Free Republic

Vice President Pence on Monday said congressional Republicans should pass a “repeal only” bill if they can’t come to a consensus on legislation to replace ObamaCare. “If they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal and replace bill — do those two things simultaneously — we ought to just repeal only,” Pence said in an interview with Rush Limbaugh. Pence’s comments echoed those made by President Trump, who last month suggested that he was open to repealing ObamaCare first and developing a replacement plan later. However, White House legislative director Marc Short on Monday said, "we still believe that the bill...

Federal immigration officials negligently allowed a Kansas City, Kan., man to remain in the country illegally before he allegedly killed five men in a 2016 shooting spree, according to a recently filed lawsuit. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., by the families of two of the five men who Pablo Serrano-Vitorino is now charged with killing. Serrano-Vitorino had previously been deported after he was convicted of a felony in 2003. But according to the suit, Serrano-Vitorino re-entered the country illegally and had several brushes with local law enforcement agencies before March 2016, when he...

When we think of climate change, most of us think of environmental consequences like rising sea levels, elevated temperatures and melting glaciers. But experts say that those effects may only be the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Climate change is shaking up everything from finance to health. As a result, it isn’t only urban planners in at-risk areas who will have to shift their framework for planning for the future. From financial planners to farmers, civil engineers to doctors, an increasingly wide range of other professionals are likely to find their industries affected. That means there may be another consequence...

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed,...

The state of Hawaii asked a federal appeals court on Friday to issue an emergency order blocking parts of President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban while the state seeks clarification over what groups of people would be barred from travel. A Honolulu judge on Thursday rejected a request by Hawaii to narrow the government's implementation of the ban, saying the state should directly ask the Supreme Court to clarify its ruling. Instead, Hawaii appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying in a court filing on Friday that the appeals court has the power to narrow the travel...

Lingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system. Sometimes described as Medicare for all, single-payer is a system in which a public agency handles health care financing while the delivery of care remains largely in private hands. Discussions of the California measure have stalled, however, in the wake of preliminary estimates pegging the cost of the program as greater than the entire state government budget. Similar cost concerns derailed single-payer proposals in Colorado and Vermont. Voters need to understand that this cost objection...

Vermont resident Jon Svitavsky announced on July 5 that he is challenging Sen. Bernie Sanders in his upcoming re-election in 2018. In his most recent race for re-election, Sanders won over 71 percent of the vote and the Democratic Party didn’t bother to run a candidate. In the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders received over 86 percent of the vote in Vermont. Among the small percentage of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in the state was Svitavsky, a homeless shelter director who is beginning to receive support from other disgruntled Clinton supporters across the country. In October 2016, Politico ran...

A prominent Boston man nabbed by ICE last month for overstaying his visa by more than a decade has been sent back to Ireland, and the city’s Irish community is still worried about further deportations, an advocate said. John Cunningham, 38, was a Brighton-based electrical contractor before he was detained for overstaying a 90-day visa that he used to enter the U.S. in 2003. Cunningham left on a commercial flight Wednesday night. “ICE is enforcing the law, it’s simple and sometimes painful but they’re just doing their jobs,” said immigration attorney John Foley, a board member of the cultural center...

For years, Black people have delivered our vote to Democrats. Many Democrats wouldn’t have won without our vote. Now some Black people, and other people of color, have become discouraged because no matter the votes we deliver, we are taken for granted. Once elected, many forget our efforts on their behalf. Until President Barack Obama ran for office, I voted for Democrats, but I’d lost my enthusiasm for my Party. My enthusiasm returned full force in 2008 and 2012. By 2016, I still enthusiastically supported Secretary Hillary Clinton. I did so because she was a Democrat, but also because she...

Siberia is no stranger to mysterious explosions. In 1908, a blast flattened an entire forest and the exact cause of the Tunguska Event is still debated. More recent explosions, by far less powerful, but still dangerous, seem to be caused by climate change. According to a reindeer herder of the Jamal Peninsula, on the morning of June 28, he heard a loud blast and a column of smoke rising from the ground. The explosion he heard created a crater with a diameter of 25 feet and almost 65 feet deep. When first reports about the mysterious craters in Siberia appeared...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is battling to prevent US President Donald Trump undermining the world leaders' united front on climate change. At the Paris climate deal, all world leaders spoke in favour of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees but that was after a massive diplomatic effort by President Barack Obama made membership of the climate club a moral imperative. He and the French hosts created such an atmosphere that even the normally foot-dragging Russians and Saudis committed to the deal, despite their long history of slowing progress in climate negotiations behind the scenes. They own vast fossil fuel...

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party. The last few years of the Obama administration and the 2016 primary season once again created a rush to the left. Identity politics, class warfare and big government all made comebacks. Candidates inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and a host of well-funded groups have embraced sharply leftist ideas. But the results at the voting booth have been anything...

California and 17 other states on Thursday sued Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, alleging she unlawfully delayed new federal regulations designed to protect student loan borrowers from being ripped off by for-profit colleges and other schools. The rules, which would have made it easier for students to have loans forgiven if they were defrauded or deceived, were developed by the Obama administration and had been set to take effect last Saturday. But last month DeVos delayed their implementation and launched an effort to rewrite them, arguing they were unfair to students and schools while putting taxpayers at risk for “significant costs.”...

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths. March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science". But that was so three months ago. Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready...

U.S. President Donald Trump arrived for a G20 summit in Hamburg on Thursday risking isolation on climate policy and the wrath of anti-capitalist protesters threatening to disrupt the meeting of the world's leading economic powers. Trump, who paused to wave as he descended the steps of Air Force One with his wife Melania, faces a testy confrontation with leaders of the other big G20 economies after deciding last month to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate deal. Trade policy is another area of contention at the summit, which protesters have vowed to disrupt. "Welcome to Hell"...

Six in 10 American voters support the new ban on people from six countries from entering the United States unless they can show they have a close relative here, according to opinion poll results released on Wednesday. The Politico-Morning Consult poll found 37 percent of voters said they "strongly supported" the new U.S. State Department guidelines that would deny visas to citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen who do not have close relatives in the United States. Another 23 percent of voters said they "somewhat support" the guidelines. The partial ban was most strongly supported by Trump's...

German police used water cannon to disperse around 500 anti-capitalist protesters overnight in the port city of Hamburg where Chancellor Angela Merkel will host leaders of the G20 leading economies in a two-day summit starting on Friday. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to march in the city this week against globalization and what they say is corporate greed and a failure to tackle climate change. German authorities believe around 8,000 demonstrators were prepared to use violence, the interior minister said on Tuesday. Some 20,000 police officers will be deployed. Hundreds of mainly young left-wing activists gathered and marched...

Hopes that the world’s huge carbon emissions might not drive temperatures up to dangerous levels have been dashed by new research. The work shows that temperature rises measured over recent decades do not fully reflect the global warming already in the pipeline and that the ultimate heating of the planet could be even worse than feared. How much global temperatures rise for a certain level of carbon emissions is called climate sensitivity and is seen as the single most important measure of climate change. Computer models have long indicated a high level of sensitivity, up to 4.5C for a doubling...

... Imagine, if you will, that you spend your entire professional life trying to do one thing to the best of your ability. In my case, that one thing is to study the nature and causes of climate change. You put in a long apprenticeship. You spend years learning about the climate system, computer models of climate and climate observations. You start filling a tool kit with the statistical and mathematical methods you’ll need for analyzing complex data sets. After decades of seeking to advance scientific understanding, reality suddenly shifts, and you are back in the cold darkness of ignorance....

U.S. declares independence In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain and its king. The declaration came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually encourage France’s intervention on behalf of the Patriots. The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America....