Free Republic

President Trump's hope for bipartisan legislation to combat the coronavirus pandemic was put in doubt when House Democrats tried to include non-pertinent add-on spending to it. A particularly egregious add-on was a provision that would authorize spending federal funds on abortions. After the US Supreme Court declared that women had a right to abort unwanted babies up to the third trimester in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill) led a bipartisan majority to enact a law barring the use of taxpayer funds to provide abortions. His reasoning was that since many taxpayers considered abortion to be...

Some rando fanatic Lefty judge-geezer from Hawaii [75 years old] mouths off to the Supreme Court, after ignoring the ZeroBama administration cr@pping all over the law for eight years.

Her Mom and I have been trying to persuade her not to go. She will be flying from iad to fort lauderdale. Cheap tickets. Several of her friends scooped them up last minute and the air b&b is dirt cheap. Any thoughts on how to convince her to cancel would be helpful. She successful, single and is in her mid 20s and has just been told to work from home for the next 3 weeks.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Wednesday that the White House is considering an executive order to reduce America’s dependence on foreign countries for supplying medical resources. “China has managed to dominate all aspects of the supply chain using the same unfair trade practices that it has used to dominate other sectors — cheap sweatshop labor, lax environmental regulations and massive government subsidies,” Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro said in an interview with the New York Times. Navarro indicated that the widespread coronavirus infection demonstrated that the United States depended too much on...

U.S.—CNN's ratings have somehow tanked even worse than they previously had as Americans began to quarantine themselves and stopped taking commercial flights, emptying American airports and robbing the cable channel of its captive audience. While CNN is usually able to claim millions of captive viewers every day, their audience dropped to almost nothing overnight. With airports completely devoid of weary travelers with dead smartphones and nothing to look at but CNN, the core of the channel's audience has disappeared overnight. Screens at airports across the country continued to play CNN to empty airports, creating a spooky, dystopian atmosphere as hosts...

LONDON — When I got off my flight from Beijing to London nearly two weeks ago, I knew what I had to do: go straight into self-quarantine. I live in China, where a dramatic lockdown since late January has made it clear that all residents, even those well beyond the epicenter’s outbreak in Wuhan, were in the middle of a global health crisis. The boarding process in Beijing was the final reminder: two mandatory temperature checks and an electronic health statement for which I had to provide an email address and two contact phone numbers. But as the plane approached...

The Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) announced Friday that it would delay its county conventions over concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. The IDP did not specify when it would hold the county conventions, which had been scheduled for March 21. “Today, the Iowa Democratic Party is announcing it will postpone County Conventions to a future date to be determined," IDP Chair Mark Smith said in a statement. "After extensive consultation with County Chairs, the State Central Committee, party leaders, and public health officials, we have come to the determination that the spreading coronavirus poses a risk that outweighs a temporary delay...

While neither she nor any of the show’s staff have tested positive for the coronavirus, Behar is heeding the entreaties of her daughter to stay at home for the time being. Behar is expected to be absent from the show all next week and will evaluate her situation after that. “I’m in a higher risk group because of my age, but I’m perfectly healthy,” Behar says on the episode, according to Variety. “I don’t look my age, but I’m actually up there. The number makes me dizzy.”

“We’re going to fill it right up to the top, saving the American taxpayer billions and billions of dollars, helping our oil industry [and furthering] that wonderful goal — which we’ve achieved, which nobody thought was possible — of energy independence,” Trump said. Trump’s announcement follows market turmoil in the international market when Russia and Saudi Arabia’s negotiations recently broke down and the Saudis announced they were increasing production. The Department of Energy describes the importance of the SPR: Established in the aftermath of the 1973-74 oil embargo, the SPR was established to counter a disruption in commercial oil supplies...

Astronomers have finally found something they have spent decades searching for: a teardrop-shaped star that pulsates on only one side. Citizen scientists helped the discovery team find the strangely lopsided star, which is known as HD74423, in data gathered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star is about 1.7 times the mass of Earth's sun, and scientists determined that HD74423's weird pulsing is caused by a second, smaller star. "I've been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years, and now we have finally found one," study co-author Don Kurtz, an astronomer at the University of...

Thursday night Seema Verma, one of the top members of the White House coronavirus task force and the current head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, repeatedly dodged when Fox News’ Martha MacCallum grilled her over possible ventilator shortages. Tucker Carlson was so stunned by that exchange he invited Verma on his show Friday night and opened by saying, “I watched that exchange last night, and I must be honest with you, I was really troubled by it. Because you were asked a direct question by Martha MacCallum, ‘do we have enough ventilators in ICU units,’ and you...

The Canadian Parliament on Friday ratified the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, making Canada the third and final country needed to make the trade pact official and replace the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The USMCA had faced opposition in the Canadian Parliament and became stuck in a committee for several weeks. That delayed the adoption of the deal for two months after the United States ratified it and even held a signing ceremony. Mexico approved the deal last year. "Now that the USMCA has been approved by all three countries, a historic new chapter for North American trade has...

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...

“It is not permissible to buy and sell from Zionists and Israel,” said Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi. “Unless the treatment is unique, and there is no substitute. Then this is not an obstacle.” A prominent Iranian cleric said on Wednesday that would be acceptable for the country’s citizens to use a coronavirus vaccine developed by Israel—if “there is no substitute.” “It is not permissible to buy and sell from Zionists and Israel,” Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, 93, told the Iranian daily Hamdeli. “Unless the treatment is unique, and there is no substitute. Then this is not an obstacle.”...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear arguments in two Trump administration cases over a House subpoena to White House counsel Don McGahn and funding for a southern border wall. The court vacated previous rulings in both cases on Friday, according to Politico. Arguments for each are scheduled for April 28 in front of the full D.C. Circuit. House lawmakers petitioned the court last week to revisit a lawsuit to force McGahn through subpoena to testify to Congress. A divided three-judge panel ruled on Feb. 28 that the Judiciary could not decide what amounted to a political debate between...

Republicans operatives are confident President Trump has the upper hand over his Democratic opposition. The Trump campaign entered the 2020 contest with a critical infrastructure advantage after spending spent last year building an extensive field and data program and deploying more than 800 paid staff and volunteers to key battleground states. But even with the switch to virtual campaigning, to avoid excessive person-to-person contact to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Republican insiders say the president’s eventual Democratic challenger will begin the general election at a significant operational deficit. “This situation helps Trump a great deal,” said Jim Dornan, a Republican...

The House voted just before 1 a.m. Saturday to pass an emergency coronavirus response bill to increase testing and aid people kept from work, a measure meant for quick signing by President Trump next week as the government tries to arrest the pandemic. The final vote was 363 to 40, with one member voting "present." "Our bill which is basically intact what we are passing," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, referring to the Democrats' original coronavirus package released on Wednesday. "And there's some things that they wanted that we have to put off until the next time because it just...

March 14 2020 Saturday of the Second Week of Lent Reading 1 Mi 7:14-15, 18-20 Shepherd your people with your staff, the flock of your inheritance, That dwells apart in a woodland, in the midst of Carmel. Let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old; As in the days when you came from the land of Egypt, show us wonderful signs.Who is there like you, the God who removes guilt and pardons sin for the remnant of his inheritance; Who does not persist in anger forever, but delights rather in clemency, And will again...

Guatemala will from Monday widen travel restrictions to fight the spread of coronavirus, banning arrivals from the United States and Canada, President Alejandro Giammattei said on Friday. Earlier this week, Guatemala banned arrivals from European countries, China, Iran, South Korea and North Korea. “We are therefore announcing that everyone who arrives from Canada and the United States between now and midnight on Monday will be subject to quarantining,” Giammattei said in a televised address. The president said he had also asked the Mexican government to halt deportations of migrants by land to Guatemala. No cruise ships will be allowed to...

President Donald Trump announced that Sunday would be a National Day of Prayer on Friday, not long after he officially declared a state of emergency over the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. After declaring a national emergency, Trump took to Twitter to announce his "great honor" in declaring that a National Day of Prayer would be taking place two days later. An annual National Day of Prayer normally takes place on the first Thursday of May, which falls on May 7 this year, although Trump has previously given other days the designation during emergencies. "It is my great honor to declare Sunday,...