Free Republic

In researching this Spygate scandal, I repeatedly encounter stories of people supposedly engaged in very sensitive intelligence and law enforcement work, who rely on people such as Christopher Steele and end up leaking the same “evidence” to the news media. This isn’t how real intelligence work is done. And that’s the first big clue that none of these Spygate investigations were authentic. Federal officials knew quite well the true nature of the sources they were using to drive these politically motivated investigations. Their sources were political operatives being handsomely paid to target their employer’s political opponents. Because of that, any...

Oslo (AFP) - A Dutch WikiLeaks associate who went missing under mysterious circumstances a year ago probably had a kayaking accident, Norwegian police said Friday, adding that his body had not yet been found. Arjen Kamphuis, a cybersecurity expert then aged 47, had not been seen since he left his hotel in the northern Norwegian town of Bodo on August 20, 2018. His disappearance had triggered a wave of conspiracy theories on social media, ranging from CIA and Russian involvement to a mission to carry out a secret project for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Then police discovered a kayak in...

Jansing: To be a mainstream Republican means to offend MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing referred to a Louisiana Republican's belief that there are only two genders as "incendiary" on Friday. Jansing and her panel addressed the GOP's relationship with women and the LGBT community, in the aftermath of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national LGBT group, endorsing President Donald Trump for a second term. "We've got an important question now," Jansing told viewers. "What does it mean to be a mainstream Republican? It is the question that some Republicans have been asking in the age of Donald Trump, and increasingly, it...

A former classmate of Justice Brett Kavanaugh sued HuffPost for defamation Wednesday, alleging that the liberal news site concocted a false story about their high school’s “party scene” as the Senate reviewed Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual misconduct. The lawsuit accuses HuffPost and reporter Ashley Feinberg of publishing false information and failing to contact persons she implicated in a crime in a September 2018 article about Georgetown Preparatory School, where Kavanaugh was a student when he allegedly assaulted Ford in the early 1980s. The contested article is an extended interview with an unnamed Georgetown Prep alumnus who described the...

Democrat Dilemma — Base Disconnected From Front-Runner Biden By David Limbaugh Published on August 23, 2019 • What could better illustrate the floundering chaos of the Democratic Party than a new national poll showing Joe Biden as the clear front-runner? The party’s got nothing else besides this fumbling faux pas factory.You know the base doesn’t want Biden, yet he’s leading the party’s polls.The Polls Sen. Kamala Harris decided to challenge Biden in the first round of Democratic presidential primary debates in June, and for a second it appeared to work, as her poll numbers surged, largely at Biden’s expense. But the...

Posted on August 22, 2019August 22, 2019 by Msgr. Charles Pope Some Advice from Mother Church Given our brief sampling of the Book of Ruth in daily Mass, perhaps a reflection is in order.The detailed background to the text is too lengthy to go into here, but a few points will help. The story features three main characters: Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi. Boaz is clearly a picture (or “type”) of Christ. He was born and lives in Bethlehem; he ultimately acts as Ruth’s “kinsman-redeemer” by rescuing her from poverty and paying the price so as to cancel her debt....

Fewer and fewer Americans are getting divorced, with the rate falling 18 percent from 2008 to 2016. Among American adults, there is support for divorce when couples do not get along. Women, people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and adults who have experienced divorce personally or among friends and family are especially likely to be accepting. Despite this growing acceptance, the divorce rate dipped again in 2018. The decline began in 1980 or 1990, depending on the data source and experts. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of divorced people per 1,000 Americans fell from 4.7...

Mayor Pete Buttigieg warned Americans in Maine Thursday of a spike in unplanned pregnancies under President Donald Trump’s administration. Buttigieg criticized Trump’s new restrictions on federal Title X funding, prompting Planned Parenthood to withdraw from the program entirely.

Perhaps there’s a perverse rationale behind the Trump administration obstinate refusal to acknowledge the monstrous calamities threatened by global warming. Why sweat floods, droughts, forest fires, supercharged hurricanes, when the teensie maladies are gonna’ kill us first? Because the hotter it gets — and Florida is coming off the hottest July, after the hottest June, after the hottest May in 125 years of record keeping — the better thermophilic bacteria, amoebas and parasites like it. The Florida peninsula provides a disturbing preview of the kind of creepy-crawly climate-change horrors that will plague America’s future. I do mean horrors. Already, Florida’s...

Russia launched the world's first floating nuclear reactor today, sending it on an epic journey across the Arctic, despite environmentalists warning it could become a 'Chernobyl on ice'. Loaded with nuclear fuel, the Akademik Lomonosov left the Arctic port of Murmansk to begin its 3,000-mile (5,000 kilometre) voyage to Pevek in northeastern Siberia. Nuclear agency Rosatom says the reactor is a simpler alternative to building a conventional plant on ground that is frozen all year round, and it intends to sell such reactors abroad. But environmental groups have long warned of the dangers of the project, dubbing it a potential...

With a sturdy job market, healthy consumer balance sheets, and low inflation, the economy is probably not headed toward a recession. But to continue America’s prosperity and guard against a potential economic slowdown caused by the ongoing trade war with China, President Trump should lower one of the most oppressive of all federal taxes — the payroll tax. The payroll tax is imposed on both employees and employers to fund Social Security, Medicare, and other social-insurance programs. Since 1955, the basic payroll tax has nearly quadrupled from 4 percent to 15.3 percent. Today, almost 70 percent of taxpayers pay more...

[Catholic Caucus] Thank You, Abp. Viganò A reflection from Fr. Paul Kalchik A year ago, Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò issued a letter to the Universal Church, and promptly went into hiding, his letter confirmed and validated in numerous ways over the ensuing months. Francis’ papacy continues on unchanged and the "homosexual current" in the Church maintains control.  For myself as a priest, as the victim of priest homosexual abuse, Abp. Viganò's letter prompted me to write my own letter to Pope Francis; this letter has been left unanswered, although it was made public.  As the victim of priest homosexual abuse, Abp. Viganò's letter prompted me to write my own letter to Pope Francis.Tweet It...

Graduating M.B.A. students this year have had no trouble landing very good jobs. In most cases, starting pay has hit record levels and placement rates for schools are at or near records as well. Yet, for the second consecutive year, even the highest ranked business schools in the U.S. are beginning to report significant declines in M.B.A. applications and the worse is yet to come, with many M.B.A. programs experiencing double-digit declines. Last year, the top ten business schools combined saw a drop of about 3,400 M.B.A. applicants, a 5.9% falloff to 53,907 candidates versus 57,311 a year earlier (see...

<snip> There are two methods of manipulation, ‘persuasion’ that the left uses to get gun control and the media is able to optimize both tactics with mass shootings.The first ploy is to pounce on a tragedy before the bodies are cold.Rahm Emanuel gave voice to this technique when he instructed: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Translation: if you have a horrific massacre, get right in there while the emotions are raw, while the victims’ families and survivors...

Back in 2017, Queerty, a prominent LGBT news and advocacy site, gleefully shared a recut of the trailer for the award-winning movie, “Call Me By Your Name,” featuring clips from Disney’s “Monster’s University.” In 2018, on the site Dan Tracer lamented that explicit sex scenes between the two main characters, a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man, were cut from the main release.Describing the decision, Tracer wrote, “James Ivory, who won the Oscar for writing the film’s screenplay, says his original script called for full-frontal from both the film’s two stars. Both Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer’s contracts, however, nixed...

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The New York Times has published a series of essays about slavery, race, and American politics under the heading “1619 Project.” These essays cover an enormous amount of terrain: music, constitutional theory, economics, management, ethnic identity, and more.Many conservatives responded negatively, which at first perplexed me. Slavery was a huge part of American history and has affected every facet of our society. A collection of articles outlining this history seems as good a topic as any to write about.But zoomed out from the mostly mundane minutiae of individual articles — in the absence of slavery and thus without as...

VIDEO The Democrat National Committee had a summer meeting meltdown in San Francisco on August 22. This is an hilarious preview of what promises to happen next year at the DNC convention in Milwaukee.

On May 28, 1993 Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12850. This improper EO changed the way the U.S. made trade deals with China and led to the loss of tens of millions of American manufacturing jobs. The story of how this was done not only proves that the Clintons are behind the loss of American jobs, but shows how Bill Clinton established a Democratic strategy for manipulating foreign policy that was copied by both Hillary while she was Secretary of State and Obama while he was president. At the time, U.S.-China trade relations were conditioned upon China’s humanitarian treatment of...

Facebook has banned The Epoch Times, a conservative news outlet that spent more money on pro-Trump Facebook advertisements than any group other than the Trump campaign, from any future advertising on the platform. The decision follows an NBC News report that The Epoch Times had shifted its spending on Facebook in the last month, seemingly in an effort to obfuscate its connection to some $2 million worth of ads that promoted the president and conspiracy theories about his political enemies. “Over the past year we removed accounts associated with the Epoch Times for violating our ad policies, including trying to...