Free Republic

“I don’t believe for a minute that either the president or John Bolton…has any interest in going to the Middle East and going to war. That’s just not going to happen. There’s no interest in doing that,” said Romney, a frequent critic of Trump who sits on the Senate foreign relations committee. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have been building since Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Obama-era nuclear pact in 2018 because he said the agreement did not adequately address Tehran’s influence in the region or its missile programs.

Moments ago Judiciary Committee ranking member Doug Collins released the transcripts of nine key figures from the House investigation into DOJ and FBI political activity. The transcript release includes testimony from: Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. James Comey former chief-of-staff James Rybicki. Former FBI lawyer, Office of Legal Counsel, Trisha Beth Anderson. Deputy Asst. Attorney General (DOJ-NSD), George Toscas. FBI Deputy Asst. Director, Jonathan Moffa. Former FBI Executive Assistant Director of the National Security Branch, John Giaclone. FBI Unit Chief, Office of Legal Counsel, Sally Moyer. FBI New York Field Office, Assistant Director...

REVIEW ESSAYSérotonine by Michel Houellebecq Flammarion, 2019, 352 pages For a brief moment, just before the end of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Sérotonine, a ray of hope seems to galvanize its protagonist. For a short while he seems to recover his lust for life. Having languished for years without a sense of purpose, Florent-Claude resolves to end his reliance on antidepressants. Gradually something akin to a will to live begins to resurface: he notices skirts by the bar in a café, girls, facial expressions, emotion, desire, and irritation at the mind-numbing TV programs he had been watching every day. Indeed,...

The latest Zogby poll shows that a majority of Millennials now approve of President Donald Trump’s job performance. That is a stark change from recent years—and just like Reagan in the 1980s, the rising economy is changing their mind. It has been 32 years since Ronald Reagan was president. Much has changed since then. The Federal budget was a quaint $590 billion when he started (about $1.5 trillion in today’s dollars) and will be $4.75 trillion in 2020. The Soviet Union is gone and the European Union has been on the world stage since 1993. At home, social issues have...

For all their hollow declarations that they are “pro-science”, the left continually demonstrates that they only accept “science” that affirms their own radical science-defying ideology. This is never truer when applied to the increasingly fascistic and dominant “gender ideology.” If you are a college professor and would like to lose your job, your tenure, your credibility, and even your access to social media, go ahead and present your clinical findings that contradict social justice warrior talking points. Ray Blanchard, the groundbreaking psychologist who helped craft the diagnostic and treatment procedures for clinicians dealing with transgenderism, was blocked on Twitter this...

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower. The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region...

It was hard to miss seeing Manny Garcia either out for a run or coaching soccer in his hometown of Mission, Texas, in 2014. He was out running almost every morning before his teaching job at Nikki Rowe High School, and then back out to coach the soccer team in the afternoons. He was healthy, though the runs were to shed a few unwanted pounds to get him below 200. That was his only goal, at least until January 2, 2014. He had finished soccer practice and mowed the lawn, so he lay down to watch TV. That was the...

The White House is asking Americans to share their personal stories of censorship and bias on social media. Predictably, liberals don’t seem interested in believing these victims. The appeal was announced on Wednesday and includes a tool to monitor Big Tech censorship. This is welcome news for conservatives and anyone concerned about the trend of censorship by the giant social media and search engine companies. It’s proof positive that Donald Trump is very serious about stopping the suppression of conservative speech on social media, as he alluded to in a recent tweet, when he said, “Social Media & Fake News...

VIENNA -- Formula One legend Niki Lauda, who won two of his titles after a horrific crash that left him with serious burns and went on to become a prominent figure in the aviation industry, has died. He was 70. The Austria Press Agency reported Lauda's family saying in a statement he "passed away peacefully'' on Monday. "His unique achievements as an athlete and entrepreneur are and will remain unforgettable, his tireless zest for action, his straightforwardness and his courage remain," the statement continued. "A role model and a benchmark for all of us, he was a loving and caring...

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the "most impressive... candidate" in terms of political talent in the current 2020 Democratic presidential field, Brit Hume said, comparing the South Bend, Ind. mayor's rise in popularity to the "emergence of Barack Obama." Hume said Buttigieg is "as fluid as he can be, [and] he seems to have something to say about nearly every issue."

A Darlington church is coming under fire after offering to cover up crosses and allow Muslims to say prayers in its building. St Matthew and St Luke's had initially invited members of the Muslim community for an event next month to mark Ramadan. It also offered different rooms to allow segregated worship for men and women. Upon hearing about the event the Diocese of Durham intervened and told the church it must not hold Islamic prayers in the church building. Rt Rev Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, is one of many to speak out. Speaking to...

Switzerland is one of the most gun-friendly nations in Europe. It has one of the highest rates of gun ownership per capita on the continent, and those numbers are probably skewed low because many households contain guns technically owned by the military as veterans keep their service weapons at home for rapid call-up purposes. (I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer as to whether those weapons are counted or not.) Switzerland also isn’t part of the European Union. However, the country does enjoy a good relationship with the EU. That relationship is threatened right now because the EU...

Justin Welby has become the first Archbishop of Canterbury to interview a pope in a symbol of the warm relationship shared by the two Church leaders. In a significant moment for relations between the Anglican and Catholic Church, the interview was recorded on the Archbishop's mobile phone during a recent meeting in Rome. The recording was made for Thy Kingdom Come, a global movement of prayer between Ascension and Pentecost on June 9, and will be played at a major rally of Christians taking place in Trafalgar Square on Pentecost. In a clip published in The Times and to Twitter,...

In a Register interview, Cardinal Willem Eijk discusses his concerns about gender ideology, and how faithful Catholics can respond to the current moral crisis in the Church. Gender theory, the notion that male and female roles have no, or merely a remote, connection with the biological sex, sets the human race and world order “against the Christian faith,” Cardinal Willem Eijk warned at a Rome conference. Speaking May 16 at the Rome Life Forum, an annual meeting of members of the international pro-life movement, the archbishop of Utrecht, Netherlands, explained how the ideology, which has spread rapidly, is rooted in...

New suppression measures include the ban on pilgrimages and customized “political conversion” of those refusing to join the Patriotic Catholic Association.The National Shrine and Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Sheshan is a prominent Roman Catholic church and a renowned pilgrimage site, located on the peak of Sheshan Hill in Shanghai’s Songjiang district. After the clampdown on other pilgrimage sites, Sheshan is the only remaining functioning national destination for China’s underground Catholic pilgrims; tens of thousands go there each May – the month for devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary – despite government’s restrictions and continuous suppressions. More than 800...

I hope everyone has been able to enjoy Spring migration, when it finally decided to become somewhat Spring-like. Lifer Golden-Winged Warbler American Redstart - male Bay-breasted Warbler Trumpeter Swan Blackburnian Warbler - male Eastern Screech-Owl - red-morph A week later Eastern Screech-Owl - grey morph in same cavity. Someone else photographed both in the hole together shortly after.

A good chunk of regular coffee drinkers know that coffee isn’t just great at getting them awake in the morning—it also makes them get up and go poop. But while coffee’s laxative powers are well-known, it’s not clear why exactly this happens. To get to the bottom of this mystery, some scientists decided to do exactly what you’d expect scientists to: They gave lab rats some coffee. Their preliminary results, presented this weekend at a research conference aptly named Digestive Disease Week, seem to reaffirm a suspicion that coffee’s poop-making prowess has nothing to do with caffeine. Coffee might also...

Credit to Rush Limbaugh who gave me the inspiration to write this. This was inspired by his invaluable writings in his Rush Revere series of childrenÂ’s books . Please enjoy. A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy. -Wikipedia This is the story about Moma and her amazing soup. You see, while everyone else was making...

Ritchie Valens-Donna