Free Republic

Obama: Planet Will ‘Boil Over' If Africans Are Allowed Cars and Air-Conditioning July 1, 2013 - 4:22 PM By Ryan Kierman (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama said at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday that unless we find new way of producing energy "the planet will boil over" if people in Africa are allowed to attain air conditioning, automobiles and big houses. “Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got...

Joe Biden also said the US remained committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Barack Obama's threats to use military force to prevent Iran securing a nuclear weapon are more than idle bluffs, vice-president Joe Biden told the biggest pro-Israeli lobbying group Aipac on Monday.Biden said that while the US preferred a diplomatic solution to the standoff with Iran, a military option remained on the table."The president of the United States cannot, and does not, bluff. President Barack Obama is not bluffing," Biden told the audience in Washington.Israel is seeking assurances of support...

WASHINGTON - If you thought President Obama's first term was one long, uninterrupted political brawl, the next four years will make that period look tame by comparison. If you need any evidence for this prediction, Obama's in-your-face, second inaugural address is Exhibit A. It was a speech tailored to make the hearts of liberal Democrats beat faster, cheering what some in the Washington news media called "Obama unbound." It was a speech that sent an unmistakable message to his party's base that this time around, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off, these are my issues, and...

Although it is now digital, Newsweek celebrated President Obama's upcoming inauguration with a "cover" that calls the event "the second coming," an apparent reference to the return of Jesus Christ, The Blaze reported Friday. A post at Twitchy called the cover "creepy," while The Blaze described it as "controversial" and “questionable.” The cover highlights an article by former editor Evan Thomas, who once compared Obama to God. “Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn't felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We're seen too often as the...

A former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the FBI says played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, accompanied Iraq’s prime minister to the White House on Monday, attending an event at which President Obama trumpeted the end of the Iraq War. Hadi Farhan al-Amiri, transportation minister in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, was part of the delegation that visited the White House to discuss Iraq’s future and Iran’s influence there, among other topics. -excerpt - Louis J. Freeh, who served as FBI director in the Clinton administration and the early months...

Zomblog has obtained an extremely rare copy of the first issue of Osawatomie, a newspaper published by the Weather Underground in 1975. Noteworthy passages are reproduced below, along with exact transcriptions. The full pages, with each passage in context in high resolution, are found at the bottom of this post. Much of Osawatomie, which was written at a time when the Dohrn-Ayers wing of the Weather Underground was transitioning from terrorism to “working from the inside” for revolution, concerns itself with the need to encourage “organizers” who will work in “communities” and use “audacity” to bring about “socialism” in America....

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Afghanistan to encourage President Hamid Karzai to continue efforts to reconcile with the Taliban. Mr Karzai has expressed frustration at the process after the assassinations of several key Afghan leaders. US officials say Mrs Clinton also wants to convince Afghans that Washington is committed to a long-term relationship with their country. The US is planning to withdraw troops and hand over security to the Afghans. "She wants to signal US support for a secure and stable Afghanistan," a US official told journalists travelling with Mrs Clinton. Her visit to Afghanistan was not...

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) tells MSNBC regulations create jobs because a business will have to hire people to help them comply with the new requirement. "I think the answer is no," Ellison said when asked if he believes regulations kill jobs. "And here is why: When we talked about increasing fuel efficiency standards, the industry responded, and they need engineers and designers and manufacturers, and they need actually more people to help respond to the new requirement."

Back when the Obama administration was young, the White House set up what amounted to a snitch line, an email address where people were invited to report on other people bad-mouthing the president of the United States on health care. The snitch line was soon taken down. However, it has now been resurrected in the form of a website called Attack Watch. People are invited to use the website to report on other people who are running down President Obama. In this way the Obama campaign for reelection would gather information to "fight smears." According to the Washington Post, the...

Obama ‘Attack Watch’ Website to Help Supporters ‘Fight Back’ By Devin Dwyer Sep 13, 2011 6:21pm It’s not easy being an Obama for America volunteer, especially when you feel ill-equipped to respond to the waves of attacks from his critics, says Jennifer Kickliter, a Tennessee college student who’s signed up for the 2012 campaign. “What do I tell people who point out that the Affordable Care Act isn’t helping people, and that the ”don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal was accompanied by a court order Obama plans to fight?” she said in July during an online chat with several Obama campaign...

A new Twitter hashtag designed to help fight misinformation against President Obama appears to have backfired in early use on Wednesday. President Obama's Twitter feed, which is run by his campaign staff, on Tuesday evening started promoting the new website AttackWatch.com and hashtag #AttackWatch, designed to fight misinformation against the president. The hashtag was already in heavy rotation by Twitter users by Wednesday morning, but many users are conservatives such as columnist Michelle Malkin, who offered up her own daily column as an example of an Obama "attack." The website is meant to be "the first line of defense against...

President Obama has said that both parties must take on their “sacred cows” in order to reach a debt-ceiling compromise. He could start by taking on ACORN, a cow so sacred to the Democratic Party that it is still receiving federal funding despite a 2009 vote by Congress to stop giving the controversial group any more tax dollars. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded two separate grants of $79,819 and $461,086 to ACORN this year, according to USAspending.gov. But you might not know that unless you know the organization receiving the money - the Affordable Housing...

Policy Errors: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says he's puzzled by the failure of the economy to respond to our government's many ministrations. Which explains much of why our economy is such a mess. 'We don't have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting," Bernanke said recently, adding that the growth slowdown was proving to be "more persistent than we thought." His remarks came as the Fed dropped its 2011 gross domestic product growth forecast from the range of 3.1% to 3.3%, made just two months earlier, to a much slower 2.7% to 2.9% pace....

The U.S. has “raced” to control space exploration, nuclear arms and electronics. Since taking office, President Obama has introduced the idea that the U.S. is now battling China — the world’s largest polluter — in new race for world domination. A clean energy race. “The nation that leads in the creation of a clean-energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy,” the president has said. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has repeated the message several times, creating a frenzy to “go green,” before China does. If America really is in such a race, the Energy and Commerce...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/08/live-stanford-s-sustainability-summit Home • The White House Blog The White House Blog Live from Stanford: Secretary Chu on the Global Clean Energy Challenge Posted by Secretary Steven Chu on March 08, 2010 at 01:45 PM EST What are the steps we must take as a nation to create new, clean energy jobs and ensure America’s long-term competitiveness? What are the consequences for our climate of inaction? How can science and technology offer us new and better choices – and how can America’s young people make a difference? Today, I’m returning to Stanford University, where...

Many of us had just the grandest time conducting worthless research for the old monopolistic phone companies.  Dr. Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy was one of the typical products of that era of unfocused industrial research.  He nurtured his career in what had become the most arrogant and unfocused lab of them all, Bell Laboratories.   If you landed one of those storied jobs as a newly minted Member of Technical Staff, you could expect to conduct research indistinguishable from that of any academic scientist supported by government agencies like the National Science Foundation. That a once glorious Bell Labs...

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons. Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--A grant program introduced in the federal stimulus package passed earlier this year was intended to jump-start investment in renewable energy, but the rules of the program threaten to hobble it from the start by restricting private equity involvement in any projects the government backs. The rules, published July 9, exclude from the program any projects with investors that have tax-exempt status. That was done because the grant program is intended to replace tax credits, which have become less widely used as taxable incomes have fallen.... However, most private equity firms receive backing from tax-exempt limited partners...

After the selection of a largely centrist economic team, liberals have been asking when President-elect Obama would give them a seat at the table. Well, now we know, and Americans should strap themselves in. Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters. It's striking that the moderate in this bunch may be Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped as Energy Secretary. Though a political unknown, Mr. Chu is the respected director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the...

WASHINGTON -- Aiming to keep the focus on climate change legislation, President Barack Obama put a plug in for administration efforts to make lamps and lighting equipment use less energy. "I know light bulbs may not seem sexy, but this simple action holds enormous promise because 7 percent of all the energy consumed in America is used to light our homes and businesses," the president said, standing alongside Energy Secretary Steven Chu at the White House.