Free Republic

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his speech at the UN threatened to cancel PA-Israel agreements if the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea are annexed...

FROM THE OP -ED BY NEAL KATYAL IN THE NEW YORK TIMES That’s why our founders wrote the impeachment clause to be broader than criminal activity. Many crimes are not impeachable (jaywalking, for example). Other activity isn’t necessarily criminal but is obviously a basis for impeachment (not defending the United States against a foreign attack).For our founders, the touchstone of presidential unfitness to serve was always abuse of the public trust. They viewed the president as having a fiduciary obligation to the American people — just like trustees — and if the president violated that duty, he should be impeached....

REP. ERIC SWALWELL: Do you agree that the definition of a cover-up is an attempt people from discovering a crime? ACTING DNI JOSEPH MAGUIRE: I would say that’s close. I’m sure there are others, but I don’t disagree with that, sir. REP. SWALWELL: And in the whistleblower’s complaint, the whistleblower alleges that immediately after the president’s call with the president of Ukraine on July 25, White House lawyers moved quickly to direct White House officials to move electronic transcripts to one computer system, where it was normally stored, to a secret, classified information system. Is that right? ACTING DNI MAGUIRE:...

FULL TITLE: James Goll Prophesies Trump Will Appoint a Third, Female Supreme Court Justice: 'She Will Be a Modern-Day Esther' ============================================================== James Goll, president of God Encounters Ministries, says God told him in a prophetic dream that U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint a third Supreme Court justice that will be a pro-life woman who will become "a modern-day Esther." In a recently posted video, Goll tells Jim and Lori Bakker on The Jim Bakker Show that he received this dream about "a year and a half to two years ago." (Goll says the primary way God speaks to him...

It’s easy to ignore national polling when you represent a D+29 district that hasn’t elected a Republican since you were an infant, I guess.Having said that, even freshman Dems from purpler districts have swung around towards supporting an impeachment inquiry this week. And her view of whether representatives should do what they think is right versus what’s popular is surely correct. Few policy reforms in modern American poll as well across the board as expanded background checks for gun purchases, but gun-rights advocates have earnest concerns about whether those checks will lead to a national gun registry. They’ve dug...

Acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy on Sept. 25 announced new criteria for interment (burial) and inurnment (preservation of cremated remains) at Arlington National Cemetery to keep from running out of space in the nation’s most hallowed military cemetery. Congress called on the Army to revise the criteria for burial at the cemetery in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, with the goal to keep it functioning as an active burial ground for another 150 years. That’s not possible under present rules. Today, some 95,000 burial spaces remain available, but with more than 20 million living veterans and 2 million military...

Damning allegations against President Donald Trump and White House officials were exposed Thursday with the release by Congress of a complaint by a whistleblower who is a member of the U.S. intelligence community. Among them is the whistleblower’s belief that Trump’s actions were so obviously egregious that White House officials promptly launched a cover-up to minimize the chance that Trump’s efforts to have a foreign power dig up dirt on a leading Democratic presidential contender would become public. ... continued

Marietta, GA – In an unusual case with national implications, a jury in Cobb County, Georgia, has found now-retired abortionist Daniel McBrayer and his defunct Alpha Gynecology and Consulting liable for causing a nuisance that affected other tenants of a business park that once housed the abortion business. The Governor’s Ridge Office Park Association and other plaintiffs were awarded almost $1.5 million by a Cobb County jury, including more than $311,000 in attorney fees and expenses, according to Law.com. The office park association contended that McBrayer was already the subject of frequent protests when he moved into the office in...

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday morning told a crowd of staff from the United States Mission to the United Nations that he wants to know who provided information to a whistle-blower about his phone call with the president of Ukraine, saying that whoever did so was “close to a spy” and that “in the old days,” spies were dealt with differently. The remark stunned people in the audience, according to a person briefed on what took place, who had notes of what the president said. Mr. Trump made the statement about several minutes into his remarks before the group...

Amazon wants Alexa everywhere. The online shopping giant said Wednesday that it will soon start selling wireless earbuds, finger rings and prescription eyeglasses with its Alexa voice assistant built in. The goal: Get Alexa outside the home and wherever customers are. "You can have Alexa with you 24/7," said Werner Goertz, a personal technology analyst at Gartner.

Sometimes, when a news story is still unfolding in real time, we can’t do much better than to hazard a guess about how it will affect the polls. Of course, we can also not hazard a guess — that is, we can not say anything about it at all. But given that I wrote yesterday about public opinion surrounding the impeachment of President Trump, this is one time when I think it’s worth weighing in on the latest development; namely, the White House’s decision to release, on Wednesday, Trump’s reconstructed conversation (note: not a verbatim transcript) with Ukrainian president Volodymyr...

A national organization says South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is violating the Constitution by holding prayers before press conferences. News outlets report the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter to the governor’s office concerning two prayers earlier this month before press conferences regarding Hurricane Dorian. Foundation attorney Ryan Jayne says the practice violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government from favoring one religion over others. A spokesperson for the governor, Brian Symmes, says as long as McMaster is governor and the state has to prepare for dangerous storms, there will be a chaplain saying prayers...

GILMER, Texas — The Gilmer City Council passed an ordinance Tuesday officially banning abortions. The move comes one day after Tenaha also approved an ordinance to ban abortions. The city council voted 4-1 with two council members absent from the meeting. The ordinance also declared Gilmer a "Sanctuary City for the Unborn." "We need to have the discussion and the talk. We have to get beyond the emotions and sit down and have the talk," City Manager Greg Hutson said. Unlike previous ordinances, Gilmer's ordinance does not ban the morning-after pill. Hutson says the 1973 Supreme Court Case Roe vs....

Scoldilocks, Or the Story of Greta Thunberg A pair of Scandinavian leftists pimp out their Asperger’s-suffering daughter to push global warming, and chaos ensues. Monday was the culmination of a year’s worth of programmatic, propagandistic proselytization, as a 16-year-old Swedish child with a developmental disability took to a podium at the United Nations to harangue and insult the leaders of the free world over the supposed “mass extinction” that is coming as a result of global warming.Sorry. “Climate change,” as though that is somehow a tragic event; never mind the fact that the climate changes four times per year in...

China’s factory activity is expected to have contracted for a fifth straight month in September, a Reuters poll showed, adding to the country’s economic woes as Beijing remains locked in an escalating trade war with the United States... fuelling expectations the authorities will have to roll out more stimulus measures to avert a sharper slowdown... The slowdown in the manufacturing sector which saw double-digit on-quarter deceleration in revenue, profits and sale prices, according to a third-quarter survey of thousands of Chinese firms by China Beige Book International (CBB) published this week. That was despite borrowing at the highest level nationally...

Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division announced today an expansive health care fraud enforcement operation across the Gulf Coast, involving charges against a total of 11 individuals across four federal districts for their alleged involvement in various schemes to defraud Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE and to obtain oxycodone and other controlled substances by fraud. The conduct allegedly resulted in more than $515 million in fraudulent billings. Those charged included physicians, licensed social workers, as well as other medical and business professionals. In addition, in the state of Louisiana, 22 defendants, including 19 certified mental...

The Trump campaign said the whistleblower complaint is "an even bigger hoax than the Russia delusion," according to a statement released Thursday. The response comes after the release of the whistleblower complaint on Thursday, which alleges that President Trump sought to enlist Ukraine's help in the 2020 election by mounting a corruption investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden. "This whistleblower complaint is an even bigger hoax than the Russia delusion," said the Trump campaign's National Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. "It’s built on second-hand information echoed by the biased fake news media." The press secretary said in the release that...

The Justice Department announced today a significant health care fraud enforcement operation across Florida and Georgia, involving charges against a total of 67 individuals across four federal districts for their alleged involvement in various schemes to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. The conduct allegedly resulted in more than $160 million in fraudulent billings. Those charged included physicians as well as other medical and business professionals. In addition, in the state of Florida, 16 defendants, including one licensed mental health professionals, have been charged with defrauding the Medicaid program out of over $1.2 million. Florida’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) investigated these...

FULL TITLE: How the Pill transforms your personality as revealed in a landmark book by a top psychologist: It changes who you fall for, It dictates the clothes you wear AND it lowers your libido (but the good news? You are less likely to divorce) After more than a decade on the Pill, our family complete, my husband and I decided on a more permanent way to prevent pregnancy. He took the lead by having a vasectomy, and I ditched the Pill. But a couple of months later, I realised that I felt . . . different. I didn’t notice...

Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination. In recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race. “You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to...