Free Republic

A YouGov poll of 18,000 people in 17 countries found only 9.2 percent of Americans rank global warming as their biggest concern. Only Saudi Arabians were less concerned about global warming at 5.7 percent. The biggest concern for Americans was global terrorism - 28 percent of Americans polled listed this as their top issue. Despite a big PR push by President Barack Obama to tout his administration's global warming agenda, most Americans have been unconvinced it's the country's most pressing issue. A Fox News poll from November found only 3 percent of Americans list global warming as their top concern.

For me, the big question isn't which team wins in that football thing this weekend. The real big question is whether local anarchists and malcontents will try to shut down any big-name bridges, freeways or otherwise jam up the Bay Area's Super Bowl festivities. Social media and news organizations report chatter of a big protest a-brewing. San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan -- master of the protest beat -- told me, "Chances are very good that a major disruption will be attempted at least." In Iowa, if you build it, they will come. In the Bay Area, if you...

The appeal of Mr. Trump, in its face, is clear. He rips away the scourge of political correctness, a virus that is destroying the country from within. We’re all rightly concerned about terrorism, but that’s a cancer that will only finish off this nation. The tipping point for me was last week’s absurd drama surrounding new attacks by the Trump gang on Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. She’s “unfair” we’re told, and shouldn’t moderate the debate. This stemmed from the first debate when Ms. Kelly asked Mr. Trump to explain his attitude toward women many consider misogynistic. Yes, you can be...

The left's greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome. For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other. It didn't matter that this model didn't fit a reality in which Communists leaders...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will this November's presidential election come down to a choice between a felon and a pied piper? People who call Barack Obama a lame duck president seem not to have noticed that he is exercising more power than ever, and has turned the Republican Congress into a lame duck branch of government. The best New Year's Resolution I ever made was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. That may be especially valuable during an election year. With 4 of the 9 Supreme Court justices being more than 75 years old, the next...

<p>I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants-and few in between. Or rather, as I gazed out on the California Aqueduct, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Luis Reservoir, I realized we are like the hapless, squatter Greeks of the Dark Ages, who could not figure out who those mythical Mycenaean lords were that built huge projects still standing in their midst, long after Lord Ajax and King Odysseus disappeared into exaggeration and myth. Henry Huntington built the entire Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in the time it took our generation to go to three hearings on a proposed dam.</p>

To be candid, there’s not usually a line of reporters waiting to talk to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). But last week, with only four days to go until the Iowa caucuses, the 69-year-old glassy-eyed former U.S. attorney nearly forgot to cast his vote on a routine matter he was so busy moving from one interview to the next outside of the Senate chamber. The four-term senator is hardly a new face in the Republican Party, nor is the soft-spoken and twangy Sessions considered the party’s rising star. But suddenly, almost out of nowhere, and for reasons even he doesn’t fully...

So Iowans and all people should be forewarned. You are entrusting your precious support and vote for a man who has fraudulently represented himself as someone standing up for the little guy. In reality, he has only cared about the man whose name he emblazons on every item he could. His campaign is not about you -- it is about him. And he will screw you, as he always has done.

"We"-sel Words: Libs exempt selves from collective guilt by Daniel Clark One of liberals' many assaults on the English language is in their tendency to use the first-person plural when referring to groups of people that do not include themselves. Take, for example, embittered former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who once said about her husband's successor, Ronald Reagan, "I think this president makes us comfortable with our prejudices." By saying this, Mrs. Carter was not confessing to harboring prejudices of her own. Rather, the "us" of whom she spoke was the electorate, who presumably were not motivated by prejudice when...

On Sunday Peebles told Neil Cavuto that Trump is poised to win. Don Peebles: "On the Republican side for president, governors, Donald Trump, so you got people who know how to manage things. New York City is an example of what you can get with incompetent management. Neil Cavuto: Ted Cruz said he (Donald Trump) can win the whole thing if he wins in Iowa. What do you think of that? Can he go on to win it all? wrote Don Peebles: Oh, I think Donald Trump is poised to win it all.

The recently announced ScHOLA2RS House was met with an overwhelming response from the UConn community including everything from excitement at the opportunities that will be provided to shock at the idea of housing based on race. "I was not pleased, my immediate thought was 'What?'" Haddiyyah Ali, a fourth-semester Africana studies and political science major said. "I know there had to be a lot of research that went into it...but just for me coming from a student perspective, my initial thought was what about black women and girls - what about us?" The idea behind the ScHOLA2RS House is to...

Hillary Clinton campaigned Saturday with gun-control advocates Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, trying to draw a contrast between her push for stricter laws with rival Bernie Sanders' record.

In one of their most heinous massacres to date, militants from the radical Islamist Boko Haram group slaughtered over a hundred victims in a village in northeast Nigeria Saturday night, including a number of children whom they burned alive. The latest atrocity from the jihadi group allied to the Islamic State took place in the village of Dalori, some three miles from Maiduguri, Nigeria. Vice Chairman of a civilian joint task force in Dalori, Modu Kaka, said that at least 100 dead bodies were taken away but that hundreds are still missing.

This year's Davos summit was attended by political leaders, business executives, intellectuals and celebrities. Notable politicians who attended included U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Prominent business leaders included Bill and Melinda Gates, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman. Celebrities included Kevin Spacey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Emma Watson and will.i.am.

President Obama is set to speak next week at a mosque which was led for over a decade by an Imam who justified suicide bombings in some circumstances and who helped found a mosque with ties to Al Qaeda. The President will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday and deliver remarks there, the White House confirmed on Saturday. This will be the first time the President has paid an official visit to a mosque during his seven years as President. However, Obama has toured mosques while on overseas trips. "The president believes that one of our nation's greatest...

"Fair" Trade Let us now turn to some of the leading protectionist arguments. Take, for example, the standard complaint that while the protectionist "welcomes competition," this competition must be "fair." Whenever someone starts talking about "fair competition" or indeed, about "fairness" in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked. For the genuinely "fair" is simply the voluntary terms of exchange, mutually agreed upon by buyer and seller. As most of the medieval scholastics were able to figure out, there is no "just" (or "fair") price outside of the...

For 25 years I've lived in the beautiful town of Pacifica, California situated about 15 miles south of San Francisco. It was a wonderful place to raise a family. Its great expanse of green space is a delight for an ecologist. My daily hikes vary from coastal bluffs to watch feeding Humpback Whales or migrating Gray Whales, to inland mountain trails with abundant deer, coyotes and bobcats. Oddly this past week I received emails from friends around the country asking if I was "all right", thinking my little slice of heaven was falling into the sea. Not to disrespect their...

President Obama will make the first visit during his presidency to a U.S. mosque next week, the White House announced Saturday, as the administration tries to promote religious tolerance at a time when rhetoric linking Islam with terrorism is becoming more voluminous. On Wednesday the president will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a sprawling community center in the the city’s western suburbs, that serves thousands of people with a place of worship, a housing complex and schools, (according to its website). It is one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s largest Muslim centers and describes itself as aspiring “to be the...

The decision by two branches of the Crips street gang to band together allowed a grand jury to indict six of them under a federal law created in the 1970s to target the Mafia. U.S. Attorney Deb Gilg announced the indictments Friday as part of a three-year investigation into gang and gun violence in north Omaha. According to court documents, all six men belong to the 40th Ave Crips or the 44th Ave Crips. They had united to retaliate against their enemies, make more money selling drugs and meet their goal of becoming "the most feared street gang in Omaha,"...

One of the recurring themes of questions we receive here at the USCCA has to do with older shooters and some of our training tips. Basically, readers and viewers continue to ask questions like the following: "Can you provide any training tips for those of us who can't move the way you do? Some of us are no longer so limber." The short answer is "No." But the longer answer is far more important from a personal safety and legal standpoint. So let’s get to the short answer first.