Free Republic

Senator Tom Cotton was roundly ridiculed and branded a conspiracy theorist for saying that the Wuhan coronavirus may have come from a lab. There was an immediate false equivalence that he was accusing China of releasing an engineered bioweapon. That was never what he said, so we lived through weeks of China’s preferred “bat soup” story that insisted the virus came from a wet market. Then last week, something strange happened. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on China to outlaw wet markets to protect global health. These types of markets where wild animals are kept in close proximity to...

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is facing a growing sexual assault scandal, but Americans who only watch left-leaning TV networks may not have even heard about it. Biden’s former staffer Tara Reade went public with her claims on March 25, and since then new evidence has arisen, making her accusation far more credible than Christine Blasey Ford’s claims against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Yet left-leaning mainstream media outlets have nearly boycotted the story over the past month. The Media Research Center (MRC) analyzed the news coverage on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and PBS between March 25 and April...

Democrat Kweisi Mfume won a special congressional election in Maryland on Tuesday and will replace the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) for the rest of his term in the state’s 7th district. Cummings, who chaired the House Oversight Committee, died at 68 in October 2019. His office told news outlets that he died due to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” Following Cummings’s death, over 30 people—including some two dozen Democrats—announced bids for the seat he had held since 1996. Mfume defeated Republican Kimberly Klacik to win the seat, with The Associated Press calling the race after 8 p.m. local time....

Turn out the lights, the election's over, and Trump has lost! So says Joe "Swami" Scarborough. On today's Morning Joe, Swami Scarborough repeatedly ripped as "idiots" Republicans who favor a faster re-opening of the country, and ultimately said: "These conserv -- not conservatives, they're idiots. These Trumpists who think that they're finding a way forward politically by attacking stay-at-home orders, they're the 10%, they're the 15%, they're in a minority. If they think this is how they're going to rebuild the future of the Republican party after Trump loses this fall, they are badly mistaken!" Get the rest of the...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is being accused of singling out his city’s Jewish community after a Brooklyn funeral was broken up by police for allegedly violating social distancing requirements being enforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn appeared to draw a massive crowd, as images of the scene appeared on social media. De Blasio even went to the site of the funeral with police before posting a tweet that touched off the backlash. “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the...

Remdesivir is widely considered to be a front-runner among the investigational therapies being tested as treatments for COVID-19 Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) said that its experimental COVID-19 therapy remdesivir met the main goal in a government-funded clinical trial and that a shorter dosing regimen was as successful as a longer one in a separate study. The early findings set the stage for the closely watched drug to move toward a possible emergency use authorization or approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The drug is currently being used on an expanded use or compassionate use basis. Shares of Gilead...

Americans broadly support federal relief for businesses and workers, but they don’t want to bail out failed business models and corporate corruption. So how would they feel about bailing out the governance failures of America’s most corrupt state? Welcome to Illinois, America’s shrinking state, home to 1,000 public corruption convictions in the last 20 years. Our acquisitive state politicians want over $40 billion from other states in a brazen attempt to spread the Illinois model beyond our borders. My Democratic state Senate colleagues garnered national attention with a letter containing this audacious request. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has separately requested billions...

When Stanford University School of Medicine professor John Ioannidis warned on March 17 that the rush to implement sweeping coronavirus lockdowns could be “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” his was a lone voice amid the rising pandemic panic. Not any longer. As the statistical models on deaths are revised downward and the economic and social costs of the stay-at-home strategy grow more dire, contrarians are diving into the data and asking whether the lockdown pain was worth the gain — or whether the COVID-19 reaction was overblown. “It is now clear that the lockdowns were a major mistake everywhere except the...

The Biden campaign reportedly is relying on a New York Times report in talking points being circulated to combat the explosive sexual assault allegation made by the candidate's former Senate staffer, Tara Reade. BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday that despite strong denials the campaign has issued to various media outlets, aides for former Vice President Joe Biden are taking Reade "seriously enough behind the scenes to coordinate messaging among other Democrats to try to cast the matter as one that’s been thoroughly vetted and determined to be unfounded." The "talking points" reportedly read, “Biden believes that all women have the...

Spitzer said the convicted men spent “just days” in jail instead of the six months required by law for those registered as sex offenders. The men apparently had also been charged with cutting off their GPS monitors or tampering with their tracking devices. They were released on April 7 as a result of rulings by appointed Court Commissioner Joseph Dane... “It is not the court’s responsibility to control the jail population by releasing these dangerous criminals back into our communities,” the DA said. “The residents of Orange County deserve to have the peace of mind that registered sex offenders are...

An I’m-so-cute-and-clever reporter recently asked the president if he deserved to be re-elected given the number of deaths from coronavirus, noting that the number is greater than American fatalities from the Vietnam war. People can always find something as a point of comparison as if that automatically adds weight to what they are implying. No doubt this reporter thought stats from the Vietnam war added gravitas to her query. In any case, her disrespectful and rude question didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. But Trump answered her anyway. Unfortunately, he didn’t use the opportunity to his advantage by...

...Recent reports, then, that excessive flab may be a leading indicator of susceptibility to the novel coronavirus are problematic indeed. Here are the specifics so far: as Melissa Healy reported in the Los Angeles Times last week, two new studies, both out of New York University, show that young and middle-aged COVID-19 sufferers with high body-mass indexes (BMIs) are “twice as likely as their non-obese peers to be admitted to the hospital for acute care instead of being sent home from the ER.” They’re also nearly twice as likely to end up in the ICU. (Among patients over 65, interestingly,...

China is badly bungling its diplomatic response to its responsibility for unleashing COVID 19 on the world, and the consequences for its ambition to become the world’s hegemon will be profound. As you may have seen, when Australia announced it would investigate the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic, China threatened a boycott. The leftist Guardian summarizes the contretemps:  Australia has been described as “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe,” by a Chinese state media editor as Beijing criticised calls for an inquiry into the coronavirus origin as “political manoeuvring,” further straining ties. Australia has emerged as one...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials report that an illegal alien from India tested positive for the coronavirus (COVID-19) after he illegally crossed the border with a group of Mexican nationals. CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan reported that Border Patrol agents patrolling near Calexico, California, apprehended a group of three Mexican nationals and an Indian national after they illegally crossed the border from Mexico. Border Patrol agents quickly returned the Mexican nationals to their home country under anti-coronavirus policies. “On Thursday, April 23, a U.S. Border Patrol agent apprehended three Mexican nationals and one Indian national suspected of having illegally...

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio oversaw the dispersal of a large, tightly packed Hasidic Jewish funeral and lashed out at the mourners who had gathered in defiance of social distancing rules intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus. "My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed," de Blasio tweeted Tuesday after police dispersed the funeral in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In another tweet, de Blasio said, "Something absolutely unacceptable happened in Williamsburg tonite: a large funeral gathering in the middle of this...

Andrew Cuomo backed a state regulation that turned nursing homes into pandemic hotspots. But journalists determined to boost him at TrumpÂ’s expense arenÂ’t biting. The news media isnÂ’t waiting for the dust to settle on the coronavirus pandemic to start assessing blame for the ensuing losses. Since the moment it became apparent that the Wuhan coronavirus was going to exact a fearsome toll in the United States, the pundit class began asserting that the Trump administration had failed to safeguard the country against the threat.As the crisis deepened and lockdowns were imposed, a different political narrative emerged that contrasted with...

"Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men cast insults at you, and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, on account of Me" (Matt. 5:10-11). The persecution you receive for proclaiming Christ is really aimed at Christ Himself. Savonarola has been called the Burning Beacon of the Reformation. His sermons denouncing the sin and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church of his day helped pave the way for the Protestant Reformation. Many who heard his powerful sermons went away...

WASHINGTON - A week ago, President Donald Trump chastised Georgia for starting to reopen. “It’s too soon,” he said. But on Tuesday, he cheered Texas as it began resuming business. “Great job,” he said. And Florida may be next as the president welcomed its governor to the Oval Office. White House guidelines urge states to retain coronavirus restrictions until they meet certain criteria, but Attorney General William P. Barr is now threatening to sue them if he deems those limits too strict. And even as the president talks about opening the country, he has ordered it closed to immigration, even...

...Nurse Miller blamed the spread on staffing problems that have plagued the home for years. Workers were forced to cover shifts in different areas, taking germs with them — and at least one unit was shut with not enough staff to operate it. SEE ALSO Utah launches program to issue free face masks to residents “Veterans were on top of each other,” she said. “We didn’t know who was positive and who was negative and then they grouped people together and that really exacerbated it even more. “That’s when it really blew up,” she said. The home’s superintendent, Bennett Walsh,...

Amid the president's mixed messages, some supporters go against health experts. Outside groups tied to President Trump’s re-election bid have ramped up recent efforts to promote back-to-work protests, pushing anti-lockdown messaging -- and even some conspiracy theories -- that would appear to contradict the Trump administration’s own prescription for knocking down the novel coronavirus. And amid the throes of the global coronavirus pandemic, some pro-Trump influencers with ties to the president’s re-election team, who’ve already joined forces with outside political action groups such as Turning Points USA and ViralPAC, are bombarding millions of social media followers with messaging that undermines...