Free Republic

Editor's note: Global warming is unlikely to be a dangerous future problem, with or without the implementation of such programs as the Kyoto Protocol, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...alarmist media claims to the contrary are fueled more by politics than by science... The global mean temperature is never constant, and it has no choice but to increase or decrease--both of which it does on all known time scales. That this quantity has increased about 0.6ºC (or about 1ºF) over the past century is likely. A relevant...

WASHINGTON — Fairfax County, Va., Police Detective Vicky Armel, who was murdered Monday during a shooting rampage by a troubled teen-ager, had helped people with severe mental illnesses. I know because she helped my son. Four years ago, I rushed my college-age son to a Fairfax Hospital emergency room only to be turned away. Although Mike was delusional and had been hospitalized twice before for treatment of bipolar disorder, a doctor said he was not sick enough — yet. (snip) I was told to bring my son back after he hurt himself or me. Forty-eight hours later... (snip) I have...

Breaking from NewsMax.com In what could be a blow to Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations, two Democratic White House hopefuls have offered preliminary endorsements for his health care plan, which would force small businesses to offer health insurance to all uninsured employees. "To come up with a bipartisan plan in this polarized environment is commendable," Sen. Hillary Clinton told the Associated Press on Thursday. The Romney plan, which has already been passed by the Massachusetts legislature and is waiting the governor's signature, mimics in some ways Mrs. Clinton's own Hillarycare proposal, which crashed and burned in 1994 with...

..................The strangest episode came from an appearance by Senator Jay Rockefeller on Fox News Sunday: WALLACE: "Now, the president never said that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. As you saw, you did say that. If anyone hyped the intelligence, isn't it Jay Rockefeller? " ....ROCKEFELLER: "No. I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I'll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had...

yesterday delivered a stinging, long-overdue lecture on the realities facing America in the Age of Terror — in the process hauling Washington Democrats up short for their near-seditious rhetoric regarding the war in Iraq. ADVERTISEMENT Good for him. The president took the occasion of Veterans Day to again remind the public of the stakes involved in the War on Terror — and why Iraq remains its central front. Most welcome was the detailed retracing of the steps leading up .............

A MATERNITY unit has been created within a secondary school to cope with soaring rates of teenage pregnancies. Parents of children at Menzieshill High School in Dundee, which has Western Europe’s highest rate of teenage pregnancies, have hit out at the plan to create a centre for pregnant pupils and schoolgirl mothers. Dundee City Council plans to have the specialist unit opened within Menzieshill in time for the start of the next academic year in August. More than one in every 100 schoolgirls in Dundee aged between 13 and 15 will become pregnant, according to statistics released this week. Pregnant...

Drugs, not just age and disease, are killing Canadian seniors. As many as 3,300 seniors die every year due to adverse drug reactions, according to a CBC estimate done by analyzing Health Canada's adverse drug reaction database (obtained under Access to Information). It's an estimate that has been judged credible by a number of researchers who study pharmacology and adverse drug reactions. "The 3,300 deaths number and the way it's been calculated by CBC I think is quite cautious and is realistic. It's likely to be higher than that, but nobody at the present time has a way of really...

LaGrange has its own feeding tube controversy, with family members at odds over medical care for an 81-year-old woman at Hospice LaGrange. Ora Mae Magouirk has been in hospice since March 22, suffering from what granddaughter Beth Gaddy described in court papers as dementia, an aortic aneurysm and a blood clot. ...cont on link

"...and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation, let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise." Gov. William Bradford, 1640's That is my favorite passage from Bradford's Journal. Two decades after the famous landing of the Mayflower, Bradford sat down to write of Pymouth Colony, in a family journal to pass on to his descendants, relating the period of time from the first beginnings in England, their sojourn in Holland, and their first 20 years in New England. Little did...

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea (search) said Saturday that it was "quite possible" to settle the international standoff over its nuclear weapons program if the United States allows for the existence of the communist regime.

Two U.S. senators investigating the U.N. Oil-for-Food (search) program have told U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search) in a letter that they were "troubled"....

Two month anniversary "Wails of grief reverberated through the streets of this town Sunday as its residents began burying the more than 300 people slaughtered in a 52-hour hostage crisis last week. ..."

One of the pillars on which the alarmist case for doing something about global warming rests is the contention that the 20th century was the warmest in the last thousand years. This proposition is most dramatically expressed in the "hockey stick" graph.............. ************ They found numerous and worrying errors. As they put it, the data "for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects." They used the original source data to correct these errors, after...

WASHINGTON - A new round of MSNBC/Knight Ridder polling in five battleground states that President Bush carried four years ago shows the president with the upper hand in West Virginia, Missouri, and Colorado over his Democratic challenger John Kerry, and very slim leads in Ohio and New Hampshire. And another survey in Nevada found Bush with a strong 10-point lead over Kerry. The poll results are somewhat heartening for Bush, but Ohio, with 20 electoral votes, remains a potentially fatal problem for the president’s re-election hopes

Help. Just talked with my son - on the road on job...says he just picked up a snippet on radio about a project where 1,000 video cameras were given out to Iraqi citizens with the only instructions to take videos and comments on how Iraq had changed and their lives, since Saddam was taken down. Supposedly they got hundreds of hours worth - "1000% positive for us being there" and had to winnow it down to air on TV - he thinks they said Sunday night - the 24th ? (That would be more reasonable than waiting til the 30th,...

"A few other TV stations around the country have contacted the producer of this documentary as well," Sinclair spokesman Mark Hyman told nationally syndicated radio host G. Gordon Liddy on Tuesday. "So there appears to be some growing interest in making this available to the nation's viewers." *****

Kerry Betrayed His Comrades In Arms. In my article Bush and Uncommon Valor, I state that although it is fair to recognize Sen. Kerry's four-month war record and medals, it is what he did after leaving the military that deserves the greatest scrutiny. He became a turncoat by misrepresenting to the American public what our soldiers were doing in Southeast Asia. As part of the anti-war movement with Jane Fonda, he maligned, mocked and discredited our soldiers. He lied about what our soldiers were doing in combat. He defamed our brave fighting men. Today, John Kerry holds a place of...

the deliberate dumbing down of america is also a book for my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I want them to know that there were thousands of Americans who may not have died or been shot at in overseas wars, but were shot at in small-town 'wars' at school board meetings, at state legislative hearings on education, and, most importantly, in the media. I want my progeny to know that whatever intellectual and spiritual freedoms to which they may still lay claim were fought for-are a result of-the courageous work of incredible people who dared to tell the truth against all...

CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program. As Duelfer documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.'s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. *************** The report notes that the start...

Members of an international panel studying United Nations' operations say the group hopes to lay down clear rules declaring when it is legal for a nation to use pre-emptive military force in its own defense. The issue grows out of the international controversy over the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq without a final U.N. Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing the war, said panel member Gareth Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia. "I expect the panel to be giving close consideration to what those rules are and how they should be applied and whether an effort should be made...