Free Republic

That’s the title of a great song in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and that, it occurs to me, is an appropriate song for the media and the Democrats. For two years they vigorously promoted -- for their amusement and political benefit -- a fake Russian collusion story and now must watch it unravel and boomerang on them, their allies and the miscreants who created it. They had their fun, and the denouement has begun. This Week’s HearingsThere were two hearings on the Mueller report this week, one before the Senate Judiciary Committee and another...

I find it impossible to disagree with Ryan Saavedra’s Twitter observation: "The Democratic Party, which has called everything under the sun a “Nazi” for the last 3 years, all of a sudden can’t muster up the spine to condemn blatant anti-Semitism within their own party.” It’s been in the works for years under the cloak of intersectionality -- in truth little more than an effort to ingather voting blocs of illegal immigrants, Palestinian supporters, socialists, blacks locked in the ghettoes of their minds, sexual outliers – LGBT (and "whatever other gender” now included), and malcontent women delighted that even post-birth...

Nothing offends people more than unequal justice -- disparate treatment of protected persons and classes. This week, the FBI and Department of Justice’s hash of equal justice became even clearer and the media’s fat thumb on the scales as well. If you read nothing else this week, read this essay by Lord Conrad Black in the New York Sun, who links the Special Counsel fiasco and the Jussie Smollett hoax and concludes that we just avoided the “biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War”: The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in...

“Hoist with his own petard” is a phrase taken from Shakespeare and means someone destroyed himself with a weapon (a petard, that is, small bomb) intended for another. President Trump has hoisted the #NeverTrumpers on theirs and is about to do the same thing to the now irremediably lunatic Democrats. Christopher Bedard has done a brilliant job describing the downfall of the #NeverTrump scribblers. It’s worth reading it all, but here are some highlights: The Never Trumpers say they don’t recognize a Republican Party where the core tenets are neither free trade nor foreign democracy promotion. But maybe they just...

Still Winning This week the President signed a new trade deal with Mexico, Canada, and Argentina, a deal far more favorable to our interests than the now discarded NAFTA deal. In the same time frame, our master negotiator hosted the first trilateral meeting with Japan and India, which should also boost the economy and which includes defense and military purchases. Merry Christmas, Xi. Comey: Still a Loser On the home front, Mueller and Comey keep looking worse and worse. Previously, former FBI Director James Comey refused to answer 100 questions when he testified before Congress because the hearings were public....

The two big stories this week are interrelated: the utter collapse of the Russian Collusion Fantasy and the conclusion of the Manafort case, a case of selective and apparently not very persuasive prosecution which flows from that fantasy. The Manafort Trial EndsThis week marked the end of the trial of Paul Manafort. The jury is now deliberating his fate. I cannot with certainty opine on the prosecution’s handling of the case. I can’t because all we know -- in the absence of transcripts of the trial -- is what reporters have told us. In my experience they often lack the...

The Internet is full of information, some of it not well researched or considered, but every now and then a star appears on the horizon. To my mind the new star is Yaacov Apelbaum, who, using his considerable technical skills, has produced a masterpiece of well-documented analysis underscoring the nonsensical and partisan nature of the Mueller operation. He compares this effort by the anti-Trumpers to the plot line of the Dreyfus affair, where falsified evidence and suppressed evidence led to Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction for treason.

As I will explain, the widespread notion that Russia and Trump colluded to beat Hillary has long been demonstrable bunk. What seems more clear each day is that there was collusion between certain members of the U.S. and British intelligence communities to spy on the Trump campaign. This may explain, in large part, the reluctance of the Department of Justice to reveal what it knows publicly. After all -- with rare exceptions -- the two countries’ intelligence services have long had important information gathering and sharing agreements, and exposure of this may harm the traditional reciprocal relationship. Whether the British...

It appears on the record that Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s recently fired deputy director, was a vicious man who used the power of his office to attack an FBI agent and General Michael Flynn, who rose to her defense. George Parry writes at American Spectator: He admitted under oath that the FBI had started an internal investigation into [Robyn] Gritz’s personal conduct after learning that she “had filed or intended to file” a sex discrimination complaint against her supervisors. This bone-headed statement constituted an unequivocal and legally fatal admission that the FBI had illegally retaliated against Gritz for exercising her...

Obama Administration Used Confidential Taxpayer Information to Push Obamacare It’s Government Gone Wild Time In Washington, DC Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Mueller Russian Special Counsel Budget Obama Administration Used Confidential Taxpayer Information to Push Obamacare Your Judicial Watch uncovered yet another Obama IRS scandal – and one that includes the massive Health and Human Services (HHS) running Obamacare AND the Obama White House directly! We received two productions of documents, 77 pages and 108 pages , from the IRS revealing that the Obama IRS coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Obama White...

As more and more leaks about the ongoing “Russian collusion” witch hunt by Robert Mueller appear in print, it seems to me that if Russia had been trying to erode our faith in our institutions, the Deep State is accomplishing what Russia failed to do. The Obama claque’s efforts were initially intended to help Clinton when they thought she would win and no one would know about their crimes. Then they continued the unlawful spying to cover up their role in the worst case of misuse of federal power in our history, to effect the removal or emasculation of the...

My focus this week is on the “wiretapping” (electronic interception of communications, if you insist) of President Trump and his associates during the campaign. It seems to me this story is rapidly unfolding -- if only mostly in overseas press and online -- and promises to be far more explosive than the Watergate story, an account that says frightening things about our intelligence agencies and those of some of our allies, most particularly Great Britain. It has become increasingly clear to me that there was widespread wiretapping of President Trump and his associates and that the underlying justification was pretextual...

It’s a lie often repeated that Obama was a Constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago law school. In fact, he was just a lecturer there for a short time who never much impressed his colleagues. Watching this administration in action one wonders what, if anything, he understands about the Constitution at all. His is an administration based on flouting it. It’s true that the judicial process moves slowly and such conduct can continue for a while until halted, but repeatedly the courts are catching up. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against the administration 20 times....

Hillary Clinton (pending the conclusion of the criminal investigations about her emails and the Clinton Foundation which linger on) may well be the Democratic nominee. As it is perfectly clear that Trump will win the Republican nomination the #NeverTrump bleats are beginning to fade. Many have realized that their arguments are ridiculous, and are more related to the diminution of their power to affect opinion than they are to substance. This week, as well, the administration gets its failures in foreign and domestic policy off the front pages as the loony press attempts to justify his public school unisex bathroom...

March 13, 2016 Trump Storm Troopers Mob Sanders Rally: Force Cancellation By Clarice Feldman Of course, this didn’t happen. The opposite is true,This makes Ted Cruz ‘s spineless rejoinder to the violent demonstrations in Chicago so galling to me. Some years ago I wrote here of my contempt for conservatives who flee the forum for fear of getting their spotlessly white togas spattered with mud and blood when their colleagues are being savaged by liars and thugs. This week my White Toga award goes to Ted Cruz. As thousands of rent a mobs from Soros funded Move On, the White...

Of course, this didn’t happen. The opposite is true, but you can be sure that would be the headline had conservative opponents of Sanders prevented his rally in suburban Chicago from taking place because of mob threats of violence. This makes Ted Cruz ‘s spineless rejoinder to the violent demonstrations in Chicago so galling to me.

Robert Frost wrote in "Mending Walls" that "good fences make good neighbors", and this week it appears that people in this country and the UK are chock full of citizens who agree. As I explain, the immigration crises both here and in Europe have underscored growing anger at the arrogance and incompetence of unelected bureaucrats and their rules. The big election kerfuffle of the week was the Pope's ill-considered attack on those who want to limit illegal immigration from Mexico by building a wall at the border. To many it seemed an attack on Donald Trump whose campaign against illegal...

I have enormous respect for Victor Davis Hanson and read with great interest his account this week that people are fed up with liberal elites. Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of...

This week the bizarre priorities and policies of the President presented themselves in relief so stark even the members of those upscale synagogues headed by J Street rabbis -- the guys who say “never again” and then support the very Administration that is making “again” more likely -- must be starting to catch on. In a speech full of platitudes and signifying nothing much at all besides his 1960’s style fantasies of history and human behavior, Obama made his Middle East peroration in Cairo in June 2009. Just as he preposterously promised us that upon his election the oceans would...

I remember once when -- we were sitting shiva for my paternal grandmother, I think-- I mentioned to my grandfather how smart I thought my youngest cousin, David, was. He replied, “All my grandchildren are smart, but the longer they go to school the dumber they get.” I thought of this when Drudge reported “42% of Millennials say they’re socialists, 16% know what a socialist is.” I guess the other 26% think it means they twitter. On the other hand, though the news of the world seems grim, there are small rays of intelligence starting to beam through the dopiness....