Free Republic

In a sweeping initiative to curb pollutants blamed for global warming, the Obama administration's EPA unveiled a plan Monday aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by nearly a third by 2030. But it delays the deadline for some states to begin complying until long after President Barack Obama leaves office. The 645-page plan, expected to be finalized next year, is a centerpiece of Obama's efforts to deal with climate change and seeks to give the United States more leverage to prod other countries to act when negotiations on a new international treaty resume next year. Under the...

There comes a point where the Left’s calumnizing of conservatives, its endless quest to delegitimize ordinary words, and its determination to criminalize religious expression all combine to make me want to offend as many leftists as I can, in response, just for fun. But not only for fun: Deliberately choosing to offend them, and thus trying to shred their ideological straitjackets, is occasionally a necessary endeavor. We on the right must show that we need not cower; we can and must fight back. In that spirit: To 50-year-old men, 20-year-old females are indeed “girls.” Not women. Get over it. If...

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who suggested on Monday that "every institution" in America should ignore the nation's immigration laws until Congress passes amnesty legislation, said President George W. Bush will go down as the last Republican president in history if Congress does not act on immigration. "I give you George W. Bush--the man who will go down in history as the last Republican president in American history," Gutierrez said Tuesday on the House Floor. He added: If you do nothing on immigration, I guess you can take comfort in knowing that from Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, you had...

"With the news this week that more than 600,000 Washington residents have acquired new health care plans through the state exchange, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers said it’s unlikely the Affordable Care Act will be repealed.... "...She also discussed... the feasibility of immigration reform this year..."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Internal Revenue Service told House Republicans on Wednesday that it would take years to provide all the documents they have subpoenaed in their probe of how the agency handled tea party groups' applications for tax-exempt status. The comments by IRS chief John Koskinen drew a frosty response from Republicans who run the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, one of several congressional panels investigating the controversy. The panel's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., warned him he should comply with the request "or potentially be held in contempt" of Congress, a sometimes threatened but...

Obama delivers remarks in Brussels Belgium

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 175,000 workers were added to nonfarm payrolls in December, well above Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 149,000. 162,000 of those hires were to private payrolls, above expectations for a 145,000 rise in the ranks of private-sector workers. The unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to 6.7% from 6.6%. Labor force participation was unchanged at 63.0%. 610,000 were unable to work due to inclement weather in February, above the historical February average of 317,000.

The winners have accepted their statuettes at the 86th Annual Academy Awards show at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. This is the complete list of Oscar award winners:

Enjoy Classic Duck Dynasty

U.S. consumer prices barely rose last month as a sharp increase in energy costs was offset by cheaper clothing, cars and air fares. The figures indicate inflation remains mild. The Labor Department said Thursday that the consumer price index rose just 0.1 percent in January, down from a 0.2 percent gain in December. Prices have risen 1.6 percent in the past 12 months. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices also rose just 0.1 percent last month and 1.6 percent in the past year. The year-over-year increase in core prices was the smallest in seven months. The "mild...

Democracy is starting to get me down. Oh, I know what you're thinking: I write regularly about American politics, and democracy is only just starting to get me down? Okay, good point. Maybe I should say that democracy is starting to get me down even more than it usually does. And why is that? Because it's beginning to dawn on me that Jeb Bush is probably going to be the Republican Party's nominee for president in 2016. Consider: With the ongoing implosion of Chris Christie's political career, the GOP establishment has lost its best hope for a candidate who could...

Geneva (AFP) - Last year tied for the sixth-hottest on record, confirming that Earth's climate system is in the grip of warming that will affect generations to come, the UN's weather agency said Wednesday. "This is confirmation of the trend of global warming of the planet," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) chief Michel Jarraud told AFP. Last year equalled 2007 as the sixth-warmest year since reliable records began in 1850, with a global land and ocean surface temperature that was 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average, the WMO said in a statement. Last year equalled 2007 as...

In a recent interview, 57-year-old Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, said that the network “has never had an ideology.” The former NBC researcher, who prefers jogging suits to business suits and is beset with constant nervous twitching, insisted that the network stays “true to the facts.” Griffin maintained that if a Democrat has problems, MSNBC anchors are not going to bail them out. He claimed, “If you’re a Democrat in trouble, we’re not a place where we’re going to rehabilitate you. You’re not going to get a free ride if you did wrong.”

The iconic Doomsday Clock remains poised at five minutes until midnight, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced today (Jan. 14). The clock is no doomsday device — rather, it's a visual metaphor for the danger of a "civilization-threatening technological catastrophe." Every year, the board analyzes international threats, particularly nuclear arsenals and climate change, and decides where the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock should rest. The closer it is to midnight, the closer the world is to doom. "As always, new technologies hold the promise of doing great good, supplying new sources of clean...

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart. It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3....

The record cold spell that has half the country in the deep freeze could cost the U.S. economy up to $5 billion. That's because millions of Americans haven't been able to drive to work, fly or take a train to business meetings or vacations, go to the shopping mall or take the kids out for a movie and a meal. And they may also have to pay more just to keep warm.

BEIJING — The Obama administration's push to help clean up China is emerging as a bright spot in a relationship rife with economic and strategic tensions. The failure of the world's two largest economies to agree on tough carbon emissions limits four years ago doomed substantial progress on climate change and left each side blaming the other. Since the Copenhagen talks, however, the U.S. and China have ramped up their environmental cooperation as repeated outbreaks of thick, acrid smog have virtually shut down major Chinese cities and cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year. “For a period...

Just hours earlier, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby issued a 53-page ruling saying Utah's law passed by voters in 2004 violates gay and lesbian couples' rights to due process and equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Shelby said the state failed to show that allowing same-sex marriages would affect opposite-sex marriages in any way. "In the absence of such evidence, the State's unsupported fears and speculations are insufficient to justify the State's refusal to dignify the family relationships of its gay and lesbian citizens," Shelby wrote.

WASHINGTON -- As an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws stalls in the Republican House, most Americans support a cornerstone of the proposed changes -- a path to citizenship for immigrants in the United States illegally, according to new polling released Monday. Support for the citizenship route has held steady at 63% throughout 2013 -- rising slightly among Republicans and dipping among political independents, according to the report from the Public Religion Research Institute. [Updated, 4:25 p.m. PST Nov. 25: Information from a Brookings Religion, Values and Immigration Reform Survey was also incuded.] Earlier this year, the Senate approved a...

President Barack Obama repeated on Monday that he will not take executive actions to halt deportations of undocumented immigrants, saying that such unilateral action would "violate our laws." "We are a nation of laws – that’s part of our tradition."