Free Republic

On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.

I know Democrats are eager to find a way to throw Trump in jail, but geez. The only time lying is a crime under American law that I’m aware of is when you lie to the government. Perjury while testifying, making false statements to the FBI, cheating on your tax returns, etc. If lying to the general public were a crime, every politician in the U.S. would be in jail. Inslee’s proposal would make it a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison for an elected official or candidate to knowingly lie about election results. That bill...

When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced on Fox News on Sunday that he won’t vote for the current version of Build Back Better, experts predicted he may have single-handedly killed the world’s best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

I hadn’t heard of Winsome Sears until she appeared to acknowledge victory in her race for Virginia lieutenant governor on the evening of November 2. My immediate reaction was that a star is born. Of the politicians who spoke that night, she said what I most wanted to hear. Yesterday she appeared for a segment on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash. Bash went in search of a cudgel with which to bash Sears and somehow landed on vaccines (see CNN story here). Neither our nor CNN’s State of the Union is good. However, I stand by my...

GET WOKE, EMPTY THE PEWS It would be a full-time job to chronicle all of the irrational reactions by liberals to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, and scarcely worth the effort. But I do want to note one such response because it affects me directly: that of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The ELCA, of which my congregation is a member, sent out this “Pastoral Letter” authored by Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton. Here is the letter, titled “A pastoral message on the Rittenhouse acquittal,” with my comments interpolated: ​Dear church, In the book of Leviticus we read: “You shall not...

Anthony Fauci is the ultimate bureaucrat. He is 80 years old and has worked for the federal government since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Apparently there is no expiration date for bureaucrats. Fauci has been wrong so often, and has contradicted himself so many times, that much of the public has lost confidence in him. Yet he clings to office like a superannuated senator. Yesterday Hugh Hewitt recited some of Fauci’s errors and contradictions, suggested that much of the public has lost confidence in him, and asked whether there are any circumstances in which Fauci would consider resigning for the good...

In the early hours of Aug. 10, caravans from across the city ransacked high-end stores in and around downtown after rumors circulated on social media that Chicago police had shot and killed a 15-year-old Black boy on the South Side. Police did shoot 20-year-old Latrell Allen, who is Black, the day before. Police allege Allen fired gunshots at them, but officers were not equipped with body-worn cameras, and no other footage of the incident has been made available. Allen is expected to recover. Images of people walking in and out of department stores with their hands full of products transfixed...

True to form, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing the "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" game and is calling for reparations because minorities are getting the coronavirus at a faster rate than white people. Reparations for being sick, reparations for being a distant ancestor of a former slave, reparations for being a victim of "redlining," reparations for business inequalities -- eventually she's going to run out of white people's money to take. But that won't deter our fearless warrior queen.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is not expressing any remorse for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was swept up in the yearslong Russia investigation. In an interview clip released on Friday, "Firing Line" host Margaret Hoover read quotes from Page about how the Russia probe had such a negative impact, including how the FBI spying into his life "ruined his good name" and that he will "never completely have his name restored." "Do you have any sympathy for Carter Page?" Hoover asked. "I have to say, you know, Carter Page came before our committee and for...

ANDREI VYSHINSKY QUOTES THE LEGAL PHILOSOPHY OF TERROR IN STALIN'S RUSSIA Although Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky is best known as Joseph Stalin's chief prosecutor during the trials of "state enemies" in the 1930s, Vyshinsky was also something of a theorist of the relationship between law, Marxism-Leninism, and the Socialist state. The quotations below are drawn from three of Vyshinsky's publications. They illustrate the basic direction of Vyshinsky's thought and political philosophy throughout his life as a leading member of the Soviet state apparatus. What is here is a scientific justification for the use of terror by the state.

For months, Univision and Fusion anchor Jorge Ramos has been inviting to his shows prospective 2020 Democrat challengers to President Trump. Now, he’s expanded his search to include potential Republican challengers. For his Real America series on the Fusion network, Ramos travelled to Ohio to meet with Governor John Kasich. However, don’t expect Ramos to be endorsing Kasich anytime soon. For starters, Kasich clearly disappointed Ramos when he failed to call President Trump a racist.

Arizona lawmaker Jeff Flake compared Donald Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on Wednesday, delivering a blistering attack on the president to a nearly empty U.S. Senate chamber. The Republican has become one of Trump's favorite targets, earning a presidential nickname – 'Jeff Flakey' – since his impending retirement has freed him to openly castigate the White House on several fronts. 'It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,' Flake said, citing a Trump tweet in which he branded five news outlets 'the...

The president has a huge impact on the country’s political culture. Trump’s misuse of the bully pulpit ensures that that impact is negative in his case. So, he did it again. As we’ve learned countless times since his inauguration, President Trump is the exact same person as celebrity Trump and candidate Trump. He’s crass, vicious, and petty. This morning, he tweeted this: Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449111/donald-trump-mika-brzezinski-vengeful-tweets-degrade-american-political-culture

Even as progressives whine about the threat Donald Trump represents to Democratic norms, the harassment of GOP electors has continued across the country. In Arizona, electors Bruce Ash and Alberto Gutier tell Tucson.com the number of calls, letters and emails are increasing as the vote draws near: (continued)

Speaking after “appreciating the congrats” on the Orlando shootings, Donald Trump again insisted that what mowed people down at Pulse was not an assault rifle but radical Islam, because in Trump Tower, it cannot be both. Trump’s world is binary. It is zero-sum: Either guns kill people or radical Islam kills people. In that world, only one religion can be bad, and so Christianity is good and Islam is bad. Christianity is peaceful and Islam violent. Christianity is tolerant and Islam intolerant. Both are inherently one thing or the other, immutable blueprints etched in stone for the behavior of their...

The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan said in an op-ed Monday that she refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism in order to prove her allegiance to the United States. Rana Elmir wrote that she’s “consistently and aggressively asked” to condemn Islamic terrorism, and is tired of having her religious views linked to atrocities like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in Paris and San Bernardino this year. “I emphatically refuse,” she wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The op-ed was titled: “Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I’m Muslim.”

WHY does the pro-choice movement so often find itself in a defensive crouch? I cringed as I watched Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, apologize in a YouTube video last month for the lack of “compassion” in two doctors’ language at supposed business lunches arranged and secretly recorded by the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress. Not because she wasn’t eloquent, but because of what her words said about the impossibly narrow path abortion providers now are forced to walk. After all, have you ever heard an apology from a crisis pregnancy center for masquerading as an abortion clinic? What about the...

In his new book Believer, former Obama strategist David Axelrod reveals that President Obama misled the American public when he said for several years that he opposed gay marriage ... In terms of its magnitude, this lie might seem pretty harmless to a nonbeliever. FDR's campaign promise that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars" was obviously much more significant in the grand scheme of things. George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips" tax pledge and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" were arguably more substantive lies than Obama's. But Obama's...

I n a recent column, I explored some obstacles to the embrace of religious faith among young people today, paying special attention to the gulf between the often simplistic way that traditional churches talk about God and the pluralistic complexity of modern life. Here's another obstacle: The overly literalistic character of so much of American piety. My favorite example is the way that many American Christians think and talk about hell. Jumping off from a handful of Gospel passages in which Jesus Christ speaks about "eternal punishment" for sinners in the afterlife, these believers conjure visions of a cosmic torture...

A day after he announced he was going to make a film taking on the NRA with Meryl Streep, Harvey Weinstein — the producer of several violent films — told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview to air tonight that he has had a change of heart about violent content in film. django-unchained-trailerAsked by Morgan about his hypocrisy of making these violent films, Weinstein said, “They have a point. You have to look in the mirror, too. I have to choose movies that aren’t violent or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know,...