Free Republic

A signature audit of over 15,000 ballots in Cobb County, Ga., found no fraudulent absentee votes, according to Georgia’s secretary of state’s office. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office teamed up with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to review what they determined was a "statistically significant sample of signatures on oath envelopes" cast in the county on Election Day. He said this is the third time the state confirmed the election's outcome and pointed to two earlier recounts. He said his office has been focused on "calling balls and strikes" and "in this case, three strikes against the voter claims...

) — There may be no more potent reminder of California's humongous snowfall than the plows still clearing roads that snake across the state's highest mountains as summer approaches. Crews have been digging, blowing and blasting for months — and the work is not finished, though an approaching heat wave could speed up the process. "We're almost at the middle of June and we still have lots of passes that aren't open," said Florene Trainor, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation. Few roads traverse the Sierra Nevada, the rocky spine running 400 miles up the state that is...

A Massachusetts woman was arrested during the blinding blizzard that walloped New England after she attacked her neighbor with a snowblower, police said today. The incident took place as the freezing winds and snow continued to fall at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. Police were called to a home in Boston's upscale suburb of Arlington to find a 60-year-old woman suffering from lacerations to her foot. Her alleged attacker, Barbara Davis, 61, was arrested on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, violating a restraining order, and mayhem. Anderson had a long-standing dispute with the victim, who was not seriously...

Republic of Korea: For the record. Pak Ku'n-hye (Park Geun-hye) of the New Frontier Party won South Korea's presidential election on 19 December, media reported. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee and the first woman elected to be president of the Republic of Korea. That should confound the North! North Korea-Iran: According to a Japanese news service, an Iranian lawmaker told the service that North Korea informed Iran in October of its plan to launch a satellite. The head of an Iranian parliamentary delegation to North Korea, Hamid Reza Taraghi, revealed talks took place mid-October with the North's delegates...

Once again the world economy has proved the naysayers wrong and there's been a "real rebound" so far this year, Barclays CEO Robert Diamond told CNBC Wednesday. "One of the lessons we’ve learned in the last couple of years is every time it’s doom and gloom ... the economy is far more resilient," he said. "We see China at 8 percent to 9 percent growth, and reduction in unemployment [cnbc explains] in the U.S. So we’ve seen a real rebound." That even extends to Europe, which was stabilized by the European Central Bank's [cnbc explains] second liquidity injection. President Mario...

As kids, we dreamt of a day where we'd flap our wings and take off into the great blue yonder to travel amongst the birds, right? On the swings, we pumped higher and higher until at last, for an exhilarating second, we would let go as we reached maximum height and soared freely through the air, experiencing complete independence from terra firma. When did we stop trying to fly? When did we become so content with remaining beholden to gravity? Well, Todd Reichert never gave up that silly dream. After years of planning and development with a team made up...

The article starts with the following: "Joseph Romm, a climate change expert and former Energy Department official; Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog; and others argue that this winter's snowstorms are, counterintuitively, evidence of global warming and not cooling. "It's absurd for the 'anti-science side' to say we're in a cooling trend when we're in an overall warming trend," says Romm of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "Heavy snow is not evidence that climate science is false," he added, noting that "the snow we've seen is entirely consistent with global warming...

On Monday, the nation’s capital was still digging out from the weekend’s record snowfall that would effectively shut down the federal government for days. Making matters worse was the awareness among DC residents that their shoveling would require a repeat performance quite soon, as another major winter storm was due to hit early Wednesday. What a perfect day to announce the formation of a new federal agency to study and report on global warming.

China closed 12 highways around the capital Beijing on Thursday because of heavy snow brought on after seeding clouds with chemicals, state media said on Thursday. All outbound highways were closed in Hebei, the drought-hit northern province surrounding Beijing, after heavy snow fell on Wednesday night, Xinhua news agency said. In all, 12 highways, including one linking Beijing and Shenyang, capital of northeastern Liaoning province, were closed. Hebei got its first heavy snow of this year on Wednesday. The provincial weather bureau said that snow too was "enhanced" by artificial seeding. "The snow has brought moisture to the soil, which...

Apparently, you can have it both ways. Freak snowstorms and record low temperatures sweeping northern China are linked to global warming, say Chinese officials. … The head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, Guo Hu, linked the blizzard-like conditions this week to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming. ”In the context of global warming, extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently, such as the summer’s rain storms and last year’s icestorm disaster in southern China,” Mr Guo told Beijing News.

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors. For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere...

Like every great sales pitch, Mitt Romney's case for Mitt Romney is low on the hard sell. At the Sheraton Hotel here one recent morning, the boasting is handled by a former governor of South Carolina, who opens this "Ask Mitt Anything" session with a precis of the candidate's career. This includes academic achievements (Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School "in four years!") and election as governor of Massachusetts in 2002, which is described in a tone befitting a miracle. "He ran for governor in the bluest state of all blue states," says James Edwards, "the bluest state you...

Outgoing White House press secretary Tony Snow said today that the Bush administration had underestimated the ferocity of opposition to White House-backed immigration legislation. "I freely admit that we underestimated the (public) skepticism," Snow said over breakfast with a group of reporters on his final day on the job. Snow said that the White House was not prepared for the anger of foes of illegal immigration, who believed that government at all levels had failed to secure the nation's borders. While the public backlash is aimed "not merely (at) the Bush administration," he conceded that the White House "made some...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - President Bush sharply challenged critics of his stalled immigration-overhaul efforts on Thursday, suggesting that failure to pass a guest-worker program could trigger a labor shortage in the United States. At a town-hall style meeting, Bush also rebuffed a question about whether he would consider pardoning two Border Patrol agents in prison for the cover-up of the shooting of a drug trafficker in Texas. "No, I won't make you that promise," Bush told a woman who asked about a possible pardon. Many Republicans in Congress have said the men should not have been convicted and have criticized the...

Tony Snow is about to appear live on FOX & Friends on FOX News. The subject is Bush's push for immigration "reform".

With the Democrats' full-throated moralizing of late, I'm almost tempted to vote for them — although perhaps "full-throated" is the wrong phrase to use with regard to Democrats and sex scandals. The sudden emergence of the Swift Butt Veterans for Truth demonstrates that the Democrats would prefer to talk about anything other than national security. Unfortunately for them, the psychotic Kim Jong Il seems to be setting off nukes, raising the embarrassing issue of the Clinton administration's 1994 "peace" deal with North Korea. At least with former Rep. Mark Foley, you could say the Democrats' hypocritical grandstanding was just politics....

In new ads, ski company says global warming could dry up snow during the next century... The Aspen Skiing Co. hopes potential customers are ready for a snow job. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a new advertising campaign for the 2006-07 season that centers around the message that snow — and skiing — will disappear around 2100 if humans don’t take drastic action to slow global warming. Three full-page ads, which show a melting snowflake imposed over Highland Bowl, will run in SKI and Outside magazines in the next few months. One ad portrays a “certificate of death” for snow....

Governor Mitt Romney has sent this letter to every member of the Senate encouraging them to Vote "Yes" on this landmark peice of legislation--the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA). A few excerpts are below: "Americans are tolerant, generous, and kind people. We all oppose bigotry and disparagement, and we all wish to avoid hurtful disregard of the feelings of others. But the debate over same-sex marriage is not a debate over tolerance. It is a debate about the purpose of the institution of marriage. Attaching the word marriage to the association of same-sex individuals mistakenly presumes that marriage is principally a...

by Mark Finkelstein June 6, 2006 While considerable attention focuses on Ann Coulter's more superficial charms, from a conservative perspective Ann's real beauty is her absolute refusal to buy into liberal logic, no matter how pervasive. That independence of mind was on display this morning during her interview with Matt Lauer. Ann was on to tout her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, released today on . . . 6/6/6 - sign of the devil and all that. The first example came in the the context of President Bush's current push for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit gay...

In a year it is wrestling with an out-of-control budget, a war going badly, and one impasse on immigration and another on its own ethics, the Senate is taking time out to debate altering the U.S. Constitution by adding the Marriage Protection Amendment. The amendment is widely predicted to fall short of the needed votes to amend the Constitution for only the 23rd time in its 217-year history _ 13th if you omit the original 10, the Bill of Rights _ and well it should. At its gravest level, the amendment would make a significant incursion into federalism and state's...