Free Republic

I love Ireland for its natural beauty, its people, its food (some of it), its music, its writers and especially its elections, which are shorter, less costly and designed to engage citizens and boost voter turnout. On January 14, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called a general election for February 8. That means a campaign of slightly more than three weeks. In the process, the Irish Parliament was dissolved. What a delightful thought. If only the U.S. Congress could be at least occasionally dissolved. It could use some dissolving, or at least disinfecting, after the toxic impeachment and trial of...

Project Veritas Action released a new undercover investigation today that includes footage of two Bernie Sanders operatives. It just keeps getting worse and worse for Bernie Sanders and his supporters. It seems like anyone and everyone who works for the Bernie Sanders campaign is all about promoting violence, extreme action, even “Republican reprogramming camps.” Two South Carolina Field Organizers for the Sanders Campaign, Mason Baird and Daniel Taylor, are secretly recorded admitting that the Sanders campaign attracts “truly radical people.” https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1222167846790352897 Full video:

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s unfavorable ratings among women in the Granite State have ballooned by five points since she accused rival U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of saying a woman can’t win the White House, a new poll shows. Warren has also lost support from both male and female voters in New Hampshire despite a new campaign push focusing on the Bay State senator’s electability and female electability in general(snip) “Can we just address it right here? Women win,” Warren said at a 300-person rally in Davenport, Iowa, Sunday. “Women candidates have been outperforming men candidates — since Donald Trump was...

... The Tseycum Nation claims the pair’s rented $18-million mansion is built on land “stolen” by British colonizers almost two centuries ago. “We get no money from the land now, nothing. But for us, it’s just not right houses like that are built there,” Chief Tanya Jimmy told the Sunday Mirror. Brits settled on Vancouver Island around 1843. Harry and Meghan spent six-weeks over the Christmas holidays at the posh palace, believed to be owned by a Russian oligarch. And since the couple severed their ties with the Royal Family, it appears that Vancouver Island will be the pair’s base...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is leading the Democrat primary field in Utah, a Salt Lake Tribune/Suffolk University poll released Monday showed. Suffolk University conducted the poll January 18 – 22, 2020, among 132 Democrat primary voters. It showed the socialist senator leading by double digits with 27 percent support overall. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came in a distant second with 14 percent support, followed by Joe Biden (D) and Michael Bloomberg (D) with 12 percent and ten percent, respectively. Even though the margin of error is +/- 8.5 percentage points, Sanders’ lead is outside statistical error.

Thanks to Utah’s benighted legislature this past week, parents in that state are now barred by law from seeking licensed counseling for their children who suffer from gender identity confusion or unwanted same-sex feelings. The parents are free, of course, to hire counselors who steer the kids into transgenderism or homosexuality – but not the other way around. This is the brave, new America. So, if a child is molested and develops same-sex attractions or gender dysphoria, parents cannot find credentialed help, just quacks who insist that no one can ever “go straight” or even try. This would be news...

David Hogg ✔ @davidhogg111 This is a tweet for for the founders of the gun violence prevention movement started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and non binary people that never got on the news or in most history books. We may not know all your names but thank you. 3,327 8:07 PM - Jan 26, 2020

The more we talk about freedom (of speech, of assembly, to carry guns, religion) in the world today occupied and controlled by everything progressive, the more we hear the chains rattling I wrote before about the 2006 Oscar winner for the best Foreign Language Film, “Das Leben des Anderen” (The Lives of Others), a German drama that describes in painful detail life in the communist East Berlin of 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret...

This is the kind of thing that insures President Trump will be re-elected in November–or would, if anyone watched CNN. It is hard to imagine a less attractive 80 seconds of television. What is it about liberals (and formerly conservative never-Trumpers like Rick Wilson) that makes them so smug and self-satisfied? Especially given that, as in this case, they are generally people of so little accomplishment. Anyway, here it is: President Trump has tweeted this, so a great many people will see it. Well done, CNN! https://twitter.com/SteveKrak/status/1221988232528826369?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1221988232528826369&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.powerlineblog.com%2Farchives%2F2020%2F01%2Finsuring-trumps-re-election.php

Nor were the golden bullet pens Pelosi’s first flight of fancy on speaking in bullets The public at large should be clued in about prayerful Nancy Pelosi’s overriding obsession with bullets. In fact, the off-the-rails Democrat Speaker of the House now speaks to the Nation in bullets. “Instead of lasting “forever”, Nancy Pelosi’s signed “souvenir impeachment pens” ran out of ink today.

Hillary Clinton has returned to the political stage at the Sundance film festival and says she believes she could beat Donald Trump if she were to run again in November. In a wide-ranging interview with Variety about her new Hulu docu-series she was asked if she felt the urge to beat the president. 'Yeah. I certainly feel the urge because I feel the 2016 election was a really odd time and an odd outcome,' Clinton replied. 'The more we learn, the more that seems to be the case. But I'm going to support the people who are running now and...

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is discussing an idea for the ongoing impeachment trial of President Donald Trump that would allow each party to call one witness to testify. According to The Washington Post, the lawmaker from Pennsylvania has brought up his "one-for-one" proposal with Republican colleagues, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. Romney is one of a handful of senators who is on the fence about calling witnesses for the trial. Most Republicans are publicly opposed to having witnesses testify and would like the trial, which kicked off more than a week ago, to come to a swift end.

The idea of a campus “safe space”—a university-sanctioned oasis where students can go to destress and feel at ease—has had its share of ridicule. And it’s not hard to see why: It is often hard to distinguish between a college safe space and a preschool daycare. For example, in April 2019, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted a “Week of Balance” for students. The week’s events were packed full of therapeutic activities including “coloring and origami therapy,” “sweet treats,” “yoga and crafting,” and engaging in a “cathartic primal scream” followed by an ice cream outing. But safe...

The Chinese partners of US citizens have been banned from a rescue flight to evacuate Americans from the city of Wuhan amid a deadly outbreak of coronavirus. A charter flight is scheduled to fly from the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport to San Francisco International Airport on Tuesday. The US consulate in Wuhan began reaching out to all Americans registered as living in the city last week to offer them a seat on the plane. There are roughly 1,000 Americans in the city. Benjamin Wilson, who is from Louisiana but living in the epicenter of the disease with his Chinese wife...

SUBTITLE: As face masks sell out, people say "information is so hidden" and "we don't know the whole picture". Subtle changes are seeping into daily life in Bangkok. Thermal scanners now stand at the doors of luxury malls and attendants pump disinfectant into the hands of visitors as they stream in. With 14 cases, Thailand now has the highest confirmed number of coronavirus infections outside China and people are starting to worry. "It's spreading so fast and the information is so hidden, we don't know the whole picture," young mother Cathy told me. Even her four-year-old son obediently wears a...

“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. Happy is the man that feareth alway: but he that hardeneth his heart shall fall into mischief” (Proverbs 28:13-14).

An Iranian news agency has claimed a CIA chief who helped plan the assassination of general Qassem Soleimani was killed in a plane crash yesterday in Afghanistan. The highly dubious report comes after the Pentagon yesterday denied its E-11A communications jet had been shot down by the Taliban, but stated it had crashed in the Dih Yak district. The US gave no details of casualties but Iranian media and Kremlin-linked news sites have claimed that among the dead was Michael D'Andrea, a CIA boss credited with hunting down Osama bin Laden, known as the 'Dark Prince' and 'Ayatollah Mike.' Iranian...

I guess I should say something. For five years my office at AEI was right next to John Bolton. Lately I’ve been having fun with this photo suggesting I can do “hearsay” with the best of Adam Schiff’s witnesses (that is, “making stuff up”). I can’t say I got to know Bolton very well, but as early risers we were often the first people in the office before well before 7 am on many days, so I’d sometimes stop to chat over coffee and we’d joke about things. And he was helpful to me several times when I needed some...

I’m taking the day off to go skiing as the Sundance herds continue to muck around town. I feel a bit safer from the coronavirus up in the clean mountain air.There will be hot cocoa, as I understand it is loaded with antioxidants; and whipped cream.So I leave today’s heavy lifting and trolling in your capable hands. Don’t do anything they wouldn’t do on a Ukrainian bot farm.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

Environmental organizations are urging the board members of a major lobbying group for California restaurants to reconsider their support for a lawsuit against Berkeley over the city's ban on natural gas in new buildings.