Free Republic

It is very gratifying to know that President Trump shares our high opinion of the analytical powers of Clarice Feldman. For many years, regular readers of American Thinker have looked forward to Sundays in order to see her latest thoughts on the key issues in politics. Her column, titled “Clarice’s Pieces,” is must read material for everyone who wants to understand American politics. Now, we can add President Donald J. Trump to Clarice’s long list of fans. On Truth Social Sunday, the President wrote:

So many of this week’s top news stories involve legal matters in Washington, D.C. that I’m making it the focus of this week’s column. There’s the Roger Stone case, the decision to close the investigation into Andrew McCabe over the Horowitz referral that indicated that he had lied to the FBI about the Clinton email leak, and Congressman Jerry Nadler’s calling Attorney General William Barr as a witness in an upcoming hearing. (a) The Problem with DC juriesWashington, D.C. has a relatively small population from which jurors must be found for the federal and local grand juries, petit juries, and...

Eleven years ago, the writer Michael Walsh wrote (under his penname David Kahane) “Think of the Democratic Party as it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.” After the Democrats’ Russia, Kavanaugh, Mueller, and Ukraine fiascos, the Iowa caucus debacle, and Friday’s bizarre Democratic debate, I think we need to update it: It’s a Criminal, Insane Posse masquerading as a political party. The following day, the Senate voted down the House’s absurd impeachment effort, after which the President gave a heartfelt address to all those in the House and Senate who had helped him in exposing the...

This week, the Democrats have been revealed as the party that exposes us to (1) criminal mayhem (often anti-Semitic) on the streets of New York and (2) terrorism everywhere as they consistently ignored it, indeed, paid off the perpetrators with pallets of airlifted unmarked bills and praised the worst of its perpetrators. The President has the magical power, it seems, to get idiots and criminals to expose themselves. Mayhem on the Streets of NY Beginning on the first of this year, New York's “no bail no jail” law, enacted by the Democratic legislature and put into law by Governor Andrew...

To date the Schiff hearings -- unfairly run as they are -- show nothing less than a revolt by the Ukraine Desk Bureaucrats in which they concede they are poorly armed with any facts sufficient to overthrow the president, whose only crime was to change the direction of our Ukraine policy in which they’d played a significant role. History of Democratic Party’s Treatment of Ukraine While the hearings might have led some to believe that U.S. policy respecting Ukraine has been consistently supportive, the facts are otherwise, and the President’s effort to change that has the bureaucrats' dander up. Mickey...

Like the expensive California fast train to nowhere, Schiff’s funhouse impeachment hearings are a useless waste of time and money, and subject him to well-deserved ridicule. They are certain not to prevent President Trump’s reelection in 2020 and may well cost the Democrats their majority in the House. With a pack of losing candidates and a series of “now we got him” flops ahead of them, this is a losing desperation ploy. Roger L. Simon notes that the market figured this out this week. What does it mean after the House of Representatives -- on an almost one-hundred-percent pure partisan...

This week Mitt Romney confessed that he was posting on Twitter under the absurd moniker Pierre Delecto and set up himself for some serious online satirizing. It’s way overdue. The #NeverTrumpers in the Republican party have exposed themselves as Democrat Me Tooers. They do themselves, their party, and the nation no favors. As the Russian collusion nonsense fades into the ether absent any fact basis and the Schiff-Pelosi impeachment funhouse proceedings head in the same direction, some congressional Republicans, like the brave band that shut down the Miami-Dade vote harvesting charade in the Bush-Gore election, stood up at last for...

Believing Adam Schiff’s lies and calling for an “impeachment inquiry” has to be one of the worst blunders of Speaker Pelosi’s career. The whistleblower tale has crumbled and the backup witnesses the Democrats are relying on only confirm the Deep State bureaucrats and Democrats believe that they, not the elected president, have a lock on executive powers. In fact, the ploy boomeranged and the spotlight is now on the Democrats’ White Hope, Joe Biden. Despite the media downplaying Biden’s actions, there is more to come of his and his party’s corruption. Whistleblower Won’t Testify The leaker, incorrectly tagged a “whistleblower,”...

... This week in a closed hearing Schiff called U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker, the recently resigned special envoy to Ukraine. Prior to the hearing media stenographers of hot Democrat tips bruited that Volker was going to be the final nail in Trump’s coffin. Schiff has refused to release the transcript of that hearing in which, to Schiff’s certain embarrassment, Volker confirmed what present Ukrainian officials had already said. “The Ukrainians were not pressured, they never raised any issue of quid pro quo, they did not view the President’s call to Zelensky to be inappropriate in any way.” The Schiff show...

My neighbor, E.Z. Ryder, fancies himself a farsighted entrepreneur and is always full of imaginative ideas. He was sitting on his front porch shuffling through a stack of blueprints as I pulled into my driveway. He waved and motioned me to join him, so I walked over. “See these plans? This is my best idea ever -- an assisted suicide center for political consultants.” “What? Why?” “I got this idea during the last presidential campaign.” Ryder said. “Political consultants burn through billions of dollars and have no idea what they’re doing except to enrich themselves. “They do a number of...

As is often the case, Tom Maguire speaks what many of us are thinking. This week, following the Democratic debates and a poll indicating that only 25% of Democrats want a “bold, new agenda” he tweeted: “Per this poll, this is not a 'Time For A Change' election; It's a 'Can We Please Catch Our Breath And Have Something Like Normal For Five Minutes, Please, I'm Begging Now' election. But Dems, transfixed by the Twitterati, aren't listening. Too bad.” With him, as well, I share this favorite exchange of the last “debate”: INSLEE: ...I've heard you say that we need...

This was a week the President could only have dreamed of. There was the highly promoted appearance of Robert Mueller before two congressional committees in which the impeachment dream of the party with no saleable agenda died in full public view. Egged on by Deep Staters, Guatemala had recently backed off of a deal to keep asylum seekers there, but at the end of the week thought better of reneging (after the President threatened tariffs and other responses if they didn’t follow through on the deal). The week ended with the Supreme Court green lighting the transfer of some funds...

The French movie Hiroshima Mon Amour is based on human memory and forgetfulness as recounted by two lovers. The tale of the congresswoman who calls herself Ilhan Omar is a tale of an anti-Semite bred-in-the-bone corruptocrat whose rise in political power rests very largely on complicity by the media’s airbrushing of her history because they thought this physically attractive African Moslem “refugee” was just the ticket to defeat Donald Trump. The media counts on our forgetfulness and ignorance. Hard work by independent media, however, has exposed her and her media apologists and the Democrats have little choice: Condemn her and...

Fascism, Communism, Nazism -- all gifts to the world from Europe. Now it's nonsensical worries about climate change resulting in deliberately built-in inefficiencies in everything from household appliances to transportation methods. Compared to the U.S., Europe’s love of control-down economics leaves it in the dust: “The US GDP is five times that of Germany, seven times that of France and UK, 10 times of that of Italy, and 14 times of that of Spain in 2018.” And when the UK leaves the EU as I predict it will, the gap will be much larger. Still, the control freaks of the...

My friend Lynn Chu has boiled down the basis for a just, prosperous society: “It is very easy to spend other people's money, thus eliminating all of the vital discrimination about the devils in the details which are knowable only at the level of the individual. This is the main justification for the protection of individual liberty against autocracy other than the clarity of the moral imperative of human rights as the privileges and immunities of the individual in society.” When Great Britain turned over Hong Kong at the expiration of its lease, the Chinese government promised to leave its...

If you want to follow a legal battle by someone who knows what he’s talking about, you could not do better than reading Legal Insurrection, William Jacobson’s website. For some time now he’s been documenting the lawsuit filed by Gibson’s Bakery, a five-generation family bakery near Oberlin College that was boycotted based on false claims of racism after they had several students arrested for shoplifting, a crime to which the students pled guilty. …a black male Oberlin College student was stopped for shoplifting wine at Gibson’s Bakery and Market in downtown Oberlin, OH. Gibson’s had been in existence since 1885,...

In common parlance, a made man is someone whose path to success was greased by circumstances. It also refers to someone formally inducted as a full member of a criminal outfit -- the Mafia. In the political atmosphere in which Robert Mueller was born, he, like John Kerry, was virtually assured of a prestigious place in society: He was a tall white man with a hatchet jaw who (like his classmate Kerry) went to an expensive private school – St. Paul’s -- and came from a well-connected and well-off family. His wife, Ann Cabell Standish Mueller, is related to Charles...

Adapting the phrase from the Roman poet Horace, Wilfred Owen during World War I turned "it is was sweet and seemly to die for one’s country" into an anti-war poem. He may have had a point when it came to that war, a war that destroyed the very best of Europe’s young men and, in my view, set it on a downward spiral. Today Western Europe, with all its glorious architecture, art, and music seems like a living Disneyland. Take, for example, the fire that gobbled up the roof and spire of one of Paris’ most enduring symbols, Notre Dame. The cathedral...

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 think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 Democrats who have thrown their hats into the ring so far. Frankly, I’ve lost count. Each week, as a new hat comes flying, the contender is the recipient of free, often favorable, press doting, only to be followed within hours by attacks on his or her personality, policies and history. This week’s person-whose-definitely-going-to beat-the President is Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden. He postponed the big announcement several times, and finally, the big day arrived this week. His party’s theme for some time now has been straight white men...