Free Republic

You could not concoct a worse scenario for a pandemic catastrophe than what is unfolding Syria.  Start with a regime that depends on troops sent from Iran, where satellites detect trenches being bulldozed for bodies felled by the plague of COVID-19.  Add the bombing of hospitals by that same regime and secretiveness to the point of punishing doctors who speak out about the coronavirus.  Then consider millions of refugees living in close quarters in camps and others fleeing their chaotic and impoverished homeland into Turkey, whose leader wants to send them into Europe. Snowy Syrian refugee camp near Turkey border last December.(YouTube...

We may finally get a Democrat debate tonight that isn't deathly boring for a change.  Elizabeth Warren, facing declining poll numbers, is attacking Bernie Sanders with the claim that in a private meeting 13 months ago, he told her that a woman could not win the presidency.  M.J Lee of CNN broke the story yesterday: The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should...

Professor Stephen Bainbridge is getting a lot of well deserved attention and praise for staring for staring down the academic diversity mafia and throwing its own rhetoric back in its face. Required to submit to what amounts to a loyalty oath to "diversity" in order to qualify for a merit raise at UCLA Law School, he spoke truth to power and discussed his devotion to intellectual diversity — documenting it with footnotes. I take the liberty of reprinting it in its entirety below, taken from his blog, ProfessorBainbridge.com:

Scientists seeking funding and journalists seeking an audience agree: panic sells.“Global cooling is going to kills us all!” “No, wait: global warming is going to kill us all!”All that’s  missing is a back-and-forth of “You shut up!” “No, you shut up!” That is reserved for those who doubt the need for panic.That’s the gist of an amazing chronology of the last 120 years of scare-mongering on climate, assembled by butnowyouknow.net and reprinted by the estimable Anthony Watts in Wattsupwiththat, who updates it to the present. It is truly mind-boggling: 1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February...

While Dave Ball today on these pages cautions us that polls no longer are reliable, in his article Trump in a Landslide: Here's Why, the New York Times’ own polling guru is picking up signs that the paper’s bête noire may be surging in public support. Nate Cohn writes in Don’t Assume Trump’s Approval Rating Can’t Climb Higher. It Already Has.: "Donald J. Trump doesn’t always seem like a candidate focused on expanding his base of support. He may have done so anyway. The share of Americans who say they have a favorable view of him has increased significantly since...

Once again, President Trump has flaunted his scorn for the media-defined norms of the American political conversation. Under those informal rules, Republicans can be labeled racists with impunity and America can be trashed as irredeemably racist, evil, and shameful. But any criticism of “people of color” for expressing such views is racist, as Nancy Pelosi discovered so recently. Many Republicans have internalized these norms, knowing that their colleagues in professions dominated by an educated and credentialed workforce have scorn for Trump’s attacks on the four freshman congresswomen Nancy Pelosi ruefully dubbed “The Squad.” Their neighbors in upscale communities are equally...

Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy? In only 5 more days of the already-“longest government shutdown in history” (25 days and counting, as of today), a heretofore obscure threshold will be reached, enabling permanent layoffs of bureaucrats furloughed 30 days or more.

In its third round of tariff cuts this year, China announced that 700 more goods will have tariffs cut. Bloomberg reports: China announced another round of tariff cuts, lowering import taxes on more than 700 goods from Jan. 1 as part of its efforts to open up the economy and lower costs for domestic consumers. No doubt, that’s what they say. And it is true that domestic consumers will benefit from lower cost access to foreign goods. But, is President Trump’s pressure on China not a factor? I am sorry, but I can’t accept the notion that Trump is...

President Trump clearly shocked House speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer yesterday with his televising of the Oval Office sit-down over his demand for $5 billion in funding for border security, including funding of critical mileage for his border wall.  Knowing well that Pelosi had already vowed publicly that "transparency and openness" would characterize the Democrat-run House starting next month, her plaintive request to speak in private scored points for Trump and revealed her hypocrisy before any substance at all was considered. The remarkable body language during the meeting tells the story of Trump's dominance.  Here is the...

The chief justice is just about as believable insisting that politics doesn't affect the judiciary as Iran's President Ahmadinejad was when he told a Columbia University audience that there are no gays in Iran. Groucho Marx articulated the dilemma with the immortal line, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" Or, as Mark Levin posted on Facebook: "It appears John Roberts doesn't live in the real world. A few decades ago he understood that there are, in fact, too many progressive judges and justices who legislate from the bench. Indeed, when it came to Obamacare, Roberts...

I was shocked reading this column (non-paywalled version here) appearing today in the New York Times, written by a true NeverTrump conservative, Bret Stephens. ... After briefly excoriating Trump for running on “fear” instead of basking in his accomplishments (which contradicts the political wisdom that voters rarely vote out of gratitude), Stephens gets to the nub of his semi-confession: Trump is really smart. Of course, he has to present that revelation in disparaging terms, but it is a couple of steps better than “Trump is an idiot.” The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual...

The media and political elites who pose as defenders of the poor beleaguered Palestinians don't care about them at all.  They are merely pawns in an effort to rid the world of Jews, starting with the half of world Jewry living in the historic homeland of Jews, Israel.  This has been proven beyond a doubt by the reaction – really a lack of any reaction – to Syria's bombing of a large Palestinian settlement, in the course of that nation's civil war and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims, who stand in the way of Iran's effort to establish a Shia...

While his critics among liberals and NeverTrump purported conservatives double down on their hatred of President Trump, Israel recognizes what a great friend and historic change-maker it has in the 45th president. Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post reports: Construction Minister Yoav Gallant has instructed the top officials in his ministry to begin the process of planning and approving a new quarter for embassies from countries around the world that will be built in Jerusalem, he revealed on Thursday in an interview from New York, where he will be speaking at Sunday's Jerusalem Post Conference. Even before the progress made this week toward...

Like AIDS three decades ago, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a new ailment, whose full course of development is as yet unknown. But after a year since TDS exploded on the scene in early November 2016, we can observe the progress of the disease through four stages in certain acute sufferers. This offers hope that we may start to predict how the affliction may spread or, alternatively, extinguish itself, should the rate of transmission to others be slowed by factors we may be able to identify. 1. Denial. 2. Anger 3. Shunning 4. Conversion. As the first three factors combine, and...

Megyn, Megyn, Megyn: exactly how long did you think you could remain airborne once you lost your lift? Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of American Thinker documents her mercurial rise and equally impressive descent. Which taboo did Miss Megyn violate that caused her abandonment by both conservative and liberal viewers?  Does it even matter?  Mr. Lifson points out that taboos, especially in the arena of “news” are a funny thing: “undesirability is a subjective concept, shaped by self-interest.” Megyn reported and viewers of all stripes decided.As commenter Terrence Appleby Allston suggested, this may explain Megyn’s situation: Ezekiel 16:28 "Thou hast played...

It is necessary to state at the outset that I despise Neo-Nazis. But that does not mean that I approve of violent attacks on them as they peacefully exercise their rights to free speech. And that seems to have been what happened in Sacramento yesterday, despite media reports that report “violence erupts” and other such passive voice euphemisms that obscure the difference between perpetrator and victim. An important caveat is that I was not there and am relying on both reading between the lines of media reports and on local Sacramento talk radio.

The mainstream media have been hysterical this week in their response to Donald Trump’s revocation of the Washington Post’s campaign press credentials in response to coverage and headlines so unfair that the paper went back and changed them. Yet those same media outlets remained silent in 2008 when the Obama presidential campaign booted 3 major newspapers that had been writing unfavorably about the campaign off its press plane. Joe Concha of Mediaite remembers what happened 8 years ago, and contrasts the media response in the two instances: The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls...

In a lengthy analysis of data provided by the Trump campaign, Washington Post writers David A. Fahrenthold and  Rosalind S. Heiderman find that claimed charitable contributions by Donald Trump included no actual cash from his personal funds. Since the first day of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said that he gave more than $102 million to charity in the past five years. To back up that claim, Trump’s campaign compiled a list of his contributions — 4,844 of them, filling 93 pages. But, in that massive list, one thing was missing. Not a single one of those donations...

Donald Trump has denied any connection to the National Enquirer story released yesterday claiming Ted Cruz has had 5 mistresses: I have no idea whether or not the cover story about Ted Cruz in this week’s issue of the National Enquirer is true or not, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it, did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it. Likewise, I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence. Ted Cruz’s problem...

New York State appears ready to throw as many as 200,000 people out of work by imposing a $15 an hour minimum wage statewide. The New York Post reports: Republican Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan is close to a “Faustian pact’’ with Democratic Gov. Cuomo to raise the state’s minimum wage to a national high of $15 an hour — boosting union power and possibly costing New York hundreds of thousands of jobs. A source close to Flanagan said the deal would involve Cuomo agreeing to do “little if anything’’ to help Senate Democrats, now just one vote shy of...