Free Republic

Energy: While our president sleeps on the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada’s prime minister is in Beijing signing a series of trade deals to ship additional petroleum to China. Halftime in America? We need a new quarterback. While Clint Eastwood, in that thinly disguised infomercial for President Obama's re-election campaign, was promising that the world would soon hear the roar of our engines, China's economy will soon be revving up with petroleum that should and could be flowing south in a pipeline the Obama administration won't build. Prime Minister Steven Harper is making good on his warning that Canada would seek...

Energy Independence: As our enemy Iran threatens to close a vital waterway for the shipping of oil, plans for a secure, job-creating supply from our ally Canada gather dust on the president's desk. The blustering threat from the quite mad Iranian mullahs and their supremely mad leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be just a bluff, but then again it might not. It may just be an attempt to intimidate and poke the eye of an American president perceived as weak and whose failure to support and exploit the "Iranian Spring" of 2009 may come back to bite us. These are not...

THOUSAND OAKS (CBS) — A toxicology report found that the 18-year-old son of a former NFL quarterback died from a heroin overdose, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office said. Thousand Oaks High School backup quarterback Griffen Kramer was found dead in his Agoura Hills home on Oct. 30. Friends told investigators that Kramer began foaming at the mouth while doing heroin with them. Authorities say one of his friends took him home and hoped he would sleep it off. Police have arrested five people in connection with Kramer’s death. Griffen Kramer’s father, Erik, played in the NFL for 12 years.

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree. You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global's Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. In the president's view, extending the payroll tax cuts...

A judge has acquitted a controversial pro-family activist from a July 2008 charge of trespassing at a Canadian university. William (Bill) Whatcott was arrested by campus security at the University of Calgary and put into a holding cell for distributing a pamphlet that addressed the “harmful consequences” of homosexuality. Whatcott, in an email to LifeSiteNews, called the ruling a “victory for all Canadians who value freedom of expression and religious liberty on our university campuses.” Judge J.D. Bascom ruled from the Provincial Court of Alberta on November 15th that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms “applies” to the University...

Story of the Week WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD WOLF? MamamaMEEE!! This wolf was shot recently in Drayton Valley , Alberta.which is near Edmonton about 3 hours North of Calgary. The wolf weighed over 230 lbs smashing the previous record of 175 lbs. Wouldn't want to run into this puppy in the woods. Apparently a bear hunter witnessed this wolf chase off a big black bear at his baiting station..

September 12, 2011 (UnmaskingChoice.ca) - On April 13, 2005, 19 year old Katrina Effert secretly gave birth to a baby boy in her parent’s home. She then strangled the child with her underwear, and tossed the corpse over the fence into the yard of one of the neighbours. On September 9, 2011, CBC reported that Ms. Effert’s conviction for this murder had been ‘downgraded’ by an Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench judge to infanticide, and in lieu of jail time she will merely serve a suspended sentence. In her argument, the judge stated that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion...

Gore urges Obama to block pipeline for 'dirtiest source of fuel on the planet' By Andrew Restuccia - 09/01/11 10:08 AM ET Former Vice President Al Gore called on President Obama late Wednesday to reject a pending permit application for a controversial pipeline project, calling the oil that it would carry “the dirtiest fuel on the planet.” “The answer to our climate, energy and economic challenges does not lie in burning more dirty fossil fuels —instead, we must continue to press for much more rapid development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and cuts in the pollution that causes...

Actress Daryl Hannah has been arrested in front of the White House along with other environmental protesters who oppose a planned oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The sit-in Tuesday involved dozens protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It would go through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas.Before she was arrested, Hannah told The Associated Press the protesters want to be free from dependence on fossil fuels. The group calls for clean energy investments instead. Hannah says they hope President Barack Obama will not bow to oil lobbyists.Hannah...

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug. 29, 2011 - America's top climate scientist and a large group of religious leaders were arrested at the White House this morning with 140 other Americans to push President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. "If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that the President was just green-washing all along, like the other well-oiled coal-fired politicians, with no real intention of solving the addiction," said NASA's Dr. James Hansen, who was arrested at the White House this morning. President Obama must decide whether or not to grant a "presidential permit"...

Environmentalists are staging a two-week oil-pipeline protest outside the White House to boost their importance to President Barack Obama’s political calculations in the 2012 election season. But there’s little evidence so far that progressives’ disappointment with Obama’s environmental policies threatens to reduce their turnout on election day, or that it pressures White House officials to make additional concessions to environmentalists during a political season dominated by the public’s demand for additional jobs. Monday’s colorful, TV-ready protests against the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil fields to U.S consumers took place in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. The...

Liberals are getting pretty desperate on the global warming/climate change debate. But you have to give them high marks for creativity. As one of our contributors Marita Noon mentioned the other day, enviros are switching to supposed health risks associated with fossil fuels since politicians and the general public don’t buy the carbon-hates-us argument anymore.   And lacking little evidence that many of the natural disasters that were predicted by the global warming “model” that the high priests of their religion constructed years ago, one economist has come up with a new disaster, this one wholly civil. And the media are...

United States Park Police arrested another gaggle of protesters outside of the White House Monday. The protesters were participating in an ongoing demonstration against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Police arrested 52 protesters for blocking the sidewalk in front of the White House, the third round of mass arrests since the protests began on Saturday. The protesters are calling on President Barack Obama not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — a proposed expansion of an existing line that would transport crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and down to...

Sixty-five arrested outside White House in oil pipeline protestBy Ben Geman - 08/20/11 02:55 PM ET Police arrested 65 environmentalists outside the White House Saturday as they staged a demonstration urging President Obama to block a proposed pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries. The civil disobedience launched two-weeks of White House demonstrations – with more arrests to come – as activists seek to increase political pressure on Obama over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The Obama administration is weighing TransCanada Corp.’s proposed $7 billion, 1,700-mile line to bring crude from Alberta’s massive...

A 4-by-8-mile pit deep in the wilderness of northwest Canada is taking center stage in America’s energy debate. The Athabasca tar sands in Alberta Province is the largest mine in what is the second largest oil reserve in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia. The United States gets 20 percent of its imported oil from Canada, about half of it coming from the vast Athabasca tar sands. And now there are plans to more than double the oil sands production and pipe nearly all of the oil through a new pipeline that would take it to refineries in Texas. Recovering...

Angry leftists stormed the Montana capitol on Tuesday demanding that Schweitzer end his support for the Alberta oil pipeline that will carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through Montana. He wouldn’t. They were arrested. The Billings Gazette reported: About 70 protesters thundered into the state Capitol on Tuesday, banging on plastic pails and chanting slogans in opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline — slated to carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through Montana — and the “megaloads” of oil drilling equipment destined for Alberta. The group pushed its way into the outer offices of Gov....

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a personal pitch Friday for President Barack Obama to support a controversial $7 billion pipeline that could double the amount of Alberta oilsands crude exported to the United States. Harper confirmed he pressed Obama on Calgary-based TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline during the two leaders' hour-long meeting at the White House. The planned 3,200-kilometre pipeline, which would run from Hardisty, Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Texas, is currently in limbo as the State Department weighs whether to grant a presidential permit allowing construction to begin. In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Harper was asked...

Energy: The environmental lobby has thus far blocked tapping the oil reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Canada draws oil from a remote and frozen region and sells it in the U.S....Though we already get 2.1 million barrels a day from Canada, oil from northern Alberta's oil sand fields has rarely reached southward beyond Chicago. That changed last week when crude from those oil sand reserves were piped to Oklahoma, from where they will be sent to refiners that had long been getting their crude from other sources, particularly the Gulf of Mexico.It was a landmark day when...

A wilderness and ecology guide believes Bigfoots by the dozen could be roaming the wilderness of southern Alberta and parts of British Columbia. Todd Standing says he has photographic proof that such creatures exist after snapping a photo of something in the Banff area with human-like features on its hairy face.

Fort McMurray, Alberta—This is the second dispatch from my oil sands tour. The first dispatch yesterday focused on the oil sands mining. After our Suncor oil sands mine tour, our band of flacks and hacks were bussed back to our motel for cocktails and dinner with various Canadian oil sheiks, including Alberta’s Minister of Energy Ronald Liepert, TransCanada Pipeline vice president Robert Jones, and ConocoPhillips Canada senior vice president Nick Olds, among others. In the fashion of such tours, we sat around a conference table listening to the concerns of our hosts, which in this case, mostly involved activist opposition...

Fort McMurray, Alberta—Standing on the edge of the immense and spectacular pit of an oil sands mine for the first time last week, I was surprised by a sense of exhilaration. Later, seven stories up, equipped with earplugs, and clad in bright blue overalls, I marveled at the cascades of black bitumen froth bubbling over the sides of a separation cell like a giant witch’s cauldron. The scale of the enterprise and the sheer ingenuity involved in wresting value and sustenance from the hands of a stingy Mother Nature provoked in me a feeling close to glory. Yet as I...

Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta have confirmed that Winnipeg Jets forward Rick Rypien, 27, was found dead in his home in Crowsnest Pass, AB, on Monday. According to a report in the Toronto Globe and Mail, RCMP officials confirmed the death was not of a suspicious nature. National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman issued the following statement regarding the death of Rypien: "The National Hockey League sends its deepest condolences to the family, friends and teammates of Rick Rypien, who played the game with so much energy and emotion and whose passing fills us all with a sense of...

Energy: While the U.S. dithers with concerns about "dirty oil" from Alberta's rich tar sands, energy-hungry China makes Ottawa an offer it might not refuse. Memo to Washington: Pipelines can run west as well as south. When President Obama pledged to wean us off foreign oil, we hoped he didn't mean our friendly ally to the north, Canada. Granted, it doesn't have beaches like Rio, where we're helping the Brazilians drill offshore, but we had hopes nonetheless. Together, the U.S. and Canada have enough oil and natural gas locked up in shale formations, tar sands, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and...

Thousands of people have fled their homes in northern Alberta where two out-of-control wildfires breached a town's defences and have burned down hundreds of buildings, including the town hall, police station and the radio station. The RCMP said the Town of Slave Lake is on fire and many homes have burned down. The fire is apparently out of control, engulfing about half of the town.

This is an attempt to force the french language down the throats of non-french Canadians. Geographically and culturally, Alberta is about as far removed from Quebec as you can get. Caron's intentions - like many of the minority french Canadians - is to use all means possible to entrench their language, and by default their culture - into the lives of the Canadian English. The tactic is suspiciously similar to that used by other groups such as the followers of Islam and their attempts to install Sharia law on the majority. Great company to keep, Gilles.

EDMONTON, Alberta, The city of Edmonton, Alberta, is writing off nearly $13 million worth of speeding tickets because the reliability of cameras came into question. Crown Prosecutor Steven Bilodeau said he petitioned the provincial justice ministry to nullify the tickets as people were receiving tickets for impossible infractions, the Edmonton Journal reported. In one case on Jan. 12, a camera snapshot alleged a driver was traveling at 89 mph on a city street, but the video showed all the other vehicles around it moving at the same speed, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. Bilodeau said all 141,729 tickets issued by...

Looking good is what Avon is all about, so it's not surprising that a cosmetics giant with annual revenues of $10 billion is concerned about its image. That, after all, is the motive behind Avon's boycott of fuel derived from Alberta's oil sands -- looking good. Never mind that oil banned from Alberta -- the most regulated and transparently sourced oil on the planet -- will have to be replaced by oil from some despotic regime but, hey, maybe you can put lipstick on a pig. "Avon recognizes its responsibility to the environment and the world's forests," said Tod Abreast,...

When all was said and done, when the paparazzi with their cameras had left after covering the one of the worst public relations gambles ever taken by a premier of Alberta, the James Cameron oil sands tour ended up being more buzz then progress.  And a complete waste of thousands of taxpayer dollars. The whole mess could have been easily avoided if Ed Stelmach had shown any kind of real leadership. Our oil sands industry has come under increasing scrutiny by the enviroNazi movement, who has chosen Alberta’s energy sector as their latest cause célèbre. Using misinformation and lies,...

KAMIAH, Idaho - Two of America's largest oil companies want to drive mammoth truckloads of refinery equipment along a narrow ribbon of spectacular mountain road that borders national forests, wild and scenic rivers, historic sites and campgrounds. Local residents are not pleased. "This is something that weighs 600,000 pounds (272,150 kilograms), is two-thirds the length of a football field and 30 feet (9 meters) high," said Linwood Laughy, who has sued the Idaho Department of Transportation to stop the mega-loads. "I don't think it belongs on the highway."

Next week Albertans could be witness to the most glaring of many examples of leadership failures by our own premier, Ed Stelmach. Hollywood director James 'Avatar(d)' Cameron is scheduled to make a visit to our vitally important (and equally vilified) oil sands operations. Cameron, who previously referred to our oil sands as '...a black eye for Canada', then followed up with the admission that he didn't really know anything about the subject, received a letter from Premier Stelmach inviting him to tour northern Alberta. The Hollywood director has taken up the offer - but on his schedule. Now we see...

Hollywood director James 'Avatar(d)' Cameron is scheduled to make a visit to our vitally important (and equally vilified) oil sands operations. Cameron, who previously referred to our oil sands as '...a black eye for Canada', then followed up with the admission that he didn't really know anything about the subject, received a letter from Premier Stelmach inviting him to tour northern Alberta. The Hollywood director has taken up the offer - but on his schedule. Now we see the so-called 'leader' of the province doing his best impression of a jellyfish by kowtowing to the self-proclaimed 'king of the world'.

When the third-highest-ranking politician in the Obama administration comes to Canada with her energy sidekick, oilsands producers and royalty addicted premiers rush into line for an arm-twisting opportunity. But House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's voting record, her iffy re-election prospects, her meeting mix of aboriginal and environmental delegations along with her choice of political tagalong suggest the fix is in. A suspicious observer would think today's visit to Ottawa will be more about gathering input for a future trash-talking of the Alberta and Saskatchewan oilsands than a unbiased hearing of the facts.

Companies like Bed, Bath, & Beyond, eager to give the impression that they actually 'care' about the environment, announce boycotts of our oil sands yet don't seem to have a problem taking that same oil-money at their cash registers from Albertan consumers. The enviroNazis don't bother with the truth - that just gets in the way of feel-good P.R. spin. The truth being, of course, that less than one-tenth of one percent of global emissions are a result of the oil sands.

A stone effigy monument, in the shape of a Blackfoot creator god named Napi, has been discovered in southern Alberta -- south of the Red Deer River near the hamlet of Finnegan. The Blackfoot are a people that have inhabited the prairies since ancient times. The effigy dates to somewhere between AD 1000 and AD 1500. It would have been constructed before the time of European contact. Napi is a deity credited with creating the Blackfoot people and the landscape they inhabit. "According to Blackfoot tradition he's like the creator," said archaeologist Meaghan Porter, who investigated the site. She said...

Mexico, Japan, Sweden, Norway, China, Serbia, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Denmark, France, Philippines, Spain, Austria, South Africa, Ukraine, Isreal, South Korea, Chile, …..(Writers note: I thought I’d make a theoretical list of potential customers for Alberta’s oil sands. While I have every confidence that my American friends are not gullible enough to believe the latest enviroNazi-created anti-Alberta oil sands campaign, from time to time even the best and brightest of Canada’s neighboring nation have been known to get sucked into choosing sizzle over steak and falling for spin(Obama).....

U.S. chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee Henry Waxman has shown his level of ignorance regarding the oil sands. News broke this week that Waxman had urged the State Department to block TransCanada's planned Keystone XL pipeline that would run from Hardisty, Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. This pipeline represents a direct line from the safest and largest non-American source of oil to the U.S. There are no dictators to deal with, no terrorists threats. America's ally and closest friend has a most valuable resource, and Waxman is asking his own government to ignore it. As is...

The allegation that our political scene could have been infiltrated by 'operatives' working under the direction of foreign interests should surprise no one, especially coming from the very top of our intelligence community. Given Canada's history of moving towards Trudeau's vision of a multi-cultural utopia at the expense of such things as a proper immigration system that wouldn't weaken our overall national security, to reject such a claim out of hand would be completely naive.

The world's largest dinosaur graveyard has been discovered in Alberta, Canada, according to David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and other scientists working on the project. The Vancouver Sun reports that the massive dinosaur bonebed is 1.43-square miles in size. Eberth says it contains thousands of bones belonging to the dinosaur Centrosaurus, which once lived near what is now the Saskatchewan border. Centrosaurus was a plant-eating, cow-sized dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, around 75 million years ago. It cut quite a figure back then, with its top-of-the-head frills and rhino-like nose horn. There is some evidence that it engaged...

As I face the beginning of The Mountain of Lifes Ultimate Peak/It's All Downhill From Here/Greying Temples/Wrinkles/The Music's Too Loud/These Little Blue Pills are Great years, I do so sans hesitation or dread.

With oil exploding under the sea, the Alberta oilsands suddenly don't seem that...'dirty'. Now, all we need is to get rid of the idiot in charge.

...the Tea Party movement has now spilled over the border into Canada. First it was Ann Coulter, now it’s the average American who is teaching Canadians that it is okay to stray from the leftist status quo.....

However, when I heard that the Conservative government was considering following the lead of countries like Australia by instituting a form of 'random' breathalyser tests, I had so voice my opposition. With all due respect to those fine folks at MADD, there is a danger here that the balance of personal liberty and community safety will be knocked off kilter.

I haven't seen this much flip-flopping since a Gull Lake trout hit the bottom of the boat. Or, as an old friend of mine once said, "He's trying so hard to avoid looking at the problem he looks like a tweaking rooster watching ping-pong."

"I pulled my hand back and said: '...oh, wait. My husband and I both work in the oil industry, which makes our money dirty and unacceptable to your company. I guess I won't be getting anything today.' And with that, we turned and walked proudly out of the store to the amazement of those around us."

Recently there has been a troubling trend of vandalism of oil and gas lines in Alberta and British Columbia. Is enough being done to protect our energy sector and our provincial infrastructure overall from the risk of domestic and international terrorism? DS: Some people don't feel proud of the industry the way they should. It provides so much to the Alberta economy in terms of jobs, it provides so much in terms of our growth in GDP, it provides a lot through royalty revenues, but I think that this...government has basically done a terrible job celebrating the things that the...

Way back when the Vancouver Olympic torch design was first revealed it caused a buzz because some claimed it resembled to a rolled up marijuana joint - an irony not lost on those who know British Columbia as the weed capital of Canada.....

What is interesting are the emails I get from my American readers, particularly from the Pacific Northwest and Texas. It seems the thirst to escape living under a big government, socialist system extends beyond international borders. Without fail every article receives at least one "...let's both separate and join together", referring to Alberta and whichever state they live in.

With his inability to pull his government out of the vortex of gaffes and blunders it has been stuck in, or slow the popularity freefall they are experiencing, there are some growing backroom whispers which suggest that Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach may try to repeat his strategy of 2008 by calling an early election in the hopes of catching the young Wildrose Alliance party off-guard.

You have given us years of directionless, big-spending government, and now we’re supposed to believe that you and your rearranged Gang of Usual Idiots have suddenly become born again fiscal conservatives?

It isn't often that I hand over that power and subject myself to the will and the questions of another, but that's just what I did a few nights back when I sat down and opened up for an interview by blogmeister Manganic.