Free Republic

Democrat Markowitz loses by 16 pts… RICHMOND — Republican Gary Gates has decisively beaten Democrat Eliz Markowitz in the nationally targeted special election runoff for Texas House District 28, a disappointing loss for Democrats who had hoped to use the race to build momentum toward capturing control of the lower chamber in November. With all vote centers reporting Tuesday night, Gates defeated Markowitz by 16 percentage points, 58% to 42%, according to unofficial results. Gates, a businessman who unsuccessfully ran for office several times before, jumped out to a similar lead after early voting and maintained it throughout the night....

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) indicated in a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans that he did not yet have enough votes to defeat an effort, expected later this week, to call additional witnesses and evidence in President Trump’s impeachment trial. Pressure has ramped up to include witnesses after reports that former national security adviser John Bolton says in a book manuscript that Trump directly tied the holdup of nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine to investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The former national security adviser, who has complied with a...

A plane carrying about 201 U.S. citizens evacuated from Wuhan, China – the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus – landed in the U.S. on Tuesday night to refuel in Alaska before it took off for California. The plane is en route to California’s March Air Reserve Base “for the logistics that they have,” an official said. The Boeing 747 with red and gold stripes and no passenger windows was initially headed to Ontario International Airport in California. It landed in Alaska at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Tuesday night, was refueled and took off for California. Every passenger passed...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” House Impeachment Manager and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) stated that President Trump’s impeachment defense team “basically has admitted” that President Trump engaged in corrupt behavior, “tried to cheat” in the 2020 election, and “used the money to coerce or extort the leader of Ukraine into doing his political dirty work.” Schiff said, “[T]he president’s team basically has admitted that Donald Trump acted corruptly, withheld this money, tried to cheat in the next election, used the money to coerce or extort the leader of Ukraine into doing his political dirty...

Coronavirus outbreak update by pulmonologist Dr. Seheult of https://www.medcram.com This video illustrates the current confirmed novel coronavirus cases outside of China and coronavirus mortality rate (vs. SARS and Influenza). Video Link

After five days of opening arguments from Democrat impeachment managers and attorneys representing President Donald Trump, Senators will now be able to submit their questions to each side. Here is how things will work. Like in the Clinton trial, Republicans and Democrats will alternate questions. The questions will only be directed toward Democrat House managers and attorneys representing President Trump. Senators are not allowed to ask each other questions and cannot directly challenge answers once they were given. Questions will not be asked by Senators directly, but instead will be submitted in writing to Chief Justice John Roberts, who will...

While the new spending programs Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed in his presidential campaign would at least double federal spending over the next decade, he has provided little detail about how he would implement or finance such a massive increase. The Vermont independent's agenda represents an expansion of government's cost and size unprecedented since World War II, according to estimates from his own website and projections by a wide variety of fiscal experts. Sanders' plan, though all of its costs cannot be precisely quantified, would increase government spending as a share of the economy far more than the New Deal...

President Trump has done it again. He just keeps winning. He just keeps proving “the Trump Doctrine” works magnificently. Don’t look now, but Trump has even built his wall- and Mexico is paying for it. More on the new “Trump Wall” in a minute. But first, I want to explain how and why Trump is winning like no president in history. Even UFC legend Connor McGregor just called President Trump “the G.O.A.T.”- as in “the greatest of all time.” It’s all because of the “Trump Doctrine.” This doctrine is a mixture of Trump’s unique business acumen and negotiating skills. No...

One favorite tactic of our "objective" media during the impeachment of President Donald Trump is to find a clip of the president's legal experts such as Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz expressing an opinion during the 1998-99 impeachment of Bill Clinton and then show a contrast with the present day. But this is just as easily demonstrated with the press. It's not surprising that Democrats and Republicans favor or oppose impeachment based on the party of the president in the dock. It should be surprising that our supposedly nonpartisan journalists flip to whichever talking points are in use by the...

Today’s CG is from yesterday’s Arkansas Gazette PQ OQX HLCXVO XQ XKQCV UKQ UVVG JOP YQZGHJLO, TQM XKVLM PLCVJCV LC YQOXJSLQWC. ---QS ZJOPLOQ You can find this little fun word game, to combat early dementia and senility in us baby boomers, in several daily publications. The way it works is a letter stands for another letter. For example: AXYDLBAAXR is LONGFELLOW (does not apply to today's cryptogram). Beware, the game is very addictive. If this is your first time, don't be intimidated. PLEASE DO NOT post the answer in general comments, but DO post your time and any tips you...

SEOUL -- The U.S. military has begun issuing a notice of a potential furlough to its nearly 9,000 South Korean civilian employees as a defense cost-sharing arrangement between Washington and Seoul remains unresolved. In a press statement issued Wednesday, United States Forces Korea, the main command for U.S. troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula, said that residual funds from 2019 being used to pay the salaries of the Korean employees would soon run out. "Without the Republic of Korea's continued commitment to share the cost of employing our Korean national workforce, USFK will soon exhaust programmed funds available to pay...

BERLIN - The German cabinet on Wednesday backed plans to exit coal as an energy source by 2038 as part of efforts by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition to protect the climate and restore its green credentials. The government is spurring a shift toward renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power with exits from nuclear power by 2022 and coal-fueled power sources by 2038. “This is not just an exit from coal, it’s an entry into renewable energy,” Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told reporters. Of the coal exit, she said: “We will cut a quarter of all CO2...

... China is the planet’s premier incubator of new flu strains, blamed for the 1918-19 “Spanish” flu, 1957’s Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and the “Russian” flu of 1977. Yet the story is one of progress. China’s backyard agriculture, where ducks and pigs are raised in close proximity, was long considered a key culprit in generating new strains. With this year’s Wuhan outbreak and 2003’s SARS outbreak, suspicion has shifted to urban “wet” markets where affluent Chinese indulge an increasingly atavistic taste for wild and exotic animals slaughtered on the spot. Notice that such issues with meat...

Medicaid was created to be a safety net for the truly needy such as seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income children. Most of us agree: It is important to protect this program for the people who need it most. Unfortunately, many politicians have lost sight of Medicaid’s intended purpose. In doing so, they took limited resources meant for truly needy individuals and moved millions of able-bodied adults—the majority of whom do not work at all—to the front of the line instead. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people with developmental disabilities and other conditions remain trapped on waiting lists, hoping to...

There are a lot of ways to win a battle at different levels, but the most effective methods involve some kind of surprise and deception. Sneak attacks go back as far as war itself, and since then man has always come up with a lot of weapons designed to deliver damage without getting caught. This list are some of the coolest, scariest, and most notorious sneak attack weapons in history, focusing on attack weapons – not traps or ambush tactics. This list of stealth weapons is meant to take out a single target in silence or wipe out whole contents...

Democrats in Virginia aren’t wasting time with their first statehouse majority in 26 years—by repealing the state’s 70-year-old right-to-work law that has helped the commonwealth thrive. Twenty-seven states including Virginia have right-to-work laws that give workers a choice of whether to belong to a union. According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, the rate of job growth was two times higher in right-to-work states between 2008 and 2018 than in states where workers can be compelled to join unions or pay dues as a condition of employment. This disparity is the result of a confluence of pro-growth policies...

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Two Japanese men were diagnosed with pneumonia Wednesday while 11 others are showing symptoms including a fever and cough after they were evacuated from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the center of a deadly virus outbreak, authorities said. A total of 206 people arrived in Tokyo early in the morning on a government-chartered plane, and 204 of them are being tested for infection with the new coronavirus. The remaining two did not consent, according to the health ministry and the Tokyo metropolitan government. Among those repatriated, 12 were hospitalized including the two men in their 40s and...

President Donald Trump’s defense team falsely claimed the Justice Department was already investigating him even before the 2016 election and distorted the facts about a dossier of opposition research into Trump’s ties to Russia. A look at some of the claims Tuesday during Trump’s impeachment trial: TRUMP LAWYER JAY SEKULOW: “The president of the United States, before he was the president, was under an investigation. It was called Crossfire Hurricane. It was an investigation led by the FBI.” THE FACTS: Trump was not under investigation before he took office. In fact, Trump says he was told that directly and repeatedly...

In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.” Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state. Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage,...