Free Republic

Genesis 14:21 The king of Sodom said to Abram, “Give me the people and keep the goods for yourself.” Just as the price of gas is reaching levels Americans can both go to the grocery store and fill their cars in the same week, our Glorious Premier Obozo decides to close the remainder of the ANWAR desert to oil exploration. This oil reserve holds more than thirty years of energy for America and would further stabilize the price of gas, but Marxists like him hate cheap oil so he is closing this production by edict. Alaskans want to develop and...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has published a final environmental impact statement for the agency’s conservation plan for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In that EIS the agency has selected a plan alternative that recommends that Congress should designate the entire refuge as wilderness, (see map page 23) including the coastal plain area, sometimes known as the 1002 area. This wilderness designation would place the entire refuge off limits for oil and gas exploration and development. Land in the immediate vicinity of the coastal village of Kaktovik would be excluded from the wilderness designation but would still require Congressional...

How would Sarah Palin do if she decides to run for president? According to her former top-of-the-ticket running mate, quite well. "She's very interesting. And I'm sure she'd do great," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told The Washington Post Wednesday in a brief interview. After the 2008 presidential election, McCain has consistently praised Palin, despite her clash with his campaign team. Palin has also defended McCain. The former Alaska governor campaigned for the senator in his 2010 reelection bid....

JUNEAU - In a move geared toward increasing awareness of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, nine bars throughout Alaska volunteered to participate in a University of Alaska Anchorage study on FASD. "It's a full academic research study, on the effectiveness of a pregnancy test dispensers located in bar bathrooms," said Ryan Ray, aide to state Sen. Pete Kelly (R-Fairbanks). Most of the nine bars participating are located in rural Alaska. Kelly Spokesperson Heather Shadduck says $500,000 was allotted in the FY2015 Mental Health Trust budget for the FASD awareness campaign, plus another $400,000 out of the capital budget for the UAA...

Explanation: Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets leapt into the night on January 26, from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. This time lapse composite image follows all four launches of the small, multi-stage rockets to explore winter's mesmerizing, aurora-filled skies. During the exposures, stars trailed around the North Celestial Pole, high above the horizon at the site 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Lidar, beams of pulsed green lasers, also left traces through the scene. Operating successfully, the payloads lofted were two Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiments (M-TeX) and two Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) experiments, creating vapor trails...

Energy: While taking credit for increased oil and gas production on private and state lands, the president moves to put 12 million acres of the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge off limits. OPEC and the Saudis are smiling. Whoever's in charge of presidential optics these days fits the classic definition of the blind leading the blind. It's bad enough that President Obama doesn't have time to get to Paris for a global protest against terrorism after the Charlie Hebdo attack but can meet and greet the San Antonio Spurs. But then he privately slams an invitation by Congress to Israeli...

Screw you, Alaska. Obama has simply engaged in yet another assault on this nation's economic vitality About a third of all the jobs in Alaska are connected to oil exploration and development. And the ability to keep the oil industry vibrant in Alaska is very much dependent on the Trans-Alaska pipeline. So you’d think an administration that claims to be about keeping good jobs viable would have an interest in seeing to it that oil continues to flow freely through the pipeline - not only for the sake of Alaska’s economic viability but also for the sake of the nation’s...

President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration. It’s also a slap at the new Republican Congress, where Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been corralling bipartisan support for more Arctic drilling.

Sen. Murkowski: “I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska.” Fifty million Americans who live in the northeast will experience what is predicted to be a historic blizzard from Monday evening through Tuesday. Cities and towns will virtually or literally close down. People will be told to stay indoors for their safety and to facilitate the crews that will labor to clear the roads of snow. In other words, welcome to Alaska, a place that is plenty cold most of the year and which is no stranger to snow and ice. Alaska, however,...

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) - President Barack Obama is proposing to designate the vast majority of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a wilderness area, including its potentially oil-rich coastal plain, drawing an angry response from top state elected officials who see it as a land grab by the federal government. "They've decided that today was the day that they were going to declare war on Alaska. Well, we are ready to engage," said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and chair of the Senate energy committee. The designation would set aside an additional nearly 12.3 million acres as wilderness, including the...

RedState assisted in sponsoring Rep. Steve King (R-IA)72%‘s event in Iowa this past weekend. I did not go, but made sure to pay attention to what was going on and who said what. As I have previously written, this is the most substantive field of Republican contenders since 1980. The number of Governors, Senators, and others who are running gives the GOP a deeper bench than any the Democrats can or will muster. They also agree on most topics and are trying to nuance themselves into unique positions. I appreciate Governor Perry’s desire to paint a vision for the country....

The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president. The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled,...

America's greens chalked up a `victory' when the United States Senate voted last week to omit funding for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the fiscal year 2004 budget. Not surprisingly, the Sierra Club's national office trumpeted the vote as one "to protect this spectacular (Alaskan) landscape." And it also claims with a straight face to favor reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We both agree on the last point. But the Sierra Club sees your SUV and its thirst for gas as the problem in our achieving that important goal. This powerful green lobby pushes...

The White HouseÂ’s Troll Fest, 2015 continues apace. In fact, if you are getting the impression by now that the Obama administration has no higher priority than provoking fights with Republicans, youÂ’re probably right. On Sunday, the White House leaked a proposal to The Washington Post in which the administration revealed plans to make the 1.4 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and parts of the Arctic Ocean off limits to drilling. Some of this can be accomplished via new regulations administered by the Department of the Interior, but not entirely. They have also proposed additional restrictions on oil...

The White House is proposing to designate the oil-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness permanently off limits to drilling. The proposal sets up a showdown with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who said the White House also intends to put much of the Arctic Ocean off limits to drilling in the new five-year offshore leasing plan to be released this week. SNIP Obama’s proposal to designate 12.3 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness would require Congressional approval, and there is no chance...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is boosting protection of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and will ask Congress to designate more than 12 million acres as a wilderness area, including its potentially oil-rich Coastal Plain. The designation would seal off the area in Alaska's northeast corner from oil exploration and give it the highest degree of federal protection available to public lands. Obama and the Interior Department announced the effort Sunday.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told The Washington Post in an interview Friday that she is “seriously interested” in running for the White House in 2016. “You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested,” Palin said, when asked to clarify her thinking about a possible presidential bid. Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee, said she stood by comments she made Thursday in Las Vegas to ABC News, where she first expressed enthusiasm about potentially competing for the Republican presidential nomination.

While Scoop has done a good job of debunking the rumor that Palin said she was interested in running for the presidency in 2016 already, some are saying she hinted at it in this speech. Whether she did or not, she packed it full of puns and zingers and really pumped up the crowd.

Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin is saying she is “seriously interested” in running for president in 2016, injecting some intrigued into next year’s race and the already crowded field of potential GOP candidates.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) lambasted Hollywood liberals in a rambling speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday. The party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, who said this week she’s “ interested” in a presidential bid, took the stage with to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” feeding off the energy of the crowd as she jumped from conservative topic to topic. Her speech was replete with memories of her own trips to Iowa, but she also focused on one recent controversy — defending criticism over the country’s top-grossing movie, “American Sniper.” Palin detailed how she and her family were...