Free Republic

As liberal politicians take control of the Commonwealth of Virginia, they are getting a healthy dose of grassroots resistance by legally armed citizens. A massive crowd of 22,000 descended on its state capitol in Richmond, and the Democratic governor overreacted by declaring an inappropriate state of emergency. Unlike the women’s march which left trash all over D.C. after Trump’s inauguration three years ago, this peaceful protest by Second Amendment advocates even picked up the garbage afterwards. The gun groups are motivated, in contrast with media-created protests that quickly fade as the women’s rights march has. Many armed participants at yesterday’s...

Ultimate Fighting Championship legend Conor McGregor on Monday saluted another battler who has overcome the odds. “Phenomenal President,” McGregor tweeted in praise of President Donald Trump. His tweet then inserted the image of a goat, shorthand for “Greatest of All Time.” “Most certainly one of them anyway, as he sits atop the shoulders of many amazing giants that came before him. No easy [feat]. Early stages of term also. Incredible. Congrats and Happy Martin Luther King Jr. day America,” McGregor said.

US cherry growers want level playing field with foreign exporters DETROIT – Cherry growers in the United States have lost a fight to institute tariffs against Turkish dried cherry exporters. The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled Tuesday that the domestic cherry industry “is not materially injured or threatened with material injury by reason of imports of dried tart cherries from Turkey.” That’s despite the the U.S. Department of Commerce’s determination on Dec. 6 that dried cherries were being subsidized by the Turkish government and sold in the U.S. at less than fair value. This is of particular concern...

Is this thing still going on?

Well-known CNN personality Jim Acosta tried to intercept Ivanka Trump this week, but was expertly boxed out as her security detail left the reporter in the dust. The network’s chief White House correspondent confronted the first daughter Tuesday in Davos, Switzerland. Ivanka Trump and her father, President Donald Trump, were in the European nation for the World Economic Forum. But instead of asking about the state of the world’s finances, it seems Acosta had a different agenda. The CNN reporter hounded the first daughter and senior White House adviser as she descended a set of stairs, asking her about her...

Democrats including 2020 presidential hopefuls Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang were firing back at Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night, hours after her remarks about Bernie Sanders in an upcoming documentary were published by The Hollywood Reporter. Although Clinton appeared to walk back the remarks Tuesday night, her claims about Sanders – a leading contender for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination who battled Clinton for the 2016 nod – that “nobody likes him” and that “nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” were characterized by critics as petulant and potentally divisive for her party. For his part, Sanders...

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler -- one of the impeachment managers prosecuting President Donald Trump -- believes perjury and obstruction of justice need not be impeachable offenses. Or that is what Nadler claimed in 1998, when he was a dissenting minority member on a Judiciary Committee that approved four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. Clinton -- like Nadler -- was a Democrat. The full House voted to approve two of the four articles against Clinton -- with five Democrats voting for each of the approved articles. One article alleged Clinton committed perjury in a federal grand jury. "The...

As Oregon point guard Sabrina Ionescu racks up triple-doubles, she’s driving attendance, selling jerseys—and drawing raves from LeBron James “For a long time, one of the things that has held back the popularity of women’s basketball is this sense that male sports fans have that they are better than women’s basketball players,” Having learned the game partly on the playground makes Ionescu stand out in a landscape of young players, especially girls, who are reared on highly structured play, said Carol Callan, women’s national team director at USA Basketball. Rather than look to a coach for direction, players who play...

The coronavirus discovered in Wuhan may share the same bat-related ancestor as Sars, according to the latest study by Chinese scientists, which said the strain was weaker than the devastating 2002-03 Sars outbreak but was still “highly infectious”. The new virus shares a common ancestor with severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), in HKU9-1, a virus found in fruit bats, they found. The connection with wild animals was confirmed on Wednesday by Gao Fu, director general of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. According to Gao, the coronavirus, which has sickened more than 400 people across the country and led...

Skies are mostly clear, but the airport in Hollywood, Florida just reported light snow during the 6 to 7am hour.

An alarming graph shows how fast the Wuhan coronavirus has spread in the past two weeks alone and highlights how soon it could become a pandemic. The bar graph was posted on Twitter by Cate Cadell, the China correspondent for Reuters, on Wednesday. It shows that in the past three days the number of infections has risen sharply, as have the number of deaths and the number of countries discovering infected people. —Cate Cadell (@catecadell) January 22, 2020 It's not clear who made the graph, but the data on it is current. Cadell did not immediately respond to a request...

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump should begin with an indictment of the media. The alleged crime committed by Trump revolves around his request that the president of Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden's shady business dealings with a corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas company when Joe Biden was vice president. That investigation might have been unnecessary had the news media chosen to do what they're supposed to do: investigative journalism. Why would Trump have to ask a foreign official for an investigation into Biden sleaze? Because when politicians have a D next to their name, the idea of the press...

FLEMINGTON, N.J. - A Hunterdon County, New Jersey woman who made national headlines after claiming PetSmart groomers killed her dog is now apologizing. In 2018, Scruffles the bulldog went viral after owner Danielle DiNapoli claimed groomers from PetSmart in Flemington left her to die. Scruffles’ story made national headlines and DiNapoli's social media campaign, "Justice For Scruffles," quickly gained thousands of followers. Online petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people condemned PetSmart's grooming practices and grooming safety bill "Scruffles Law" made its way to the New Jersey legislature. But now DiNapoli is apologizing, writing in part on the "Justice...

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP/VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE and AMERICA: Healthcare, Government, Family, Military, Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. his is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 1 JOHN 5:14 Religion Forum Threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

SurveyUSA has a new national poll that shows Joe Biden leading with 32 percent of the vote, followed by Bernie Sanders at 21 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 14 percent and both Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg at 9 percent. As compared with SurveyUSA’s previous national poll in November, Biden is up 2 percentage points, Sanders is up 4, Warren is down 1, Buttigieg is down 2, and Bloomberg is up 6. While SurveyUSA has seemingly good news for Biden, an Ipsos national poll for Reuters does not. Instead, it has Sanders ahead nationally at 20 percent, followed by Biden at...

Boy, here’s a shocker. Not. – The ratings are up for Fox News’s 3:00 p.m. news block. Up by 37%, in fact, according to a report in today’s Daily Caller. That time slot got a new host this week in the form of Bill Hemmer, who has hosted a mid-morning program for the last several years. The 3:00 time slot had long been a sinkhole in the Fox News ratings while it had been hosted by the execrable leftwing jerkweed Shepard Smith. Yet, the news channel left him in that job for almost 15 years before he mysteriously resigned last...

Sometimes the timing of events is so auspicious that it is hard to attribute it to coincidence. The week of Jan. 26 is National School Choice week. First observed in 2011, for the 10th time, events will take place around the nation that are focused on raising awareness about parental choice in K-12 education and the options available to parents and children. A few days before National School Choice week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which will address the constitutionality of the so-called Blaine Amendments, arguably the greatest obstacle...

Reporters complain about business. We overlook the constant improvements in our lives made possible by greedy businesses competing for your money. Think about how our access to entertainment has improved. “When I was a kid,” says Sean Malone in a new video for the Foundation for Economic Education, “my TV broadcast options were PBS, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. Depending on the weather, it was hit or miss whether or not they were even watchable.” 1977 brought the first video rental store. “We literally had to rent a VCR along with two or three movies we could get on VHS...

Liberal billionaire 2020 Democratic candidate and owner of Bloomberg News Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the liberal media-driven impeachment drama. Bloomberg told MSNBC’s Craig Melvin on NBC's Today Show on Jan. 20 that he was asked if he were Senator how would he vote. He responded, “I’d have to swallow two or three times, but I would say I would vote to impeach, vote to convict because there's just so much evidence that he acted inappropriately” [emphasis added].

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Jan. 16 that President Donald Trump broke the law when he withheld aid from Ukraine. The union for that “independent, nonpartisan” agency naturally supports Democrats. Just don’t expect the media to tell you about it.