Free Republic

The US and India are two of the most populous and powerful democracies in the world. And they are both represented by far-right leaders. Even by the standards of the Trump era, the “Howdy Modi!” meeting in Houston, Texas, this Sunday was weird. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, had invited Donald Trump to be his guest at a massive rally in the American heartland. And, unsurprisingly, giving his submissive behavior towards authoritarian leaders, the president had accepted, happily playing second fiddle to a foreign leader on US soil. But beyond these remarkable details, the meeting was in many ways...

United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–N.Y.) announced the initiation of a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon. This launch of an impeachment inquiry comes after this weekend’s revelations that President Trump requested damaging information from the Ukraine government about presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is leading the race for the Democratic nomination in the majority of public opinion polls. Impeachment has “no legal standard,” according to Prof. David Bateman, government. The process is meant to be entirely political –– not “partisan or tawdry,” Bateman said, but considering if the “whether the president’s actions have...

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday he would back impeaching President Donald Trump if the White House refuses to comply with congressional demands for information about his interactions with Ukraine’s president and other Democratic probes. “Congress should demand the information it has a legal right to receive,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware. If he doesn’t, Biden said, “Donald Trump will leave Congress no choice but to initiate impeachment. It would be a tragedy, but a tragedy of his own making.” Biden’s remarks were his first extended comments about Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump...

For months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned itchy Democrats against the perils of impeachment. She should have stuck to her guns. In surrendering to the radicals and the noisy drumbeat of their media handmaidens, Pelosi established a formal investigative process involving the top legislative committees. Yet she did something else, too, something far more monumental: She effectively committed House Dems to impeaching President Trump. Because of what she said and did, if the House doesn’t go all the way, it will be a political disaster. Either failing to take a vote on articles of impeachment, or failing to get enough...

In his opening monologue, Stephen Colbert didn’t get the chance on Tuesday to tell a lot of jokes about the news that the House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. But his audience didn’t seem to care, because they were too busy celebrating with a standing ovation. On Tuesday’s “The Late Show,” Colbert began by rattling off numerous Donald Trump scandals, including “Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, saying Nazis are fine people, being an unnamed co-conspirator to campaign finance violations, lying about the Moscow Trump Tower, stealing money to pay for the border wall”...

The reviews are in, and critics have reached an unsurprising verdict: “Rambo: Last Blood” is not politically correct. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has scored what is presumably the final entry in the Rambo franchise at 27 percent positive based on 100 reviews from critics. In contrast, 85 percent of moviegoers gave it a thumb’s up on Rotten Tomatoes. Here is a sampling of headlines: ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is a Trumpian, Anti-Mexican Nightmare ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is A Rollicking Good Time Of Hyper-Violent Xenophobic Revenge Fantasies ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Is An Ugly, Xenophobic Mess Right wing “Rambo” propaganda is alive and...

The anonymous U.S. intelligence official accusing President Trump of improperly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is represented by two lawyers who run a group that offers financial help to fired whistleblowers. Whistleblower Aid was launched in September 2017 — eight months after Trump's inauguration — with an advertising blitz that involved mobile billboards being driven close to the White House, Congress, outside the Pentagon, and around the headquarters of the CIA and National Security Agency. The group’s pledge of support, in addition to free legal representation including rent and mortgage assistance, media coaching, and doctor’s bills and counseling, is...

Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Khan of Pakistan Before Bilateral Meeting | New York, NY FOREIGN POLICY Issued on: September 23, 2019 InterContinental New York Barclay New York, New York 1:05 P.M. EDT PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. It’s a great honor to be with my friend, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And we have some great discussions going on with Pakistan about a lot of things, including the Taliban and Afghanistan, and many other things. And trade, I think, maybe is one of the most important. We’re going to increase trade with Pakistan by a tremendous...

There is a clear ideological split concerning the current kerfuffle over President Trump’s contact with the Ukrainian government. Liberals say that any effort by the president to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings there represents a violation of law that could lead to impeachment. We conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the president has wide-ranging powers in the area of foreign policy and any such inquiry on his part was well within those powers. But then there’s the Washington Post columnist who wrote that “if the facts point to corrupt behavior, impeachment will be a...

LOS ANGELES – A high-level member of a global drug ring arrived in Southern California last night after being extradited from Colombia on charges that he conspired to transport cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars from South America to Mexico for eventual sale in the United States. The extradition resulted from a coordinated, international law enforcement operation that has led to arrests of co-conspirators on three continents. In conjunction with the extradition, federal authorities on Thursday arrested seven defendants named in a 22-count indictment that outlines how the organization obtained ton-quantities of cocaine manufactured in South American labs; used...

Details from a phone call made by Donald Trump that has led the U.S. House of Representatives to launch a formal impeachment inquiry against the president isn’t likely to come from a recording or be verbatim, former White House and national security officials say. ... Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama presidency, said not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public. “Typically a note-taker will write notes about what...

Remarks by President Trump and President Duda of Poland Before Bilateral Meeting Issued on: September 23, 2019 InterContinental New York Barclay New York, New York 2:22 P.M. EDT PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, thank you very much. It’s a great honor to be with President Duda of Poland. And we’ve become friends over the last fairly short period of time. But it’s been — it was quite a day in Poland, when we made the speech. You said some nice remarks, I said some nice remarks, and a lot of people remembered what we said. And that was a big — that...

"Republicans for the Rule of Law," a group headed by Bill Kristol, released this campaign-style ad highlighting a whistleblower accusation that President Trump inappropriately asked the Ukrainian president to investigate allegations of corruption related to Joe Biden and his son's business in the Ukraine. The ad shows pictures of Republican Sens. Mitt Romney, Richard Burr, Ben Sasse, and Marco Rubio and tells them to "stand up for the rule of law -- and stand up for yourselves."

Pelosi admits Earlier Today Everything They’re Doing Is Attempt to Stop Trump from Being Elected!!   Pelosi demanded the ‘whistleblower statement’ be given to Congress and accused the acting DNI of violating the law by withholding the document. Nancy Pelosi asserted that Trump violated federal law by and said the House of Representatives will be ‘moving forward with an impeachment inquiry.’  Speaker Pelosi also called President Donald Trump a “domestic enemy.”But earlier today Pelosi spoke at the Atlantic Festival and let the cat out of the bag. Speaker Pelosi accidentally admitted to a liberal crowd that everything Democrats are doing...

California prison officials have halted an effort aimed at forcing warring prison gangs to get along with each other after the inmates wound up brawling and even rioting when placed together in prison recreation yards, officials told The Associated Press.

At age 35, with six months of chemotherapy and three weeks of radiation behind her for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Oregon resident Karen Baas didn’t feel relief because her treatments had ended. She felt poisoned. “Of course I was grateful to have had treatment and get past it,” she told Runner’s World. “But before I got cancer, I was a vet tech, and one of the chemicals we use for euthanasia is red. It turned out one of my infusion chemo drugs is also red. I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to make that mental connection.” Three days after her...

POTUS and his team probably set this situation up to trap the Dems.

“Trump, Inc.” examines Brad Parscale, a web designer turned digital strategist turned presidential avatar with a knack for personal invention that rivals that of his boss. In August, at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, a tall man with a Viking beard and an elegant gray suit walked out on a stage, carrying a stack of red Make America Great Again hats, tossing them to an adoring crowd, shouting “Four more years!” The man is Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who vaulted from a mid-level web designer to digital strategist for the 2016 Trump campaign and now manages the...

Mr Secretary General, Mr. President, world leaders, and distinguished delegates, welcome to New York. It is a profound honor to stand here in my home city as a representative of the American people to address the people of the world. As millions of our citizens continue to suffer the effects of the devastating hurricanes that have struck our country, I want to begin by expressing my appreciation to every leader in this room who has offered assistance and aid. The American people are strong and resilient, and they will emerge from these hardships more determined than ever before. Fortunately, the...

We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do. It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the...