Free Republic

Civil servants always will have the “American people’s back” despite dysfunctional politics, former Vice President Al Gore told federal employees on Monday. “I have never lost faith in you, the career people who keep this thing going in spite of all curveballs thrown in front of you, the latest being the sequester, well, the latest is -- what’s the date today?” the head of an initiative to reform government during the Clinton administration told a standing room-only crowd of federal employees at the Excellence in Government conference, sponsored by the Government Executive Media Group, in Washington. **SNIP** “Workers know, they...

A blast of wet and chilly weather left some hilly areas of the UK cloaked in snow as well as spring blossom on Wednesday.... Among areas affected was the hamlet of Anchor, close to the border between Shropshire and Wales. Landlord Mike Steedman, who has run the Anchor Inn for the past 17 years, said he could not remember snow falling in the area during May....

Having collected the Nobel peace prize in 2007, Al Gore's fortunes as a climate crusader slid into the doldrums. But 8th November 2011 arrived as a ray of sunshine. On that day Australia's parliament passed into law the world's first economy-wide carbon tax. Rushing to his blog, Gore posted a short but rapturous statement, cross-posted in The Huffington Post. His fervent language echoed in progressive circles across the globe. Australians have been held-up as pioneering environmentalists ever since, putting Americans to shame. "This is a historic moment", thundered Gore. "With this vote", he blogged, "the world … turned a pivotal...

A leading venture capital firm gets taken to the clean energy cleaners. The story in the New York Times says Kleiner Perkins has been “humbled” by the past decade’s performance. That seems appropriate. The nation’s most famous venture capital firm had a stunning 35.7 percent annual rate of return in the decade of the 1990s. That was before they met Al Gore. Somewhere around the time Gore had won his Academy Award for warning the world about global warming, the former Vice President was hired on as a senior partner at KPCB. Fortune wrote an article describing Gore sitting in...

Carbon dioxide levels have reached its highest throughout human history, recent figures from a US monitoring station show. The level in our atmosphere is now at a record high 400 parts per million, prompting renewed warnings of the ‘huge risks’ of climate change. The shocking figures, which have risen from 270ppm before the Industrial Revolution, is a result of human activity such as burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The preliminary figures have come from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) monitoring station in Hawaii. The greenhouse gas has not been at such high levels for around three...

For a man with a carbon footprint the size of a dwarf planet, Al Gore takes the hypocrite's cake for his ignorant statement that there is "no such thing as ethical oil." He was in Canada this week to sell his new book, of course, so what better way to get media attention than to insult both the host country and one of its major resources? If you want to know the name of his book, look it up. We're not going to shill for him, even if he is a former vice president of the United States as well...

The Prince of Wales has criticised "corporate lobbyists" and climate change sceptics for turning the earth into a "dying patient", in his most outspoken attack yet on the world's failure to tackle global warming, made shortly before he is to take over from the Queen at the forthcoming meeting of the Commonwealth.

Former Vice President Gore on Tuesday said "there's no such thing as ethical oil," slamming the notion that importing oil from U.S. ally Canada was better than doing so from unfriendly nations. “There’s no such thing as ethical oil. There’s only dirty oil and dirtier oil,” Gore told Canada’s The Globe and Mail during a Tuesday event in Toronto. Gore was responding to Globe and Mail Editor in Chief John Stackhouse on whether it made a difference that oil sands from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would come from a democratic nation. U.S. backers of the Canada-to-Texas pipeline have pointed...

‘No such thing as ethical oil,’ Al Gore tells Toronto audience IVAN SEMENIUK The Globe and Mail Published Tuesday, May. 07 2013, 10:44 PM EDT Last updated Wednesday, May. 08 2013, 7:41 AM EDT Declaring that “American democracy has been hacked,” former U.S. vice-president Al Gore told a Toronto audience that his countrymen needed to wake up to the special interests that have a grip on the levers of power in the U.S. Congress and are able to block legislation on a range of policy issues including his signature cause, global climate change. Mr. Gore added that he felt action...

The inconvenient truth about Al Gore is that he's to climate change what Michael Moore is to cinematic authenticity. He's a mockumentarist. If he were not a former U.S. vice-president, as well as a Democrat representing the loud left, Gore's docu-fictional film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, would not have added millions to his portfolio, enlarged his own carbon footprint to hypocritical proportions, but would have instead been taken with a grain of salt. Without the big name, he would have long ago been dismissed for lack of credibility. In an interview with the Globe & Mail, however, America's...

Current TVOver the last decade and a half, former Vice President Al Gore has amassed a personal fortune that rivals former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s, Bloomberg’s Ken Wells and Ari Levy report. Gore wasn’t even a multi-millionaire when he ran for office against George W. Bush in the 2000 election, but several recent moves have put his personal fortune at a point where it “may exceed $200 million,”...

Al Gore will always be known for suffering one of the most gut-wrenching losses in Electoral College history, but at least he's found a very nice way to cushion the blow. Instead, of spending eight years dealing with the worst problems the world can throw you, in the years since he became Almost-President, Gore has slowly amassed a personal fortune to rival another famous presidential loser.

As informed citizens, we need to be careful about conflating weather, climate change and natural disasters. Weather (i.e. the extreme cold we’re having in Texas this spring) is weather. Climate is the measurement of long-term weather data over broad areas (i.e. global temperatures over a 50 year period). For most people, these are pretty easy distinctions to make.

At the two-thirds mark for meteorological spring, 2013 was the second coldest spring on record – slightly warmer than 1975. But 1975 had an unusually warm May at 17C. The two warmest months of May were in 1934 and 1896. Both graphs above show the average of all daily temperatures at all US HCN stations, calculated per year. The forecast for the first two weeks of May is well below normal, so odds are that the spring of 2013 will be the coldest on record in the US. This is what Fort Collins looked like at 7pm today (May 1.)

In an interview with Bloomberg TV from the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, former Vice President Al Gore claims American democracy has been "hacked." Gore also opined on former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently commenting that she regretted her decision in Bush v. Gore.

But he was most animated, his voice pitching higher and lower and the volume steadily increasing, when he spoke of global warming. "This is for real. It is not made up. The scientists are not in a conspiracy to lie to us," Gore nearly shouted. "The generation of people alive today will be held accountable," he said. "Our children and grandchildren ... if they exist in a world that has been devastated by these consequences that have been predicted and are beginning to unfold -- they would be well justified in asking of us: 'What in the hell were you...

That famous golden spike takes on a whole new meaning with the nearly 1 billion dollar rail to nowhere contract that clocks in at a truly golden 35 million dollars per mile. And its recipient, Mr. Diane Feinstein owner of Tutor Perini, just happens to sit in a warm position near the top of the state’s political heap

Paging Al Gore! Iraq on Sunday suspended the licenses of Al Jazeera and nine other satellite stations for promoting violence and sectarianism. Al Jazeera reports: "We took a decision to suspend the licence of some satellite channels that adopted language encouraging violence and sectarianism," Mujahid Abu al-Hail of the Communications and Media Commission (CMC) said on Sunday. "It means stopping their work in Iraq and their activities, so they cannot cover events in Iraq or move around." The CMC said it believes that "the rhetoric and substance coverage" by Baghdad, Al Sharqiyah, Al Sharqiyah News, Babylonian, Salah al-Din, Anwar 2,...

Our democracy has been hacked. The operating system has been taken over." That was the message former Vice President Al Gore brought to Stanford Tuesday night. The 65-year-old paced the stage as he rattled off a litany of dark news from climate change-related superstorms and droughts to the U.S. Senate's failure to pass meaningful gun safety legislation. He offered blunt assessments of the Iraq War, saying it was about "a country that just happens to have a lot of oil." He spoke of the interest in energy-intensive Canadian tar sands oil extraction, the driving force behind plans for the controversial...

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing...

More than three months after buying Al Gore’s Current TV with a grand vision of launching a US-focused network, Al Jazeera’s plans are still not ready for prime time. The new network, to be called Al Jazeera America, has still not hired a news chief, finished its studio or settled on office space, The Post has learned.

Westboro Baptist Church said that the bombings during the Boston Marathon were sent by God as punishment for same-sex marriage and that members would definitely show up at funerals to protest. The group posted the message on its Twitter site, with a headline that read, “Thank God for the Boston marathon bombs.” The release continued: “WBC to picket the funeral of those killed by the bombing in Boston. … The federal government is classifying the bombs as a terrorist attack, but say it’s unclear if it’s of a domestic or foreign nature. Here’s a hint — God sent the bombs!...

A recent study suggests that drivers that have real time traffic loaded on their GPS systems spend 4 days less on congested highways. The study also noted that C02 emissions from the traffic-enabled drivers decreased 21%. Traffic-enabled navigation retails for $250.00 to $350.00. By comparison, the expensive ‘cash for clunkers’ program cost up to $4,5000 per driver and if you assume the driver keeps the same driving habits with the new car, cuts CO2 emissions per driver 25%. (However, some suggest that most drivers will drive a new car more).

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

NYT March 2011 ($3.57 a gallon): US better prepared for rising gas costs NYT August 2005 ($2.55 a gallon): Economy shows signs of strain from oil prices 'Two oil men' to blame for high gas prices, Pelosi says http://articles.cnn.com/2008-07-17/politics/congress.oil_1_drilling-anwr-pelosi?_s=PM:POLITICS April 24th, 2006, "Democrats Eager to Exploit Anger Over Gas Prices http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20060424monday.html Blame rising oil prices on Bush Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/10/EDPP11775T.DTL#ixzz1p3rq8dZ8 As gas prices and oil profits soar, Bush promotes giveaways to corporations http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/gas-a30.shtml Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/opinion/22friedman.html http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/10/EDPP11775T.DTL

A new Israeli television channel called "i24news" that will go out in English, French and Arabic is to begin broadcasting by summer this year, it said on Tuesday. The channel, which is based in Jaffa Port just south of Tel Aviv, aims to rival global news outlets like Al-Jazeera and France 24, its executives say. i24news "will broadcast news from the heart of Middle East," the channel said in a statement. "The letter 'i' was chosen as representing several of the topics and values that will guide the channel: international, information, independent, individual, innovation, interactive, etc. The number 24, of...

"Since record keeping began in the sixties, we've never encountered anything like this before," ice breaker Ulf Gulldne told the local newspaper Örnsköldsviks Allehanda. On March 29th, 176,000 square kilometers of the Baltic Sea was covered in ice, a record for the time of year. On a map, it means about half of the central and northern parts are frozen over. Far north, the ice is both thick and difficult to break through. The date on which the ice reaches its maximum spread usually falls much earlier in the year. The previously latest date record was March 25th, 2008. That...

Undocumented Intelligence wrote: Ransom wants to make climate change concern all about being liberal. Actually, it's all about being rational and not blinded–as Ransom is--by an ideology that is highly inconvenienced by an overwhelming body of expert scientific evidence. -Combat Global Warming: Be Gay for a Day Dear Comrade Undoc, Please note that the Ransom Style Book will no longer recognize the phrase Hooverville Follies. Just as the Associated Press has axed the term Illegal Immigrant, we have replaced the term Hooverville Follies with a more apt phrase: Undocumented Intelligence.  Thank you. Look, I’m not the one who declares every...

Obama quietly signs bill shielding airlines from carbon fees in EuropeBy Keith Laing - 11/27/12 02:02 PM ET President Obama has signed into law a bill that requires U.S. airlines be excluded from European carbon emissions fees. Environmentalists had framed the bill as the first test of the president's commitment to fighting climate change in his second term and urged him to veto it. Obama quietly signed it Tuesday over their objections. "The Obama administration is firmly committed to reducing harmful carbon pollution from civil aviation both domestically and internationally, but, as we have said on many occasions, the application...

Woodward: Dinner with Al Gore 'unpleasant' By DYLAN BYERS | 4/5/13 12:32 PM EDT The Washington Post's Bob Woodward has described a dinner he had with former Vice President Al Gore was both "taxing" and "unpleasant." Speaking to a crowd at Ohio's Youngstown State University on Thursday, Woodward said he was sitting next to Gore at a dinner when the former vice president asked him why he hadn't been harder on President George W. Bush over the Iraq War, according to a report in the Youngstown Vindicator. Woodward said that Gore, who had been a journalist in his younger days,...

THE high priests of global warming are in a panic these days as their prophecies of doom have proved to be as credible as a the Mayan calendar. "Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models' range within a few years," the newspaper Australian reported over the weekend. As always, global warmists blame carbon dioxide. "Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard...

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream. ... But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.

Former Vice President Al Gore will give a lecture on climate change on Tuesday, April 23, in honor of former Senior Fellow Stephen Schneider, a world-renowned climate scientist who died in 2010. Former Vice President Al Gore, chairman of The Climate Reality Project, will share his thoughts on addressing climate change within our democracy and take questions from students at Stanford University on Tuesday, April 23, when he gives a lecture in honor of Stephen H. Schneider, the Stanford professor and world-renowned climate scientist who died in 2010.The program, which is open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m....

UPDATE 11:30 a.m. Friday: Reuters reports that Fisker has hired a bankruptcy attorney. Fisker Automotive , which has received $193 million of a $529 million Department of Energy stimulusloan guarantee and apparently still wants the rest of it, stopped making its sole electric car – the $102,000-plus Karma – last July. But only now has it decided to furlough workers for a week. “In parallel with the process of identifying a strategic partner, Fisker is, of course, continuing to manage its day-to- day operations and has recently instituted temporary furloughs for its U.S. workforce covering the final week of...

Former Vice President and environmentalist activist Al Gore is defending the sale of his television network to Al Jazeera, saying that the Qatari government-run network is “honest-to-goodness” news. During a panel discussion at the South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas on Saturday, Gore was asked about his $500-million deal to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera, in January. “You just sold your TV network to Al Jazeera, which is owned by a government and that government is basically a big—nothing but an oil producer,” NowThis News asked Gore. “Gas mainly, and oil, yes,” Gore said. “And they’re producing exactly...

Current TV's $500 million sale to Al Jazeera has prompted a lawsuit that claims co-founder Al Gore originally was opposed to the deal but had a "change of heart" on selling his cable network to oil-rich Qataris. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court by John Terenzio, who presents himself as a highly regarded media consultant, executive and TV producer who conceived the idea for the distribution of an American version of Al Jazeera. Now, Terenzio claims that he has been cut out of the lucrative deal.

Al-Jazeera has hired GOP lobbyists to help it gain approval to buy Current TV from Al Gore. Aljazeera, the former “voice of Osama Bin Laden”, wants to pollute US airwaves with its anti-Israel, pro-Islamist agenda… And GOP lobbyists are going to help them make that happen. ... in addition to hiring the K Street lobbying firm of DLA Piper to lobby on its behalf, the channel has hired Global Policy Initiatives and TCK International to represent it on Capitol Hill

... a second major winter storm in less than a week hits the central Plains. The National Service says today's storm, which has been tracking across western Texas toward Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, also is packing high winds

Al Jazeera America has hired a lobbying firm to advocate for the broadcasting company on Capitol Hill, according to reports. The media company Al Jazeera America Holdings, which recently bought Al Gore’s cable news station Current TV, has hired the DLA Piper law firm to conduct “informational communications regarding client's cable television channel,” Politico reported. The global law firm, which has 4,200 lawyers located in more than 30 countries throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East, has reportedly been educating lawmakers about the company’s plans to be based in New York City and open bureaus across the...

What started as a condescending “cautionary tale� about Sarah Palin’s mixing of celebrity and politics quickly became a cautionary tale about mixing contempt for Sarah Palin with desperation for the traffic her name will generate. Suzi Parker of the Washington Post‘s She the People blog reported Tuesday that Palin, in an attempt to “stay relevant,� would join the Al Jazeera America network, to “reach millions of devoutly religious people.” The only problem is the report comes from “The Daily Currant,� a parody site whose lead story today is “Catholic Church considering Jerry Sandusky for Pope.� A sampling of the original...

Whatever it is, and whatever quirks and contradictions I’ve observed, nothing prepared me for the rogue wave of hubris that crashed onto the talk show shores last week as Al Gore, rising like Poseidon from the sea, graced us with his latest global treatise, a 592-page tome entitled simply “The Future.” Now honestly, even Edward Gibbon limited his immortal history to the specific decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And it’s hard to imagine those industrious chroniclers of Western civilization, Will and Ariel Durant, embarking on a quixotic compendium to explain “The Past.” Then again, the restraints common to...

Al Gore: George Soros Should Have More Influence Over American Politics February 2, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield Apparently controlling the White House and the Foreign Policy of the country via the Soros Money Machine isn’t enough. Not until the entire Senate and Congress bows to the new Emperor of America. Billionaires influencing American politics is bad. Really bad. It’s a grave threat to Democracy. Unless they’re liberals. During an appearance with CBS anchor and host Charlie Rose at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on January 29, former Vice President Al Gore said that progressivism cannot compete with...

Our former U.S. Vice President Al Gore just sold one of his business holdings and earned a bit profit – and he contradicted himself while doing it. Gosh, I am shocked! Aren’t you? The headlines tell us that Gore is being pummeled with criticism from his fellow liberal-progressives because he sold Current TV, a television network that he co-founded, to Al Jazeera, a television network based in Qatar. In the liberal-progressive worldview, this transaction is problematic on two accounts. For one, Gore did business in an oil-producing country (Qatar), and for liberal-progressives, this is an un-forgivable sin. In their view,...

Some things are easy to mock, such as Al Gore – Pope Gorus IV of the Holy Church of Global Warming – selling his Current TV for hundreds of millions of oil dollars. But some other things are so bizarre it’s difficult to mock them because they come across as mockery already. Such is the case with the “Capitol Wellness Expo” happening on Capitol Hill this week. The master of ceremonies for the event is a woman named Judy Kosovich, an attorney who, among other things, has written of the need for people to reconnect with the Earth. OK, that’s...

It is fun to watch Big Oil critic Al Gore squirm as he is questioned about selling out to the oil-rich dictatorship in Qatar. But his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera is not a laughing matter. This transaction is a homeland security threat that violates numerous U.S. laws. To his credit, funnyman David Letterman got close to the truth when he asked the former Democratic vice-president, “Now why do we think of Al Jazeera as something not right going on there in terms of, in terms of the good for Americans? Why do we think that they may...

Al Gore said President Barack Obama was forced to be cautious during his first term in office because of the “propaganda” served up by Fox News and talk radio that created a “hostile environment for progressive ideas.” The former vice president — who has been on somewhat of a media whirlwind since the sale his Current TV to Arab news network Al-Jazeera — made the comment during an interview to promote his latest book with PBS’ Charlie Rose this week in New York. “I think it has been a pretty hostile environment for progressive ideas,” Gore said. “And why is...

Former Vice President Al Gore spoke with Charlie Rose on January 29th on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. After praising the integrity, independence and journalistic standards of foreign oil-backed anti-American Al Jazeera, the former Vice President took a swipe at Fox News Channel.

Within 24 hours of posting openings for the majority of their new positions, Al Jazeera America received 5000 applications for open positions, a number that has grown to 8,063 over the past three days, a network source told BuzzFeed. Al Jazeera caused a stir earlier this month when it was announced that the Qatar-based network had bought the struggling liberal channel Current from Al Gore for $500 million, and would use it to expand into American coverage...

I guess you can call this progress: we’re not blaming Bush for the economic non-miracle on Main Street anymore. From now on, we’ll be blaming tsunamis, hurricanes and other natural disasters:     As well as “strong headwinds.” Specifically strong headwinds kicked up by all those wily weepubwicans in the House who are hampering our economic recovery. I’m still stunned. How could the GDP have dropped so precipitously in just one quarter when our jobs! jobs!jobs! numbers have been so strong? Either the Republicans’ politics of destruction are worse than we thought, or the GDP is a less perfect measure...

There have always been two Al Gores. There is techno-enthusiast Al, who, during his 2000 run for president, proposed that an online network ("G-Bay") be used to auction off surplus government property. I found techno-enthusiast Al beguiling when I was researching manned Mars missions for his 1988 presidential campaign. But there is also Savonarola Al, who loudly denounces the excesses of modern capitalist society and demands repentance—though, given Mr. Gore's lucrative commercial dalliances (most recently, the sale of his Current TV network to the repressive, oil-rich Qatari regime), perhaps Jimmy Swaggart would be a closer clerical model than Savonarola. Each...