Free Republic

When I began this blog back in 2012, I had already studied up on the “climate change” issue. And I had already come to the conclusions that not only was the science of human-caused catastrophic global warming hogwash, but also that the proposed solution of replacing energy from fossil fuels with the wind and sun could never work at reasonable cost. My first post on the subject was on December 4, 2012. But at that time there was almost no organized political opposition to the program to “save the planet” by transitioning to “green” energy. Here in the U.S., the...

Rogan is the most popular podcaster in America but he opened himself up to censorship, not just about COVID but about everything critics dislike. When some has-been hippies decided to see if they could leverage themselves into renewed fame by attacking Joe Rogan for daring to post interviews countering Anthony Fauci, Rogan groveled. He apologized and agreed to have warnings posted on his content. Once you start down that road, you’ve already lost. Alert people have noticed that 70 of Rogan’s podcasts have mysteriously vanished. It seems that they’ve done so because in older podcasts he offended today’s racial sensibilities....

Could you imagine a scenario where aging rockers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell could team up and force Rush Limbaugh to make an apology, and possibly moderate his content going forward? Yet, that’s exactly what happened last week when the two no longer relevant Boomer artists threatened to pull their music from Spotify to force the platform to seemingly pressure Joe Rogan to perform a public mea culpa for two recent episodes of his hugely successful “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of Spotify users had no idea who Neil Young or Joni Mitchell were...

Imagine if the U.S. government targeted a foreign nation state by devaluing its currency, pushing waves of migrants across its borders, undermining the security of its elections, denigrating the unifying elements of its citizens' shared history, stoking the flames of any racial or ethnic discord, and spreading fake news in order to incite the passions of its people. Wouldn't we call that an effective, albeit immoral, hybrid war strategy for taking down an enemy without ever having to fire a shot? Does that assessment change if the hybrid war is being fought, not against a foreign nation, but rather against...

If the medical authorities and pharmaceutical companies actively suppressed the adoption of useful medications during a pandemic, then this is beyond the pale. It’s a common occurrence in winter. A patient calls a primary physician to report a nonproductive cough, slight hoarseness, muscle aches, and a low-grade fever. The physician, and likely the patient, realize that this is almost certainly a viral upper respiratory infection. If the patient were in the office, the physician may test for a streptococcal bacterial infection, but it will likely be negative. This is probably an infection with a rhinovirus, adenovirus, or endemic coronavirus. Despite...

CLAYTON — Prosecutors on Monday dismissed charges against a St. Louis man in a July 2020 double shooting that left another dead at the St. Louis Galleria, concluding he did so in self-defense. Jaron D. Lemmitt, 19, was set to stand trial this week in St. Louis County Circuit Court in the July 22, 2020, killing of Jaquan Steed at the mall in Richmond Heights.Prosecutors dismissed counts of second-degree murder and armed criminal action Monday after reviewing surveillance video that was unavailable at the time Lemmitt was charged and witness statements that Steed was the aggressor. “In view of the...

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Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday directly rebutted Donald Trump’s false claims that he somehow could have overturned the results of the 2020 election, saying that the former president was simply “wrong.” In a speech to a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society in Florida, Pence addressed Trump’s intensifying efforts this week to advance the false narrative that, as vice president, he had the unilateral power to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office. “President Trump is wrong,” Pence said. “I had no right to overturn the election.” In a statement Tuesday, Trump said the committee investigating the deadly...

Scott Potmesil, a fourth-generation farmer who raises cattle in Sandhills, Nebraska, recently bought a John Deere tractor that is over 25 years old. He said he purposely went looking for the older device in 2020 because he believed it would be easier to repair than newer models, which can often be fixed only by authorized dealerships. “I visited with my local mechanic and asked which tractor he could fix, and it was a 1995 one,” Potmesil said. “New equipment is getting so complicated and loaded with sensors. If one of them goes out, you can’t even start your tractor. You...

President Biden's pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pledged to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that he would crack down on companies that take advantage of the agency's accelerated approval pathway. But in a letter released Friday, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said that even though he extracted that promise from Robert Califf, he's still not satisfied. Under the accelerated approval pathway, the FDA can accept lower quality evidence from manufacturers in order to expedite approval if the drug will address a serious unmet medical need. But Wyden said some companies have been taking advantage of...

A dark money group aligned with Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) brought in a record $92 million in dark money from anonymous donors while Schumer blasted Republicans for using dark money. Majority Forward is a nonprofit organization affiliated with Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC. Between July 2019 and June 2020, Majority Forward hauled in $92 million, according to the organization’s most recently released tax forms. During the 2020 election cycle, Majority Forward gave Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC $51 million in contributions, making it the largest donor to Schumer’s PAC.

RENO, Nev. (AP) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed designating critical habitat for a Nevada wildflower it plans to list as endangered amid a conflict over a mine to produce lithium batteries for electric vehicles critical to the Biden administration’s plans to combat climate change. The agency on Wednesday proposed designating critical habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat on a high-desert ridge near the California line halfway between Reno and Las Vegas. It’s the only place in the world the delicate, 6-inch-tall (15-centimeter) wildflower with yellow blooms is known to exist. It’s also the site where Ioneer USA Corp....

Voters would get a chance to amend the N.H. Constitution to redefine who is allowed to cast ballots in the state under a proposal considered Monday in an N.H. Senate committee. Current constitutional wording specifies that one must have a domicile in the place where that person is voting in New Hampshire. The proposed constitutional amendment would require people also to have a “primary residence” where they vote. Some who testified before the N.H. Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee said the wording change could be used to prohibit voting by students who are from out of state but...

A new study conducted in primates suggests there may not be a benefit from updating Covid-19 vaccines to target the Omicron variant at this time. The work, by scientists at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Vaccine Research Center, shows that animals boosted with the original vaccine had similar levels of protection against disease in the lungs as did primates that received an updated booster based on the Omicron strain. The work was done with Moderna’s licensed vaccine and a booster shot based on the Omicron variant. Study of blood from the animals showed that many of the...

Most of us see President Joe Biden’s falling job approval rating as a measure of his declining popularity. But for every candidate, Democrat or Republican, running for the House or Senate this year, Biden’s numbers mean political life or death. That is because the president’s job approval rating is an extraordinarily important factor in the upcoming midterm elections. Biden’s is low and going lower. A recent Pew poll puts Biden at 41% approval, versus 56% disapproval. Those results are very close to the RealClearPolitics average of several polls, which has Biden at 41.4% approval and 54.7% disapproval. If those results...

Damning internal emails sent by members of the New York Times editorial board were made public today during the libel trial brought by Sarah Palin against the newspaper. The emails were introduced by Palin's lawyer Shane Vogt as he questioned Elizabeth Williamson, a journalist with the editorial section of the Times who wrote the first draft of the article. In a message shown to the jury, Jesse Wegman, a member of the NYT editorial board, wrote that he worried the opinion piece that Palin sued over looked like they were trying to 'sneak in' a link between her and the...

Ophelie Meunier is a familiar face on French TV.Former frontwoman of the daytime and evening news on Canal+, she now presents Zone Interdite (Forbidden Zone), a popular documentary series similar to Channel 4's Dispatches. Today, Miss Meunier, 34, is under police protection after receiving death threats following her investigation into the growth of Islamist influence in the northern town of Roubaix, near Lille. Officers from the armed SDLP (Service de la Protection) police unit, which normally provides security for the country's president, ministers and visiting heads of state, have been assigned to her, after her revelations about Sharia-compliant faceless children's...

Fox News host Tucker Carlson's criticism of the Biden administration's handling of the crisis in Ukraine has pushed a Democratic lawmaker to ask an intelligence briefer to dig up dirt on the top-ranked cable news program in an effort to find out if the show is tied to Russia. Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, 65, asked the question during a closed-door briefing in Congress on Wednesday, Carlson revealed on his show Friday. 'We are not tied to Russia, of course,' Carlson said. 'It's a cable television program. He knows that. But that is not the point.'

The Texas senator attempted to make light of his aborted trip to Mexico last year, which came amid a winter storm that left millions in his state without power Sen. Ted Cruz is poking fun (or at least trying to) at his ill-fated trip to Cancún, Mexico, last year — joking in a recent social media post about rising flight costs as he took a jab at inflation under President Joe Biden. Some commenters, however, wondered about Cruz's comic timing considering his state is again facing a winter storm similar to the one that hit when he caught a flight...

President Joe Biden’s approval rating has fallen off a cliff in Georgia, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll released Thursday that showed just one-third of registered voters approve of the Democrat’s job performance. ... The 62% of voters who disapprove of him include key elements of the coalition that helped elect him. Only 5% of Democrats gave him an unfavorable review in the AJC’s May poll; in this poll the number rose to 21%. His support among independents fell sharply, too. But the contrast was particularly sharp in the most powerful constituency in the state Democratic Party. In May, only...