Free Republic

High-profile dismissals of U.S. diplomats who participated in the House impeachment inquiry are raising questions about what oversight authority Congress has to push back on the president's actions. American diplomats serve at the “pleasure of the president” but charges of political retribution, campaigns of disinformation and threats to personal safety are prompting some members of Congress to call for more concrete protections for the officials. “Choosing who serves on your team is one thing. Kicking someone out because they're not loyal to your personal political agenda is another,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations...

Is robust freedom compatible with preening in front of mirrors? If men were allowed to be men, wouldn’t wild unkempt hair be much more common?

A New York Police Department detective committed suicide at his mother's home in Queens on Monday, authorities say. Sources identified the officer as Second-grade Det. Paul Federico, 53, according to the New York Post. This marks the first force suicide of 2020, following a string of alarming suicides where 10 NYPD officers took their own lives in 2019.

Over the past year, conservatism has changed. At least, the way conservative intellectuals and some politicians talk has changed. Many now speak of orienting our society toward the common good, and about using government power to pursue that good. But has anything really changed within the Republican party? Politics and policy often run a course independent of philosophical debate. Are policymakers ready to go on offense and commit to a different strategy for combatting transgender ideology and the gay agenda? The answer seems to be yes.Last month, NBC News announced: “Dozens of anti-LGBTQ state bills already proposed in 2020, advocates...

Speaking onstage to Peter Feaver, professor of political science at Duke, Bolton, by his own admission, “ducked” questions about his instructions from Trump. He said the administration’s prepublication review meant that he could not discuss details for fear of legal action. “I say things in the manuscript about what he said to me. I hope they become public someday,” he said. “He tweets, but I can’t talk about it. How fair is that?”

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Vandenberg Air Force Base, CaliforniaVandenberg Air Force Base is a United States Air Force Base located 9.2 miles northwest of Lompoc, California. The installation falls under the jurisdiction of the 30th Space Wing, United States Space Force (USSF). Vandenberg AFB is a Department of Defense space and missile testing base, with a mission of placing satellites into polar orbit from the West Coast using expendable boosters (Pegasus, Taurus, Minotaur, Atlas V, and Delta IV) and reusable boosters (SpaceX's Falcon 9). Wing personnel also support the Service's LGM-30G Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic...

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on Thursday said that he has written a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to voice concerns over the state's public pension fund chief and his connections with China. The Indiana congressman is calling out the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest state pension fund in the U.S., for allegedly investing in numerous select blacklisted Chinese companies that manufacture military products. The California-based fund invested $3.1 billion into 172 different Chinese companies, Banks said in an appearance on Fox Business Network. He said that some of the companies invested in have been blacklisted...

In fiscal year 2019, which ran from October 2018 to September 2019, Border Patrol agents detained 851,508 immigrants who illegally entered the U.S. via Mexico. Of those, more than half, 473,682, arrived with family members, Customs and Border Protection data showed. According to the Washington Examiner, more than 375,000 immigrants who were detained as part of family units were later released directly into the U.S, including 145,000 who were released directly from Border Patrol stations between March and September.

Denny Hamlin emerged victorious at the Daytona 500 on Monday night, winning the iconic NASCAR race for a third time shortly after a series of dramatic crashes on the track, including a fiery wreck that sent Ryan Newman to the hospital

Each year the White House Historical Association designs an ornament that commemorates the legacy of a president and the design for the 2020 ornament honors President John F. Kennedy. Unveiled on Monday by the White House Historical Association, the official 2020 White House Christmas Ornament honors JFK, the thirty-fifth president of the United States. (PHOTOS: Melania Wishes Everyone Merry Christmas With Release Of Official WH Christmas Photo)

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently made a splash by threatening to vote against corporate managers who don’t disclose an array of non-financial information as directed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. But what is SASB, and where is this all going? Michael Bloomberg founded SASB in 2011 as a shadow regulator for his policy agenda. SASB claims to be modelled on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a nonprofit with the imprimatur of the Securities and Exchange Commission that regulates how corporations account for and disclose financial information. SASB’s nine-member standards board issues guidelines for what kinds of sustainability information...

We’re not sure what Joe Biden is hoping to do, except to pander, by continually asserting that DACA students are in many ways more American than most Americans. Back in January, he told a crowd in Iowa that DACA recipients are “in many cases, more American than most Americans are, because they have done well in school. They believe in basic principles we all share.”

..Born in Boston in 1948, Taylor was, according to his memoir, “brought up devoted to progressive politics, self-improvement and the arts”. His father, a doctor, moved the family to the south when he became the dean of the medical school of the University of North Carolina; his mother didn’t want to go, and fought against the politics she found there. She saw the north-eastern state of Massachusetts as a “lost Eden” and would spend her days doing sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, on protests, and hauling her five kids to Martha’s Vineyard every summer to “restore our Yankee credentials”. Not...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned fellow Democrats in an exclusive CNN interview that the party "must be unified" to defeat President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential race, while noting that any of the candidates running to face him "would be a better president." "I can't even envision a situation where he would be reelected. But we are not, we don't take anything for granted. As I say, we have to have our own vision for the future. But everybody knows that we must be unified in making sure that he does not have a second term," Pelosi told CNN's...

FBI agents last month raided the home of the CEO of a bankrupt hospital chain and one of its hospitals in Pennsylvania in new signs of trouble for a company central to accusations of influence-peddling by James Biden, brother of former Vice President Joe Biden. The federal investigation was disclosed in documents filed this month by the acting U.S. trustee overseeing the bankruptcy case of Florida-based Americore Holdings, which is in the business of acquiring and managing rural hospitals. The filing in Kentucky by the federal trustee, Paul A. Randolph, seeks the appointment of a trustee specifically to oversee the...

Hollywood celebrities worked out their Trump Derangement Syndrome on President’s Day by mocking President Trump, paying tribute to former President Barack Obama, and lamenting the current slate of Democratic presidential hopefuls. Left-wing stars including Kathy Griffin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rosanna Arquette and Michael Rapaport, expressed their fervent anti-Trump sentiments on social media Monday, using the holiday to rally their fellow Democrats. Rosanna Arquette used President’s Day to send special thoughts to former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama. thinking of Michelle Obama and her husband today happy Presidents’ Day. — Rosanna Arquette🌎✌🏼 (@RoArquette) February 17, 2020 Full Metal Jacket star...

“If you show up with cancer & you’re 95 years old, we should say, Go & enjoy. There’s no cure, we can’t do anything. A young person, we should do something. Society’s not willing to do that yet.”

President Trump is set to travel Tuesday to the belly of the Democratic beast — California, the prime target of his clashes on sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, a powerful foe of his auto-mileage proposal, a flashpoint in his battle over federal funding for abortion and the home of what he calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “disgusting slum” district in San Francisco. The president is making his fifth trip to the state that has become his Ground Zero of everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party. In addition to his high-profile policy disputes with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, California is home...

Dr. Michael Ryan, a top World Health Organization (WHO) official, revealed why the organization is not classifying the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic.“I think we need to be extremely cautious in using the term ‘pandemic.’ We had lots of controversies during the H1N1 situation, around when it was pandemic and when it wasn’t pandemic, and I think we need to be careful,” he said, referring to the swine flu virus. A pandemic, Ryan suggested, would have to entail “efficient community transmission outside of China,” where COVID-19, or the Novel Coronavirus, is believed to have originated. He is the executive director of...

A former Justice Department official who is discussed throughout the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse added his name Monday to a petition calling on William Barr to resign as attorney general. David Laufman, who served as chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section through 2018, said Monday that he joined more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees who signed the petition, which was started by the anti-Trump activist group, Protect Democracy