Free Republic

Alexey Navalny, the dissident and political nemesis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, spent the last few years of his life behind bars but still managed to stay connected to the outside world. Letters from the final months of his life, obtained by The New York Times, showed Navalny, who had been imprisoned since January 2021, managed to stay on top of current events — including in the US. In a letter sent to a friend, photographer Evgeny Feldman, Navalny called former President Donald Trump's agenda for a second term "really scary," according to the Times. If President Joe Biden has...

AmazonSmile, launched in 2013, allows customers to select a charity...The company uses the SPLC to separate legitimate charities from so-called "hate groups"...The letter charges that the SPLC "frequently vilifies group based upon nothing more than their advocacy for biblically-based beliefs about sexuality and family ethics that were uncontroversial a generation or two ago." It adds that the SPLC map omits groups "which ally with international terror organizations, openly glorify murder under the guise of 'resistance,' and frequently descend into clearly anti-Semitic expression."

Actor Corey Feldman’s new documentary called ‘(My) Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys’ is set to release on March 9. According to reports, in the film, the musician and former teen star will expose the details of the most “emotionally trying” period of his life. There is one catch, however. Viewers will only have one chance to watch the much-anticipated film. Specifically, ‘(My) Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys’ will air only once, and curious viewers across the world will have to view it at the same time. The documentary will stream live at 8 pm PST (11 pm EST).

Consider it a twist on the old question about a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it: If the House adopts articles of impeachment but never sends them to the Senate, is a president truly impeached? A Harvard law professor, who also served as a Democrat-called impeachment witness, answered with a resounding “no” in a column that speaks to the deep dilemma House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces as she sits on two articles of impeachment against President Trump. Pelosi, D-Calif., is apparently using the delay as leverage to extract favorable terms for a Senate trial. But...

by Joe Callen One of the top impeachment witnesses the Democrats presented in their case against President Donald Trump, just took a hatchet to the plans of Nancy Pelosi to gain the upper hand against Senate Republicans in any trial against Trump. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman said in an op-ed on Thursday that Democrats have not yet impeached the president despite their vote last night. Uh, oh! Feldman’s op-ed at Bloomberg News comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is considering withholding sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate because she is worried that the political trial would be biased...

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...

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...

I’m beginning to think that hidden somewhere in the White House or Trump Tower there’s a magic wand that the president wields which turns his detractors into laughingstocks. If so, this weekend he waved it over the Washington Post. First, a little background. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was an ISIS leader. He was a very, very bad man. In 2009, we had him captured and imprisoned in Iraq. President Obama released him. Thereafter, Baghdadi and his troops took over the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and Mosul, and threatened Baghdad. Along the way they burned down everything in their path...

Former child star Corey Feldman has long contended that he and his one-time best friend, the late Corey Haim, were molested by Hollywood insiders as children. Now, Rolling Stone reports in a lengthy, fascinating profile that Feldman has made a documentary about he and Haim’s experiences, one in which he apparently shines a light on “the two industry men who allegedly molested him at the age of 14" and “the A-lister and others who allegedly raped or molested his best friend.” This project is separate from his previous efforts to produce his story, which fell apart in the midst of...

As the long-running Mueller Witch Hunt pulled into the station empty, the one thing that held together the disparate factions of the Democratic Party -- the thought that Mueller would hand them grounds for impeachment -- was lost and a “Gadarene stampede” (in Conrad Black’s fine phrase, descriptive of a pack of crazed swine heading for the abyss) has followed... To be sure the Congressional Democrats are floating a series of moves with more public relations impact than likely success. The planned subpoena of an unredacted Mueller report is unlikely to yield results... [Clarice uses a lot of excerpts. See...

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...

Absent a coherent saleable agenda, the Democratic Party has tried to cobble together every group angling for special legal and financial privileges. Now that cobbled-together collection is crumbling. Worse, as the governor of Virginia showed us this week, honesty about what really takes place in the late-term abortions that the radical feminists want repulses many voters who had not been paying attention and were swayed by imprecise linguistic explanations. And as the attention was drawn on him, the racial fault lines in his state came into full focus, despite the media’s best efforts to hide them. Abortion: A Person’s not...

Saturday was National Popcorn Day, but I’ve been nibbling on popcorn all week as Nancy Pelosi learned a lesson about presidential power and the media was gut checked by the special prosecutor. I haven’t had this much fun since election night 2016. While she might have thought otherwise, the power of the commander-in-chief is far greater than that of the speaker of the House, and the humiliating way this was brought home to the congressional equivalent of Maerose Prizzi (h/t Michael Walsh) was something. She anticipated that she and her posse of cronies and their families (reports of a ninety-some...

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....

This Saturday eleven people were killed by a shooter in a Pittsburgh synagogue during morning services. The shooter appears to someone who not only hates Jews, but hates President Trump as well . Julia Ioffe, a GQ correspondent, finds a way to blame Trump for this mayhem: Julia Ioffe‏Verified account @juliaioffe FollowFollow @juliaioffe More And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it. 9:22 AM - 27 Oct 2018 It will be interesting to see how the rest...

It seems to me the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, last seen in Istanbul, is Erdogan-brand Turkish taffy, a confection of sugary lies made to inflame Americans against the Saudis and aid the far more dangerous to our well-being mullahs of Iran I confess to prejudice in this matter. I think Iran is a grave threat to the world, and the Saudis are aiding us in constraining the mullahs. Like Matthew Continetti, I believe the Saudis are now an important counterterrorism ally and roiling the waters there would disrupt “energy markets, create pockets of instability in which jihadists and Iranian-backed militias...

The performance of women this week – from Senator Dianne Feinstein to Christine Blasey Ford to the howling mobs on Capitol Hill – made me seriously consider surgically altering my sex. They are demanding special treatment because of their sex and in the process placing all of us – male and female alike – at peril of witch hunts against men and then, in time, against all who will not bow to their rule. My Facebook friend Alex Bensky reminded me of the advantage to me of transgendering: Ah, then we'd be unable to criticize your politics, your social viewpoints,...

Looking back on the week's events, it occurs to me that the Democrats' new theme song should be "Let's Do the Time Warp Again" as they reprise the demagogic lies and smear tactics that once worked for them but are now failing for anyone with a memory longer than a week or two. On the other hand, watching the Russian collusion fizzle, it might be "I'm Waiting for Ships that Never Come In."

By any reasonable account, the historic meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, resulting in an agreement pledging to work toward a stable and enduring peace (over six decades after the Korean armistice was signed at Panmunjom) was an incredible achievement. In fact, had Obama or Clinton achieved as much, we would expect a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue. North Korea has agreed to completely denuclearize and has begun the process, according to reports of satellite imagery , and has agreed to return the remains of U.S. military who perished in North Korea. China, long rightfully considered the muscle behind...

An Iraqi migrant suspected of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in western Germany has been caught by Kurdish forces in Iraq, Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday, one day after German police issued an international warrant for his arrest. Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old asylum-seeker, was arrested in northern Iraq early Friday at Germany’s request, police said. He had fled from Germany to Iraq via Istanbul with his family on June 2. “I thank the participating Kurdish security forces for making the arrest possible,” Seehofer said. Susanna Maria Feldman, a resident in the western German city of...