Free Republic

A little old but worth it. A SUCCESSFUL foreign policy begins at home. So does an unsuccessful one. Older readers may recall the days when American foreign policy represented a stable, shared understanding of the national interest, but American foreign policy has now polarized into two foreign policies: two sets of irreconcilable attitudes, each treating the world as a stage for the enactment of domestic partisan differences, one leg kicking away at the other. Since 2008, Americans have launched themselves into one of their periodic recastings of their society. After Barack Obama and Donald Trump, two varieties of hope and...

According to a recent study by the Aspen Institute, up to 40 million Americans faced eviction towards the end of this year, no doubt due to the financial impact of COVID-19. As federal resources for unemployment and additional stimulus came to a complete halt, millions of Americans and small businesses are fighting to survive amid this widespread, government-mandated lockdown. To make matters worse, nearly 100,000 businesses that temporarily shut down because of the pandemic are now permanently out of business. While Congress fell into the dark abyss of hyperpartisan bickering, Americans of every race and political party affiliation continued to...

Distilleries just learned that to cap off a brutal year, the FDA is charging them a fee normally reserved for drug manufacturing facilities. For many American craft distillers, 2020 was already one of their worst years ever. The COVID-19-related closure of tasting rooms and cocktail bars, loss of tourism, and inability to offer in-store sampling slashed their sales revenue and cut them off from their customers. Then this week, just as it seemed they'd made it through the worst of a terrible year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had one more surprise in store: The agency delivered notice to...

Reverend Raphael Warnock has preached that Jesus was a “poor Palestinian prophet.” This is not only false, it is targeted hate speech that only touches the surface of what he believes. The word Palestine does not appear one time throughout the New Testament and the Philistines referenced in the Old Testament became extinct during Biblical times. The only people that attempt to rob Jesus, a Jew born to Jews in Judea, of his heritage are those who hate Jews. It appears that Warnock is more interested in pushing a subversive political agenda than teaching God’s word. Warnock’s teachings are a...

The man who invented and patented the technology that lets you scan items at the grocery store, create an airport boarding pass, and generate authentication codes just blew the doors off the Georgia State Senate subcommittee hearing on elections.Tech expert Jovan Hutton Pulitzer claimed that to the extent there were election issues in Georgia, they could be explained by simply looking at the paper ballots. And he claimed to prove in real time that the system was susceptible to manipulation via WiFi because his team had broken in and were in it at the time of the hearing.Pulitzer basically threw...

Democrat Jon Ossoff, running against Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), says he is opposed to local law enforcement agencies cooperating closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep criminal illegal aliens from being released into Georgia communities. During a campaign stop in Marietta, Georgia, on Wednesday, Ossoff said he opposed local law enforcement agencies cooperating with ICE’s 287(g) program that allows local officers to swiftly turn criminal illegal aliens over to ICE agents for arrest and deportation.

It is by now far more than obvious that the presidential vote was massively altered in at least five states, among them Georgia. At the very least, the Republican-controlled legislatures in these states should be legally obliged to refuse to confirm any electors at all, thus allowing the next president to be selected by the House of Representatives, as is required by the Constitution. Article II, section 1: "[I]f no Person have a Majority, then ... the said House [of Representatives] shall ... chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation...

Sen. Josh Hawley (R. MO) officially stated that he will object to the Electoral College vote count to be held in the Senate on January 6. May this courageous man be the first of many Senators to take a stand against the overwhelming evidence of election fraud. If neither candidate wins enough Electoral College votes on January 6, Trump should win – and it’s all in the Constitution without the need for any strained statutory interpretations.Let me start with an overview of what happens on January 6. It’s crucial to appreciate how this can end if Hawley is joined by...

Republican Josh Hawley (MO) became the first senator to announce he would back a plan by House GOP members to and object to election vote counts on January 6th. January 6th is the day that a joint session of Congress will be called and lawmakers officially certify the Electoral College votes. In a statement posted online, Hawley said he believed states like Pennsylvania failed to follow their own election laws, while social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, “interfere[d]” in the election. “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity...

Here are updates related to January 6th when a joint session of Congress will meet to vote on the Electoral College results. (Depending on how things unfold, there may be some surprises. Some could be quite shocking. More on that further down on the blog.) On January 6th, members of Trump’s legal team hope to present their case of massive voter fraud to Congress and the American people. I presume they’ve been sharing information with Congress for weeks now, but on the 6th it will be official and they will also have a platform to speak to the public. At...

A year ago, people were gathering by the tens of thousands for New Year's Eve parties, football games, soccer games, concerts and a variety of other reasons. You could have dozens or even hundreds over to your home (if they fit). While people didn't want to catch the seasonal flu, and while many of us (myself included) received the flu vaccine, we didn't shy away from surrounding ourselves with friends and family. The old normal was what we had all grown up with: Students were taught by teachers -- in the classroom; people went to an office to work with...

A hospital employee in Wisconsin who "intentionally" ruined hundreds of doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine has been fired, Advocate Aurora Health said Wednesday. Earlier this week the medical center learned that 57 vials had been removed from a pharmacy refrigerator and left out overnight. Each vial contains 10 doses. “While some of the vaccine was administered to team members on Dec. 26 within the approved 12-hour post-refrigeration window, unfortunately most of it had to be discarded due to the temperature storage requirements,” Advocate Aurora Health said Monday. After an internal review, officials initially believed the cause was “inadvertent human...

At least 145 employees of a Washington state Costco have been infected with COVID-19, county health officials announced Tuesday, according to a report. The outbreak at the store in Union Gap could worsen, officials said, as testing of workers continues, KOMO news reported. “As Costco continues its site-wide testing, we anticipate the number of cases to continue to go up over the next few days as results are received,” Melissa Sixberry, Yakima County’s director of disease control, told the outlet.

On Dec. 28, Pennsylvania lawmakers concluded that "Numbers Don’t Add Up, Certification Of Presidential Results Premature and In Error" President Trump tweeted about it:“Breaking News: In Pennsylvania there were 205,000 more votes than there were voters. This alone flips the state to President Trump.”The key paragraphs from the PA lawmaker's two-page statement:A comparison of official county election results to the total number of voters who voted on November 3, 2020 as recorded by the Department of State shows that 6,962,607 total ballots were reported as being cast, while DoS/SURE system records indicate that only 6,760,230 total voters actually voted. Among...

During a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stated that “There is no other game in town” but the House bill to increase direct payments to $2,000, and that if the House bill is modified, it will not be able to become law before the end of this Congress because the House has already recessed.

I don't like making predictions for a new year because they are just guesses and like palm readers, fortune-tellers and "experts," guesses are often wrong. The point was proved last year when I predicted Donald Trump's re-election and could not foresee the COVID-19 virus, as few did, or its impact on the economy and our optimistic spirit. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, author Bob Greene recalled the 75th anniversary of the film "Meet Me in St. Louis" in which Judy Garland sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." The lyric contains the optimistic lines, "someday soon we all...

It seems like a lifetime, but it was only one year ago that the world learned about a cluster of pneumonia cases linked to a live animal market in Wuhan, China. The cause: a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that leads to a disease called Covid-19. Fast forward one year, and the U.S., as of mid-December, has seen more than 300,000 Covid-19 deaths and more than 17 million confirmed cases—but also remarkable scientific innovation and reasons for optimism. Much has changed. An economy that was humming along with record-low unemployment was voluntarily shut down in an attempt to mitigate viral spread and...

Make Hate Speech Great Again Posted onWednesday, December 30, 2020 by Douglas WilsonIntroduction Charles Spurgeon once said that when God begins to work, it always looks more like an undoing than a doing. And this is why I have decided to try cheering everybody up with a little cultural analysis in the recon postmillery line. So if we really want to know what to do in these troublous times, we really need to hang on to our mercies. As Spurgeon said in another place, “If we cannot believe God when our circumstances appear to be against us, we do not...

It is obvious to everyone who supports the President that the current system of the uni-party is eagerly awaiting his departure from office. I will never vote again for a Republican. I am only one vote. I don't know if the President will try to use one of the other parties that currently exist: the Constitution party is one, the Tea Party I think may be another, or form a wholly new entity perhaps MAGA etc. The days before the Civil War were very dark and it took a long time for the Republicans to slowly gain power. I don't...

Hello, my name is MOTUS and I’m addicted to Hallmark Christmas movies – don’t judge, especially if your idea of a Christmas movie is Die Hard.In fact, I’m watching one – A Boyfriend For Christmas - as I write this. It is one of the first of 5 Christmas themed movies that Hallmark made way back in 2004. There are now 136 Christmas movies if Wiki is to be believed, although I’m not sure if that includes the whopping 40 new ones they cranked out in 2020 despite the cooties. So I think we can all agree then when I...