Free Republic

Al Gore’s office issued a formal correction yesterday to a speech the former US Vice-President had given earlier in the week that started the latest in a series of “climate spin” rows. Mr Gore told the Copenhagen summit meeting that the latest research suggested that the North Pole would be ice-free within five to seven years. The Times revealed that this was not the information provided to Mr Gore’s office by the climatologist Wieslaw Maslowski, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California. Dr Maslowski said that his projections suggested that the North Pole would be near ice-free,...

FORT WORTH -- Good riddance? We can’t recall the last time a company promoted the end of a product. Did Ford extol the Edsel? Coke the New Coke? Yet we have Whataburger buying little ads, setting up toll-free hot lines and Web sites, then paying PR people to call attention to the withdrawal of what is easily the Corpus Christi-based chain’s unhealthiest menu item: The A1 Thick and Hearty Burger. The burger has lost its pizzazz, said a PR person with SPM Communications of Dallas, who is not authorized to be quoted by name, Wednesday night, a North Texas hairstylist...

When family members decided Monday's burglary of 75-year-old Frank Dusenka's home in Chisago City, Minn., was an inside-the-family job, they didn't wait for police to investigate, according to court documents filed this week. Instead, Dusenka's son, Bradley Anthony Dusenka, and son-in-law, Marcus Lee Clay, allegedly took matters into their own hands. Specifically, they're accused of taking an ax handle and a boat oar into their own hands, kidnapping their 25-year-old nephew and beating him so severely that he spent most of this week in the hospital.

Public skepticism about the officially promoted cause of global warming has reached an all-time high among Americans. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of likely voters now believe that global warming is caused primarily by long-term planetary trends. Just 34% say climate change is due primarily to human activity, even as President Obama and other world leaders gather at a UN summit to limit the human activity they blame for global warming. Six percent (6%) say there is some other reason for global warming, and 10% are not sure. Belief that human activity is the primary...

California's population growth slowed over the past year as tens of thousands of residents moved away - many of them heading to other Western states, according to the state Department of Finance. The Golden State's population grew by 353,000 to 38.4 million from July 2008 to July 2009. The only years with lower growth rates since 1900 were 1994-96, according to a report released by the department Thursday. More people left the state for other parts of the country than moved here, a difference of about 142,000 people. While that number is outweighed by people moving from other countries to...

COPENHAGEN: The industrialized countries are cheating the world. A confidential document of the UN Frame Convention on Climate Change secretariat prepared on December 15 shows, contrary to what the rich nations might claim, even if they come true on their current pledges to reduce emissions the world is headed towards a 3 degree temperature rise by 2050, not two degree Celsius – the tipping point. ( Read confidential initial draft )

The leading global warming skeptic in the U.S. Senate shocked reporters in Copenhagen with a dose of American reality with his prediction Thursday morning that the U.S. Senate will not pass a carbon ‘cap and trade’ bill, regardless of the commitment President Obama is expected to make here tomorrow. “I am here to make sure the 190 countries here don’t go home with the false impression,” said sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. “The United States is not going to pass cap and trade. It just isn’t going to happen. Its chances are zero.” Inhofe said just 25 Senators would support the...

A Marshall County Sheriff’s Deputy is recovering after a pistol blew up on Tuesday (November 30 -- sd) during qualifications, according to Chief Deputy Kevin Cecil. The veteran officer was using a Glock 21 .45 caliber pistol with out of country ammunition at a shooting range outside of Moundsville, Cecil said. It’s believed the ammunition was bad, causing the receiver to blow apart in the sergeant’s hand.

I knew that the Copenhagen conference would be a time to break out the shovels. I just didn’t realize that they would be snow shovels. Well, actually I suspected it would. The Copenhagen Post: “Bitter cold and steady snowfall has paralyzed the country’s roads and public transport since yesterday, and the icy cold weather is expected to get even worse over the next couple days.” What have I been saying? On Sunday night, the forecast was for record cold today in Copenhagen. Later that was upgraded to cold. Now, 4 inches of snow have fallen on the Church of Global...

COPENHAGEN — A visibly angry Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet at China and other developing nations Friday, declaring that the time has come "not to talk but to act" on climate change. Emerging from a multinational meeting boycotted by Chinese Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Obama warned delegates that U.S. offers of funding for poor nations would remain on the table “if and only if” developing nations, including China, agreed to international monitoring of their greenhouse gas emissions. "I have to be honest, as the world watches us... I think our ability to take collective action is doubt and it...

The more polite amongst the officials call it a melee. The more direct ones describe it as chaos. Gordon Brown pronounced that progress had been made at this morning's 8.30am meeting with 25 world leaders and their respective flunkies. Others are not so sure. Having spent all night rowing over arcane points of procedure, the negotiations were in a perilous state when world leaders came to the Bella Centre this morning. Even the basics of a deal are unclear - some countries are dragging their feet over signing up to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees by 2050. World leaders...

I warn you, this story is very disturbing. In Virginia, a mother gave birth to her baby and then suffocated it. Virginia law enforcement is powerless to charge her. As Investigator Tracy Emerson put it: "In the state of Virginia, as long as the umbilical cord is attached and [the] placenta is still in the mother, if the baby comes out alive, the mother can do whatever she wants to that baby to kill it," Emerson reports. "She can shoot the baby, stab the baby or anything as long as it is still attached to her in some form by...

WASHINGTON -- A Senate committee approved legislation Thursday to impose tighter regulation of the rates that freight railroads charge shippers to transport goods, but the bill doesn't include the tough antitrust provisions pushed by some Democrats.

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN STERLING VIRGINIA HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR SNOW... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 6 AM EST SUNDAY. THE WINTER STORM WATCH IS NO LONGER IN EFFECT. * PRECIP TYPE... SNOW. * ACCUMULATIONS... HEAVY SNOW WITH ACCUMULATIONS OF 5 TO 10 INCHES THROUGH SUNSET SATURDAY. LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS POSSIBLE... MAINLY IN OR NEAR SOUTHERN MARYLAND. ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS EXPECTED SATURDAY NIGHT. * TIMING... SNOW WILL BEGIN LATE FRIDAY NIGHT AND WILL CONTINUE THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING. * TEMPERATURES... UPPER 20S TO LOWER 30S THROUGH THE EVENT IN THE BALTIMORE WASHINGTON METROPOLITAN AREA......

The real estate market in the U.S. hasn’t yet recovered from the subprime meltdown. These days, though, the bigger worry ought to be a federal government meltdown -- likewise triggered by overborrowing and an inability to repay debts. When the 2009 fiscal year wheezed to a close in September, our government had borrowed $1.4 trillion. That’s more than 11 percent of the entire country’s GDP for the year. It’s the largest deficit since the end of World War II, when there was an actual life-or-death crisis for Washington to deal with. Faced with this massive deficit, Congress will act to...

ALBANY — A disgruntled, 45-year-old Long Island businessman was being held on a staggering $500 million bail yesterday for allegedly threatening to shoot Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on the Long Island Expressway....

At a time of year when faith is celebrated by most Americans, it may surprise some to learn that many students of faith and history believe we are living in a post-Christian age. It is not apparent at the local malls now so festively decorated, but it can be seen in some telltale cultural indicators. One of those is the number of attacks on people of faith, particularly Jews. Throughout much of the world today, where Christianity is in decline attacks on Jews are on the rise. In post-Christian Europe, Jews are often victims of a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism. Synagogues...

Barack Obama stepped into the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit today saying he was convinced the world could act "boldly and decisively" on climate change. But his speech offered no indication America was ready to embrace bold measures, after world leaders had been working desperately against the clock to try to paper over an agreement to prevent two years of wasted effort — and a 10-day meeting — from ending in total collapse. Obama, who had been skittish about coming to Copenhagen at all unless it could be cast as a foreign policy success, looked visibly frustrated as...

Does anyone remember back to when the current healthcare reform initiative began? What were the goals? What were the reasons for the subject even being broached? Progressives and Democrats insisted that the healthcare system was broken because there were millions of people (figures varied, but averaged around 37 million) who were uninsured and that those who had health insurance were subject to continuously rising insurance premiums and diminished coverage. The goal, Progressives and Democrats said, was to provide every American with health insurance and lower healthcare costs for all...all by the end of President Obama’s first term. Today, as we...

Climate change is one of those issues I know enough about to know how little I really know. And I certainly haven't learned much more during the 193-nation climate talks that concluded in Copenhagen this week. I'm one of those agnostics willing to accept evidence that the earth is warming but not yet convinced that scientists fully understand why. And my skepticism has grown greater in light of the recent climategate scandal involving leaked e-mails that suggested prominent climate-change scientists have manipulated data and tried to stifle dissent in the scientific community. But while the Copenhagen talks didn't shed much...

Four words in a proposed Rapid City school district discrimination policy have ignited a passionate debate among community and school board members. A proposed change to add the words "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to the policy drew a record number of community members and five legislators to the board's meeting Thursday night. The district's current policy was most recently revised in September to add the words "pregnancy" and "student marital status" to the policy of what it won't discriminate against to stay in line with state accreditation rules. A majority of the community speakers Thursday night asked board members...

As Obama peddles the left's fear-mongering war on science in Copenhagen to force through the greatest redistribution of wealth scam in history, it is worth noting that the will of people is overwhelmingly against him, as usual... Only 34% (the Democrat base) now believe that climate change is even man-made. Only 24% support Obama's Constitution-trampling plan to impose his own regulations through the EPA, without Congress. Only 21% think the news media aren't wildly misrepresenting the "threat." 71% think job creation is what matters right now, rather than job-killing climate legislation. As I have noted, even leading alarmist experts are...

Global warming? Case closed. Consensus achieved. There can be no debate about it. ClimateGate? Never happened. I refuse to even acknowledge its existence. Must hang on to the global warming belief at all costs even against evidence to to the contrary. That dogmatic stance pretty much sums up the attitude of Associated Press writer Malcolm Ritter in his story about how global warming skepticism can be ascribed to psychological faults: The Copenhagen talks on climate change were convened with a sense of urgency that many ordinary folks don't share. Why is that? One big reason: It's hard for people to...

Cease and Desist any and all charges brought against the United States Navy Seals Listed Below. We the people feel as a collective that known terrorist Ahmed Hashim Abed injured himself after resisting arrest. Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for wilfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault. Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement. Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge...

From 1992 to 2004, Barack Obama lectured at the University of Chicago's Law School. By all accounts, our future president was popular with students. He was known to be polite and accommodating to those who disagreed with him. His reputation at Chicago was that of a teacher who broadened your horizons. It's a pity our president didn't take full advantage of his time at Chicago and broaden his own horizons. For on the same campus was Gary Becker, the economist and original thinker who married economics and sociology into a hybrid that became known as behavioral economics. Becker won the...

Front Royal, Va., Dec 18, 2009 / 06:49 am (CNA).- With the close of the Copenhagen summit on climate change, demographics expert Steven W. Mosher has warned that blaming overpopulation for global warming is “unscientific” and “dangerous.” “The people of China have paid dearly for their leader's obsession with driving down the birthrate, and now we hear anti-population extremists at Copenhagen advocating a China-like one-child policy for the entire world,” Mosher said in a Thursday press release. Mosher, president of the Virginia-based Population Research Institute (PRI), is an expert on China’s one-child policy. He has witnessed forced abortions and forced...

MONTREAL - If the Chinese stock market is still an indicator of global investor appetite for risk, as analysts viewed it a few months ago, then that appetite has lately diminished. Perhaps they are finally absorbing some of the revelations about statistical manipulations. They may also be reacting to more recent revelations warning of bank fraud in China. In one case, the Royal Bank of Scotland is reportedly investigating suspected fraud in its China unit. Client losses could be worth up to US$3 million, the Financial Times has reported, citing local media. Whatever the reason, neither Chinese nor global stock...

DEVELOPING STORY: India and China walked out of the climate summit in Copenhagen on Friday, the India news agency Press Trust of India reported. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao walked out of the summit along with their respective delegations, as talks failed.

Without discussion, the Milwaukee School Board voted 7-0 Thursday night to make condoms available at many of the city's high schools, paving the way to make Milwaukee Public Schools one of the relatively few districts in the nation to provide contraception to students. The communicable disease prevention program, as the district calls it, could be in place as soon as the 2010-'11 school year. The proposal sparked some opposition after being made public Dec. 2, but the board approved the condom distribution without much dissent. Comments from the public are not allowed at board meetings and a board committee had...

<p>In the popular view, the economy is not in recovery until the unemployment rate, the most political of lagging indicators, begins to decline. Finally now it has, slipping from 10.2 to 10 percent in November. US output has already been on the rise since the spring, in the face of sagging employment. Increases in productivity are offsetting diminishing man-hours of input. Conclusive signs of a turning point have yet to shake most commentators out of their gloom, and the vigor of the recovery continues to be questioned. All too typically, it's input (i.e. employment) rather than output that receives attention from politicians or ink from journalists.</p>

BERLIN -- The Germans are so strong on their family values they want the state to enforce them. They're debating now whether shops should be shuttered on Sunday by law. It's a burning issue in coffee shops, on the street and in the newspapers, hotter than whether Angela Merkel should send more troops to Afghanistan. Germany's highest court has ruled that keeping Sunday a day of rest benefits everyone, like it or not. So buying a head of lettuce, repairing a bike or purchasing a pair of shoes is not for Sunday. The ruling is especially disappointing to Berlin shopkeepers...

"The Road," John Hillcoat's adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title, has been receiving conventionally varied reviews this season. The Los Angeles Times described the apocalyptic film—depicting a man and his son clinging to survival in a future America devastated by an unnamed catastrophe—as "no more than a reasonable facsimile, an honorable attempt at filming an unfilmable book." The Guardian praised "a brutal portrait of a dying planet stalked by starving, desperate men." People who recall the reviews of the novel a few years ago will notice something missing in nearly all of the movie analyses, and...

DECEMBER 17, 2009 Officials Probe Auckland Firm's Role in Seized Arms Cache By PATRICK BARTA, DANIEL MICHAELS and SIMON LOUISSON New Zealand officials are investigating whether an Auckland-based company has links to a weapons-filled plane from North Korea that was detained in Bangkok last week. Investigators are still unsure where the plane -- carrying 35 tons of missiles, explosives and other armaments -- was heading or who coordinated the flight plan. Its five-member crew, from Kazakhstan and Belarus, remains in detention in Bangkok and all five have denied knowledge that there were weapons onboard. Officials in Kazakhstan and the Republic...

Russia confirms that the global warming scientists excluded temperature data provided to them from over 40% of Russian territory.

Allen West hasn't changed his core message since falling short in a run for Congress last year, but with the political winds now at his back, the retired Army officer's passionately delivered emphasis on constitutional principles of liberty, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and free-market solutions is attracting an audience well beyond Florida's 22nd district. A video of his rally cry to the party base in preparation for a 2010 run has drawn more than 1.2 million views on YouTube.com.

In a three-sentence press release e-mailed to the Verona-Cedar Grove Times last week, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office announced a gun buyback program. Today and tomorrow, residents who are in possession of illegal handguns can turn them in and receive up to $200 – no questions asked. It's the county's Gun Amnesty Buyback Program, held in high crime areas such as East Orange, Newark and Irvington. No such programs are being held in Verona or Cedar Grove, presumably because the crime rate is lower here and residents obtain their firearms the legal way, with permits. The programs are typically held...

Obama proposes U.S. liaison in North Korea-Yonhap By Jon Herskovitz SEOUL (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed setting up a liaison office in North Korea next year in a step to ease tensions between the two rival states, Yonhap news agency said on Friday. U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, December 1, 2009. (REUTERS/Jim Young/Files) The offer was in a letter for leader Kim Jong-il that Obama's first envoy to the secretive state delivered when he went to Pyongyang last week for discussions aimed at reviving dormant...

Many alcoholic beverages contain byproducts of the materials used in the fermenting process. These byproducts are called "congeners," complex organic molecules with toxic effects including acetone, acetaldehyde, fusel oil, tannins, and furfural. Bourbon has 37 times the amount of congeners that vodka has. A new study has found that while drinking a lot of bourbon can cause a worse hangover than drinking a lot of vodka, impairment in people's next-day task performance is about the same for both beverages. Results will be published in the March 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 28% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14 (see trends). The number who Strongly Disapprove of Obama’s performance has now topped 40% for seven straight days and his overall Approval Index rating has been in negative double digits every day for over a month. The President this morning at a United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen at a time when a record number...

As predicted earlier in this column, gun prohibitionists are using the murder of a Seattle police officer, and a couple of other slayings, to launch a new effort to ban the sale of semiautomatic firearms in Washington State, and require current owners to register their firearms. I forecast this development in a Nov. 3 column that addressed the cowardly slaying of Seattle Officer. Timothy Brenton on Halloween as he sat in his patrol car in the Central District with trainee Britt Sweeney, who was able to return fire. The irony is that Brenton, as I wrote in a Nov. 10...

Popular auto makes, magazine publishers and retailers were among the businesses laid to rest in 2009. Here's a list of 8 familiar names you won't see in the future.

A $626 billion Pentagon budget narrowly advanced in the Senate Friday morning but not before Washington’s political battles seemed to eclipse the real wars of Iraq and Afghanistan overseas. The whole Senate scene, played out in a post midnight session on a freezing night, dramatized how poisonous the atmosphere has become in the health care fight.

If only the Nobel Committee and the American voting public had dug a bit deeper before they endorsed Obama, they might not have been so surprised when he morphed into an unexpected type of president. The New York Times reported in February 2008 that Obama had a history of stretching his accomplishments and playing to his audience of the moment. It would have been easy to see what was coming if only voters had paid more attention to his record as a twister of facts and prince of prevarication...

Copenhagen has been a disaster for the free world and hardly anyone seems to have noticed. We have been distracted by the sweet schadenfreude as the event was overshadowed by the Climategate scandal at the beginning, and the Russian bombshell at the end. And by our delight in seeing the many business interests of the IPCC ’s jet-setting chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri cruelly exposed. And by the told-you-so satisfaction of seeing it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the “scientific” process informing the IPCC’s increasingly hysterical reports is corrupt, fraudulent and politically motivated. And by the irony of the snow...

If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post's report from the Danish capital. "Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenari -- who is representing all of Africa here -- unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. ... "Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. ... This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure ... as too...

Foreword: As a follow-up to my recent column on competing concealed carry bills in Iowa, I have invited representatives from state gun rights groups Iowa Gun Owners and Iowa Carry to educate us on their positions. The following response is from Aaron Dorr, Executive Director of Iowa Gun Owners: In his recent article, Jeff Knox of the Firearms Coalition has brought to light some very disturbing components of the NRA’s proposed concealed carry bill in Iowa. He mentioned our organization, Iowa Gun Owners, as the state based group that is opposed to this bill. He is correct. The 5,000 members...

The terrorist attack committed by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas brought the lack of security at such a large military base directly into homes across America. Leaders of the pro-gun movement, and many soldiers, weren't quite as shocked because they knew most military bases are considered "gun-free zones," due to concealed carry being banned. Whether Hasan's attack on American soldiers was sponsored by one of the bigger terrorist organizations is irrelevant since it gave terrorists a road map to complete similar attacks in the future. You can bet our enemies learned valuable lessons from his ability to...

Thousands are now gathered in Copenhagen to embark on an aggressive plan to reach a framework for reducing carbon emissions, with the goal of instituting a more formalized, binding agreement within six months. Now, many others have rightly criticized and written on the faulty research used to support the panic of "global warming" and supposedly retreating icebergs. In the past two weeks, this justified skepticism has gained significant traction in light of the recently released "ClimateGate" e-mails, wherein researchers and peers of the notable Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University appear to concede that climate change is due to...

Obama and the Democrats are embarrassed by Detroit so we have to use it against them. Next November this Democrat mess should be a central theme of Republican campaigns nationwide. Warning America about Democrat plans to make us a nation of Detroits is a winning issue. Rubbing Democrat noses in Detroit puts them on defense and sets us up for a BIG Election Night. Obama says: Tear Detroit down, please make it go away We know Obama wants Detroit torn down. The UK Telegraph reports he has approached private organizations to manage the actual razing of large sections of many...

Popular auto makes, magazine publishers and retailers were among the businesses laid to rest in 2009. Here's a list of familiar names you won't see in the future. [...]