Free Republic

"The View" erupted with testy moments on Wednesday as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz defended President Trump against the co-hosts during a discussion about the ongoing Senate impeachment trial. Many of the co-hosts took issue with Dershowitz's answers, including Behar who, at one point, told the Trump impeachment defense attorney that his argument was "baloney." Co-host Whoopi Goldberg also cut off Dershowitz off as he attempted to give some historical background on whether impeachment could proceed without actual crimes. He was responding to co-host Joy Behar's claim that no other constitutional scholar agreed with him about needing a crime for...

Inside Gibson’s, the atmosphere is quiet and subdued. It’s clear that this little business and its owners have endured a great deal in the past three years, beginning with student protests in front of the store in November 2016. The protesters denounced the Gibson family as racist and claimed the store had a long history of racial profiling (none of which is true). Evidence introduced at trial established that the college facilitated these protests and that at least one senior college official actively participated in them. Following the protests, the college suspended its 100-year business relationship with Gibson’s Bakery.

Now firmly established in many public libraries across the nation, drag queen story hour is branching out to new territory: public school. “In an effort to continue to strengthen and enhance inclusiveness and diversity in our school, the first grade will be taking part in a ‘Drag Queen Story Hour!'” the notification read. Apparently, this is not the first time a drag queen has visited the school to read to young children. The upcoming drag queen visit, slated for Feb. 24, will only be the latest in a series of drag queen interactions that has seemingly taken place over “years.”

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday released a plan to fight disinformation and to hold tech companies accountable for their actions in light of the 2016 election. “Disinformation and online foreign interference erode our democracy, and Donald Trump has invited both,” Warren said in a Tweet Wednesday. “Anyone who seeks to challenge and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election must be fully prepared to take this on – and I’ve got a plan to do it.” Warren proposed to combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google responsible for spreading misinformation designed to...

There was a “growing divide between northern and southern Europe” when it comes to trust in democracy and a global increase in dissatisfaction with democracy, according to a report by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy. […] Though the study was not directly concerned with identifying causes, it noted that short-term crises, notably “economic shocks, corruption scandals, and policy crises,” had “an immediately observable effect upon average levels of civic dissatisfaction.” It also pointed to the 2008 financial crash and the refugee crisis of 2015 as factors in what the survey called “malaise.” “I do think...

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A bill that would require doctors and other health workers to provide life-sustaining care for an infant born alive after a failed abortion attempt was approved by the Kentucky Senate on Monday. The measure sailed through the Senate on a 32-0 vote and heads to the House next. It's the latest in a series of abortion-related bills to surface in the Republican-dominated legislature in recent years. The bill would require health-care workers to give “medically appropriate and reasonable life-saving and life-sustaining medical care and treatment” to protect the lives of newborns, including any infant born after...

January 30 2020 Thursday of the Third Wek in Ordinary Time Reading 1 2 Sm 7:18-19, 24-29 After Nathan had spoken to King David, the king went in and sat before the LORD and said, “Who am I, Lord GOD, and who are the members of my house, that you have brought me to this point? Yet even this you see as too little, Lord GOD; you have also spoken of the house of your servant for a long time to come: this too you have shown to man, Lord GOD!“You have established for yourself your people Israel as...

Riot police fire teargas and use batons against firefighters asking for pay rise French riot police clashed with uniformed firefighters at protests in Paris on Tuesday, in extraordinary scenes where police used batons and shields against crowds of angry fire officers in helmets. Thousands of firefighters held a demonstration in the French capital, as part of long-running protest movement asking for better pay and conditions, including an increase in their hazard bonus which has not changed since 1990. Some firefighters set their uniforms alight as a symbolic gesture before colleagues put out the fires. But as a group of fire...

Last week, the university where he's taught English for the last six years traded a festive teachers' luncheon planned ahead of the Lunar New Year for frozen foods with packaging that protected them from outside germs. Administrators handed out face masks and hand sanitizer. The next day, January 23, the entire city was placed on lockdown, blocking anyone from entering or leaving the city where new cases of coronavirus were being reported at an alarming clip. Grocery stores seem then to be the only places with any business. Malls and streets are otherwise nearly deserted, John writes. Fresh vegetables have...

An attention-getting new billboard on I-25 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, recently tested a new strategy of pro-abortion outreach. The billboard, clearly meant to shock, reads, “Rape is about power and control. So are abortion bans.” Another billboard, placed on the side of a truck which circled New Mexico’s Capitol building as well as in downtown Santa Fe last week bore the messages, “Voted against abortion access? We didn’t forget,” and “Keep abortion safe and legal.” ProgressNow New Mexico, a group fighting to keep abortion legal in the state, is the group behind the billboards. Marianna Anaya, the...

Ukrainian ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin has demanded that the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) open criminal proceedings against former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden for illegal influence on him as the prosecutor general of Ukraine

On March 22, 2018, Schiff told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that Bolton was a conspiracy theorist.

Abigail Disney has weighed in on Kobe Bryant's controversial past, after actress Evan Rachel Wood and a Washington Post journalist were berated for tweeting about a rape allegation against him from 2003, just hours after his death in a helicopter crash Sunday. Disney - whose grandfather Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company - tweeted: 'I haven't said anything about Kobe so far because I felt some time needed to pass before weighing in. But yes, it's time for the sledgehammer to come out. The man was a rapist. Deal with it.'

Billions of locusts, in swarms the size of cities, are eating "everything in sight" in East Africa, and experts fear the plague could get "500 times" worse. The ZeroHedge blog reported "ravenous locust swarms that are 'the size of cities' are consuming crops at a staggering pace, and this could potentially cause famine on the African continent that is unlike anything we have ever seen before." Al Jazeera previously reported locusts "dense clouds of the ravenous insects, each of which consumes its own weight in food every day" that have spread from Ethiopia and Somalia into Kenya. "The U.N.'s Food...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) dog is campaigning for her in Iowa while the senator is stuck in Washington watching the impeachment trial. Warren’s golden retriever Bailey took to the campaign trail five days before the Democratic caucuses in the state, accompanied by Warren’s husband Bruce Mann. During a stop in Fort Dodge, Bailey posed for selfies, received pets and stuck her nose into a cake of peanut butter and oats made specifically for her, BuzzFeed News reported. Meanwhile, Mann spoke about his wife asking the crowd of volunteers to shout out single words that described the senator during her town...

A predatory child molester and an alleged rapist are among the illegal immigrants released under Mayor de Blasio’s sanctuary-city laws in the last six weeks. Why doesn’t the mayor look the victims in the eye and tell them how compassionate he is? Spare a thought for the child, younger than 11, who was the victim of Andres Peña Perez, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia. Perez pleaded guilty in Manhattan Supreme Court last December to sexually assaulting the child and was released, pending sentencing. That’s when the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency should have picked him up and...

Efforts to bring wavering Republicans into line appeared to be working as President Trump’s lawyers argued that anything a president did to win re-election was “in the public interest.WASHINGTON — The White House and Senate Republicans worked aggressively on Wednesday to discount damaging revelations from John R. Bolton and line up the votes to block new witnesses from testifying in President Trump’s impeachment trial, in a push to bring the proceeding to a swift close.

Open Letter to Bp. Knestout Asks for Clarity on Catholic Teaching Your Excellency,I write to you on behalf of Catholic Virginians all across the Commonwealth to express our confusion over your recent actions and words pertaining to the event which was scheduled to take place at St. Bede Catholic Church in Williamsburg on 01 February 2020.I am writing to you in the spirit of Canon 212 of the Code of Canon Law, which affords the Faithful the right “to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their...

A Rice County Catholic priest apologized Wednesday for describing Islam as “the greatest threat in the world,” both to the United States and Christianity itself, in a recent sermon. “My homily on immigration contained words that were hurtful to Muslims,” the Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke said in a statement posted on the website of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. “I’m sorry for this. I realize now that my comments were not fully reflective of the Catholic Church’s teaching on Islam.” Earlier Wednesday, a Muslim organization called on Minnesota Catholic leaders to repudiate the sermon. VanDenBroeke, pastor of the 100-year-old...

The South Dakota House on Wednesday evening passed legislation that would ban physicians in the state from treating transgender children with hormones and sex reassignment surgery. The Republican-controlled chamber passed H.B. 1057 in a 46-23 vote. Under the proposed law, doctors would receive misdemeanor charges if they are caught giving transgender children under 16 years old hormone treatment. The bill also bans them from performing “castration” or vasectomies on children in that age range. State Rep. Fred Deutsch (R), the primary sponsor of the bill, tweeted that after “some of the heaviest lobbying,” the legislature finally passed a bill to...