Free Republic

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on this week’s broadcast of “Sunday Morning Futures” that former President Donald Trump was “100%” with him. Host Maria Bartiromo asked, “The former president, President Trump has talked about the possibility of turning aid for Ukraine into a loan. Is that what you’re considering?” Johnson said, “Yes. You know, I had a great visit with him on Friday, and he and I are 100% united on these big agenda items.”

BEIJING—The extent of China's soil pollution, long guarded as a state secret, was laid out in an official report that confirmed deep-seated fears about contaminated farmland and the viability of the country's food supply. Nearly one-fifth of the country's arable land is polluted, officials said in the report, shedding unexpected light on the scale of the problem—a legacy of China's three decades of breakneck economic growth and industrial expansion.

Water insecurity. China is home to about 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its freshwater sources. Overuse has led to severe shortages, and industry along China’s major water sources has polluted supplies. Construction of hydropower dams along major rivers has also damaged ecosystems. The government released a plan in 2015 for preventing water pollution that included placing controls on polluting industries. The quality of surface waters—bodies such as lakes, rivers, and streams—has since improved. However, groundwater continues to fall short of targets, with more than 80 percent categorized as “bad to very bad.” Desertification. More...

China has increased its reliance on food imports over the past two decades, prompting concerns among officials who worry that disruptions to food supply chains could trigger domestic unrest. In particular, this reliance has heightened China’s sensitivity to food supply disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. What is China’s current food security situation? With less than 10 percent of the planet’s arable land, China produces one-fourth of the world’s grain and feeds one-fifth of the world’s population. Data from the country’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2022, China’s grain output reached a record...

No one should ever have taken this story seriously in the first place. But it fit the Left’s picture of reality so well, it couldn’t be resisted. The idea that there would be a second-grade teacher in any school in the country in 2022 who would feel free to rip off a Muslim student’s hijab simply doesn’t accord with the real world. But in the Left’s world, we’re not living in 2022 at all, or if we are, it is a nightmare version of 1955, with “white supremacists” running rampant, terrorizing defenseless People of Color whose just grievances are laughed...

The Italian Higher Institute of Health has revised the February 2020 to October 2021 COVID death toll from a previously reported 130,468 fatalities to only 3,783. The reason for the revision is that the higher figure included all deaths in which the deceased tested positive for COVID, while the lower figure counted only those who actually died from COVID. This revision was soundly denounced by Dr. Anthony Fauci who called it "the wrong message at the wrong time. It clashes with the protocol we've adopted here in the United States that anyone dying with COVID should be classified as a...

t may contain the “Crossroads of the World,” but Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that Manhattan is “not the center of our universe.” Only about 10 percent of Manhattan office workers were back as of Sept. 18, more than six months after the coronavirus pandemic upended life in the Big Apple, the Wall Street Journal had reported, citing data from commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group Inc. “When Mayor de Blasio makes dismissive comments about the dire lack of commercial activity in Midtown, he’s really dismissing the needs of hundreds of thousands of everyday New Yorkers who will...

Elevator etiquette requires that no more than two parties share a ride, and that’s only if the next party in line says it’s OK. And Broadway is still dark, an ominous symbol of what Covid has wrought on the Big Apple.

Six weeks after the city and county of San Francisco reopened restaurant dining rooms, cases of COVID-19 have skyrocketed by 250 percent, city officials say. That’s why, as of 11:59 p.m. on Friday, November 13, 2020, restaurants will be required to shut their indoor dining operations down again, and to revert to an outdoor dining, takeout, and delivery model for an unknown period of time. “With winter on the way, limited indoor dining represented the only real hope for many restaurants to survive the next three months,” the GGRA says, as “the majority of restaurants simply cannot make it financially...

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health (DPH) has shut down at least 10 bars across the city, saying that even after repeated warnings, the venues continued to violate health orders intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. And according Ben Bleiman, the city’s most vocal defender of bars and nightlife, they should shut down even more. According to DPH spokesperson Jenna Lane, that list is accurate, but she hastened to add that all of those closures were only temporary, and that as of November 11, all the bars had reopened. Here’s how it works, Lane says: Members of the public...

The Bay Area’s brief indoor dining boom is over, as Santa Clara, Marin, and Contra Costa Counties announced that all restaurants must move back to takeout, delivery, and outdoor service as of Tuesday, November 17, after a sharp uptick in cases of COVID-19. Those three counties join San Francisco, which closed dining rooms as of November 14, even as other regions, like Alameda and Solano counties, warn that they might also revert to takeout and outdoor service only.

San Francisco CrossFit helped broaden the appeal of a type of training that was considered unconventional in the fitness industry when it opened 15 years ago. Now the popular business has become another victim to the pandemic. CrossFit held a final training session on Sunday then closed for good. Longtime members of the facility said the loss is much bigger than just a gym. They said they will miss the community and the relationships that they’ve built over the years. “It’s really sad. I mean we’ve been here for 15 years. As you can see, you know, there’s a huge...

With coronavirus again surging across California, officials are faced with a narrowing number of options to slow the spread.Weekly coronavirus cases have doubled in the last month around the state, and Los Angeles County recorded more than 6,800 cases over the weekend, an alarming spike that has officials talking about more restrictions.

This is part of a pattern of CAIR overreacting to things, and demonstrating that they don’t like people. Recently, there was an incident in South Carolina where a mosque was tagged with graffiti which said “utterly blessed”. While certainly annoying, Ibrahim Hooper’s insistence that it might be a bias incident is simply not believable. He wanted the police to catch the kids who did this and punish them. Just last year, police finally caught up with and charged the men who gave the finger to Muslim family on the freeway in Georgia. CAIR would charge them with a hate crime if only Georgia...

Fox news offered the WORST election coverage EVER! With sheer delight they announced WHILE PEOPLE WERE STILL VOTING in the west that the house was going to be won by the Democrats. To me it seemed like a calculated effort to suppress the vote to make sure that there would be divided government. I'm sure they calculated that ratings would increase with the shenanagans that the democrats will pull in the next two years. Well, they will not increase ratings in my house. I will never watch them again. They make me sick. Also with the smiling idiot that kept...

Never Squat With Your Spurs ON Most will make you smile. A little wisdom is thrown in. Will Rogers, who died in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska with bush pilot Wiley Post, was one of the greatest political country/cowboy sages this country has ever known. Some of his sayings: 1. Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco. 2. Never kick a cow chip on a hot day. 3. There are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works. 4. Never miss a good chance to shut up. 5. Always drink upstream from the herd. 6. If you find...

Bend resident Cindy Van Patten likes teaching women how to safely shoot and handle guns. She's been doing it for years. And this year, she's noticed something new. "Just in the last 30 days, I've talked to maybe 50 different people," Van Patten said recently. "It's an off season, I mean, for women to be calling, or people to be calling about hand gun instruction in the winter months and spring, because usually, it's summer." In Central Oregon and nationwide more women are taking aim.

Romney has visited Texas several times during the primary. Not to sell his vision for the country, but more as an ATM stop. Legal experts we contacted agreed this could be considered 'messin with Texas' in a court of law. Most are aware of the risks you run when messin with Sasquatch. So why do people continue to insist on 'messin with Texas'? And more to the point, why do politicians even entertain the thought. Ok he 'messed with Texas', big deal? Well it is a big deal, you can't 'mess with Texas' without messin with Louisiana.

On Face the Nation, Norah O'Donnell asked DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (a congresswoman from Florida) about her recent claim that the nation's economic situation has gotten better since President Obama took office. After all, O'Donnell pointed out, unemployment is up about 25 percent since January 2009, and 13.5 million more people are on food stamps since then. Predictably, Wasserman Schultz replied that it's all Bush's fault: "President Obama inherited a huge problem -- the worst recession that we've had since the Great Depression, created by the failed policies of the previous Republican administration,

As the Administration’s push for alternative fuels grows stronger, Congress is set to consider H.R. 1380, which would create very generous tax credits to manufacturers who retrofit existing work vehicles to run on natural gas rather than on that terrifying global menace known as oil, and very generous subsidies to natural gas vehicle consumers: $7500 per car and a whopping $64,000 for heavy-duty trucks and 18-wheelers. It’s common knowledge in DC that Texas hedge-fund operator and natural gas-magnate T. Boone Pickens is the force behind this bi-partisan, pork-laden legislation, possibly because his natural gas empire would greatly profit from the...