Free Republic

We still have no idea when or if the Senate impeachment trial will start or what the rules will be. But the general assumption is that something’s got to give and they should get underway later this month. This leaves several of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates who serve in the Senate in a bit of a fix. They can’t be seen skipping out on their solemn responsibility to act as President Trump’s jurors, but they really need to be hitting all of the campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire. (And other states beyond those if the trial...

AIN ASSAD AIR BASE, Iraq — Iran struck back Tuesday for the killing of a top Iranian general last week, firing a series of ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops in a major escalation. Iranian state TV reported the strikes were in retaliation for the killing of Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whose death Friday prompted angry calls to avenge his slaying. A U.S. official said there were no immediate reports of American casualties. Here are the latest updates: Update 9:30 a.m. EST Jan. 8: President Donald Trump is expected to speak Wednesday morning amid rising tensions...

Former vice president and presidential hopeful Joe Biden confused Iraq with Iran twice while on the campaign trail on Tuesday. "Iran's parliament voted to eject all Americans and coalition forces from the country," Biden said at a rally in New York. He made the mistake again when he said Trump threatened to get the United States into war with Iraq. "I said not long ago that as the walls close in on this president, I worried that he was going to get us in war with Iraq," Biden said at private fundraiser in New York City. Iraq's parliament approved a...

CNN on Tuesday settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann over its botched coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that had portrayed the Kentucky teen as the aggressor. Fox 19 first reported that CNN settled with Sandmann for an undisclosed amount. The $250 million defamation suit sought damages for the "emotional distress Nicholas and his family suffered" in the fallout of the network's reporting. A lawyer for Sandmann declined to comment on the settlement but confirmed to Fox News that lawsuits against The Washington Post and NBC were ongoing. Fox...

Picture by Caldwell family, with permission. Cropped by Dean Weingarten Mountain lion populations are on the increase and pose significant threats to unarmed humans.  Mountain lions were involved in a flurry of interaction with humans in the last two weeks of 2019. On 26 December 2019, Gary Gorney was hunting pheasants with his two dogs, in the Custer Mine hunting area near Minot, North Dakota. His dogs alerted him to something ahead. Instead of a pheasant, a large female mountain lion charged him out of the grass. He shot and killed the lion with his 9mm pistol. Minot dailynews.com: Gorney...

We’re going to be digging through the details of last night’s Iranian missile strike against US installations in Iraq for a while. (More on that in a moment.) But at nearly the same time that all of the shelling and yelling was going down, so was… a plane. A Ukranian owned Boeing 737 was taking off from the airport in Tehran, but it almost immediately crashed, killing all 176 people on board. (NBC News) A Ukrainian airplane carrying 176 people on board crashed after takeoff in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Wednesday, killing all on board, according to Iranian...

While the funeral for General Soleimani proceeds in Kerman, Iran, the military, with the blessing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fired 15 ballistic missiles at two bases in Iraq. The bases in Erbil in the north and Al-Assad in the west were targeted, while other bases with greater numbers of American soldiers and far closer to the Iranian border were avoided. To some, this might appear curious since as of this writing there are no American casualties. This would appear to be a significantly minimal attack, possibly a face-saving threat necessary in the belligerent Middle East. Possibly, four missiles...

“For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it” (Proverbs 8:11 KJV).

One could conceivably hold House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responsible for the death-by-drone of Qassem Soleimani for she rushed impeachment of President Trump on the grounds we could not let him occupy the White House for even one more day lest our erratic commander-in-chief do something irrational. Then she unconstitutionally withheld the two cotton-candy Articles of Impeachment from delivery to the Senate for trial. Guess you waited too long, Nancy. The killing of Soleimani was of course quite rational and quite ironic, as the Iranian general supposedly banned from international travel traveled the road from Baghdad International Airport on a road...

The US military had advance warning of an incoming rocket barrage from Iran at two bases in Iraq, giving troops time to reach shelter, according to a report Wednesday. Tehran fired more than a dozen missiles at the bases that house US and coalition forces in retaliation for a drone strike that killed Iran’s top military leader, Qassem Soleimani, last week. “The early warning system worked,” a US official told USA Today. A total of 15 surface-to-surface missiles were fired by Iran, US officials.

Iran lobbed more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. military forces in Iraq, mostly at a remote base at al-Assad, the Defense Department said Tuesday night. Iran “just conducted a massive fireworks demonstration in the desert … attacking Iraqi soil. That is unbelievably reckless and provocative,” Jim Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham later in the night.

God chose us “that we should be holy and blameless before Him” (Eph. 1:4). The challenge of Christian living is to increasingly match your practice to your position. God chose you in Christ to make you holy and blameless in His sight. To be “holy” is to be separated from sin and devoted to righteousness. To be “blameless” is to be pure without spot or blemish—like Jesus, the Lamb of God (1 Pet. 1:19). Ephesians 1:4 is a positional statement. That is, Paul describes how God views us “in Christ.” He sees us as holy and blameless because Christ our...

Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime has survived based on "internal repression" and "exporting terrorism". However "Exporting terrorism" has been a significant role in prolonging the regime's life in Tehran. The Revolutionary Guards have been identified as the regime's central apparatus of repression and terrorism. Qassim Suleimani has been the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force for 20 years and has been the driving force of all the regime's wars in the region. He has served as both the chief of staff of the army and the head of the regime's intelligence agency and as Iran's foreign minister...

The purveyors of solar energy are working overtime to spin the now official failure of the Crescent Dunes thermal solar plant in central Nevada. The contracts to purchase the electricity from the constantly broken plant will be voided. Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Crescent Dunes was obsoleted by technological advances in the form of photovoltaic based solar plants. That is nonsense and misses the whole point of the Crescent Dunes project. It also misses the reality that all utility-scale solar is a failure — not marginal, not growing into being practical, but a total and complete failure. The scalable forms of...

Imagine if a district attorney charged you with wrongdoing, and then let the charges hang over you indefinitely? That's the stunt Nancy Pelosi has been pulling, sitting on the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump since Dec. 18. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., accuses House Dems of "trying to hold these articles over the head of the president," denying him a chance to be acquitted. Graham says "if we don't get the articles this week," then Senators should deem the impeachment articles "delivered to the Senate" so the trial can begin. Monday, freshman Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo.,...

Doctors have used focused ultrasound to destroy tumors without invasive surgery for some time. However, the therapeutic ultrasound used in clinics today indiscriminately damages cancer and healthy cells alike. Most forms of ultrasound-based therapies either use high-intensity beams to heat and destroy cells or special contrast agents that are injected prior to ultrasound, which can shatter nearby cells. Heat can harm healthy cells as well as cancer cells, and contrast agents only work for a minority of tumors. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and City of Hope Beckman Research Institute have developed a low-intensity ultrasound approach that exploits...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to immediately take a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday evening notifying her that Iran had launched missile attacks against at least two U.S. military bases in Iraq. “Tell him I’ll call him back,” Pelosi said to an aide who handed her a note that the vice president was calling her during a meeting, opting to not immediately take the phone call as U.S. bases in Iraq were under attack and instead call the vice president back.

Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday wrongly attributed Australia’s devastating bushfires to climate change — an assertion that follows the arrests of 183 people accused of setting fires over the past few months. Australia has been ravaged by deadly bushfires in recent weeks, claiming the lives of at least 25 people and millions of animals across the region. Climate change activists have been quick to attribute the devastation to anthropogenic climate change.

These books contain important accounts and teachings from the early Church that every Christian should at least be familiar with. Unfortunately, many of these ancient resources are unknown to Christians today. How many of these have you read? Take the challenge here: Fifty Works From the Early Church That Every Christian Should ReadIf you have read less than 5 of these, you rank as a catechumen. If you have read at least 5, you are a novice. If you have read at least 10, you are an acolyte. If you have read at least 20, you would qualify as a...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's understanding of the constitutional authority of the president when it comes to using military force seems to depend on the party affiliation of the president in question. Pelosi supported former President Barack Obama -- a Democrat -- using military force against the Libyan regime of Moammar Gadhafi without prior congressional authorization. But she opposed President Donald Trump -- a Republican -- using military force in Iraq to kill the leaders of two State Department-designated terrorist organizations: Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of Kata'ib Hezbollah. On constitutional grounds,...