Free Republic

“Green” started as the stand against pollution. To the “greenies,” that pollution seldom seemed small enough, especially when the pollutants were made by evil humans rather than by nature itself. Green is no more good for saving the environment than it is for protecting the people. Green wears the badge of hypocrisy. Being green requires minimizing pollutants in products, places, people, and the environment. But it depends on what is a pollutant and how little of it is little enough. The EPA, for example, has declared CO2 a pollutant, the invisible, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic substance that sustains all life on...

A couple of weeks ago a toddler shot himself in the head after finding a gun under the pillow of his parent's bed. Just days later a police officer accidentally shot his mother at a family wedding while adjusting his jacket. Last year, a nine-year-old girl was being shown how to use an automatic weapon and accidentally killed her instructor. In Idaho a two-year-old boy was shopping at Walmart with his mother and three other children, when he found a gun in his mother's bag; he pulled the trigger and killed her. Some would argue that these tragic stories...

Next week, members of the Copyright Royalty Board, three of the most powerful people you have never heard of will decide how to shift millions, heck, billions of dollars from one set of players to another.The CRB is the sole arbitrator of all matters of music royalties and it is about to issue a death sentence to digital music services, like Spotify and Pandora. Every five years, the board reviews royalties paid by digital streaming services. The board's troika is set up as a panel of administrative law judges, Suzanne Barnett, chief copyright royalty judge; David Stricker, economics judge and...

By now everyone has had their say about Jeb Bush's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The consensus is that Bush misheard Megyn Kelly's "knowing what we know now" question about the Iraq war. I'm not convinced. Politicians routinely answer the question they wish they were asked rather than the question they were actually asked. Indeed, those are the only kinds of questions some politicians -- particularly ones with the last name Clinton -- ever answer. The question Fox News' Kelly asked is the tougher one, at least for Bush, so perhaps he opted to answer in a way...

Stony Brook University’s Graduate Queer Alliance (GQA) has managed to elevate opposition to free speech to a Zen Art. The group recently demanded that their university apologize simply for hosting my friend Frank Turek in a debate that had nothing to do with homosexuality – that is until his opponent, Michael Shermer, interjected the issue into the debate. It is worth noting that the audience actually booed Shermer after he continued to lecture them on how they would all some day accept same-sex marriage.This is not an isolated incident. Readers will remember my column, “The Cisco Kid,” which documented Frank’s...

It was outrageous for ABC News to promote Bill Clinton's spokesman George Stephanopoulos to the top of the political-anchorman heap. It was shameless to keep him there, even as Hillary Clinton keeps running for president. Conservatives never felt he was an appropriate choice, and never felt he sincerely attempted fairness and balance in his "journalism." This feeling should belong to every American now that it's out that Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation -- run by Bill and Hillary -- over the last three years. Given his background in the innermost circle of Team Clinton in the 1990s, these...

For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel. I defended free markets on TV, and he studied blood at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Mom asked me when I'd get a "real job" like his. Then the crusade against capitalism reached his world. Medical "journalists" demanded that corporations distance themselves from medical research. They'll bias the results, "put profits before people" and sell dangerous goods. Tom didn't notice this "conflict of interest crusade" until he joined the scientific advisory board of a biotech company and learned how difficult it is to bring medical innovation to market. Now...

n our home, we try to instill a life lesson for our kids best summed up in Latin: Nihil boni sine labore. It means, "Nothing good achieved without hard work." Few people I've met in my lifetime embody this motto better and more brilliantly than Tony Maglica, inventor of the iconic Maglite flashlight. The spry 84-year-old founder and CEO of Mag Instrument still traverses his 450,000-square-foot factory floor dozens of times over the course of his 12-hour workday, six days a week, beginning at the crack of dawn and ending after most of his 800 employees have clocked out. I...

The Washington Post actually tweeted this out today on the Texas biker gang shootings. The race-obsessed paper wants desperately to make the story about race… And threw in a photo of Sarah Palin for kicks.

Health Care: We keep hearing about how millions will lose insurance if the Supreme Court strikes down ObamaCare's federal exchange subsidies. But there's another side to this story that never gets discussed until now.

Here's another question to add to the long and growing list of those that have gone unasked since Hillary Clinton announced her run for the presidency on April 12. What is the significance of that second private email address?

Politico says that Scott Walker is having a “crisis of faith” because social conservatives are questioning his bona fides.  Showing their ignorance of what “social conservatism” actually is, they quoted a lot of evangelicals and mentioned over and over how it was surprising he would have this problem given that he mentions God a lot.   You know, because that’s the criteria. Hold your hand up, say God led you, and the social conservatives will stop drooling on the floor long enough to scream “UNDER GOD!” defiantly when reciting the pledge of allegiance. That Walker is under pressure to prove his social...

Those accustomed to reading or listening only to liberal commentators may not be aware of “trigger warnings” and “safe zones” on college campuses. It seems that mostly conservative sites and writers are concerned with the increasingly draconian suppression of free speech on college campuses. But then, it is mostly conservative writers and speakers who are treated as though they’re bringing the Ebola virus rather than contrarian ideas to the sensitive ears of what we may as well name the “Swaddled Generation.” A trigger warning is usually conveyed on a sign carried or posted near the auditorium where a speech is...

Last fall, RCP Election Analyst David Byler and I put together an index of party strength. While most journalists look at presidential performance as a measure of party strength (see the ubiquitous “Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections”), we take a broader view of party strength. Rather than look simply at presidential performance, we look at party dominance at the federal, congressional, and state levels. One need only look at fights over voter identification laws, redistricting, food stamp benefits, Obamacare expansion, and a multitude of other battles from the last few years alone...

The Amtrak crash outside of Philadelphia was an invitation for practically every politician in the Northeast and every transit expert in America to complain about lack of funding for the county’s infrastructure. They didn’t even wait to know what was the cause of the tragedy to take to the airwaves, and weren’t deterred when it emerged that the engineer had been going twice the speed limit around a tight curve when Amtrak Train 188 derailed. They cared only for reciting the usual litany of laments for our “crumbling” infrastructure and our lack of high-speed rail, which is supposedly a stinging...

SIX days before last week’s deadly Amtrak derailment, a train carrying crude oil went off the tracks in rural North Dakota and burst into flames. Thankfully, no one was killed. But it should not take a deadly disaster — like the one that took 47 lives in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013 — for us to grasp the risk from oil trains, which pass through many densely populated parts of the United States. The Obama administration recently issued new safety rules for oil trains, to take effect in October. But it didn’t do the one thing many...

RUSH: Let me just tell you, this Hillary Clinton e-mail stuff, I'm just gonna tell you right now, it is so complicated, don't ever, ever think the low-information voter is going to even care, much less try to figure this out. I myself, El Rushbo, blessed with an amazing mind, able to wade through all of the BS and get to the stuff that matters, the stuff between the lines, not even I, ladies and gentlemen, can quickly decipher all of this. It takes study even for someone like me to figure this all out, and then to try to...

RUSH: This is from the Washington Free Beacon that broke the Stephanopoulos story. Oh, there's more on that. Do you realize ABC just paid him $105 million on a re-up? Before all this broke, Stephanopoulos, his contract was due to expire soon, $50 million over five years or six, whatever it was. they bumped him up to $105 million, seven years, through 2021, which would be what? That would be through Hillary's reelection. That's how long his deal is. They have committed guaranteed $105 million to Stephanopoulos, not in a lump, he's gotta earn it every year, but they've guaranteed...

RUSH: I got two examples here of something I have been talking about since I first encountered it. I don't remember exactly when I first encountered it. It was in the past couple of years, maybe three, as rapidly as time goes by. It was the first poll that I saw of Millennials in which they were fully aware that the economy is in the tank and they're fully aware of the obstacles in their way to having what they consider to be a life, an economic life that is an improvement over their parents, which is one of these...

RUSH: Oh, we got a flash: "Patriots Will Not Appeal Deflategate Decision." You know, there have been all kinds of secret meetings going on over the past 24 hours between Goodell and Robert Kraft, between the NFL and the Patriots. The sports media was starting to get breathing heavy, thinking that some sort of compromise had been reached. Because in the Drive-By Media, their template/their narrative is that Goodell is a jerk, that Goodell does nothing but screw up every time he hands out this penalties. And that Goodell therefore knows he's a jerk, and Goodell knows he screwed up...