Free Republic

Has the White House been influenced by a convicted domestic terrorist for its attack on the Chamber of Commerce?The latest assault on the Chamber has been spear-headed by none other than the President himself and picked up by David Axelrod, MoveOn.org and all the usual Astro-Turfers who receive marching orders from the DNC. It’s become part of the standard talking points for cable-news pundits and their well-programmed guests and has been the new rallying cry for the left as they try their best to explain the imminent electoral disaster that looms on November 2nd. But one group was well ahead...

Jon Meacham got one thing right. On Thursday's Morning Joe, he said that the heads of any conservatives listening to him would blow up over their Wheaties. What was Meacham's remark that was so explosive for any right-thinking listener? His prediction that someday, we'll look back and realize that Al Gore was . . . "a prophetic voice" about the environment.Meacham glorified Gore in the context of commenting on the withdrawal from the presidential race of Jay Inslee. Inslee's campaign was focused entirely on impending environmental doom. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Humans ruined everything. They bred too much and choked the life out of the land, air and sea. And so they must be vaporized by half, or attacked by towering monsters, or vanquished by irate dwellers from the oceans’ polluted depths. Barring that, they face hardscrabble, desperate lives on a once verdant Earth now consumed by ice or drought. That is how many recent superhero and sci-fi movies — among them the latest Avengers and Godzilla pictures as well as “Aquaman,” “Snowpiercer,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Interstellar” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” — have invoked the climate crisis. They imagine postapocalyptic...

We think of air conditioning as a “first world” luxury, but it’s really more of an American one. In Europe, fewer than 5% of households have air conditioning, according to the International Energy Agency, and even in hot regions like Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, only 8% of households have it. In the US, nearly 90% of households are air conditioned. In New York, where the summer reverberates with the hum of air conditioners, that percentage seems even higher. Along certain avenues, you walk in a sprinkle of condensation dripping from row after row of window units above,...

The first trove of documents have been unsealed in the 2015 defamation case brought against Ghislaine Maxwell by Virginia Roberts. The documents were made public Friday morning just moments after the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the decision to make public over 2,000 pages of court filings that had previously been under seal. Those documents reveal in great detail the three-year period in which Roberts claims she was Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell's sex slave. Roberts has said that in that role she was 'forced to have sex with ...numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign...

VIDEO What better tribute to Ross Perot than to take a look at a few highlights of his 1993 debate on NAFTA with Al Gore. These clips illustrate the character of Perot. He turned out to be correct about the harm NAFTA would cause for American workers and economy as well as provided great entertainment in the way he handled Gore during the CNN debate hosted by Larry King.

Here is a sentence one does not often get the opportunity to write: Bill de Blasio is right. Sen. Cory Booker demands an apology, because apologies under duress are an important part of the political ritual of 2019, and to be able to command an apology signals that a politician is a real player. But Booker isn’t... The Al Gores and John Kerrys of the world enjoy rubbing elbows with Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t find Davos on a labeled map, doesn’t want to and doesn’t need to. Democrats may not be ready to comfort...

Ice is melting in unprecedented ways as summer approaches in the Arctic. In recent days, observations have revealed a record-challenging melt event over the Greenland ice sheet, while the extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites. Greenland saw temperatures soar up to 40 degrees above normal Wednesday, while open water exists in places north of Alaska where it seldom, if ever, has in recent times. It’s “another series of extreme events consistent with the long-term trend of a warming, changing Arctic,” said Zachary Labe, a climate researcher...

Angel Portillo doesn't think about climate change much. It's not that he doesn't care. He's just got other things to worry about. Climate change seems so far away, so big. Lately though, Portillo says he's been thinking about it more often. Standing on the banks of a swollen and surging Arkansas River, just upriver from a cluster of flooded businesses and homes, it's easy to see why. "Stuff like this," he says, nodding at the frothy brown waters, "all of the tornadoes that have been happening - it just doesn't seem like a coincidence, you know?" A string of natural...

Climate change represents “a near-to midterm existential threat to human civilization,according to an analysis by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. The paper, published by the Australian think tank last week, gives one scenario in which by 2050 "accelerating climate-change impacts pose large negative consequences which might not be undone for centuries." If policymakers fail to act on evidence presented in the current Paris Agreement, in which global human-caused greenhouse emissions will not peak until 2030, this will lock in about 3 degrees Celsius of warming, according to the scenario presented in the report. There is "broad scientific acceptance"...

Gee, why wouldn't President Trump listen to Prince Charles or Al Gore when it comes to slapping taxes on carbon? I mean, it would only cost untold trillions globally, hobble economies, hurt the poorest countries and people most . . . and do little if anything to affect "climate change." [snip] David Gregory: "They apparently met for much longer than they were scheduled to so the President could listen to Prince Charles on the issue of climate change. Look, the President just continues, he has now for years, whether it was Al Gore, or his children or others who are...

This has been a spring of angry weather across the U.S. as heat, flooding, and hail pummel the eastern half of the country. But along with the garden variety suffering, devastating tornadoes have also spread across the U.S. from Texas to Pennsylvania. Twisters have ripped through communities across the U.S., killing at least three in Missouri last week, injuring nearly 100 on Monday in Ohio, and upending thousands of people’s lives. On Thursday, nearly 78 million Americans still faced increased odds of tornadoes touching down, according to the Storm Prediction Center, including major metro areas like New York, Washington, D.C.,...

Progressive politicians like Al Gore, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.N.Y., don’t hesitate to blame any kind of severe weather – even if it is decreasing over time – on global warming. With the devastating Dayton, Ohio tornadoes fresh on our minds, it is useful to examine exactly why (modest) global warming has produced fewer – not more – of such events. The simple answer is that tornado formation requires unusually cool air. Very few thunderstorms produce tornadoes. In the hot and humid tropics, they are virtually unheard of. The reason why is that (unlike hurricanes) tornadoes...

Here is an interesting little cautionary tale. That it involves the schadenfreude-y takedown of a feminist writer for getting a key fact - that supports the premise of her new book - not just wrong but completely wrong is just a holiday bonus.  The writer, Dr. Naomi Wolf: Liberal progressive feminist author, journalist, and former political advisor to Bill Clinton and Al GoreThe fact she got so wrong? This: In her brand-new book, she claims that Victorians were executing men for sodomy for longer than previously believed. She bases this claim on having discovered in court records the phrase “death...

Donald Trump wasn’t the first person to fire Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the combative “Apprentice” contestant who makes a heralded return to the NBC reality show on Thursday, the next-to-last episode of the ratings hit. According to the new issue of PEOPLE, the former political appointee — who spoke glowingly of her White House days — was banished from four jobs in two years with the Clinton administration. At her last one, “she was asked to leave as quickly as possible, she was so disruptive,” says Cheryl Shavers, the former Under Secretary for Technology at the Commerce Department, where Omarosa worked several...

You'd think Al Gore, the big clown dumkopf who went off the rails after he lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush, would have learned a thing or two about what works in Western politics. One of those things is that foreign interference in another country's election is the most reliable way to get the opposite of the desired result. Well meaning Brits who wrote letters to Ohio voters, after all, urging them to vote for John Kerry in 2004, were pretty much the example of how well that idea works out. Well, either Gore is a slow learner...

If you think it’s hot in Las Vegas now, Al Gore says, just be glad it’s not the year 2100. Gore told an audience at UNLV today that if global warming continues at its current rate, the number of days above 95 degrees in the valley will increase more than 50 percent by that year - from 75 now to 132 then. And despite the claims of deniers who say such changes are merely the result of natural shifts in the weather, Gore said the cause was undeniably the greenhouse gases that are causing earth to absorb an amount of...

limate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. The consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical and predicted to observable reality over the past few years, but this has not been matched by an uptick in urgency. The...

**SNIP** "We need a new president, and we need a president committed heart and soul to the climate crises," Gore said during an activist training conference in Atlanta hosted by his nonprofit, nonpartisan Climate Reality Project. "I'm very happy that so many of the Democratic candidates have made it clear that's the way they would intend to govern if they won." Trump's presidency "is unfortunate in so many ways," Gore said, but he also credited Trump's open contempt of the scientific consensus that human activity affects the Earth's atmosphere with pushing many moderates and even some conservatives toward the more...

Hi kids, Many of you will be marching today, demonstrating for an issue you believe to be very important. Many years ago, I was young, well informed, and absolutely convinced I knew enough to make good decisions for the future of the world, and couldn’t understand just how obtuse all the oldies were, how they just didn’t know the stuff I had just learned. Malthusian economics drove most of us, the Club of Rome had reported, and to my subsequent shame, I confess that in 1975 I voted for the Values Party…. I wanted a better world, I knew resources...