Free Republic

The White House scrambles to clarify key details from Trump's speech announcing his coronavirus response Three crucial components of President Donald Trump's nationally televised Wednesday-night address on the US response to the novel coronavirus were quickly walked back or contradicted. After Trump announced a 30-day ban on travel from most of Europe to the US, the Department of Homeland Security clarified that it would exclude US citizens and permanent residents.

Doctors in China have urged male coronavirus patients to test their fertility as soon as they recover because the infection may damage the function of their testicles. No study has proved that the virus will reduce men's fertility or sexual potency. But medics in Wuhan have suggested the likelihood that the disease can affect the production of sperm and the formation of male sex hormones.

President Trump raised fresh questions surrounding his response to the coronavirus on Thursday by saying that Americans in Europe will be tested for coronavirus before they are allowed to board flights and that they will not be allowed to come home if they test positive. The shocking announcement came after his decision to halt all travel from Europe to the US for 30 days starting from Friday at midnight. During a press conference with the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office, Trump said: 'We are not putting them on planes if they test positive. It is going...

The father of the founder of the conspiratorial site filed a criminal complaint against me in Bulgaria. Then things got weird.About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family, and business information; and insulting the memory of someone’s parents and grandparents. MOST POPULAR The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism Joe Biden’s Sketchy Climate Record What Happened to Jordan Peterson? What If Biden Is Simply...

Clint Eastwood is breaking his silence over the 2020 presidential hopeful he believes is best fit for office. The 89-year-old discussed the #MeToo movement, career highlights and dished on his political views in a revealing interview with the Wall Street Journal, and it turns out Mike Bloomberg has the actor's support. "The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there," Eastwood told the outlet.

The dramatic expansion of the unchecked power of the executive branch is one of the major legacies of the Obama administration. Unfortunately, a new rule from the Department of Commerce threatens to continue this consolidation of power in the executive branch and would undermine the economic strength that America has enjoyed during President Trump’s tenure. By giving the Department nearly unbounded authority to stamp out trade with “foreign adversaries,” this vague new rule risks imposing serious economic harm. Under this rule, transactions between American companies and “foreign adversaries” that involve information technology or services that are deemed to be vital...

Twelve years after the Supreme Court ruled that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right "unconnected with service in a militia," the Second Amendment is in worse shape than ever. New York; California; Massachusetts; Connecticut; and Washington, D.C., with a combined population of 70 million, have outlawed the sale of most semi-automatic rifles and all gun magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds to the public. Colorado, New Jersey, Vermont, Maryland, and Hawaii also have restrictions on magazine capacity. Seventeen states have so-called "red flag" laws, allowing the summary confiscation of a person's firearms on...

Rep. Denny Heck, D-Wash., said one of the reasons for his announced retirement from the House of Representatives is that a growing number of Republicans and Democrats in Congress "simply don't believe in compromise, don't believe even in principled compromises" anymore. In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press with Chuck Todd" to be broadcast Sunday, the four-term representative of a district that includes the Washington state capital, Olympia, also said he will "go to my grave not understanding how some of my colleagues could simply turn the other way and overlook the president's behavior and his misdeeds." "My soul...

The country’s immigration enforcement officers launched a website Tuesday demanding that President Trump do more to clean up their agency, saying he has left the Obama team in place and it’s stymying his goal of enforcing laws on the books. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervisors in Philadelphia banned officers from wearing bulletproof vests during an operation in the dangerous “badlands” section in the city’s north for fear of offending the immigrant community. Meanwhile, officers in one Utah city are required to give city officials seven days’ heads-up before arresting anyone — and by the time they go to make...

...snip... And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials. Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago. “I think this is...

President Donald Trump injected doubt into whether former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani will long be representing him, when he said he 'has been' his attorney. Trump was asked about the matter a day after two Giuliani associates were indicted in federal court on alleged campaign finance violations. The men, both born in former Soviet republics, have assisted Giuliani in pursuit of his theory of Ukrainian 'collusion' in the 2016 election. 'Well, I don't know. I haven't spoken to Rudy,” Trump said, when asked about it.

President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was beautiful. Except for the part where Trump talked about former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. That was inappropriate. But what’s even more inappropriate is the hysterical, hyperbolic, hypocritical, fabricated (I’m talking to you, Katy Tur) impeachment-seeking reaction to the call. In football terms, President Trump deserved a five-yard penalty flag. What he did was the equivalent of a false start.

As House Democrats push forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, Republicans have largely rushed to Mr. Trump’s defense, or at least tempered their criticism to avoid his furious reprisals. Among the handful of exceptions, though, there has been none louder or more prominent than Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a figure who once embodied the essence of the Republican Party before Mr. Trump commandeered it, and is now in a lonely category of his own. Since the first reports a week ago that Mr. Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R....

I've seen this before.. DemonRat operatives infiltrating conservative rallies, protests, etc., and starting trouble. Then, the media is ready to POUNCE because the entire fiasco had been scripted even before the event started. Was the "send her back" chant started by a small group of Democrat insurgents allowed into Trump's rally?

MP Materials, which runs the sole operating rare earths mine in the United States, is an unusual victim in the year-long tit-for-tat trade war between the two largest economies on the planet, as the conflict looks set to open up a new battlefront over technology. The operator of the Mountain Pass mine in California said it will kick-start its own processing operation by the end of 2020, after China last week more than doubled an import duty on concentrates to 25 per cent effective June 1. MP exports pellets – ground-up ores that contain oxides of rare earth elements –...

Justin Amash is reconsidering his place in a party he is at odds with, isolated from Republicans that have largely bent to the will of the president. The Michigan Republican is gaining a national following as a Congressman who isn’t afraid to buck the Republican line, often going to toe to toe with the party’s biggest star, President Donald Trump. Amash is a frequent critic of the president, often slamming Trump on Twitter, accusing him of violating the constitution and attacking Trump’s character.

There is strong public evidence that Denise McAllister is savage and also a dope for openly criticizing her boss’s wife. But contrary to what the Twitter mob says, there is no evidence she's anti-gay. McAllister, a conservative writer, was dropped Sunday as a contributor to the right-leaning Federalist and Daily Wire websites after a Twitter bender wherein she got into a back-and-forth with some critics. The day before, McAllister had tweeted about trying to talk to her husband only to have him tell her, “Woman, you know better than this. The game is on.” She explained in a subsequent tweet...

These sanctions were supposed to punish Moscow's elite, but instead they've spurred economic development and patriotism. The current conversation about Russia sanctions centers around targeting and scope. Are we punishing the people whose behavior we most want to change? Is there pain, well inflicted, on those individuals responsible for creating chaos in Ukraine and Crimea, for reckless attacks on Sergei Skripal and others, and for wanton interference in Western elections? Can we hurt Russian elites in a way that Putin will notice? Have we done enough? In at least one sector, though, the sanctions are a textbook case of unintended...

In an ideal world, the president of the United States would succeed in negotiating a nuclear arms treaty with a foreign government — and do so with full congressional support; his lawyer would respect the attorney-client privilege and not reveal confidences publicly; Congress would abide the old adage that politics ends where the water’s edge begins and lie low when the president is overseas on a delicate mission; the president would not engage in a grievous constitutional over-reach that provokes a congressional negation; no one in his administration would have a top-secret security clearance who failed to be truthful to...

President Trump’s decision to unilaterally attempt to build his promised wall at the Mexico border is pulling his party into a tailspin of drama and unease — a move that could help his own 2020 reelection effort even at the expense of fellow Republicans, numerous GOP officials said on Friday. Trump’s bid to circumvent Congress puts GOP lawmakers — including many vulnerable senators up for reelection in the next cycle — in the position of having to choose between their party’s leader and their self-described opposition to executive overreach. If they back Trump’s emergency declaration, many lawmakers worry, they will...