Free Republic

An online prediction market weighs in on whether VP candidate Sarah Palin will be dropped from the Republican ticket. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Now the Democrats aren't the only ones who can try to capitalize on the negative buzz growing around Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the prospective Republican VP candidate. Intrade, an online prediction market based in Dublin, created a contract Tuesday morning on the likelihood that John McCain will drop Palin as his running mate. After opening at a probability of just 3%, the odds on Palin being cut from the ticket climbed to 18% around 9 a.m. and...

Another day, and no white smoke yet from Sen. John McCain’s Sedona, Ariz., residence. The search for a vice president continues as the Democratic clans gather in Denver. In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, McCain offered no new information about his vice presidential thinking. But he did have some kind words for Sen. Barack Obama’s newly announced running mate, Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden: “I think he’s a good selection…Joe and I have been friends for many, many years, and we know each other very well, and so I think [Obama’s] made a very wise selection.” Just because McCain’s...

John McCain is seriously considering choosing a pro-abortion-rights running mate despite vocal resistance from conservatives, with former Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) very much in the mix, close McCain advisers say. Under strong consideration: former Pennsylvania Republican Gov. Tom Ridge, and Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. Multiple GOP sources say that party officials in Washington and in the states have been contacted by the McCain campaign in the past two weeks and asked about the fallout from such a choice. One person familiar with the calls said the party was being instructed to...

NR has learned that the McCain campaign has been calling key state GOP officials around the country the last couple of days and sounding them out about the consequences of a pro-choice VP pick. The campaign is asking about the reaction of conservative grass-roots activists to such a pick and whether a pro-choicer can be sold to them. This is an indication that the McCain campaign is serious about the possibility of a pro-choice VP nominee and that McCain leaving the door open to Tom Ridge last week may not have been merely a friendly nod to a longtime supporter....

On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinctionThere's no 'adaptation' to such steep warming. We must stop pandering to special interests, and try a new, post-Kyoto strategy We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never...

A SICK game on Facebook has been removed from the website after The Sun revealed how kids were able to STAB each other. Members of the internet social network could "SHANK" - street slang for knifing - other users by clicking on a blade icon in the popular SuperPoke! application. The revelation comes at a time when the UK is gripped by a knife-crime epidemic with 21 teenagers dying violently in London alone this year. But responding to calls from The Sun to remove it, US makers Slide admitted the icon was in bad taste and have taken it off....

Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that freezes victims' organs Senior police officers have been warned to look out for a new knife which can inject a ball of compressed gas into its victim that instantly freezes internal organs. The 'wasp knife', which can deliver a ball of compressed gas capable of killing its victim at the press of a button, may be heading for Britain, the Metropolitan Police fear. A needle in the tip of the blade shoots out the frozen ball of gas which instantly balloons to the size of a basketball, freezing organs....

It started with a news report in January of 1983 of 40 teenagers and 7 adults, who were members of a gang called The Smurfs. They committed petty crimes. Hysteria spreaded throughout middle and high schools in Houston. At the peak, many students stayed home out of fear that the Smurfs might attack them. Anyone from the Houston area living at the time might remember it. Snopes Message Board-Texan schools attacked by Smurfs?Google Book Scan From Rough Guide of Unexplained PhenemenonHouston Press-The Year The Smurfs Attacked

It looks just like the type of story that would appear in The Onion but the funniest thing about this Reuters story about the effects of cow "burps" on global warming is that it was covered with a completely straight face. According to this story, methane released by cow "burps," not humans, might be the culprit in causing the rise in greenhouse gases. A scientific study on this phenomenom is being undertaken via cow "burp" collection: Argentine scientists are taking a novel approach to studying global warming -- strapping plastic tanks to the backs of cows to collect their burps.Researchers say...

For years, climate alarmists in the media have loved showing video footage of Greenland glaciers slipping into the ocean in order to evoke feelings of global warming gloom and doom in the citizenry. On Friday, the journal Science is publishing a seventeen year study of Greenland's ice sheet that flatly contradicts all such hysterical reports and claims. In fact, the paper concludes that such melting is a normal summertime event, and that when looked at over a longer period of time, there has been little change in the ice sheets in this region, and even possibly a slowing in glacial...

PARIS (AFP) — Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday...

PARIS (AFP) - Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday....

32,000 deniers That's the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of scienceQuestion: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as -- and was -- the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations -- virtually every nation...

"Unfortunately, the recovery of the ozone hole has a dark side: The return of a thin, suspended blanket of stratospheric ozone will raise temperatures over the southern polar region, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The scientists, who relied on a NASA computer model for their predictions, also report that the healing of the hole will weaken winds that currently shield the Antarctic interior from warmer air masses to the north. Antarctica may not be the only continent affected: The...

Ethanol and waterDon't mix Feb 28th 2008 | MIAMIFrom The Economist print editionNew reasons to be suspicious of ethanol OFFICIALS in Tampa, Florida, got a surprise recently when a local firm building the state's first ethanol-production factory put in a request for 400,000 gallons (1.5m litres) a day of city water. The request by US Envirofuels would make the facility one of the city's top ten water consumers overnight, and the company plans to double its size. Florida is suffering from a prolonged drought. Rivers and lakes are at record lows and residents wonder where the extra water will...

If you are a parent (or grandparent) of a young child, you are a target for manipulation by activists (some with scientific degrees) who claim we are surrounded by a sea of chemical "toxins" and "carcinogens." You are easy prey — because you care so deeply about the health and welfare of your babies and children. Purveyors of unfounded health scares know that. The fearmongers have just about everything going for them. And unless you recognize their manipulative tactics, you will be among their millions of terrified victims. Here's how they work: They know what psychiatrists have known for many...

A lawyer for the owner of the Player's Club Bar and Grill in Independence has challenged in court the enforceability of the city's Clean Indoor Air Act ordinance and won. John Carnes, an Independence attorney for Player's Club owner Jennifer Brashear, got Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Bushur to overturn two clean air citations given to Brashear. Municipal judges in Independence had found Brashear guilty of violating the city's health code by allowing patrons of the lounge to smoke on two separate occasions. "There are some holes in that ordinance that basically makes it unenforceable," Carnes said. "It's an...

I can’t remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to choose from. Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, my God, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Oil is 'the bloodstain of the earth's economy' and will soon trigger a global conflict that will cost millions of lives. That is the stark claim of a controversial new film, which says a crash in oil production is about to set off worldwide recession and economic collapse. A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, which opens in UK cinemas this week, shows stark images of rusting Texan and Venezuelan wells and fuel riots in Asia and Africa. Such scenes will be repeated thousands of times around the planet in the near future, argue the film's makers, who say the world...

PARIS: The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations. Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997. "The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director...

ESCONDIDO, Calif., Oct. 25 — One is the most powerful Republican in the country. The other is among the most popular. But it took an inferno in Southern California to thaw the ice between President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is no secret in California or Washington that the two have never been buddy-buddy, dating back to when Mr. Schwarzenegger was a top fitness adviser to Mr. Bush’s father. Mr. Bush thought little of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s first bid for governor and did not endorse him. Mr. Schwarzenegger has taken jabs at the president on such issues as climate change,...

Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer Thursday, September 20, 2007 A group of heavyweight environmental organizations is asking the federal government to crack down on air fresheners, products that scientific studies show can aggravate asthma and pose other health risks. In response to the groups' petition filed Wednesday with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Walgreen Co. quickly pulled three of its air fresheners off the shelves of its 5,850 stores nationwide. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Alliance for Healthy Homes and the National Center for Healthy Housing filed the petition asking the agencies...

On an overcast day in April, Stuart Weiss stood in the rolling hills of a Bay Area nature preserve and lifted a bag of nitrogen-based fertilizer to his shoulder. The heavy sack symbolized the unprecedented release of nitrogen into the Earth's air, land and water and the insidious environmental changes the potent fertilizer is causing globally. At Edgewood Park in Redwood City, where he stood, nitrogen in vehicle exhaust from a nearby freeway has led to the local demise of a threatened butterfly population, according to research Weiss conducted. The link he established between the exhaust and the butterflies' decline...

If Al Gore were in Professor Tim Ball’s classroom, he wouldn’t be bringing his Report Card home. ... “They are showing his film in schools when I would give it an “F� even as a Grade X assignment,� says climatologist Ball. Gore needs a lot of work on the subject of man-made Global Warming, but his biggest boo-boo comes from his well-publicized definition of C02.  “Gore says C02 is the most important greenhouse gas. This is wrong for two reasons,� says Dr. Ball. “First, C02 is nowhere near the most important greenhouse gas from a climate perspective. C02 is...

As Britain counts the costs of the worst floods in 200 years, Charles Clover argues the signs of global warming are now impossible to ignore A still from the Robert Carlyle film, Flood Big Ben, the London Eye and Westminster Abbey awash. The submerged streets of London indistinguishable from the Thames. Admittedly, the above image, arresting as it is, is the stuff of cinematic trickery. But could it happen? One day, if we are not careful, it just might. Of course, nowhere in the country are flood defences built to a higher standard than in London, because of the value,...

Studiously hidden from public view are some extraordinary findings in physics which are providing new understanding of our planetary history, as well as providing a much more plausible scientific understanding of global warming. Regrettably, the current hysteria about global warming is based much more on fear, political agendas, and computer models that don’t agree with each other or the climate, rather than hard-nosed evidence and science. The climate forces which have led to the estimated 0.6C degree temperature increase over the past 100 years or more (according to the International Panel on Climate Change) have been assumed to be man-made...

Back on July the 6th all of my systems that were on Comcast could not connect to most websites. I could connect to google just fine and also some smaller sites. I called around to most people I knew (on Comcast)and found they also had the same problem. So I called Comcast and after waiting on-line for around 30 minutes, I just hung up figuring that they must be inundated with calls. I then proceeded to do some checking on my own, I was able to ping the sites I could not connect to, but unable to do anything else(web/Mail/Telnet)...

When Your Doctor is a Muslim: Medical Terrorism Comes to America By Debbie Schlussel www.debbieschlussel.com May 17, 2007 Sometimes--so many times--diversity is not what it's cracked up to be. Just ask Joseph Applebaum. Well, you could ask him. But you won't get an answer. He's dead. And he's dead because he was a Jew, and his doctor is a Muslim and grad of "Ayman Al-Zawahiri" Medical School. But Applebaum wasn't denied treatment for being a Jew in Egypt. Or elsewhere in the Muslim world. It happened right here on U.S. soil. In Chicago. As Muslim doctors continue to flood into...

A federal health official says Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker has a less severe form of tuberculosis than health officials previously diagnosed. Speaker was diagnosed in May with extensively drug resistant TB, based on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of a bronchoscopy sample taken in March. The XDR TB, as it is called, is considered dangerously difficult to treat. But a series of sputum samples all showed the TB to a milder form of the disease, multi drug-resistant TB. MDR TB can be treated with some antibiotics that XDR TB resists. Doctors who are treating Speaker in Denver...

American pundit Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times recently: “We don’t just need the first black president, we need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president, we need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil – and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.” He then went...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “facing the most difficult reelection campaign” of his career, or at least that’s what he’s telling his political supporters. McConnell, who has yet to draw a major opponent, sent a fundraising letter characterizing his 2008 reelection bid as a battle against “radical national liberal organizations” and calling himself one of the top Democratic targets in the country. The letter was posted this week to a blog dedicated to drafting another Republican, former gubernatorial nominee Larry Forgy, to run against him in a primary. McConnell decried the efforts against him by Americans United for...

Rising temperatures in the Middle East more than 8,000 years ago directly led to the invention of money. The carbon emitted from cars and power plants in your neighborhood may be causing destructive hurricanes. These and tens of thousands of other surprising connections are being made on a new online database called K-Web, or Knowledge-Web, to be released this month. The Web site will allow users to trace more than 30,000 connections between science, economics, history and the weather. Created by science journalist James Burke, the site aims to explain, in real-world terms, the impact of melting ice caps, rising...

Barack Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech Tuesday, drastically overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died. The death toll was 12. "In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser. Obama mentioned the disaster in Greensburg, Kan., in saying he had been told by the office of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius that the state's National Guard had been depleted by its...

Police discovered five swords in the bedroom of a Clements High School senior whose home they searched after getting complaints about a 3-D computer “shoot-‘em-up” game map the student designed, which depicted a portion of the school. That information surfaced in a Fort Bend Independent School District Police Department report released Tuesday, and was confirmed by several district officials who also revealed other details about the case for the first time. The student, whose name has not been released, was not arrested or charged by FBISD police, however, he was removed from Clements and transferred to M.R. Wood Alternative Education...

Drought Hysteria from The Pasadena Stirred News From Pasadena Star News Today: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinions/ci_5623625 Excerpt: Southern California finds itself in the midst of a drought, one that extends to the east and west slopes of the Sierra and into the Colorado River basin. And whether the cause is global warming or cyclical weather patterns, it's time for action, not words. Consider: The water content in the Sierra snowpack is at its lowest level in two decades, meaning that water supplies to cities and farms could be affected if conditions persist. The Colorado River system is in the midst of one of...

The Academy awards ceremony may have hailed Al Gore as a prophetic hero, but history will treat him as the personification of an incredible delusion: the idea that carbon dioxide emissions fundamentally affect the Earth’s weather patterns. While much of the media treats this theory as catastrophic fact, the fact is it ain’t—it’s an unproved theory. Over the last few decades carbon dioxide emissions have risen, and there has been a slight increase in the Earth’s temperature. Ergo, goes the theory, it must be cause and effect and—ergo, ergo—we must take draconian measures to reduce the emissions, even if that...

An 80 Foot Sea Level Rise!!?? Here is a graphic that will make you stand up and take notice–especially if you have relatives who live in New York City. This image appeared in Vanity Fair magazine in May 2006 and shows how much of New York City would be under water if all of the ice on Greenland and the Antarctic were to melt causing sea levels to rise 80 feet. 80 feet! Where did they get that number? What a scare tactic. Not even Al Gore uses a number that high. Certainly the IPCC doesn’t.What does the IPCC Summary...

Will Ann Coulter never learn? There are some things you just can't say, not even in jest. And at the top of that list right now is anything derogatory about the "gay" lifestyle or, worse yet, anything that is considered a slur against homosexuals, a protected class of people with special rights which entitle them to live free from all offense. Ann surely should have known this. After all, hasn't she seen any of the countless films or TV shows produced by Hollywood in recent years which promote homosexuality as a perfectly normal and acceptable alternative lifestyle? Indeed, the homosexuals...

In Pakistan, thousands of parents refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations to their children last month, mostly due to rumors that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilize innocent Muslim children. The disinformation -- spread by clerics using mosque loudspeakers -- has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan. The scaremongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003, where the disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months. Pakistan is one of just four countries where polio remains endemic. The...

It takes a certain kind of gumption to stand up to the status quo. Folks who challenge the mainstream media and popular culture are subjected to some of the nastiest insults and character assassinations. And such retribution is nowhere more severe than for those who take issue with popular views about global warming.

Ms Nowak said she did not intend to harm Ms Shipman A US astronaut has been charged with trying to kidnap a woman she thought was a rival for the affection of a space shuttle pilot. Navy Capt Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew to the international space station last July, was charged with attempted kidnapping, battery and other crimes. She drove from Texas to Florida to confront Colleen Shipman, disguised in a wig and trench coat. Police said Capt Nowak, who was denied bail, used pepper spray on Ms Shipman. The man in the love triangle was said to...

BOSTON -- Nine blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a marketing campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. At least one of the devices depicts a character giving the finger. Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless. "It's a hoax -- and it's not funny," said Gov. Deval Patrick. Turner Broadcasting, parent company of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for...

It may well turn out that George W. Bush's greatest service to the country won't involve terrorism or Iraq at all, but his steadfast refusal to be buffaloed into joining the panicky consensus on global warming. Rumor had it that Bush intended to embrace the warming thesis at last in his State of the Union address. Instead Greens nationwide went into depressed tailspins as he called for an attack on the problem by means of technical advances, a curve ball very much in the old Bush mode, of a type that we've seen too little of recently. Bush is acting...

Are you afraid? Very afraid? Well, if you aren’t, you should be. And if you are, you aren’t scared enough. In just over a week, we are about to be treated to yet another Cassandra-style warning about the “fate of the earth,” this time from the International Panel on Climate Change. It has become part of the background noise in our daily lives: the constant refrain that the world is rushing headlong into certain doom. A doom, that is, that you will suffer unless you hand control of the economy and your daily lives over to the very elite that...

Chicken Little yelled, "Help! Help! The sky is falling!" Our frightened Chicken could well be a "journalist" writing about Global warming, or a former Vice-President that can't find anything else to do with his time. The hysteria that is global warming is perfectly evinced in a recent story by the Independent newspaper from England. Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island is so fraught with absurd claims, fear-mongering, and hyperventilation that it is no wonder that skeptics look to the Globaloney movement and laugh at their claims of "scientific" seriousness. For some sidesplitting, hilarity, this particular story is as ridiculous...

An Economic Pillar on the Verge of Collapse By Steven Pearlstein Wednesday, December 6, 2006; D01 It's been more than a year since we've heard from those who denied there was a housing bubble. Since then, the industry boosters, along with the "soft-landing" crowd over at the Federal Reserve, have coalesced around the idea that maybe the market got a bit frothy after all, but now the correction is almost complete, the unsold inventory's been worked off and the worst is behind us. But just when you're feeling hopeful again, you get reports like yesterday's Wall Street Journal piece reporting...

What reparation can women seek — like the 40 acres and a mule due slaves after the American Civil War — to compensate our 2000 years of discrimination? I have yet to come up with a comparable formula for paying back the historically abused majority of the planet — known as “females” — who remain the largest earthly class of victims of prejudice. Misogyny is not just an American problem — it’s a global one. A recent report described the justice system in Kabul, Afghanistan, a country that we are allegedly making safe for “democracy.” If one man kills another...

London - British television journalist Terry Lloyd was 'unlawfully killed' by US forces in southern Iraq in 2003, an inquest by a coroner in Britain concluded Friday. Lloyd, who was 50 when he died, had 'disappeared in a hail of American tank fire' as he and three colleagues approached the southern Iraqi port of Basra on a highway on March 22, 2003, the inquest report said. His wife, Lynn, and daughter Chelsey Friday called for the US marine who opened fire on Lloyd's convoy to face murder charges. 'The marines who fired on civilians and those who gave the orders...

Hysteria is a 4,000-year-old diagnosis that has been applied to no mean parade of witches, saints and, of course, Anna O. But over the last 50 years, the word has been spoken less and less. The disappearance of hysteria has been heralded at least since the 1960’s. What had been a Victorian catch-all splintered into many different diagnoses. Hysteria seemed to be a vanished 19th-century extravagance useful for literary analysis but surely out of place in the serious reaches of contemporary science. The word itself seems murky, more than a little misogynistic and all too indebted to the theorizing of...