Free Republic

It wasn’t all a dream. One impeachment manager took an unusual approach to answering a Trump attorney’s question: by quoting a legendary rapper from his Brooklyn House district. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) took a line from Notorious B.I.G. on Tuesday when responding to a question from Jay Sekulow, an attorney on President Trump’s impeachment defense team, who asked, “Why are we here?” “We are here, sir, because President Trump pressured a foreign government to target an American citizen for political and personal gain,” the New York Democrat responded, adding, “We are here, sir, because President Trump solicited foreign interference in...

Chinese officials have confirmed 440 cases of the new coronavirus strain - 2019-nCoV - so far, with 17 deaths. Based on existing data, it is said to have a 2% death rate. This means that for every 50 people who catch the infection, one will statistically die. To put this into context, around one in every 1,000 who develop flu die, giving it a death rate of 0.1%. “This [2019-nCoV’s death rate] could be 2%, similar to Spanish flu,” Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, said. Professor Peter Horby, from the University of Oxford, pointed out fatality estimations are...

President Donald Trump said teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg should save her anger for other countries in the world that were worse polluters than the United States. The president spoke about Thunberg during a press conference at Davos before he left Switzerland to return to the United States. He said the United States was experiencing great environmental numbers while other countries were worse polluters of the air and putting tons of garbage in the Pacific ocean. “I think Greta has to start working on those other countries,” Trump said. “Pretty much nothing has been done,” Thunberg lamented at a World...

https://youtu.be/IdpSZGoOtFE

President Trump has condemned the European Union’s protectionism and difficult attitude towards free trade, remarking that British leader Boris Johnson had “guts” in taking on the continental power bloc but that ultimately the UK was “in a good position” to strike deals. Speaking at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, shortly before departing for the United States, President Trump spoke about the difficulty in getting a trade deal with the European Union and how the bloc was ripping off non-members with tariffs. Comparing their relationship with the U.S. to that with even China, the President...

In a sit-down interview with Maria Bartiromo which aired Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” President Donald Trump said Virginia is “in play” for him to win in 2020. Trump pointed to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s (D) push to take away guns, arguing Northam wants to do away with the Second Amendment. “I think Virginia is crazy where they want to take away guns,” Trump outlined. “You have a governor that’s — I just can’t believe it — but Virginia is very much in play. I think we are going to win state of Virginia. They want to...

The attorneys general of 21 states have come forward with a blistering rebuke of the impeachment of President Trump, asserting that it "establishes a dangerous historical precedent." The Republican attorneys general, in a letter submitted to the Senate Wednesday morning and obtained by Fox News, urged the chamber conducting Trump's trial to "reject" the impeachment articles. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS ADMONISHES BOTH SIDES AT SENATE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL, AFTER MARATHON SESSION ERUPTS INTO SHOUTING MATCH "If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent that is entirely contrary to the Framers' design and ruinous to...

NEW YORK (AP) -- CBS was the first major network to break away from President Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate on Tuesday, allowing its viewers to watch their regular afternoon fare instead of a debate over a proposed amendment to subpoena White House documents. The decision illustrated the on-the-fly judgments television executives will face every day of the trial, juggling concerns over millions of dollars in advertising revenue, news purists cognizant of the weight of history and angry soap opera fans. Uncertainty over the Senate's schedule from hour to hour, much less day to day, complicates things even...

DAVOS, Switzerland—President Donald Trump said China’s human rights record and the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong are part of phase two trade discussions with China, in response to a question from The Epoch Times on Jan. 22. At a press conference in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, Trump said “we would like to see we can do something” about the issues in China and Hong Kong. “We are discussing that already,” he told reporters. “We’re doing a trade deal, and it’s a very big deal. Phase one is done, phase two...

Some Senate Democrats are considering accepting a proposal first voiced by GOP Sen. Ted Cruz to trade witnesses in President Trump's impeachment trial. Cruz proposed what he called "witness reciprocity" to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was receptive to the idea, last week as a potential means to secure testimony from Hunter Biden. Several Senate Democrats are now considering embracing the proposal in order to get former national security adviser John Bolton to testify in the trial, according to the Washington Post. Bolton has said he is willing to testify in the Senate trial if subpoenaed. The Democrats weighing...

As usual, fake news media ignored a Democrat irresponsibly throwing a racial-hate-generating grenade into a crowd of blacks. On MLK day 2020, Joe Biden referred to Trump as “this president and his Ku Klux Klan...” This is extremely evil when you understand that Biden knows his accusation is absurd and easily proven false. Biden thought he was simply throwing the dumb black congregation a vote-winning racist dog biscuit. As a black and grateful proud American, it turns my stomach the way Democrats repeatedly pander to us, pretending race relations in America have not progressed beyond the 1950s. Irresponsibly, Hollywood, public...

House impeachment manager Adam Schiff misconstrued text messages between two key players in a pressure campaign against Ukraine waged by President Trump's administration, according to a new report. In a letter to fellow impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler, Schiff said indicted businessman Lev Parnas “continued to try to arrange a meeting with President Zelensky” and provided text messages between Parnas and Rudy Giuliani, the driving force behind the campaign, as evidence of this effort. Documents obtained by Politico Tuesday night show Schiff cited one text message in which Parnas told Giuliani he was “trying to get us mr Z.” A...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. Though he worked primarily in framing the legacies of many prominent pre-#Woke Democrat figures, he was well-received in circles occupied by Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent...

Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and their jackal pack are already howling that a Senate trial dismissal vote or a trial without witnesses amounts to a "cover-up." We don't care what they think. But we must care very seriously about what Americans think, and Americans have not heard the president's defense against the bogus charges because the House Democrats forbade this basic fairness. The Senate trial is his perfect chance to destroy the Democrats' sham impeachment. If most Americans knew about the vicious covert war waged by anti-Trump officials at the highest levels of our revered security agencies to usurp the...

Liberal billionaire 2020 Democratic candidate and Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg said he’d have to “swallow two or three times” before he would “vote to convict” President Donald Trump. But that may have just been political theater. Bloomberg intends to “shift his television ad message this week to directly call for President Trump’s removal from office, with a new spot that will run in states with Republican senators who face competitive reelection fights this year” [emphasis added], The Washington Post reported Jan. 21.

Democrats conspired with foreign agents, lied, cheated, and denied due process to Donald Trump. If they were willing to do that to a duly elected president in order to obtain power, what should Americans expect them to do to them should they refuse attempts to be disarmed? Democrats understand that an armed America can say, “No!” And they can’t have that. If they want to radically change the America extant for more than two centuries, they need to first disarm Americans. And they realize asking nicely is not going to accomplish this. Therefore, the ever-equable Democrats have suffered a recrudescence...

In the wake of the Virginia gun rights rally on Monday, Democrats in the Capitol are not slowing down their push for tyranny. They are moving a bill through the legislature that would effectively criminalize dissent against Governor Blackface Northam and other state government officials. House Bill 1627 was introduced by Delegate Jeffrey M. Bourne last week. The legislation “provides that certain crimes relating to threats and harassment may be prosecuted in the City of Richmond if the victim is the Governor, Governor-elect, Lieutenant Governor, Lieutenant Governor-elect, Attorney General, or Attorney General-elect, a member or employee of the General Assembly,...

... Biden’s pattern of gibberish If you expect a president to be able to speak coherently about the matters of the day ... Biden is not your man, at least not consistently. That’s simply a fact. The bigger issue is whether his speech is a reflection of an increasingly disordered brain. He interrupts himself in mid-sentence and goes on extended riffs, introducing new subjects that seem to have nothing to do with what he was just talking about. He is sometimes impossible to follow. And he can get quite irascible. He is in some ways the absolute verbal opposite of...

The first day of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump was largely taken up with procedural issues. Senators argued over and then adopted an organizing resolution laying out the rules under which the trial will proceed. In his opening statement, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., charged that the resolution proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was “partisan,” a “national disgrace,” and a “dark day in Senate history.” All of this heated rhetoric was based on Schumer’s misleading claim that McConnell’s resolution was unfair and significantly different from the resolution governing Bill Clinton’s trial. Yet the resolution adopted...

"There are no words to express the result" was the beaming reaction of Belgium's Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, after a 15th-century masterpiece -- painted over shortly after completion -- was restored to its former glory. And they were right -- commentators have been left speechless by one particular aspect of the newly revealed painting. The latest panel of the "Ghent Altarpiece," a large work by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, was unveiled in December as part of an ongoing project to restore the painting to its original design. The painting -- also known as "The Adoration of the Mystic...