Free Republic

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington has accused President Trump of supporting “illegal and dangerous acts” during the Covid-19 crisis. As a free society, our country should indeed discuss constitutional abuses of power during times of national emergency.After World War I, for example, the Supreme Court, in Schenck v. United States, argued that restrictions on free speech were justified during wartime. But where should the line be drawn? Has President Donald Trump, by encouraging governors to close much of the American economy, gone too far? Is the Constitution in jeopardy?If we compare President Trump’s actions with those of President Franklin...

I have been informally tracking the mortality rate of Covid-19 by dividing the number of reported deaths by the number of confirmed cases. I see a trend developing that is concerning. I have been seeing the percentage increasing over time. When I started tracking, the rate was down around 2.8%. It has slowling been increasing and now it is around 4.8%.

While the rest of us can’t imagine life without beauty, its absence would certainly make life easier for evolutionists. They will just have to accept their beautiful plight. I don’t often think about evolution, but I recently found myself doing so under the warm, cerulean waters of Sharks Cove on the North Shore of Oahu. I was snorkeling, taking in the tropical fish schooling around me. I thought, how did their diverse and extravagant beauty come to exist? If natural selection is the engine that created the living world, what is the reason behind this opulence? Why does beauty even...

Border Police officer “B,” who was wounded this morning, Wednesday, in a terror attack at the Kiosk checkpoint in the Ma'aleh Adumim area and is now hospitalized, recounted the incident. "During the guard shift, a vehicle drove up and rammed into me. While I was on the ground I saw the terrorist get out of the vehicle. I tried to get away from him and took him to a place where my comrades could open fire and neutralize him," B related. Although the officer was taken by surprise by the terrorist, he was still able to repel the terrorist and...

Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work. "The math is not pretty," says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. "Colleges are stressed both on the revenue side and on the expenditure side." On one end of the equation, colleges are spending money to take classes online, in some situations purchasing software, training professors or outsourcing to online-only institutions. That's on top of refunds for room and board and...

Yesterday we looked at the President’s recent announcement about suspending all legal immigration to the United States and how that might impact both our long-term immigration strategy and our efforts to combat the pandemic. Well, as too often happens, interpreting United States policy based on a single tweet from the President’s Twitter feed is a risky proposition at best. President Trump’s first announcement didn’t contain much in the way of details, but now that it’s being more fully fleshed out, we’re learning that we’re really not ending legal immigration entirely. In fact, we’re probably not going to be changing...

Around 25,000 accounts from the National Institute of Health (NIH), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Gates Foundation and other organisations working towards containing the coronavirus pandemic were hacked. The database also seems to carry several IDs from a virology lab in Wuhan, giving rise to fresh speculations and conspiracy theories. The Washington Post reported that unknown activists posted 25,000 email addresses and passwords online. This was found out by the SITE Intelligence Group, which looks after online extremism and terrorist organisations. According to the SITE report, 9,938 IDs from NIH, 5,120 IDs from World Bank and 2,732 IDs from...

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited two major abortion-related decisions in a concurring opinion spelling out when "erroneous precedents" ought to be overturned. Monday's majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a prior decision about unanimous jury verdicts, striking down state laws in Louisiana and Oregon which allowed people to be convicted of serious crimes with non-unanimous jury votes. The now-reversed 1972 ruling upheld nonunanimous verdicts in state courts. The final vote was 6-3, with a mixture of the court's conservative and liberal justices on both sides, agreeing mostly or in part with the decision. In his concurrence, the...

There could hardly have been a more terrifying place to fight a fire than in the belly of the Losharik, a mysterious deep-diving Russian submarine. Something, it appears, had gone terribly wrong in the battery compartment as the sub made its way through Russian waters 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the First of July. A fire on any submarine may be a mariner’s worst nightmare, but a fire on the Losharik was a threat of another order altogether. The vessel is able to dive far deeper than almost any other sub, but the feats of engineering that...

An Idaho woman was arrested Tuesday after police say she was violating city orders by trespassing on a city playground that was closed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. CBS affiliate KBOI-TV reports that 40-year-old Sara Brady, of Meridian, was arrested and charged with one count of misdemeanor trespassing. Following Brady's arrest, which was captured on social media, there were protests held at Meridian City Hall, KBOI reported. Station KTVB reported that roughly 100 people protested.

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area. (The New York metropolitan area is generally regarded as consisting of the five boroughs of New York City, the five New York State counties surrounding New York City -- Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Orange -- and the populous parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.) That means that more than half (52%) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New...

The director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, is warning that while we're now reaching the apex of infections by the coronavirus, the outbreak could be even worse next winter.Redfield told the Washington Post that we actually lucked out this year. If the virus had hit us a few weeks earlier, medical facilities and resources would also have been needed for other seasonal diseases like the flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis. But there will be no escaping this problem next winter.Science Alert: The coronavirus is  both more contagious and more deadly than seasonal influenza, and...

"The View" hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Meghan McCain have been sounding off regularly on President Trump's response to the coronavirus outbreak and the race between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Yet none of them have weighed in on a disturbing sexual assault allegation facing Biden leveled by his former staffer Tara Reade, who went public with her 1993 claim four weeks ago. "The View" isn't alone in the blackout. ABC News, which the daytime talk show is a part of, has not covered the controversy on-air and only acknowledged Reade's claim in the republishing...

CNN has discarded any remaining shreds of credibility by planning and then broadcasting a totally bogus event aimed at portraying its most politically connected host as some kind of hero. What makes this exercise in propaganda so stunning is that it is easily proven to be phony by the words spoken by its purported hero. You may recall that CNN’s Chris Cuomo announced to the world that he had contracted coronavirus weeks ago, and began broadcasting his daily show from his basement, as if he were some heroic jailed dissident, exploiting his illness for all it is worth. But,...

Confinement measures imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented fall of deadly air pollutants around the world, according to new research. IQAir, a Swiss-based air quality technology company, compared measurements of the world’s deadliest air pollutant — “fine particulate matter” known as PM2.5 — before and during the Covid-19 outbreak in 10 major cities across the globe. The findings, published Wednesday, revealed a “drastic drop” in air pollution for almost all of the cities under lockdown when compared to the same period a year earlier. India’s New Delhi recorded a 60% fall of...

"We all have to die of something." . That was Jocelyn Elders line (Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General). I remember that Rush Limbaugh used to play it all the time. Would be great to dig up the clip of that right now. But it’s been memory hole'd on the Internet or at least Google is not letting me know where it is. Does anyone have it? Long shot I know...

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For the press, it's quite the "gotcha" dance.  The National Institutes of Health's refusal to recommend the use of the common anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19, was proof positive according to the "science" that President Trump was wrong about the use of the drug, as well as an incompetent who was touting quack medicine, given that he noted the treatment as promising in one of his tweets. They've finally got something to pin on him. Here's a sampler of some of the headlines out there from NPR, CNN, Forbes, The Hill, and the New York Times:    One problem: The headlines are...

Morning "Him hath God exalted." Acts 5:31 Jesus, our Lord, once crucified, dead and buried, now sits upon the throne of glory. The highest place that heaven affords is his by undisputed right. It is sweet to remember that the exaltation of Christ in heaven is a representative exaltation. He is exalted at the Father's right hand, and though as Jehovah he had eminent glories, in which finite creatures cannot share, yet as the Mediator, the honours which Jesus wears in heaven are the heritage of all the saints. It is delightful to reflect how close is Christ's union with...

So this marks the sixth week in a row of a special midweek edition of Week in Pictures, which our operating guidelines say is only supposed to happen on weeks with extraordinary news events, etc. But as the lockdown has become the new normal, we’ll just have to see if we can keep this up. For now, meme-generation, along with stocking Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream supply, seem to be the only thriving sectors in America. By the way, while we’ve heard about layoffs in the news media, who no news about layoffs in Hollywood. I’ve got to think that a...