Free Republic

On Thursday Tim Morrison, the National Security Council’s Senior Director for European Affairs appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify before Adam Schiff’s sham secret chamber impeachment During the hearing Morrison told the committee he was not concerned about anything illegal that was discussed during the Trump-Zelensky phone call. But that he did have concerns about his subordinate LTC Alex Vindman who he had issues with in the past. Jim Morrison is not the only one who had issues with Adam Schiff’s controversial start witness in the impeachment scam. Retired Lieutenant Colonel (LTTC) Jim Hickman worked with then Major Vindman...

A private association is putting out a call for volunteers, armed or unarmed, to provide outdoor security for Trump supporters traveling to the president’s campaign rally Friday night in Tupelo, Mississippi. The group “Oath Keepers,” which calls itself nonpartisan, said in a notice on its website that it needs help “keeping the rally attendees safe” after a recent Trump rally in Minneapolis at which some of the president’s supporters were harassed and assaulted on their way to and from the arena. “We generally use both armed and unarmed volunteers in our security operations, so if you have a CCW [carrying...

The House vote to establish procedures for a possible impeachment of President Trump, along party lines with two Democrats opposing and no Republicans favoring, was exactly was (sic) Alexander Hamilton feared in discussing the impeachment provisions laid out in the Constitution. Hamilton warned of the “greatest danger” that the decision to move forward with impeachment will “be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” He worried that the tools of impeachment would be wielded by the “most cunning or most numerous factions” and lack the “requisite neutrality toward those whose conduct...

After weeks of behind-closed doors testimony and years of hoping for this day, the Democratic-led House of Representatives finally passed an official vote formalizing its ongoing impeachment inquiry, thus paving the way for public hearings and testimony about whether or not President Donald Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. While the only “bi-partisan” aspect of that vote went to the “no’s,” with two Democrats voting with the GOP, it looks like the wheels of impeachment are finally beginning to officially grind toward what we all knew, ever since Democrats won...

The October employment report, released Friday ... was all that anybody could have hoped for, and more. “Perfect” is how Evercore ISI summed up the numbers, which showed steady increases in the number of Americans working and continued moderate pay gains—which, in turn, is inducing more people to come off the sidelines and look for work. Nonfarm payrolls rose 128,000 last month, much more than the 85,000 that economists had forecast after adjusting for the strike at General Motors. Automotive payrolls were off by 42,000 in October, while government employment fell by 3,000, owing to a reduction of 20,000 temporary...

President Trump’s offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark was front-page news in August, but a better option for expanding the country’s geographic footprint would be to offer statehood to the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as the interior of British Columbia. After the final results of the recent Canadian election, there’s likely a growing group of Western Canadians who might seriously consider that offer. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just squeaked through the Canadian federal election with a minority government. So, with the help of the New Democratic Party, or NDP, and the Canadian Green Party, he...

Former Vice President Joe Biden's handlers, they let him out of his private airplane yesterday to do a rare campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa. I suffered through most of it so that you wouldn't have to, and I really have to tell you how shocking it is. It’s literally like being transported back to the year 1999. The rhetoric and policy proposals are exactly the same; the only difference is he says something along the lines of how this election is, quote "a battle for the soul of this nation." The rally just completely lacked the self-awareness and the...

With any luck at all, this will be the last time the Campaign Update ever pens a word about the Texas charlatan, Irish Bob O’Rourke, or, as we love to call him around our house, el Pendejo Grande. His friends call him “Beto,” but as the new USA Today/Suffolk poll released on Friday clearly shows, Irish Bob’s “friends” have all gone away now. O’Rourke came in at ZERO in that poll, after the last handful of fawning fake journalists at Vanity Fair and the Houston Chronicle finally turned their amorous eyes towards Preacher Pete Buttigieg, and it seems that may...

Elizabeth Warren has finally laid out a detailed plan for providing universal, government-funded health care to the entire country, a signature issue for her presidential campaign. That she has at last cleared up some of the questions of how she will pay for the program she’s been promising could help her quest for the Democratic nomination. Certainly the pledge to directly avoid tax hikes on the middle class while placing much of the $20.5 trillion cost on corporations and the ultra-wealthy will appeal to progressives. But Warren’s plan may hurt her when it comes to competing with President Donald Trump...

Citing untenable situations such as the wildfires aggravated by government policy and inaction, preemptive power shutoffs by a bankrupt power company, squatters living and crapping in city streets, high priced gasoline, emergency rooms straight out of Dante’s inferno, grossly underperforming public schools, an antiquated highway system and unfettered swarming looters, Victor Davis Hanson asks “Has California Becoming  Premodern?” Lights from San Francisco are seen in the distance from an Oakland neighborhood where the power was shut off by PG&E earlier this week I think Professor Hanson intended it as a rhetorical question but the answer of course is yes: California...

... Under her proposal, large employers who currently pay for health coverage would be required to pay a comparable amount (equivalent to 98 percent of what they pay now, adjusted for the number of workers they employ) in order to help finance Medicare for All. Warren shies away from calling this a tax, and she even claims "we don't need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All." Instead, she refers to it as an employer Medicare contribution, under which companies "would send payments to the federal government for Medicare." But there is...

Japan is taking its Godzilla obsession to a gargantuan new level. The Nijigen no Mori (Awaji Island Anime) theme park is set to unveil a life-sized attraction revolving around the legendary monster’s head and upper body in 2020. For the iconic B-movie beast, “life-sized” means 65 feet high, 82 feet wide and 180 feet long — the exact proportions from one of the films about the beast, CNN reports.

How many people know that Joe Biden has scurrilously defamed an innocent man in the death of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi? This matters. It is not a small thing.Neilia and Naomi Biden were tragically killed, and his sons Hunter and Beau severely injured, on December 18, 1972 when the family car was broadsided by a truck while Neilia was taking the kids Christmas shopping. An investigation by authorities revealed no evidence that the driver of the truck, Curtis Dunn, had been drinking, according to the man who headed up the investigation, Delaware Judge Jerome Herlihy. Yet,...

Have you seen this term floating around? Latinx is supposed to be a gender-neutral version of Latino/Latina. It’s supposedly more inclusive because it doesn’t separate people into the now forbidden binary categories of men or women, so it has been championed by the woke left. But it turns out Latinos/Hispanics don’t really like it very much. A survey carried out by progressive data analysts found that only 2 percent of Hispanic people actually prefer that term:

In the United States, some governmental authorities are strongly pushing the use of bear spray over other methods of protection against bear attacks. From the Montana Hunter Ed Course:In sudden encounters, bear spray has proven to work. Bears sprayed with bear spray often stop attacking and, as such, are less likely to inflict serious injury. Use a firearm only as a last resort and only if bear spray is unavailable. Always use your bear spray to help a hunting partner who is being attacked. Misdirected bear spray is survivable; bullets are not. Bears wounded with an arrow, knife, or firearm...

Twitter has caved to the pressure from the left and announced that it will no longer run political advertisements, including any for candidates running for president in 2020. That’s because Democrats view free speech as a threat and want to regain their iron grip over “The Narrative.”After Donald Trump’s historic victory in the 2016 presidential election, liberals embraced all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain how Hillary Clinton lost an election that virtually everyone expected her to win. Unable to accept the election results as a repudiation of their corrupt candidate and the Democrat Party’s legacy of failed policies, they...

Donald Trump keeps it simple, and likely too simple given Ukraine’s opaque and corrupt politics, when he says Joe Biden arranged the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into a company that employed his son. You can find quotes on both sides from Ukrainians, but all have axes to grind. And why was Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko so resistant to the prosecutor’s firing that Mr. Biden had to threaten to hold back $1 billion in aid? Never explained. Some reports say the prosecutor was actually using the threat of investigating Burisma as a lever to extort something of value from...

This will be a weekly post. Count remains at 155 judges confirmed. 110 District Court judges 43 Circuit Court judges 2 Supreme Court justices Only 11 judges confirmed SINCE July! There are currently 24 judicial nominees waiting for floor votes. Two Circuit an 18 District. They're waiting and waiting...

China secured the World Trade Organization’s go-ahead to impose $3.6 billion in sanctions against the US , in a case that predates the tariff war between the world’s two largest economies but may add a layer of tension to ongoing talks. The damages awarded, in a document released Friday on the Geneva-based organizations’ website, are the third highest in WTO history. The amount is about half of what was requested by China, which argued that some US anti-dumping rules were illegal. The case began before the 18-month-old trade war between the two nations, which has led to tit-for-tat tariffs covering...

The nation focused on the House this week, where Democrats voted Thursday to formalize an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Less noticed, but equally important, was the prebuttal on the Senate floor. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered Wednesday a speech devoted to the glaring deficiencies in the House impeachment proceedings. The Kentuckian excoriated it for its lack of fairness and transparency, and listed the affronts to due process: secret hearings, the refusal to let Republicans call witnesses or obtain answers, the exclusion of Mr. Trump’s legal counsel from the proceedings. And he noted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s resolution would include...