Free Republic

The recent decline in crude oil prices has created the potential for weaker crude oil production. EIA's Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) includes indicators that provide details on the effect low prices may have on tight oil production, which accounts for 56% of total U.S. oil production. Analyzing these indicators and the changes in oil production following the drop in crude oil prices during the 2008-09 recession may offer some insight into possible near-term oil production trends. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil delivered to Cushing, Oklahoma declined more than 31% from June to November 26 and another...

WASHINGTON — As U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey heads for the exits, the House Ethics Committee issued a “letter of reproval” Thursday for Gingrey’s actions on behalf of an Ellijay bank.The committee publicly revealed its findings that the Marietta Republican gave “special favors or privileges” to the since-failed Bank of Ellijay by allowing it to meet in January 2009 with top Treasury Department officials, a member of Congress and a high-ranking congressional staffer about its pending application for funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Gingrey helped start the bank and his investment in it was worth as much as $500,000,...

EXCLUSIVE–PALIN ON OBAMA/BOEHNER CROMNIBUS BILL: 'IT STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN' by STEPHEN K. BANNON 1. What do you think of Speaker Boehner having President Obama 'whip votes' from the White House in order to pass this bill? It stinks to high heaven. Did arrogant politicians not get the memo that Obama’s agenda was decisively defeated in last month’s historic midterm landslide? Good Lord, America said loud and clear not just “no” but “hell no” to Obama’s failed policies. Americans who pay attention said absolutely no to Obama’s amnesty for illegal aliens. We also said no to the mother-of-all unfunded mandates,...

Republicans will try to make up with conservatives irate over the passage of the “cromnibus” with a new measure in January, one that will take aim at Barack Obama’s unilateral action on immigration. House Rules Committee chair Pete Sessions announced yesterday that GOP leadership has committed to an amendment to block implementation of Obama’s plan in the first two weeks of the new Congress. The only question, Roll Call reports, is to which bill it can be attached: Rules Chairman Pete Sessions said during a panel hearing on the “cromnibus” Wednesday that Republicans plan to bring up legislation similar...

The Democratic Party is well on the way to restoring its reputation as weak on national security, not to be trusted with the nation’s safety.  Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Democrat majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee who insisted on releasing their partisan report on CIA enhanced interrogation techniques (sometimes known as “torture”) have opened a Pandora’s Box. Writing at Ricochet, Herbert Meyer, recipient of the nation’s highest intelligence medal for civilians, outlines in stark terms the sort of dilemma Feinstein’s report sets up for Democrats:  Let’s use what’s called the Ticking-Time-Bomb scenario to illustrate this point: A terrorist group...

U.S. pastor and pro-family activist Scott Lively The First Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed a lawsuit to proceed against U.S. pastor Scott Lively accusing him of “crimes against humanity” for his overseas activism opposing the homosexual agenda.The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages "to be determined at trial" and a declaration that he violated "the laws of nations" by speaking against homosexual “rights.”Pastor Scott Lively, who recently completed an unsuccessful bid for governor of Massachusetts, was sued in 2012 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of "Sexual Minorities Uganda." The Ugandan homosexual activist group claims Lively’s speeches...

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, no matter how full-throated the endorsements of Common Core by such worthies as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the parents go marching on. “Colorado Springs School District 11 struck a blow against the Common Core by voting to remove the majority of its students from the new, mandatory standardized tests,” Chris Neal wrote in School Reform News this month. “District 11, which has nearly 30, 000 students, announced it plans to randomly test the minimum number of students needed to meet the federal requirement, allowing the rest to opt...

The defeat of Democratic senator Mary Landrieu by Republican representative Bill Cassidy in last weekend’s Louisiana runoff ends an election year that has been very successful for Republicans — and has implications for 2016. Some observations: (1) Democrats relied heavily on legacy candidates — and lost nevertheless. Mary Landrieu’s father, Moon Landrieu, was elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1960 and as mayor of New Orleans in 1970 and 1974. Her father’s anti-segregationist legacy helped Mary Landrieu appeal to black voters and win narrow victories in 1996, 2002, and 2008. It wasn’t enough in 2014. Other defeated Democratic candidates this...

Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved. Yet, something needs to be said in defense of Gruber. For while he groveled and confessed to the sin of arrogance, what this Ivy League con artist boasted about rings true. Here, Gruber explained, is how we got Obamacare passed: "This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK?...

The year-end fiscal drama in Washington DC to which we’ve become accustomed during the Obama years is reaching its 2014 climax. Tuesday night, the House of Representatives released the final text of the omnibus continuing resolution (CR) that would fund the federal government through September 30, 2015. Nicknamed the “CRomnibus,” the legislation is of course highly controversial, as it rolls into a single massive bill all of the spending in all federal agencies and departments that are normally in 12 separate appropriations bills. In other words, there’s a lot of stuff in there for everyone to hate. We can judge...

On Oct. 24 at 6:24 p.m., Magic 96.5 in Birmingham, Alabama, flipped its “St. Nick” switch. The soft-rock radio station began playing all holiday music all the time. Magic 96.5 (WMJJ-FM) was one of the first stations in 2014 to give listeners exactly what they want at year’s end: more the Madonna than Madonna. In fact, there’s an entire library of songs that are in constant demand now, but people cringe if they hear them months before. Radio’s wall-to-wall holiday format is a recent development. Of course, stations in the past played some Christmas music on Dec. 24 and 25,...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Crude oil resumed its selloff on Friday, crushed by market fears that oversupply would further decimate the commodity's value in the face of tepid global demand. Stocks opened Friday in the red, signaling the fourth down day this week. The S&P 500 dropped 0.41%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.38%, and the Nasdaq tumbled 0.9%.

The location and elimination of Osama bin Laden was among the greatest achievements of the American intelligence community in the War on Terror — and “enhanced interrogation” had nothing do with it, according to the Senate Democrats’ “torture” report, released earlier this week. According to the much-touted study, “the vast majority of the documents, statements, and testimony highlighting information [that enabled the bin Laden operation] from the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or from CIA detainees more generally, was inaccurate and incongruent with CIA records.” The minority report released by six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans claims differently. The...

For a long time I resisted the word “torture” when discussing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against high-value captives in the War on Terror. I don’t think I can do that anymore. The report put out by Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious, and “full of crap,” as Dick Cheney put it the other night on Special Report with Bret Baier. But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn’t change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it “psychological torture” or...

More and more we are seeing an opening in America to paganism, false religions and open Satanism. The strange invocation that came from the Lake Worth, Florida City Commission meeting on December 2 of this year exemplifies this, only it was apparently an anti-theist that gave the invocation. Miami anti-theist Preston Smith stood and gave an utterly moronic invocation, if you can even call it that as several of the commissioners and the mayor got up and walked out before he gave the invocation. Lake Worth Mayor Pam Triolo and three other commissioners exited the area, but later returned for...

Representatives from the U.S. and 195 other countries are meeting in Lima, Peru for the 20th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, hoping to lay the foundation for a major treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But evidence shows this is the wrong approach to address climate change and negotiators would be better off focusing on market competition and innovation, which have proven able to reduce emissions intensity and promote economic growth. The U.S. is seeking an agreement based on voluntary reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by each nation. In an attempt...

Veteran Fox News correspondent who visited Bin Laden's lair and covered Arab Spring uprisings is found dead in his apartment after committing suicide Body of Dominic Di-Natale, 43, was found in a Colorado property Jefferson County Officials say they were alerted by a friend who was aware of his state of mind It reportedly related to serious undisclosed health problems Covered the death of Osama bin Laden and protests in Tahrir Square By Wills Robinson for MailOnline Published: 00:23 EST, 12 December 2014 | Updated: 09:16 EST, 12 December 2014

Demands on the NHS tend to increase during the colder months because of illnesses like flu and norovirus. But with winter just getting under way, pressures are already reaching record levels. Extra money is being invested in each nation, but the four-hour A&E waiting time target is still being missed everywhere. The mounting problems come as the BBC launches its NHS Winter project, which tracks how the health service is performing down to individual hospital trust level. In England weekly figures are released. The latest, for the first week of December, show 91.8% of patients were seen in four hours...

Rapp felt his anger stir a bit. “Senator, I have been shot on three separate occasions in the service of this country. I received this nice little scar at the ripe old age of twenty-five.” Rapp showed her the left side of his face and craned his neck to show her fellow committee members the white mark that ran nearly four inches along his jaw-bone. “It was delivered by the man who was behind the terrorist attack on Pan Am flight one-oh-three. One hundred seventy-nine Americans were on that flight. Thirty-five of my classmates from Syracuse University perished, including a...

For most of the past year, Mitt Romney supporters have publicly said he should consider running again. And for most of the past year, Romney has seemed uninterested. Until recently. While some people close to Romney insist he hasn’t moved from saying he has no plans to run, the 2012 Republican nominee has sounded at least open to the idea in recent conversations, according to more than a dozen people who’ve spoken with him in the past month. In his private musings, Romney has sounded less than upbeat about most of the potential candidates in the 2016 Republican field, according...