Free Republic

A retired Western Washington University professor testified to a Republican-controlled state Senate committee Tuesday that climate change stopped in 1998 and that human-caused greenhouse gases are not responsible for fluctuations in the Earth's temperatures or melting polar ice caps. The startling testimony from emeritus professor Don Easterbrook is at odds with an apparent consensus among climate scientists and climate-science literature about human causes behind the the rise in global temperatures over the past century. His testimony came one day after the Legislature sent Gov. Jay Inslee a bill that sets up a legislative work group to study Washington's best strategy...

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize...

...Justice O'Connor sounded the alarm against what she's termed "the increasing, and on many levels frightening, overlegalization of everyday life in our country today." The Supreme Court's first female justice is best known in tort circles for her long crusade to bring punitive damage awards under constitutional due-process scrutiny, a position for which she eventually assembled a majority that includes several of her liberal colleagues (though not conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas). Quoting a Ninth Circuit opinion, Justice O'Connor has expressed concern at the way demands for punitive damages can be "limited only by the ability of lawyers to...

Judge Emilo Garza is the favorite, which means he's the likely pick, given the track record of TradeSports.com betters to accurately predict future events. The list includes 2 prominant judges not usually included in MSM speculation: Kozinski of the 9th Circuit (my personal favorite) and Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit. But they don't have great odds, so their inclusion merely indicates that they were picked for the list by the TradeSports.com staff.

Elements of Surprise by Gregg Easterbrook Nature does not know best," the ecologist Rene Dubos--best known for coining the expression "think globally, act locally"--once wrote. Dubos's worry was that the environmental movement was beginning to depict the natural condition as Edenic and benign, when in fact nature is a mass murderer. The Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy ought to be seen as a reminder that the Earth can be a very dangerous place to live. ... . ... Productivity and planning might reduce the harm done by natural disasters--anti-earthquake building engineering, for example. ... there is no foreseeable technology that could...

Greener Pastures by Gregg Easterbrook Michael Leavitt announced yesterday that he will leave the Environmental Protection Agency after just 14 months at the EPA's helm and become George W. Bush's secretary of Health and Human Services. ... He is departing because he realized that environmental regulatory reform is currently impossible. Neither the left nor the right will allow it. [snip] But under current law, cost-effective environmental protection is often discouraged. [snip] On the right, the Republican nut-case faction in the House continues to claim that environmental protection is destroying the economy, though there is zero evidence of this: Pollution has...

Commentators are making much of the fact that exit polls showed 23 percent of voters in the presidential election described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. Supposedly this heralds the arrival of a leviathan voting bloc of far-right Christians devoted to repealing the twenty-first century. Yet the majority of Christians could be called born-again, and the majority of Christians--including most conservative Christians--are open-minded and good-hearted. Let's calm down, please, from this Christians-under-the-bed alarmism that has followed the reelection of George W. Bush. First, the term "evangelical." The American population cannot have more than one or two percent true evangelicals--that is,...

College Admissions 2004 Who Needs Harvard? The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller by Gregg Easterbrook ..... Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people's lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective...

Have you ever thought about what life was like for your great-grandparents? If you really have, you’d agree with Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution that our great-grandparents would consider the world we live in today to be some kind of utopia. Yet, all of the progress we enjoy hasn’t made Americans any happier. In fact, the opposite is true—it’s made us more unhappy. In his new book, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, Easterbrook begins by telling us just how good we have it: The average Westerner lives better than 99.4 percent of all...

In Washington the hand-wringing continues about the various security breakdowns that, on the day before Ronald Reagan's funeral, caused the Capitol to be evacuated when the approach of a private plane bearing Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher was mistaken for a terrorist attack. Surely it is unsettling that after three years of security improvements at almost unlimited expense, confusion reigned regarding who was responsible as Fletcher's plane droned toward the center of D.C. and was briefly believed to be doing just what the 9/11 attackers had done. But set the anti-terrorism snafus aside and ask the question that has so far...

FEAR FACTOR WASHINGTON — On the subway a few weeks after the Madrid bombings, I noticed a parcel under a seat. I asked other passengers, but no one claimed the object. I looked inside the parcel and saw some papers and an elaborately wrapped object the size of a grapefruit. The train pulled into Metro Center, the main station of the Washington subway. I contemplated that I might be about to pick up a bomb, but then I'd already been stupid enough to look inside, so I carried out the package, put it on a bench and told the station...

In 1993, CBS aired a miniseries of preposterous exaggeration about global warming, The Fire Next Time. A smart writer--okay, me--wrote of the show: The CBS miniseries depicted a man and boy attempting to travel the Mississippi River in an ecologically ruined United States of the year 2007, a world of searing warmth, sustained droughts, hyper-storms and dangerous exposure to bad dialogue. Conservative critics were aghast, saying the film indoctrinated audiences with greenhouse scenarios far worse than any projected by the most pessimistic computer model. My reaction was the opposite. By trivializing the greenhouse effect into a subject as ludicrous as...

No, I don't feel any better after George W. Bush's shaky press-conference appearance, either. But I also don't feel any better as the 9/11 Commission veers into absurd degrees of eagle-eyed hindsight. Increasingly, Commission interrogations boil down to: Why didn't you know the future! Once an outcome is known, it's easy to draw lines backward that seemed to foretell the event--skipping that there were multiple lines that seemed to foretell events that did not happen. Nobody knew September 11 was coming: no Republican, no Democrat, no intelligence agency of any nation, no newspaper, no television network. Please end this carnival...

A standard economic indicator is the "misery index," the combination of unemployment rate and inflation rate. This index has the virtue of simplicity: unemployment and inflation are both leading indicators with widely agreed-upon meaning. Also, this index has the virtue of clear importance — unemployment is a disaster for those it strikes, while inflation harms almost everyone. (Sometimes borrowers come out ahead.) So as statistical indicators go the standard misery index is viewed as pretty solid, and in a moment we'll discuss what the standard misery index says. First the new "middle class misery index" unveiled Monday by John Kerry's...

Washington, April 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House. Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international...

"Up in Smoke: The Bush Administration, the Big Power Companies and the Undoing of 30 Years of Clean Air Policy." So blares the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine. Author Bruce Barcott isn't responsible for the headline, but might not it have occurred to some editor somewhere at the Times Magazine that there is nothing in the 13-page article that supports a claim of "undoing" clean air policy? All pollution regulated by the Clean Air Act is declining, has been declining for years, and continues to decline under George W. Bush. That's not mentioned in the 13 pages, since...

A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House. Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be...

Two decades ago, President Ronald Reagan memorably asked what the United States could do to stop a nuclear missile hurtling toward an American city, and was memorably told by an Air Force general, "Sir, we could do absolutely nothing." Aghast, Reagan set in motion a series of technology projects that, while plagued by snafus, may soon grant America at least some protection from nuclear destruction. Reagan's instinct--that it was irresponsible for government to do nothing about a threat to millions of lives--was the right one. A few weeks ago, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics briefly believed that an...

There is a remote possibility you may hear something about The Passion of the Christ over the next few days. Yours truly would like to add a small point about scripture and a large point about theology. The small point is that Mel Gibson's movie depicts Jesus as horrifically brutalized before his crucifixion, and though it is possible events happened this way, according to scripture it is far from certain. All four Gospels report that Pilate ordered Jesus "flogged" or "scourged" before sending him to the cross. But that's all the Gospels say: There is no description in any of...

Here is the new federal definition of poverty, as quietly published last week in the Federal Register and cribbed from same for placement on the Web by a group of lawyers who provide immigrants with copious free information on coping with life in the United States. Below are the new Department of Health and Human Services poverty lines for the contiguous 48 states and the District of Columbia, Alaska and Hawaii lines being slightly higher: One person, $9,310 annual income. Two people, $12,490. Three in household, $15,670 Four in household, $18,850. Five in household, $22,030. Six in household, $25,210. Seven...