow political points against President Trump. All manner of "Trump has blood on his hands" and "His Pollyanna-ish downplaying of the scope of the crisis at the beginning cost us valuable time" comments and criticism have been forthcoming on an almost daily...

Since the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord rallied to the cause of liberty in 1775, the American military has held a unique place of respect and affection in our national ethos. Yet in the Coronavirus relief package recently passed by Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats tried to include language making it easier to commit voter fraud with the ballots of our military stationed overseas. House Democrat’s proposed additions to the Families First Coronavirus Response Act included changes to election law that would provide cover for individuals and activists yearning for federal protection for voting fraud schemes that...

Last week The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose patrons tend to be very wealthy, received a whopping $25 million American taxpayer dollars. The funding was part of Washington's $2 trillion Wuhan coronavirus rescue package.  Politicians like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists backing the center argued musicians, who are no longer working, needed financial stability like workers in other parts of the country. But despite the pleading and justification for the emergency funding, musicians and other workers are being fired anyway.  NEW: According to internal discussions and documents obtained by RCP, the Kennedy Center intends to furlough 60%...

Several months ago, before anyone imagined the current crisis, I read a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Jewish Viennese psychiatrist who was captured by the Nazis during World War II and managed to survive four concentration camps including the infamous Auschwitz and Dachau. He went through the ordeal observing human behavior, and the result was his formulation of a system of therapy he called logotherapy. Frankl found that those who were most successful, surviving under the most challenging circumstances, were those who retained a sense of meaning in their lives. That is, the...

"There are no libertarians in a global pandemic." So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we'd all be dead. Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren't spending their days fulminating over the evils of government-required lockdown orders in the face of a fast-spreading, deadly disease. That's because they, like all other sentient human beings, recognize that collective action is sometimes necessary. But here's the dirty little secret: Institutional failures during this pandemic are more indicative...

RUSH: Mr. Snerdley is trying to goad me into talking about the bailout package. He asked me during the break, “So what are you gonna do with your big stimulus check?” Folks, I don’t have any idea how big my stimulus check is gonna be. I don’t know how big yours is gonna be. I know what Snerdley’s trying to do. Snerdley’s trying to stir up a bunch of garbage here about, “What happened to the limits on spending that we conservatives believe in? What do you mean a $2.2 trillion…? It’s like I said Friday. Remember everybody freaked out...

If you thought our Democrat legislators wouldn’t try to push through more pork in the Covid-19 congressional barrel, you have been living in a fool’s paradise. The House has just completed its response to the bipartisan Senate bill, the Cares Act. With its $2.2T price tag, what this act is “helping” entails a lot more than a coronavirus response. Of course, much of the money is targeted at necessary things that will directly mitigate Covid-19’s impact on our nation. But as Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel points out, “A rough calculation suggests the single biggest recipient of taxpayer dollars in...

Is the world's draconian response to the coronavirus a panicked leap backward into indiscriminate annihilation — not only of national economic health, but also of its prerequisite, individual liberty? Does it prepare a future path, give sanction and precedent to eventual dictatorial control by government, which could be usurped by a left-wing administration to promote the globalist agenda that Obama and the radical Democrat Party endorse? Black swan events that inflict a planetary cost will continue to occur. Clearly, this one has overwhelmed national governments. George Soros himself could not have fantasized, in his habitual delirium, a more enticing catastrophic...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's attempted partisan sabotage of the coronavirus relief bill might mark a new low for her. That the bill finally passed the Senate doesn't excuse her reckless gamesmanship. Republican and Democratic Senate leaders were close to an agreement when Pelosi parked her partisan broomstick and poured poison into the congressional punchbowl. "Talking to some Senate GOP sources," Townhall political editor Guy Benson tweeted. "They seem stunned and angry. I'm told there was lots of bipartisan input into the legislative outline & emerging specifics -- including an agreement in principle on broad strokes. Then Pelosi showed up and...

When governments frantically throw more money than they can afford at a crisis -- and we're throwing trillions (yes, trillions) at the desperate war against the coronavirus with that federal relief package out of Washington -- two truths are self-evident. One was famously expressed by Rahm Emanuel, the discredited former mayor of Chicago who dropped his re-election bid rather than get wiped out over his clumsy suppression of a police video of a black teenager being killed by a white cop. Now he dispenses wisdom as a talking head on ABC. And the other was proclaimed by Comrade Napoleon, the...

Only in the fevered brain of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could things like forcing the airlines to be carbon neutral, making sure Planned Parenthood qualifies for small business assistance, cancelling the Postal Service’s debt, and requiring nationwide same-day voting be seen as a proper and valid response to the Wuhan Virus crisis that is crushing our economy and killing our people. People are dying, both from the disease of and the depression and anxiety caused by looming mortgage payments, job loss, and watching their retirement funds built up over a lifetime evaporate. Pelosi wants to make sure boards of corporations...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must be blind. She’s actually advocating that she and her fellow Democrats nationalize the medical supply chain and is holding the third coronavirus relief bill hostage until she and her party get what they want. She wants us to believe that this is the only solution to meet the growing need for goods to combat the coronavirus. What this is truly about is her and her colleagues’ own arrogance and quest for government expansion and control of the economy -- an obvious power grab that’s clearly designed to exploit the COVID-19 national emergency. Is Pelosi so...

To some lawmakers, there’s never been a better time to embrace pet projects and ideological wish lists. House Democrats recently introduced a $2.5 trillion “Take Responsibility for Workers and Families Act,” which includes many ludicrous items, ranging from carbon offsets for the struggling U.S. airline industry to $15 minimum wage stipulations for businesses getting relief from the government. But, perhaps the most hare-brained scheme is an asinine proposal to bail out the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Americans need a simple, straightforward bill right now to get the country back on track, not misguided Postal “reform” and other insane non-priorities. According...

The House speaker not only wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to entrench Obamacare, she wants to make taxpayers fund abortion in the process In the words of her former House colleague Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi never wants to let a crisis go to waste. The House speaker not only wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to entrench Obamacare, she wants to make taxpayers fund abortion in the process.A recent summary of the legislation Pelosi plans to introduce as an alternative to Senate Republicans’ “stimulus” bill laid out the strategy. House Democrats want to force insurers to reopen enrollment in...

This is not an emergency virus bill. It is a Democratic election wish list, at a time hundreds are dying, thousands are losing their businesses, and millions are out of work in the United States. The weekend began with a bipartisan plan. People were hopeful. Outside of Washington, business owners told The Federalist they finally saw light in all the darkness. They thought they’d be able to hire their employees back again. These are employees who have families, mortgages, and lives, people who have never asked for public assistance in their lives and never thought they’d have to.The mood in...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's coronavirus bill is not enough. It is not nearly enough. And if there is any hope of keeping the U.S. economy from free fall, its deficiencies must be addressed this week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s coronavirus bill is not enough. It is not nearly enough. And if there is any hope of keeping the U.S. economy from free fall, its deficiencies must be addressed this week with a combination of immediate and direct aid to the businesses that feed our families, host our celebrations, employ our neighbors, sponsor our Little Leagues, and make our towns our...

It was just a little over 10 years ago, at the height of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said one of the dumbest things in modern times. The best way to stimulate the economy, she declared, was with "unemployment insurance and food stamps." Right. Paying people not to work will get more people to work. Now here we go again. In the throes of the COVID-19 financial crisis, Pelosi is still spreading her economic pixie dust. Maybe it is just an inviolable rule of politics that politicians never seem to learn from their past mistakes. The...

It won't be comfortable in a city that has grown used to substituting talking points and campaign ads for governance, but the nature of the coronavirus crisis demands answers, and here's why. Washington, D.C. — Washington’s politicians are frightened for the economy and for their health, but in all this fear and the rush to flee the city there might be room for a political bargain — the kind of bipartisan bargain the working class and small and mid-sized business owners need to get through what’s coming.Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin are...

Mark your calendars because today is the day Townhall Senior Columnist Kurt Schlichter agreed with Big Chief Warren and Scat Francisco Congresscreature Nancy Pelosi. Yes, they are correct that Americans rejected Sitting Bolshevik because she was a woman, specifically, because she was a very, very annoying woman who, besides her track record of tacky lies, was very, very annoying in a uniquely female way. Putting aside that she is the Bud Light of faculty lounge socialism, Americans had no desire to spend four years with some national librarian in the Oval Office pestering us about using our inside voices and...