Free Republic

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act passed unanimously through the Senate Judiciary Committee this Thursday, but fortunately didn’t get much further. Oregonian Senator Ron Wyden exercised his power to place a hold on pending legislation to stop the bill from traveling to the senate floor, saying that Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile. His hold will prevent the bill passing out of committee this year; proponents of the bill will have to wait until the next time Congress convenes, and then...

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) spent a lengthy period of time on the Senate floor this afternoon defending earmarks. Inhofe argues it is the constitutional duty (citing Article 1, Section 9) of the Congress to appropriate earmarks.

President Barack Obama’s zeal to give illegal immigrants amnesty is holding the nation’s border security “hostage” to his political agenda, says GOP Sen. James Inhofe. As Obama called on Congress to tackle comprehensive immigration reform in a speech Thursday afternoon, Inhofe told Newsmax in an exclusive interview that the president is clearly using border security as a bargaining chip to obtain amnesty for millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States. That was the same charge made by Inhofe’s friend and colleague, Arizona GOP Sen. John Kyl, who stirred controversy last week when he revealed a discussion in which...

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

At first, Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph" didn't like being mocked in a YouTube video. Now Mann is alleging he's a victim of hate groups. On ABC's May 23 "World News Sunday," a segment from anchor Dan Harris alleged that threatening e-mails Mann received were part of a "spike" in violence aimed at the global warming alarmist community. "The ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf is keeping the debate over climate and energy very much in the headlines and that debate...

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, co-chair of the Republican Leadership Council, said Monday that GOP candidates in the current election cycle must reject the "the party of no" profile and the idea that "compromise is a dirty word" -- and endorsed former Rep. Tom Campbell in California's hotly contested GOP U.S. Senate race. "We feel he is the candidate which, besides being able to win in the fall...also brings those kinds of characteristics to play to the office that will make him a very effective Senator, and one that can start to solve problems,'' Whitman said in a...

It’s a sad commentary on our politics that he can’t show civility to a leader of a movement that routinely calls people like you and me teabagging racists. “There’s nothing nice about Nancy,” Inhofe said during an interview on KFAQ radio in Oklahoma this morning. “She disagrees with everything we believe.”… “She is nice – how many of you all have met her? She’s a nice person,” Coburn said. “Just because somebody disagrees with you don’t mean they’re not a good person.” Inhofe had a slightly different take. “She is a powerful person,” he said. “People wonder how she can...

Pollution Control: From cars to coal mines, the imposition of economy-killing restrictions is under way. Are the new EPA regulations on auto emissions the precursor to regulating carbon dioxide by executive order? In announcing the Environmental Protection Agency's first regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cars, Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised they won't be the last such rules stemming from the EPA's "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide, six pounds of which every human being exhales every day, is a dangerous pollutant. "These are the first regulations that cover greenhouse gas emissions in the United States," Jackson told reporters in...

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced today that he is supporting a 47-word long bill to repeal the 2,400-page long health care bill that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on Tuesday. The text of the legislation backed by Inhofe and introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) reads as follows: “To repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. REPEAL. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the amendments made by that Act,...

American families and state governments across the country are cutting spending and making hard decisions about their budgets. It is time the federal government did the same. Unfortunately, Congress has long demonstrated an innate incompetence in restraining itself. And a proposal to curb spending that is being floated by many of my colleagues—a one year moratorium on earmarks, those special provisions members insert into bills to direct funds to their districts or states—will do no good. An earmark moratorium won't save any money. Why? Because instead of reducing the federal budget, it will empower Obama administration bureaucrats to spend the...

Sen. James Inhofe for the first time was able to unpack the evidence showing that Climate Change and Global warming is a hoax in front of the Environment and Public Works Committee and its chairperson Barbara Boxer without the slightest rebuttal. That’s because a lot has transpired since e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit a major scientists at the hub of the global warming theory have been exposed. (see article) Prof. Phil Jones the preeminent scientist at the center of the Climate change/Global warming claims has stepped down from his position as director of the Climatic...

Climate Fraud: A senator wants an investigation of the false climate testimony before Congress and wants Al Gore to reappear. The illegalities may involve more than just lying to Congress. At a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, ranking Republican James Inhofe told EPA head Lisa Jackson that man-induced climate change was a "hoax" concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who "cooked the science." More than that, Inhofe, in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast...

Energy The administration asked for public comments on a plan to expand offshore drilling. When they came in 2-to-1 in favor, the Interior Department sat on the news. Time for a "Texas tea" party? When you ask for public comment on a major policy issue, at some point you should make the results public, not hide them until you can figure out a way to spin the public reaction to support a conclusion you've already drawn. On its last business day in office, the Bush administration published a proposed draft of a five-year plan to lease areas in the Atlantic...

Here is audio of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe on radio this morning where he said President Obama is the best at saying "things that aren’t true with greater conviction than anyone I’ve ever seen." Inhofe was specifically referring to what Obama had to say in his State of the Union message last night. . . . (VIDEO)

"I’m, for one - I know it’s not politically correct to say it - I believe in racial and ethnic profiling. I think if you’re looking at people getting on an airplane and you have X amount of resources to get into it, you get at the targets, and not my wife."

Energy: An oil company wants to invest its profits in clean-burning American natural gas. A Hungarian billionaire and a "green" politician want to stop it. This is the real Climate-gate scandal. While the greenies of the world united in Copenhagen to talk about the weather, emitting a Third World-country-size chunk of greenhouse gases to gather there, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, was doing something about it. On Dec. 14, Exxon agreed to buy XTO Energy, a natural gas firm, in a deal valued at $41 billion. XTO is one of the leaders in something called "fracking" technology, in...

Decision Brief No. 05-D 44 2005-08-31 On eve of U.N. push for global government, advocates urge Senate to approve a building block: The Law of the Sea Treaty (Washington, D.C.): As concern grows that the United Nations is intent on replacing what the National Security Guidance calls "an orderly arrangement of sovereign states" with a proto-world government - complete with the ability to impose international taxes, a new push is being made for a treaty that would advance that purpose: the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). This sovereignty-sapping agenda is at the heart of a dispute now playing...

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it. (snip) EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true," Inhofe said. Dr....

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...