Free Republic

A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics. According to this view, having a child is a major contributor to climate change. The logical takeaway here is that everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children. Although culturally controversial, the scientific half of this position is fairly well-established. Several years ago, scientists showed that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. That data was recycled this past summer in a paper showing...

Republican Roy Moore is trailing Democrat Doug Jones by 12 points in the Alabama special Senate election, according to a poll conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee after five women accused Moore of pursuing them as teenagers. Jones led Moore 51 to 39 percent, according to the survey taken Sunday and Monday. The NRSC withdrew its support for Moore after the Washington Post published the first allegations against Moore on Thursday, and the group’s chairman, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said Moore should be expelled from the Senate if he wins on Dec. 12.

November 15, 2017 - It's been two months since Amazon announced they will be searching for a site for their new co-headquarters, resulting in hundreds of applications and endless speculation. Now we have the answer. Trust us - it's going to be Atlanta. So says the collective wisdom of urbanists, researchers, pundits and publications. The team at Sperling's BestPlaces collected 18 of the most reputable lists and rankings of potential Amazon HQ2 locations. Using those rankings, we created one huge super-study which tallied how each location performed and from that, we generated a score for each place. Sperling's Amazon HQ...

Several House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment targeting President Trump on Wednesday, asserting that Trump has violated the Constitution. Democratic Reps. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Luis Gutiérrez (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Adriano Espaillat (N.Y.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio) and John Yarmuth (Ky.) said the five articles of impeachment come out of concern for the country's national security. "We believe that President Trump has violated the Constitution, and we've introduced five articles of impeachment," Cohen said at a press conference.

Following developments in Eastern Europe and Catalonia, EU foreign affairs ministers pledged more resources to fight against foreign interference in Europe, in particular coming from Russian actors. […] Propaganda and disinformation activities generated and multiplied by foreign actors based in Russia have become a concern, primarily in Ukraine and eastern EU member states. But following a swathe of fake news stories during the French elections and, more recently, during the Catalan crisis, ministers agreed that more needs to be done to counter this new type of threat aimed at destabilizing the bloc. After referring to the Catalan example, Spanish Foreign...

Sen. Claire McCaskill on Tuesday said she was sexually harassed when she interned in Congress more than 40 years ago. The Missouri Democrat made the disclosure to reporters when asked if she thinks the environment is changing on Capitol Hill, given increased calls by lawmakers for mandated training to prevent sexual harassment. "Well I don't know, I will tell you I interned here in college and I was definitely sexually harassed as an intern in Congress back in the summer of 1974," McCaskill said, standing just off the Senate floor. "I was definitely sexually harassed." McCaskill has said before that...

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon is keeping the door open to ditching Roy Moore as the sexual-assault allegations against the Alabama Republican Senate candidate continue to pile up.

The Justice Department’s declaration that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is considering appointing a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton in response to demands by Republicans should alarm anyone who cares about the independence of the department. On Monday, news broke that the department had sent a written response to letters from House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), requesting investigations into “a plethora of matters connected to the 2016 election and its aftermath.” Sessions confirmed the content of the DOJ letter during his testimony Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee. Goodlatte’s letter reads like a laundry list of Republican grievances about...

Congressional lawmakers raised concerns about President Donald Trump's ability to use nuclear weapons during a hearing Capitol Hill Tuesday amid bipartisan anxiety over launch process procedures and indications that the administration has considered the option of a first strike on North Korea. Members of the Senate foreign affairs committee called into question a decades-old presidential authority to deploy nuclear weapons in what was the first congressional hearing on nuclear authorization in decades. "We are concerned that the President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic that he might order...

Today the jurors in the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez (D – NJ) will go back to work on orders of the judge, seeking to break what appears to be heading for a deadlock. Of course, if you don’t read conservative blogs or watch Fox News, you probably didn’t know that. There’s been a vacuum in terms of coverage on the major networks and most of cable news. One glaring example of this is MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, who freely admits that he hasn’t mentioned the trial once since it began.Why is that? He was actually asked about it...

In their 2014 book North Korea: The Politics of Regime Survival, Young Whan Kihl and Hong Nack Kim noted that “some restricted arm and weapons material have reached North Korea from Russia. . . . Russian companies have been among the suppliers of North Korea’s nuclear program.” Now Putin may be covertly supplying its missile program as well. The key question is why Putin would exacerbate an already crisis-level situation on the Korean peninsula. The answer may be the same as to why Putin has embroiled Russia in Syria: as a way to disrupt and distract the West, especially the...

Elections in 18 separate nations were influenced by online disinformation campaigns last year, suggests research. Independent watchdog Freedom House looked at how online discourse was influenced by governments, bots and paid opinion formers. In total, 30 governments were actively engaged in using social media to stifle dissent, said the report. Educating users to spot fake news and making tech firms police their networks could combat the manipulation, it said. The different tactics used to influence online speech included: * automated bots that echoed official messages * armies of paid commentators that swamped discussions with pro-government views * false news sites...

So Colin Kaepernick is GK’s citizen of the year. That’s like naming Mrs. O’Leary’s cow citizen of the year – it makes sense only if you thought Chicago needed to be burned to the ground. But there’s another connection as well. Kaepernick’s knee caper, explained here by the currently unemployed quarterback, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…there are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." is a protest against police brutality against black men....

Roy Moore's penchant for flirting with teen girls was "common knowledge" and "not a big secret" around Gadsden, according to some area residents. The Senate candidate has denied any wrongdoing in the wake of a report from The Washington Post in which four women accused Moore of inappropriate advances - and in one instance, a sexual encounter - toward them when they were teens and he was in his early 30s. One of the four women claims she was 14 at the time, making her the only one whose claim would represent a legal violation. Moore has said he never...

New York Times reports: One idea now being discussed under this scenario, brought up by two different White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, would be for Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama to immediately appoint Attorney General Jeff Sessions to what had been his seat when it becomes vacant again. Mr. Sessions remains highly popular among Alabama Republicans, but his relationship with President Trump has waned since he recused himself from the investigation of the role that Russia played in last year’s campaign.

The back legs of the baby elephant are consumed by fire as it chases after its startled mother, screaming. In the chilling photo, a flaming ball of tar...the source of the fire, along with a few hurled firecrackers — is frozen in the air as a crowd sprints away from the petrified pachyderms. Many things in the photo are unclear: the fate of the calf and its mother, the reason the men are attacking them on a road cut through a forest, whether the practice has a formal name or is just a random bit of sadism. But in an...

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — A new poll from JMC Analytics shows Democrat Doug Jones taking a lead over conservative Republican Judge Roy Moore in the Senate race here as allegations against Moore from the Washington Post roil the Senate race. The poll, released on Sunday morning,  shows Jones at 46 percent and Moore at 42 percent while Arlester McBride, an independent, gets 2 percent—and 9 percent are undecided. With leaners included, Jones clocks in at 48 percent, Moore at 44 percent, and McBride at 2 percent with 6 percent undecided. The survey was conducted on Nov. 9 and Nov. 11—after the...

Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter took aim at three Alabama newspapers for highlighting former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s reaction to a report from The Washington Post last week that accused Moore of engaging in inappropriate conduct with four teenage girls decades ago. Stelter suggested that instead of Moore’s reaction, which Moore offered in his first public appearance in Vestavia Hills, AL a day earlier, The Gadsden Times, the Montgomery Advertiser and The Tuscaloosa News should have focused instead on what the women who accused Moore were “now saying.” {..snip..}

CNN is kicking off a new series to discuss “challenges facing the media,” and Brian Stelter is leading the way. The series, called “Free Press, What’s At Stake,” is meant to focus “on the challenges facing the media, under attack from critics, governments and changing technology.” It was kicked off by CNN’s Brian Stelter, who penned a column published Sunday titled, “Whose freedom is it?” Stelter wrote, “Press freedom is YOUR freedom. That’s the way I recommend thinking about ‘freedom of the press,'” adding, “it’s about MORE than just journalists. Turn it around. Recognize how protections for the press benefit...

Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that he “did what was necessary” in 2012 when he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes for 10 years. Reid was asked about those comments, which he made during a speech on the Senate floor, in response to call during a live interview on Las Vegas’ KNPR. The caller asked Reid if he thought that “the brazen lie he told about Mitt Romney not pay his taxes has in anyway contributed to the fake news debate that we now find ourselves in.” {..snip..}