Free Republic

The United Nations estimates that the world's population reached 7 billion people this week, growing to 9 billion by midcentury. Lots of people think the more the merrier. That is anything but the case when it comes to the explosive rate of population poor Mother Earth is having to endure. How will we feed all these newcomers? To satisfy the world's food needs, production will need to rise between 70 percent and 100 percent, according to experts. This alone is a task of phenomenal magnitude considering climate change's impact on weather patterns, a destabilized agri-foods market and today's global economic...

The long-standing ban on stationing female sailors in submarines is about to become a thing of the past. This week the Pentagon sent a letter to lawmakers telling them of this change in Navy policy, adding that the first female officers will probably start appearing on nuclear submarines by next year. This is one more step forward for women in the military, although the ban on females serving in certain combat positions still remains intact. Women now make up some 15 percent of the all-volunteer services, and have become crucial to keeping the nation’s military operational.

The story of manmade global warming is over. In reality it never existed except in the minds and hearts of grant-seeking scientists and academics, ratings-obsessed television networks and their misinformed viewers and opportunistic eco-activists. That said, climate change is real. The earth has been coming out of a 450-year cold era known as the “Little Ice Age” since it bottomed out in the late 1600s. Hundreds of studies have verified the existence of this cold period. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried to erase the climate history of the last 1,000 years in its 2001 report. They...

CBS News and U.S. News have posted a stunning, disturbing opinion piece by Bonnie Erbe...... My friend and colleague Mike Vanderboegh has sized things up well in his open letter to Erbe: You wish to sweep away those that you find "hateful." Have you ever considered that there are many who find your ideas "hateful?" Most of the Founders understood that you should never pass a law that you wouldn't be willing to see enforced upon you by your own worst enemy. (John Adams didn't, but then he and his party were swept from power by the reaction to the...

Take a gander at the YouTube video embedded below, produced and posted online by Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group. Or if you have more important things to do (and I don't blame you) than to watch this venom-spewing performance by a pompous parade of right-wing male commentators, let me describe it to you. A video cavalcade of pompous, annoying, thoroughly unattractive, low-brow guys poke fun at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent clarifications of her position on what she knew (about the Bush administration's use of torture) and when she knew it.

If you were trying to find a staff lawyer in Washington, D.C. who could automatically turn off party moderates and push the GOP further into its social issues cave, you'd have to look long and hard. Not Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-al.) though. He found one in record time after taking over the ranking Republican seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. From the Legal Times: The new chief Republican counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a blog post last month in which he linked same-sex marriage to pedophilia, according to a Web site that has since been taken down. The...

The GOP needs more Charlie Crists, fewer Rush Limbaughs, Dick Cheneys and Sarah Palins as it seeks, phoenix-like, to rise from the funeral pyre. Crist has agreed to do the party a major favor and run for the Senate, instead of for reelection as Florida governor. As CNN reports: The Senator from Texas and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee on Tuesday reeled in a big catch as popular Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced he'll forgo a re-election bid and instead run for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Mel Martinez. Crist is a moderate, a...

US News’s on-staff radical feminist Bonnie Erbe returned to attacking pro-lifers, her favorite subject of ire, in a blog entry on Monday. This time, she singled out “20-something abortion foe” Lila Rose, a junior at UCLA, for her “dishonest” and “pointless” undercover videos which she has taped at several Planned Parenthood locations. She seems to be most upset by how Rose has “created a public relations nightmare” for the abortion-mongering group, and called for the young woman’s prosecution for “ trespassing, fraud, and whatever other law she violated” for impersonating a 13-year-old statutory rape victim. The blogger later told pro-lifers...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- US News & World Report contributing editor and PBS television show host Bonne Erbe came under fire for her celebration of abortion increases in light of the sour economy. Now, the media wallah is defending her position after hearing news that the use of food stamps has risen.The use of food stamps, according to Agriculture Department figures, rose in all but four states during January and three states saw usage rise more than five percent."I blogged earlier this week about the rise in birth control usage and abortion due to the recession," Erbe writes today....

Washington, DC -- Abortion advocates complain bitterly any time pro-life people refer to them using the moniker pro-abortion. However, US News & World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe has written an editorial inviting the description as she is celebrating the fact that the poor economy is causing more abortions.

Hell hath no fury like a feminist writer directing a hissy fit at the pope. Bonnie Erbe -- the US News & World Report contributing editor and PBS "To the Contrary" host who argued that Bristol Palin is more "mature" than her abstinence education-advocating mother -- finds the pope "horrifically ignorant" when it comes to HIV/AIDS. What exactly did the pontiff say that set Erbe off? Try, "AIDS cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms," hardly a controversial, implausible statement, but one that, to Erbe, showed the pope has "no sympathy" for women in Africa. Yet in the...

PBS's Erbe: Dems Must 'Gerrymander Away', Politicize Upcoming CensusTaxpayer-subsidized journalist Bonnie Erbe has some advice for Democrats: use the 2010 Census and subsequent redistricting to your maximum advantage to gerrymander and "gender-mander" the Congress chock full of left-wing constituencies. Writes the PBS "To the Contrary" host on a March 3 post at her Jefferson Street blog at US News & World Report (emphasis mine):Depoliticize the Census? Surely they jest! Taking politics out of the Census is like taking milk out of the cow or coal out of Newcastle or diamonds out of Tiffany. Politics is the lifeblood of the Census—without...

President Obama promised change. But some of his cabinet and subcabinet appointments have been anything but. I posit two examples here, first Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner: Timothy F. Geithner became the ninth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on November 17, 2003. In that capacity, he serves as the vice chairman and a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the group responsible for formulating the nation's monetary policy. Geithner is the consummate insider, and President Obama even said so himself in pushing for Geithner's confirmation, despite serious income tax issues. Geithner...

I commend to you an article in today's Politico.com that reports on the latest contretemps between the Obamas and the Clintons--a tricky-track of a relationship if ever there were one: Michelle Obama wasn't always an admirer of Hillary Clinton, but last Wednesday the soon-to-be first lady dialed up the former first lady for pointers on protecting her two young daughters from the media maelstrom of the White House."Michelle may not have loved the senator, but she always respected how the Clintons raised Chelsea," said a person familiar with Clinton's end of the call. "They need to talk. There just aren't...

One of the many holes in the progressive coalition that brought President-elect Barack Obama to power is making itself known in California. According to the Sacramento Bee: ...an overwhelming number—70 percent—of black voters in California...voted for Proposition 8 and helped secure its passage, according to exit polling conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. African Americans, energized by Barack Obama's presidential bid, boosted their numbers at the polls this year to 10 percent of the state's electorate, up from 6 percent in 2004. "The Obama people were thrilled to turn out high percentages of African Americans, but (Proposition 8)...

So, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is looking forward to her debate with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday? Really? If I were her, I'd be wishing for a major storm surge in Alaska. Perhaps the latest hurricane could slip past the Gulf of Mexico and sneak up on Anchorage unannounced, giving her unassailable reason to head home. Instead, she's keeping her pompoms and pleated skirts in tow and telling reporters she's looking forward to her confab with Senator Biden.

Sen. Barack Obama is enjoying some of his highest numbers so far in the daily presidential tracking polls I frequently cite. Gallup has him up by 8 points today. Rasmussen by 5. The question is whether this is a result of Obama's convention bounce, or Sen. John McCain's seemingly, shall we say, adventurous selection of an extremist running mate. Forget all the strikes against Gov. Sarah Palin—her now-renowned family troubles, her connections to Republican lobbyists, her ardent desire to slaughter animals ("Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and John McCain's vice presidential pick, is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed...

Is it just me or have the political parties switched roles this election? The normally hapless Democrats have become an imperious, on-message political machine. The habitually martial GOP, which stays on message like drill sergeants stay on G.I.'s, lacks an overarching message this year, to the point where its conservative base is as energized as a turtle. Ever since the formative Reagan era, in which the GOP emerged from its post-Watergate swamp of embarrassment and strategist Lee Atwater propagated the Big Tent myth, Republicans have run aggressive, targeted, laser-like message machine presidential campaigns. What else could have transformed an inarticulate...

If Sen. Barack Obama wants to make nice-nice with the Jewish community, the last person he should be allowing to make public proclamations about Jews, no matter how tenuous that person's connection to the Obama presidential campaign, is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has long been viewed suspiciously by American Jews. And yet the week after Obama flew to Florida to woo a Jewish audience by extolling Israel's 60th anniversary, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has endorsed Obama and advised him on foreign policy, accused members of the American Jewish establishment of "McCarthyism" in their attitude...

It was Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan's first major address since facing down cancer. It was in Barack Obama's backyard—his hometown of Chicago. Farrakhan, perhaps the nation's most potent symbol of antisemitism, told a Chicago crowd of 20,000 that Obama is America's next savior. "This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.... This young man is capturing audiences of black and brown and red and yellow. If you look at Barack Obama's audiences and look at the effect of his words, those people are being transformed." Farrakhan compared Obama...