Free Republic

A new prayer from the United Nations disguised as a four-color .pdf says that the weather is all your fault. ‘We now have a better understanding of human-induced climate change,” chants Michel Jarraud, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization,“and climate scientists can increasingly determine how large scale pressure and temperature patterns influence the weather.” They prayer goes on to tie “extreme” weather in 2013 to “human-induced” causes. I didn’t even know that the weather could read a human-induced calendar. Can I get an “Amen”? The material in the report is so good that the WMO dispensed with the customary...

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens once suggested that it was as if Kim Il Sung -- the founder and “Eternal President” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) -- had read George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984,” and then tried to bring it to life. That was one of his first thoughts, he said, after visiting the country. North Korea, as most people know, is probably the most impoverished and terrorized police state on the face of the earth. Unspeakable atrocities happen there every single day. And now, in a new report, the UN is using its perch to...

Well… On the bright side: The UN Climate Chief has finally decided to adopt a certain modicum of honesty in her crusade to rid the world of pollution. As suspected by capitalists, free market advocates, and anyone who read into the redistributive agenda of the UN Climate Scientists, Christiana Figueres has suggested that only communism is capable of successfully fighting global warming and “climate change”. Of course it’s a strange statement, given the Soviet Union’s abysmal record on environmental issues, and red China’s horrific display of environmental abuse. Figueres even went so far as to suggest that communist China is...

Tired of depressing news? Smile, because here is some very positive news: 50 U.S. Senators—both Democrats and Republicans—have pledged to stop Obama’s latest attack on the Second Amendment. Last week, all 50 senators wrote a letter to Obama pledging not to ratify the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty. In order for this treaty to be ratified, it would need 60 “yay” votes in the Senate. This means, gun owners will not need to forfeit their God-given right to self-defense and President Obama is on notice that his latest attack on the Second Amendment is dead on arrival in the Senate....

President Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York was flawed, displaying a type of moral equivalency that does not exist for America's enemies. His claim that "The world is more stable than it was five years ago" is demonstrably false. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Kenya, Congo, to name only a few, there are at least as many conflicts as in 2008 and far more now than when the United Nations was created. According to Themner, Lotta and Peter Wallensteen, in "Armed Conflict, 1946-2011", Journal of Peace Research, there were fewer than 20 armed conflicts in 1946....

This week the United Kingdom, with the support of the U.S. and France, scrambled -- in vain -- to get the approval of the United Nations Security Council for a military strike on Syria. I can certainly understand why some see this as a legal or political necessity. International law says that nations should seek approval of the Security Council before attacking other nations. That means if the United States attacks Syria without U.N. approval, President Obama will open himself to the charge from the left of being even more of an international war criminal than George W. Bush, who...

Your guns are in danger. Obama has stopped defending the Second Amendment. He did not get his gun control agenda passed in the Senate. So, he’s unconstitutionally trying to use the United Nations to control your guns. Don’t let him. Obama is getting dangerously close to signing the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. If he signs this treaty and the Senate ratifies it, the Second Amendment is toast. And your guns will be in the control of dictators around the world. This sounds like a bad movie or a conspiracy theory, and I wish it were. But it’s real. 130...

Steampunk: a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century. - Wikipedia Punk'd: To be fooled publicly by the use of a videotaped or filmed practical joke. On a March snow-day in Georgetown, Washington, DC, as America was still getting over the oratory of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States delivered a landmark speech on the future of energy policy in America. The US had suffered the severe blow of the financial crises of 2008. Energy prices once again were going up as...

At a ceremony in Havana last week, UNESCO (U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) honored Che Guevara by enshrining his writings in its hallowed “Memory of the World Register.” The ceremony included several members of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s family. “UNESCO’s work is part of our support for freedom of expression as an inalienable human right set down in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” declares the UN’s mission statement. But not far from where this UNESCO/Guevara ceremony took place Cubans were being starved and beaten in pestiferous torture chambers for the crime of quoting the UN Declaration...

"Samantha Power and the UN are a perfect match," observed the British journalist Melanie Phillips last week after President Obama nominated Power to be the next US ambassador to the United Nations.She didn't mean it as a compliment. Phillips, a conservative lionheart, regards the UN as a cynical institution that long ago dissipated its moral legitimacy. It is a place where the language of human rights is routinely hijacked by the enemies of human rights, and where democracies like America and Israel are reviled while the world's most odious regimes are indulged. In nominating Power, says Phillips, Obama has picked...

Just try to wrap your arms around the magnitude of defiance and chutzpah that led to and accompanied President Obama's appointment of the discredited Susan Rice as national security adviser. But don't let this outrage distract you from his equally disturbing appointment of leftist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador. Though Democrats and their supporting liberal media, with a few notable exceptions, have aggressively downplayed the multifaceted Benghazi scandal, none of them has laid a glove on the irrefutable claim that Rice delivered talking points altered by the administration to distort the facts in order to mitigate any...

The former White House adviser and longtime Obama friend nominated Wednesday as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has a history of controversial comments that could haunt her in confirmation -- including likening U.S. foreign policies to those of the Nazis. In a March 2003 New Republic magazine essay, Samantha Power wrote that American foreign policy needs a "historical reckoning" which would entail "opening the files" and "acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia." She continued: “Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our...

On Tuesday, Dr. Miriam Grossman had a message for the United Nations: Shame on you. Grossman is the author of the acclaimed 2007 book Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. As I wrote in my very first column for Townhall, when I was a junior at Ohio University: “Grossman says her profession has been ‘hijacked’ by radical politics. Unprotected reveals how campus health professionals often risk students' well-being in order to promote feminism, androgyny, and ‘anything goes’ liberalism.” Her follow-up book, You’re Teaching my Child What? showed that radical sexual dogma isn’t...

“It is an outrage.” The source of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s anger? The fact that the United States has yet to approve a treaty known as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. Panetta was speaking after the election. His ire about LOST’s status suggests that the Obama administration may well make this a second-term priority. It’s come close to being ratified by the U.S. Senate before -- it dates back to 1982, in fact. But LOST has never been able to gain enough supporters in the Senate. That could change,...

While President Obama and Speaker John Boehner are wrestling with whether or not they will agree to raise taxes, United Nations delegates partying in Doha, Qatar are planning to impose a new kind of tax on Americans. U.N. conferees have been discussing how they can start a global tax that would hit Americans hard. The U.N. bureaucrats are not deterred by the fact that Americans should be protected by our U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, which specifies that "all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives." The greedy globalist U.N. bureaucrats have been conniving for...

While talk of the United States tumbling over a so-called “fiscal cliff” dominates news cycles in the nation’s capital and other major cities, on the other side of the planet, the United Nations is quietly but relentlessly pressing to take control of the Internet. It is being aided in this illicit endeavor by various totalitarian regimes, and by many smaller states that routinely use their strength in numbers to bash America. The vehicle chosen by the internationalists for this power grab is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), one of the many aged bureaucracies that long ago lost any degree...

There’s an old story from the Jewish shetls of Eastern Europe. There was a singing contest among the animals. The Nightingale loses, despite her lovely singing voice. Looking down on the jury, she sees the grunting wild pigs. She weeps, not because she lost, she says. “But see who my judges are!” America must feel like the Nightingale whenever she has to go before a UN panel. I had the honor of serving our country as U.S. Ambassador to the UN’s Human Rights Commission. In those days, the UN body had such worthy respecters of human rights as Algeria, Libya,...

The United Nations may be useful as a forum for world leaders, but it is not a productive place to develop policy. The international bureaucracy compulsively supports statist initiatives that would reduce individual liberty and expand the burden of government. Global taxation with no democratic accountability or oversight. A “right” to taxpayer-financed birth control. An international scheme to undermine the right to keep and bear arms. A Law-of-the-Sea Treaty that would give international bureaucrats tax and regulatory powers over international waters. And you won’t be surprised to learn that the United Nations also wants to control the Internet. Actually, to...

Not shockingly, immediately after President Obama was reelected for a second term, his administration reinforced its support for the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty [ATT], also known as the "Small Arms Treaty." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been expressing full support of the treaty on behalf of the United States for years now while for political reasons, President Obama sat back. Now, the entire administration will be out front in support of ratifying it. Hours after U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected, the United States backed a U.N. committee's call on Wednesday to renew debate over a draft international treaty...

I am grateful to George Washington University professor of Law, Jonathan Turley, for pointing out that a growing number of world leaders find the First Amendment's right of free speech to be an inconvenience. He cites, for instance, U. N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's warning that "when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected." Turley makes the valuable -- and if you think about it, obvious -- observation that free speech becomes intolerable not when it is used recklessly but when one person or a group...