Free Republic

Despite playing a key role in advancing climate change hysteria, the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, known as the Met Office, quietly released a report last week conceding that so-called “global warming” actually stopped more than 15 years ago. The startling admission shows once again that United Nations theories and climate models are wildly inaccurate at best, experts say, meaning multi-trillion dollar schemes to deal with alleged human-caused “climate change” are at the very least severely misguided. According to the latest UK Met Office report, first reported by the Daily Mail, there has been no noticeable increase in global temperatures...

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The Obama administration has joined with Planned Parenthood in a suit intended to stop an Arizona law that defunds the abortion giant. The Whole Woman’s Healthcare Funding Prioritization Act, signed into law last May by Republican Governor Jan Brewer (pictured with Obama), defunds abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. The law offers the state family planning funds instead to entities that provide comprehensive healthcare without an abortion option. On October 4, Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief in the suit, claiming that the state of Arizona is not permitted to decide which groups will receive Medicare money it gets...

<p>DETROIT -- Heidi Peterson always dreamed of living in a historical home. In May of 2010, she bought one in Detroit's Boston-Edison District for $23,000.</p> <p>After being away for a year, she said she returned to her house last week and found a woman living there. Peterson learned from neighbors she had been living there for a few months.</p>

Dr. Paul Butler is on the school board and says the sport puts players at risk of brain damage later in life. Dover High's athletic director points out that the school is part of a concussion prevention program. The school board chair and vice-chair say they will not support the proposed football ban.

Unless the Democrats and Republicans in Congress can reach an agreement on an extension, many temporary tax-cut provisions will expire at the end of this year. The so-called Bush tax cut — The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) — gave us our current six income tax brackets of 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent, a $1,000 child tax credit, a long-term capital gains rate of 15 percent, a qualified dividend tax rate of 15 percent (0 percent for those in the...

Forget zero tolerance. Bay City Public School teachers for years could be caught repeatedly under the influence of illegal drugs or alcohol without being fired. Teachers in possession or under the influence of illegal drugs could be caught three times before they lost their job, and they got five strikes if they were drunk on school grounds before being fired. A school district official said the language in the union contract that protects teachers for those instances "was incorporated into the teacher Master Agreement in 1997." Those protections also were included in the Bay City Education Association teacher’s contract that...

Kid Rock is endorsing Romney on Drew & Mike 101 WRIF FM right now.

A unit of U.S. Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq and more U.S. soldiers may soon be on their way, according to a New York Times report on the impact the civil war in neighboring Syria is having on Iraq's "fragile society and fledgling democracy." Buried in the 15th paragraph of the report in Tuesday's Times was the news that "Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions" and that a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers has already...

Republican critics and presumed GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney are slamming President Obama for reversing a landmark welfare reform law instituted in 1996 under the Clinton administration. The 1996 law enacted a number of reforms, including a time limit on how long families could receive aid, a requirement that recipients must eventually find work, and a provision that replaced a federal entitlement with grants to the states. The debacle underscores the work requirements attached to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the federal assistance program that became welfare in 1996. Currently, the program includes a series of requirements that...

It would seem that all of the optimistic talk of “hope” and “change” that marked President Obama’s campaign of four years ago is now ancient history. This election season, as the Obama administration forecasted prior to the completion of the GOP primaries, would be full of nit and grit. As the most recent Obama super PAC ad makes abundantly clear, the president is making good on his word. Priorities USA Action produced an ad — “Understands” is its title — that implicates Mitt Romney in the death of the wife of a steelworker whose Kansas City plant — GST Steel...

In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, President Barack Obama blames state and local governments, as well as Congress, for over 14 percent black unemployment. "Black unemployment still stands at nearly 14%. How do you communicate that the economy is headed in the right direction?," the editor in chief of Black Enterprise asks Obama. "Most economists will tell you that there is no doubt the economy has gotten stronger, but we are digging ourselves out a deep hole. There are a lot more things we could be doing. To get them done, we need cooperation of Congress. We got the...

Stockton, California, Police Chief Tom Morris was supposed to bring stability to law enforcement when he was appointed to the job four years ago. He lasted eight months and left the now-bankrupt city at age 52 with an annual pension that pays more than $204,000 -- the third of four chiefs who stayed in the position for less than three years and retired with an average of 92 percent of their final salaries. Stockton, which filed for bankruptcy protection on June 28, is among California cities from the Mexican border to the San Francisco Bay confronting rising pension costs as...

The state of Michigan gave one company $1.65 million, with which zero jobs were created or retained after the business went bankrupt. This is one of several instances where projections fell short for a state fund designed to support select businesses. The money was given through the Michigan Strategic Fund, a state program that administers the 21st Century Investments program “to strengthen and diversify Michigan’s economy by investing in venture capital, private equity, and mezzanine funds as a method to create jobs and provide financial assistance for the creation of new businesses or industries.” To date, the direct investment category...

Perhaps the rain made the teleprompter unreadable. That's one thought I had on pondering Barack Obama's comments to a rain-soaked rally in Roanoke, Va., last Friday. Perhaps he didn't really mean what he said. Or perhaps -- as is often the case with people when unanchored from a prepared text -- he revealed what he really thinks. "There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back," he began, defending his policy of higher tax rates on high earners. "They know they didn't -- look, if you've been successful, you...

It’s always illuminating when President Obama gives his insights on how America’s free enterprise system works. Here he is last Friday at a campaign event in Virginia: There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be...

SKIERNIEWICE, Poland -- Chinese companies have wowed the world with superhighways, high-speed trains and snazzy airports, all built seemingly overnight. Yet a modest highway through Polish potato fields proved to be too much for one of China's biggest builders. The A2 highway between Warsaw and Berlin was supposed to be an opportunity for Chinese construction to shine on a European stage after years of megaprojects at home and in the developing world. Poland badly wanted the project completed before the European soccer championships starting June 8, which Poland is hosting for the first time with Ukraine. Instead, a key 30-mile...

This book is more about the man — his hubris, his arrogance, his naiveté — than it is about his ideology because the author, a member of the insider Council on Foreign Relations, an influential group that promotes the diminishing of our country's constitutional structure and the ceding of U.S. sovereignty to a transnational global government such as the United Nations, no doubt shares that ideology. Klein is a certified member of the establishment elite, having graduated from Columbia University with two degrees and having been a foreign affairs editor at Newsweek magazine and a former editor of the New...

For more than thirty years the Ordnance Department endeavored to obtain a satisfactory semi-automatic or self-loading rifle to replace the bolt action Springfield. These efforts were not confined to the development within the Department. Invitations were extended periodically to gun designers in this country and abroad to submit weapons for test, and tests were made of those received which showed any promise of meeting the specifications prescribed. During this period of thirty odd years many rifles were received and tested. Mechanisms embodying every known principle of operation were represented in the many types submitted. After many tests of various calibers,...

A stretch of largely vacant federal lands in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado may hold more recoverable oil than all the rest of the world put together. That is what Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources for the General Accounting Office, informed the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment in her written testimony on May 10: The Green River Formation — an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — contains the world's largest deposits of oil shale. USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] estimates that the Green River Formation contains...