Free Republic

Al Gore is comparing the fight against climate change to the struggle against Nazis in World War II. The former vice president told an environmental forum in England that the world lacks the political will to act. Gore encouraged global leaders to unite their nations to fight global warming. We've reported many scientists have detailed a recent global cooling trend. The Times Online quotes Gore saying: "Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilization in World War II... We have everything we need except political will but political will is a renewable resource." Gore admitted it is...

ALBANY - Bronx state Sen. Pedro Espada, whose defection to the Republican camp helped trigger the current Senate crisis, will return to the Democratic fold and end the month-long Senate stalemate, The Post has learned. Espada, whose defection to the Republicans was the main reason for Gov. Paterson's controversial action yesterday "naming" Richard Ravitch as lieutenant governor, revealed his startling plans to The Post.

Melbourne, July 09: Wikipedians have slammed a report that found them to be egocentric introverts, socially awkward, and closed to new ideas...

It's not the troops; it's not the economy; it's not that it's mountainous and landlocked like Austria and Switzerland. It's the society. I write these words from Ghor province, and it's like the Jurassic Park in Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Nangahar ... keep going. A person can tool around in towns like Kabul, Jalalabad or Mazar-i-Sharif and build up hopes, but to extrapolate beyond the tangible is folly. Iraq is 1,000 years more advanced than Afghanistan. Nepal is far more connected to and cognizant of the outside world.

We’ve already seen this trend coming from the Rasmussen national polls, and now Politico reports that Rasmussen has substantial corroboration of their reports. Independent voters have begun rejecting the big-spending programs of Barack Obama, especially as they show little return on the vast fortunes he’s spent thus far. That means trouble for Obama in swing states that he carried relatively easily just eight months ago: Obama retains extremely strong support from Democrats, and earlier this year lost much of the Republican support that followed a giddy Inauguration. It is the independents who appear to be currently on the move: Obama...

A survey by the First Amendment Center in the US has reached the shocking conclusion that most American citizens don’t know the five basic freedoms enshrined in the constitution The study found that no more than 3% of Americans remember “petition” among the First Amendment’s five basic freedoms. However, freedom of speech was remembered by the majority of respondents – 56%. The others freedoms enshrined in the constitution appeared to have made little impression: freedom of religion was named by 15%; the same percentage remembered press freedom as a constitutional right while just 14% knew they had a right to...

Will the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) be “Lethal, Survivable, Supportable, and Affordable” like what it says on the patch? Many say “yes” and some aren’t so sure. The program progress should be brought into question. In order for the F-35 to be survivable it first has to survive. We are told that new ways of modeling and simulating will reduce the need for flight testing. Only 17 percent of the test evaluation of the F-35 will involve flight test discovery. The rest will depend on a variety of studies and analysis in order to qualify the design. So far,...

Wealthy nations agree on temperature cap in fight against global warming.... leaders of the world's richest industrial countries pledged Wednesday to seek dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to slow dangerous climate change. They agreed for the first time that worldwide temperatures must not rise more than a few degrees. However, their goals are nonbinding, and it's far from clear they will be met. The wealthy nations failed to persuade the leaders of big developing countries to promise to cut their own fast-spreading pollution, unable to overcome arguments that the well-established industrial giants aren't doing enough in the...

In the ongoing quest to determine the exact birthplace of Barack Obama, the president's alleged personal effort to put the matter to rest is raising some interesting new questions. The latest concerns focus on a letter purportedly sent by Obama to Honolulu's Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in which the commander in chief outright declares his birth at the facility. In the message dated Jan. 24, the freshly inaugurated president is said to explain that he's "a beneficiary of the excellence of Kapi'olani Medical Center – the place of my birth ... ." The text of the letter...

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.

The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign policy neophyte and "reset" man, the arms reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage. Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst. Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia "Joint Understanding," is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into...

Remember all that talk last winter about the historic awfulness of the inherited economy and how urgently the new Obama administration needed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's economic stimulus bill to get through Congress and the president flew all the way out to Denver to sign the $787-billion bill because, well, because they didn't have an Air Force One photo shoot for New York that day? And how it was absolutely, really, essentially important to start spending all that money ASAP so that it would create good, solid, strong, patriotic American jobs right here in America? And keep the jobless rate...

As Jim Geraghty notes over at the Campaign Spot, the race for Massachusetts governor is heating up. Yesterday, Charlie Baker, the relatively unknown CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, announced his plans to face off against Christy Mihos in the Republican primary, in hopes of challenging incumbent Democrat Deval Patrick in the general election. As the CEO of a major regional insurance company, Baker’s a health-care guy, and that’s very important in Massachusetts. Under Patrick, the Bay State has struggled to effectively institute the comprehensive health-care plan devised by former governor Mitt Romney. Though Massachusetts has achieved nearly universal health-care...

When I first started speaking out against Islam many people stayed silent because it was the politically correct thing to do. Those days are slowing coming to an end. For the record I placed a call to the Church and they clearly know about the threat the Islam brings to the West. Stating that it might even be too late for the UK.

GREENSBORO — The Greensboro Symphony Orchestra will be able to keep two of its full-time staff jobs, thanks to $50,000 in federal stimulus money. The symphony is among seven nonprofit arts organizations in North Carolina that will receive grants totaling $325,000 through the National Endowment for the Arts. The money comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The NEA received $50 million to preserve nonprofit arts jobs threatened by declines in support during the economic downturn. The symphony and Triad Stage were the only groups in Guilford County eligible for direct NEA grants, because they had received NEA funding...

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and it’s no accident that assorted atheists are making sure that everyone knows that. But they have some competition from those wanting to name 2009 as the “International Year of Astronomy”, because it’s the quadricentennial of the first use of the telescope by Galileo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (1564–1642), usually known by his first name only. Not to be outdone, the atheists have long used Galileo as a story of “science versus religion”. So what are the facts? [1] Not science vs religion, but science vs scienceMany historians of...

The issues before us are vast. On the state level, we can and must work to curb the excesses of government. We must also win back the battle of ideas, and this can be accomplished by fighting for hearts and minds on a local level. The positions we advocate for are right. We need only to advocate for them more effectively. A local representative can provide a voice on these issues by explaining the benefits of time tested conservative solutions and by demonstrating the fallacy of liberal, feel-good ones. For this reason, I’ve decided to run for State Representative and...

U.S. President Barack Obama suffered a double-barreled setback in Congress on Thursday when members of his own party moved to apply the brakes on his top legislative priorities, healthcare and climate change. Obama has demanded urgent and simultaneous attention to overhauling healthcare and addressing climate change, saying both were necessary to boost the U.S. economy, which is in a deep recession. He has demanded that Congress send him a bill by October to cut healthcare costs and provide medical coverage to most of the 46 million uninsured Americans. The president wants climate change legislation before year's end. While Obama was...

CAPE CANAVERAL — The aerospace giants contracted to help build NASA's next-generation spaceships are quietly hedging their bets and stepping back from the Ares rockets that the agency has staked its future on after the shuttle retires next year. In recent weeks, Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Boeing Co. have reached out to NASA officials, lawmakers and a presidentially appointed panel reviewing America's human-spaceflight plan, expressing a willingness to change plans or offering alternatives to the rockets that until recently they strongly advocated.

For a "Democrat", Rep. Anthony Weiner is no "dhimmi" Democrat. When it comes to the abuse of the "National Security Waiver" by Presidents as a "loophole" to avoid compliance with the law, Weiner "gets it. Successive presidents have used the "waiver" to continue taxpayer funding to Saudi Arabia and Islamists in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority Fatah. Against the will of Congress and the American taxpayer. The live C-Span coverage of the House floor action was very informative. Rep. Keith Ellison became very angry over a poster board display set up by Weiner that revealed to the public the hate...