Free Republic

To the President who claims he is a Catholic in good standing, Easter is just another day to poke his fingers in your eyes. For those of you who celebrate this sacred day, Happy Easter. For those who don’t, most Americans appreciate that it is the holiest day of the year for you and treat it with civilized respect. To the President who claims he is a Catholic in good standing, it’s just another day to poke his fingers in your eyes. Yes, the White House is hosting the traditional easter egg rolling event, but it has banned all religious...

The juxtaposition of the Department of Justice’s handling of Hunter Biden with its outrageous treatment of Donald J. Trump justifies Scott Adams's view: "We can now see all of the machinery of government, from influence peddling to fake news to intel-supported hoaxes to political persecutions.” Diving even deeper, as have Jonathan Turley, James Freeman, Dan Bongino, and David Samuels, it’s beginning to look as if Barack Obama knew of Hunter’s corruption and the danger it posed to national security and did nothing about it. In exchange, he’s serving a third term as president behind the scrim while the demented present...

This week, as accounts of the whistleblowers who blew the lid off the hampered investigations of the President’s crackhead son Hunter were made public, I imagined a writer making a pitch to producers for a dramatic program called Wilmington, a political version, if you will, of Dallas with more than a hint of the Godfather. Clearly, my proposed dramatization covers so much ground, it will have to be serialized. For one thing, there’s a very sordid background to the story. The family has a long history of corruption and drug use unhampered by legal prosecution. Informed by writers like Jonathan...

Dilbert creator Scott Adams tweeted this week: ”The country’s energy is strange. Everything is amped up in every direction. Something big is coming.” He’s rarely wrong about such things. Adams said he doesn’t know what that something big is, but I’m hoping it is a major shift in America’s political tectonic plates. I may be looking too hard for it, but I, too, feel it in my bones. Infrastructure FaceplantFor one thing the wacky spending program the Democrats were proposing and fiddling with seems to have hit the shoals, trapped between the far left and the more moderate senators Kyrsten...

Before I get to the bad news, let me start with some good news. Christopher F. Rufo tweets that the revulsion against Critical Race Theory being taught in schools is showing results. Nine states have already banned it: Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Idaho. As more people realize this effort to divide us into what Scott Adams calls “losers and assholes” I expect we will see more states banning the teaching of this perfidious, noxious, baseless nonsense. On the other hand, there seems no backing off of it in the military, where it can do...

Three incidents this week confirm that something is seriously amiss with our legal system. I’ve always had great respect for our legal system. It’s as good as any of which I’m aware. No, I’m not naive. I’m fully aware that every institution depends on the competence and integrity of those involved and that means sometimes decisions are rendered that are wrong -- muddy thinking and sometimes corrupt judges; self-seeking prosecutors; incompetent counsel; bad and poorly written laws; false testimony by liars -- all contribute now and then to unjust resolutions. But in recent years, my faith has been even more...

Two weeks ago, I wrote of the Department of Justice’s overreach respecting some of the hundreds of January 6 defendants. On Friday the D.C. Circuit clipped the department’s wings. I expect more such losses as time goes on and the Department must actually present evidence in contested trials. The ploy of keeping in D.C. jails without bail some of the protestors who engaged in no specific violent acts at the Capitol until their cases can be heard was very obviously designed to compel them to plea bargain so they could return home to their families and jobs, and the three-judge...

Democrat hopes for show trials a la Stalin's Great Purge are beginning to fade. Two weeks ago, I wrote of the Department of Justice’s overreach respecting some of the hundreds of January 6 defendants. On Friday the D.C. Circuit clipped the department’s wings. I expect more such losses as time goes on and the Department must actually present evidence in contested trials. The ploy of keeping in D.C. jails without bail some of the protestors who engaged in no specific violent acts at the Capitol until their cases can be heard was very obviously designed to compel them to plea...

PJ Media’s Megan Fox has a very disturbing six-part series on alleged judicial corruption in St. Louis, Missouri. The first five detail how family court guardians and psychologists are misusing their positions to siphon off money from parents in custody disputes while the St. Louis judges ignore the fraud and collude with them, by, for example, ordering children's visits with sexual molesters and/or otherwise abusive parents in order to compel the other parent to keep paying lawyers to appeal the decisions and change the arrangements. One might expect that bar examiners, judicial conduct boards, the state attorney general, the Department...

Time to put away childish things and concentrate on devising strategies and mobilizing to carry them out. Does the President have a right to free speech? Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor writing on The Volokh Conspiracy, suggests he certainly does and that his speech on January 6 is a weak reed (as was Nancy Pelosi’s past impeachment folly) on which to gain a conviction in the Senate. (Remember an impeachment vote in the House is basically an indictment with no effect unless the Senate finds guilt after a trial.) Looking at the most analogous case, the impeachment of President...

A Little Civics LessonOn Saturday, when rallies were scheduled to take place in key battleground areas to demand only legal votes were counted, the major networks announced Biden-Harris were the winners. Apparently, they are under the impression that they decide election results. They don’t. On December 14, electors chosen by state legislators cast their votes. No one else but the state legislators have that right. (Article II, Sec. 1,§2 of the Constitution). Certainly not the press, nor state boards of elections, secretaries of state, governors, or courts. If they have reason to believe the elections in their states were unlawfully...

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...

I’m phlegmatic by nature. It gives me an edge up when mass hysteria seems to take up so much space in the news and the pronouncements of Democratic leaders. Looking at the best information available to me, I find it beyond question that the President has taken the right steps to deal with this variant flu; that few people in this country will perish from it; that while there may be some economic consequences of the supply disruption from China, the fact that we’ve been decoupling ourselves from China under this administration means they are likely to be smaller and...

Once again operating out of their well-worn playbook, the Democrats are spinning the cylinder and placing the gun to their heads in suggesting the Russians are backing the President’s re-election, and once again they missed the empty chamber and fired a bullet into their leading candidate. In 2016, when they claimed that Trump was Russia’s choice and had secured his election, they ended up with highlighting to voters what the media had covered up: It was Hillary Clinton who approved the Uranium One sale of 20% of U.S. Uranium. It was Hillary who received assistance to this end from the...

If you remember The Wizard of Oz you will recall that Toto, Dorothy’s dog, pulled back the curtain, revealing that the wizard was just a little guy working a panel of sound and light gimmicks to fool people into thinking he was more omnipotent than he really was. In the same way, the President’s killing of Qassem Soleimani and the aftermath reveals the four-decades-long treatment of Iranian terrorism and Israel by the foreign-policy establishment -- our presidents from Jimmy Carter up to now and Congress -- was based on myths. The brilliant Caroline Glick makes the case. For the past...

CBS has closed deals for Clarice, a crime drama series project based on the famous Thomas Harris character Clarice Sterling, which is set after the events in The Silence Of the Lambs. The project, written and executive produced by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, has received a big series commitment. The intention for the project, which has a pilot script written, is to go to series. It will film a pilot before a series order decision is made but a writers room has already been set up, and there is a lot of enthusiasm for the title, the premise and...

Democrats have tried to impeach every elected Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. They’ve never succeeded and there’s no reason to believe this time is different. As Bill Mitchell tweeted: “If China thought there were any real chance of Trump’s impeachment of loss in 2020, they wouldn’t be negotiating and making trade deals now. The stock market and China know the same thing. Trump won’t be impeached and he wins in 2020.” Why this practice persists is that they are continually reluctant to accept political outcomes they don’t like. David Hirsanyi argues this point well as well as illustrating perfectly...

In tacit recognition that his party will never beat the President in 2020 with the gang of whackos vying to head their ticket and that no real impeachment will ever occur, Congressman Adam Schiff, with the acquiescence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called to order what they are calling an “impeachment inquiry.” It’s presumably designed to see whether formal impeachment proceedings should begin. (Impeachment proceedings cannot take place without a vote to do so in the House. Vulnerable Democrats would never vote for it any more than would almost all Republican Congressmen. And conviction and removal from office for impeachment would...

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...

The most amusing story of the week is the President’s announcement that he plans to live tweet the Democratic Party debates. In anticipation of this, people are already announcing Trump tweet parties, and some are hoping a creative media outlet will do a split screen of the point/counterpoint. Newsweek, of course, wants the media to ignore this spectacle, knowing as they must how devastating this would be to the entire  20 Democratic candidate debate kick line.At The Federalist Margot Cleveland previews the likely thrust of the tweets and wisely offers this advice:   Trump can promote his survival of the Deep State’s attempts to...