Free Republic

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign group dedicated to boosting GOP numbers in the Senate, released a slickly produced video Tuesday to mark the start of President Trump's impeachment trial. The video, which the NRSC promoted on Twitter with the hashtag "#HoldTheLine," skewers Democrats for what it claims was their desire to impeach Trump since before he even took office, as well as their lack of seriousness about the process. "This is not some neutral judgment that Democrats came to reluctantly," the video says. "It's not some somber moment or serious exercise for the left. It is the predetermined...

President Trump slammed the House impeachment managers prosecuting the case against him as “sleazebags” during an impromptu press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday -- while saying he'd "love" to attend his ongoing Senate trial back home. In the hastily called press event before Trump was to return to Washington, the president delivered an unsparing assessment of impeachment proceedings, which moved into full swing a day earlier and will resume later Wednesday with opening arguments. While making clear he's reluctant to approve any new witnesses to testify, he floated -- perhaps playfully -- the idea...

On Monday, as senators and House impeachment managers prepared for the opening of President Trump’s impeachment trial Tuesday, Democrats and their courtiers in the mainstream press decided to ratchet up the their rhetoric to the point of delusional hysteria. The House managers—led by Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler—issued a statement that essentially accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of a coverup, saying his proposed rules for the trial are “rigged,” nothing more than an “effort to prevent the full truth of the President’s misconduct from coming to light.”That wasn’t all. Schiff and the impeachment managers also called on Trump’s...

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), one of the Democratic impeachment managers, tried to establish her party's case on Tuesday for why they need to hear more witness testimony and read more documentation before the Senate proceeds in the trial against President Trump. Her remarks came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell presented his resolution on the trial rules. The White House documents that Democrats have asked for are "directly relevant to the case," Lofgren said Tuesday in support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's amendments to the resolution. Because, she argued, those documents reveal the extent to which the White House...

In the fall of 2018, the trustees of Washington and Lee University voted to paper over parts of the university’s history. On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on Institutional History and Community,” the board voted to close off the Recumbent Statue of Robert E. Lee in the university chapel that bears his name and to remove the name of John Robinson from an important campus building. A group of alumni were concerned by those decisions and started to dig deeper. They discovered that those weren’t the only attempts to de-emphasize their school’s history. Over the preceding year, the...

It was a dark and stormy night. Also icy.  Stop me if you’ve already heard this one. OK, there was a full moon so it wasn’t actually dark. We had an ice storm in Michigan the night before our departure for points west. By morning everything was still icy but road crews had done their thing and the major roads and highways were reportedly clear and wet so we proceeded with our plans. We had packed the car the day before and left it in the driveway overnight as it doesn’t fit in the garage with the car top carrier...

President Donald Trump’s legal defense team is working toward a Monday deadline to submit a defense brief against charges filed by House prosecutors in the Senate trial that is set to begin in earnest next week.https://omny.fm/shows/880-extras/alan-dershowitz-im-not-a-full-fledged-member-of-imAmong the president’s legal team is Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz, who says he’ll be making a constitutional argument against impeachment.  Dershowitz was a part of O.J. Simpson’s legal “dream team” and has defended several controversial clients, including Jeffrey Epstein. Despite voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, Dershowitz has been a vocal defender of Trump, going so far...

Immigration patterns prove that everyone wants to live in a capitalist country. Even the people who claim to be against capitalism never actually move to a non-capitalist country.

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella – the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous “whistleblower" who touched off Trump's impeachment – was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues. Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new...

Washington D.C., Jan 16, 2020 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Vice President Mike Pence will travel to the Vatican next week to meet with Pope Francis. Pence’s office confirmed with CNA on Thursday that the Vice President is scheduled to be received by the Pope during his overseas trip next week. No details have yet been released about the topics that might be discussed at the meeting. The Vice President’s visit comes immediately after the U.S. religious freedom ambassador traveled to Vatican City for the launch of the Abrahamic Faiths Initiative, held on Tuesday at the official residence of the U.S....

Former vice president Joe Biden’s extraordinary campaign memo this week imploring U.S. news media to reject the allegations surrounding his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company makes several bold declarations. The memo by Biden campaign aides Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken specifically warned reporters covering the impeachment trial they would be acting as “enablers of misinformation” if they repeated allegations that the former vice president forced the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden worked as a highly compensated board member. Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former...

As I said in a BreakPoint commentary last month, gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR and what’s being called “Prime Editing” are “existential threats.” We have no idea what our attempts to play god with the human genome will unleash on humanity. Yet, we insist on charging ahead despite our imperfect knowledge with an unbounded confidence in our abilities.Coming from a concerned non-scientist like me, these concerns can be easily dismissed as alarmist, but what if the concern comes from the Director of the National Institutes of Health?It turns out that Francis Collins is also concerned. In a recent article in...

In an unprecedented move, The New York Times editorial board recently endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar to win the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. In its endorsement of Warren, the Times described her as a “gifted storyteller,” and praised her for emerging as “a standard-bearer for the Democratic left.” If “gifted storyteller” is a euphemism for constantly lying to voters about the consequences of her policies, then Warren is a gifted storyteller indeed.For months, Warren has sold the Democrat base a false promise –– that her “Medicare for All” plan would cost taxpayers a little over $20 trillion, and that it...

The family of Kristin Smart, the California college student who vanished 23 years ago after attending a party near her school, was reportedly told by federal agents to be prepared for news and to secure a family spokesperson. Denise Smart, the woman's mother, told the Stockton Record that she was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was told to "be ready." "This is really going to be something you don't expect. We want to give you the support you need," she said she was told. The report said the FBI was not clear on what the development was,...

Say… did you catch the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial? Me neither, because I’m old and I don’t stay up until two in the morning. But many people even older than me, including some who are currently running for President, were forced to hang in there until long after the cows had come home. If any of the Senators seeking the Democratic nomination thought they would have time to dash out to Iowa or New Hampshire after the proceedings they appear to have been mistaken.The Democrats had eleven different amendments to offer concerning the...

Last year, Democrats rushed through the impeachment hearings because they claimed the evidence was overwhelming and impeachment had to be done immediately. Today, they’re bellyaching about the need for more witnesses and evidence in order for there to be a fair trial. This is, of course, after the Democrats didn’t allow the president any of his own witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry, and chose not to subpoena more witnesses in favor of getting the vote to impeach over with, so, as Nancy Pelosi has said, President Trump would be “impeached for life.” As White House counsel Pat Cippollone noted...

With impeachment drawing headlines, and Bernie Sanders sucking all the air out of the room with socialist schemes, Joe Biden is back to making gaffes, except that in this age of fantastical impeachment charges and unreal socialist schemes, gaffes are just business as usual. Here are three idiocies from Biden this week and this was just Tuesday: Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday that illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are “more American than most Americans” because they had “done well in school.” Biden, who recently said he believed drunk driving should not...

Besides the transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky, the second most important transcript is of Joe Biden's comments at a January 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. (See below.) Here's why: It's been interesting to hear Republican politicians, Trump-supporters, a few objective journalists, conservative political pundits, and even President Trump himself continue to argue that Joe Biden was the person responsible for threatening a quid pro quo to a group of Ukrainian government leaders involving a billion-dollar loan guarantee from the USA and a prosecutor investigating corruption at the Ukrainian energy company...

President Donald Trump told CNBC on Wednesday that Elon Musk is one of the world’s “great geniuses,” he likened the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX to Thomas Edison. Musk is “one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius,” Trump said in an interview with “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that came up with originally the light bulb and the wheel and all of these things. And he’s one of our very...

It is clear that China is now the new great colonial power; albeit mostly via economic colonialism, rather than necessarily some late Victorian model. Whether it is its virtual vulture capitalist snatching up of numerous European corporations during the crisis of the Great Recession, or the more subtle method of gaining ground via real estate or business investments in countries like Australia, Canada, and, to perhaps a lesser extent, the USA, or its growing influence over Hollywood’s movie industry, China has moved into a position of increased dominance throughout the world. Yet, it is its growing influence in Africa that...