Free Republic

Education in America is bad and deficient. I hear that all the time. Unless you live in the woods or are a dead person come back to haunt my blog posts, you have also heard it time and again. Politically, both the left and the right make this claim, but obviously for different reasons. On the right, the complaints are usually that no one teaches about the founding fathers or the greatness of America anymore, that teachers are too leftist and liberal and teach social justice, and of course, COMMON CORE!!!!!!!! On the left, the complaint is that schools just...

New Horizons Map of Pluto: The Whale and the Donut This map of Pluto, made from images taken by the LORRI instrument aboard New Horizons, shows a wide array of bright and dark markings of varying sizes and shapes. Perhaps most intriguing is the fact that all of the darkest material on the surface lies along Pluto’s equator. The color version was created from lower-resolution color data from the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI This is the latest map of Pluto created from images taken from June 27 to July 3 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New...

FOX News reported Monday evening on Special Report that the FBI is setting up command centers around the country to prepare for possible terror attacks on the Fourth of July holiday weekend. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith posted on Twitter about the report: Shepard Smith ✔ @ShepNewsTeam FBI tells Fox News it is building command centers around US to monitor terror threats over July 4 holiday 3:53 PM - 29 Jun 2015 BREAKING=> ISIS Publishes Map of July 4th FBI Command Centers Jim Hoft Jul 1st, 2015 9:23 am 144 Comments FOX News reported Monday evening on Special Report that...

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler’s new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up...

Here is a live map of different war zones. You can zoom in or out just like on Google Maps. Hover over different icons and more. Check out how close ISIS is to Baghdad. Yikes!

See Map Here: http://www.afa.net/bigotrymap In 2007, and with that same nauseating arrogance that has come to define him, then presidential candidate Barack Obama duplicitously quipped, “I am absolutely convinced that culture wars are just so ’90s. Their days are growing dark.” Dark, indeed. America’s soon-to-be cultural-Marxist-in-chief would then spend the greater part of a decade waging war against our nation’s Judeo-Christian culture and heritage at levels, and in ways, unseen in our storied history. Today, his anti-Christian crusade continues unabated. In fact, and with less than two years left to complete his baleful conspiracy, this neo-pagan extremist has begun to...

I thought it would be interesting to show how narrow it is...literally, but you can see the exact distribution of representation this post from The Blaze.

Congratulations, Republicans! You won the Senate majority! Now, can you hold on to it for more than two years? Looking at the 2016 Senate map, there’s reason for doubt. Republicans will have to defend 24 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. And the raw numbers don’t even tell the whole story. Seven seats held by Republicans — Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were carried by President Obama in 2008 and 2012. And there is chatter about potential Republican retirements in Arizona and Iowa. If either John McCain or Chuck Grassley decided to call it a...

Time Map of Ebola Spread And Future Estimates

If you squint you can almost see America in there

At the time of this writing, Republicans have picked up nine seats in the House, pushing them to a muscular 243-seat majority. For House Speaker John Boehner, that means the bar is set high for legislative accomplishments in the next two years. For the national political landscape, that means a lot of red. Here's the lower chamber of the 114th Congress, in vivid color.

West Africa Outbreak * Spain 1 case Guinea 1298 cases 768 deaths Sierra Leone 2789 cases deaths 879 Senegal 1 case Liberia 3924 cases 2210 deaths 2210 Nigeria 20 cases 8 deaths United States 1 case

For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an “as told to” penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine,...

How far does $100 go? Today's map, which comes from the Tax Foundation and uses data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, answers that question state by state. In Mississippi, your $100 could buy $115.74 worth of stuff relative to the national average. On the other end of the spectrum is Hawaii, where you'd only get $85.32 worth. Washington, D.C. is even lower, at $84.60. The Tax Foundation offers a little perspective on how to read the map: Tennessee is a low-price state, where $100 will buy what would cost $110.25 in another state that is closer to the national...

State and local police departments obtain some of their military-style equipment through a free Defense Department program created in the early 1990s. ..... detailed data from the Pentagon illustrates how ubiquitous such equipment has become. Highlighted counties have received guns, grenade launchers, vehicles, night vision or body armor through the program since 2006. (Interactive Map at the linked source)

Christina SterbenzJuly 3, 2014Cultures are complicated, and anyone attempting to explain or group them will struggle to avoid giving offense. Political scientists Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Christian Welzel of Luephana University in Germany put forth their best effort by analyzing data and plotting countries on a "culture map." Their system stems from the World Values Survey (WVS), the largest"non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed," which dates back to 1981 and includes nearly 400,000 respondents from 100 countries. The latest chart, published several years ago, includes data from surveys conducted from...

Mike McCaul, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, told ABC's This Week: “Well, this is a crisis. It does call for a response, not going to Palm Springs for a fundraiser.” Later on Sunday, Psaki released a statement on security at US embassies. The Obama administration faces ongoing congressional scrutiny of its response to an attack on a US facility in Benghazi in September 2012, in which four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, were killed. In Baghdad later on Sunday, a series of explosions killed at least 15 people and injured more than 30, police and...

How the Map Works: A growing number of Radiation Monitoring Stations across the country (and world), using various models of Geiger Counters, upload their Radiation Count data in real time to their computer using a Data Cable, and then over the Internet to this web site, all of this accomplished through GeigerGraph for Networks software. This system is completely automated - there is no manual posting of data required. How to Read the Map: Referring to the Map Legend at the bottom left corner of the map, locate Monitoring Stations around the country that are contributing radiation data to this...

Using data from the CIA Factbook, we labeled every country in the world by its highest valued export, a.k.a. the commodity that makes the country the most money in the global market. Click on any of the maps below to see an enlarged version. Unsurprisingly, much of the world runs on oil, particularly the Middle East and Central Asia. Europe is the world's workshop, where most of the machinery and motor vehicles are made, from optical instruments to BMWs. Latin America brings a blend of food products and oil to the trading table. Asia is the world's manufacturing center, where...

With Ukrainian troops launching a major assault on a rebel stronghold Friday, just a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Kiev to withdraw its troops from the east and south of the country, it looks like the Ukraine crisis is entering a new stage.