Free Republic

Lawmakers in Oregon, Washington, Montana and California set the table by establishing aggressive mandates for renewable power that "ratchet higher" over the next 15 years. Oregon's large utilities are required "mandated" at rate payer expense" to serve 5 percent of their demand with "renewable" this year, increasing to 25 percent by 2025. California's standard is 33 percent by 2020, and Washington's is 15 percent by 2020.

Rotund filmmaker Michael Moore has checked into a luxurious weight loss spa in Miami, The Daily Caller reports. The controversial Moore arrived at the Pritikin Longevity Center and Spa in mid-November, where the price tag for a week's stay is $4,200, a guest at the facility confirmed to the political news website. Moore, the doughy documentary maker famous for left-leaning films like Fahrenheit 9/11, Capitalism: A Love Story, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko, has spent time at the facility in recent years, claiming to have lost 30 pounds on the center's diet plan, the report said. The center promotes an...

Well, the bubble of Obama supremacy has finally exploded in all our faces and is now lying in tatters, with little giblets of its former hot-air glory spread from here to kingdom come. The candidate who played his "Peace is just an Obama speech away" tune to the easily bamboozled left has just been dealt the final blow that crashed the big, fat hot air balloon. The very first test case was just last week: a former Gitmo detainee, brought to NYC to be tried as a civilian with all the rights of a genuine American citizen, was found guilty...

PLEASURE POINT -- The state Coastal Commission encourages California's seaside communities to embrace clean energy -- with a caveat. It has to look good. The regulatory agency has told a Santa Cruz County couple that a wind turbine planned for their new home in the Pleasure Point neighborhood is too tall. Suggesting it would add to the area's "visual clutter," the commission recommends the residents lower their proposed 35-foot-high, electricity-generating windmill, an idea the home's architect says is simply unworkable. "You can also put photovoltaic cells in a garage, but it's not going to do much for you," said Cove...

In their six seasons on the Discovery Channel, MythBusters hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage have tested the veracity of more than 300 legends. But for their 100th episode (airing Feb. 20 at 9 p.m. Eastern; see a clip from the show, below), they'll take on one of the greatest: TV's MacGyver. First, they'll find out whether MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) really could've blasted a hole in a wall with one gram of pure sodium. Then, their Build Team — Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, and Grant Imahara — will attempt to replicate the ultralight airplane MacGyver constructed out of bamboo...

Massachusetts’ highest court has upheld a decision facilitating construction of an environmentally friendly "wind farm” that Sen. Ted Kennedy had opposed. The decision on Monday allows construction of 18-mile-long transmission lines to bring electricity from the Cape Wind project – a collection of energy-producing wind turbines – to shore. The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a May 2005 decision by the state Energy Facilities Siting Board that was challenged by a group opposing the Cape Wind project, Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. If it receives needed federal approval, Cape Wind would become the nation's first offshore wind farm. The developer seeks...

JAKARTA The Indonesian defense minister warned the Bush administration on Tuesday that its approach to fighting terrorism was alienating Muslims and that it needed to be more sensitive to local governments. "In the application of security, including anti-terrorist laws, it's best that you leave the main responsibility of anti-terrorist measures to the local government in question," Juwono Sudarsono said at a news conference as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stood by his side.Sudarsono added: "It's important to us because, as the world's largest Muslim country, we are very aware of the perception, or misperception, that the United States is overbearing and...

No politician in America has a darker history with the waters off Martha's Vineyard than Senator Ted Kennedy. The Chappaquiddick Kid has been leading a three-year old battle to stop a windmill energy farm. A Boston company proposed building 130 wind turbines over a 24 square mile area off the Massachusetts coast. The wind turbines would provide three-quarters of Cape Cod's energy needs and nearly two percent for all of New England instead of relying on coal burning power plants. Greenpeace supported the idea. Yet big-time environmental liberals, the Chappaquiddick Kid, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the befuddled Walter Cronkite oppose...

It's truly a shame that the panelists on the 9-11 commission were such self-important windbags -- their 41 recommendations, they never fail to remind, were (all bow) "unanimous and bipartisan" -- that they blew their chance to make this country safer. Don't' get me wrong. Washington has been unconscionably slow in doing the practical things needed -- such as providing a radio spectrum for emergency first-responders -- to make America more secure. The panel also was right to criticize the Senate for larding a homeland security spending bill with pork. That said, the panel's hodgepodge recommendations -- the radio spectrum...

Of course the PR-sucking Fox News blowhard is off his nut. Again. Question is, Should you care? It's almost too easy. He's too easy a target, really, Bill O'Reilly of the casually toxic Fox News, too bloviated and too silly and too undercooked, and no one whose opinion you truly value or with an IQ higher than their waist size actually watches him with anything resembling intellectual honesty or takes anything he says the slightest bit seriously. You hope. Especially when he, like Pat Robertson ranting about how gays caused Sept. 11 or that Dover, Pa., is now a doomed...

Bush-basher Michael Moore, in a posting on his Web site, wrote that "those pesky scientists" had "predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter, making a storm like this inevitable." He further mocked the president with the comment, "Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles." According to Moore's theory, hurricanes didn't exist before man-induced global warming happened. And in left-looped logic, Bush is to blame for the hurricane because he failed to submit Kyoto to another losing vote. (The Senate disposed of the treaty 1995 to nothing in the...

Of all the myths of the left, the most exasperating and pervasive (perpetuated by its media propaganda machine and trumpeted by blowhards like Ted Kennedy) is the fantasy that conservatives are rich, cruel, plutocrats who get their kicks evicting widows and orphans on Christmas Eve, whilst liberals - salt-of-the-earth-types, don't you know -- are champions of the powerless and downtrodden. The Supreme Court decision last week in Kelo v. City of New London should lay to rest that lie for all time. Kelo was a classic confrontation between the little guy and powerful, moneyed interests. The high court's five doctrinaire...

Bill O'Reilly has told Time magazine that he has no regrets about pushing Fox News's lawsuit against Al Franken. "This man is being run by some very powerful forces in this country, and we needed to confront it," O'Reilly maintained. He did not define the "powerful forces." O'Reilly compared Franken with Donald Segretti, the "political prankster" who served four and a half months in prison on charges of dispensing false campaign literature for Richard Nixon. "Franken's job is to do exactly what Donald Segretti did for Nixon -- dig up dirt on people. He is not a satirist; he is...

<p>The recent bared-teeth snarlfest between Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken has provided the perfect antidote to the final dog days of summer. Never have two more deserving people found each other - just in time to make one look like a silly bully and the other a best-selling author.</p> <p>The two have been embroiled over Franken's new book: "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." The cover includes an unflattering photo of O'Reilly, who is, do we need reminding, the most popular anchor in cable TV.</p>

The Axis of Weasels Germany, France and the anti-American Radical Left by Jennifer King, Managing Editor February 18, 2003 "The Heretical Housewife" The New York Post has dubbed Germany, France and Belgium the “Axis of Weasels”. Let's go one better and substitute Belgium with the Left. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been treated to a a non-ending parade of brainless liberals and celebrities spouting off against President Bush and war with Iraq. “War is so, warlike - you know - and war kills people and small, furry animals.” Yawn. Let’s just dust off that old Sixties slogan, “War is...

EUROPE AND THE NOVEMBER 5TH ELECTIONS by William GrimIconoclast Contributing Editor (www.iconoclast.ca) If you think Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were ashen-faced and depressed on the evening of November 5th, you should have seen the faces of your typical Europeans. There haven't been this many depressed Germans since SS guards passed out cyanide tablets at the last performance of the Berlin Philharmonic in April of 1945. In France, I'm told, some intellectuals were so shocked by the results of the American election that they were accidentally polite the next day. For you see, in the eyes of Europeans, all Americans...