Free Republic

The Obama White House made an unfortunate and ungracious choice in launching a preemptive attack on Rick Perry's nomination this week. Spokesman Josh Earnest did his best deadpan as he disparaged the choice as one based on politics and not merit. But what about President Obama's appointments of Ken Salazar, Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack and Janet Napolitano? They were all lawyers without specific expertise in the issue areas of the departments they led. But each, having experience as elected Democratic statewide officials, knew enough about their respective issue areas that their status as non-experts never really mattered. Perry spent 14...

Guest essay by Eric WorrallAccording to Scientific American, The US Department of Energy has refused a request from President-elect Trump’s Energy Department Transition Team for information about what their people do on their work time. Energy Department Refuses Trump’s Request for Names on Climate ChangeTrump’s transition team asked for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers.By David ShepardsonWASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have...

Mission change This will be portrayed in the media as a “flip-flop,” or as some sort of inherent contradiction. How can a man lead a department he once advocated eliminating entirely? But there’s no contradiction at all. If you believe the federal government doesn’t need to be dictating energy policy to the rest of the nation, but the Energy Department is still going to exist, why not have someone in charge of it who believes in the inherent limits of its usefulness, and runs it accordingly?

It was reported last week that President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team had sent the Department of Energy a list of 74 questions. In that list, the DOE was asked to provide names of employees who had worked on President Barack Obama’s climate change policy. This action brought up concerns that the incoming POTUS and his administration may be looking to not only dismantle many of the actions Obama has set forth to study and combat climate change, but to also push out federal employees and contractors who had worked on those programs. Scientists have signed petitions to call on Trump...

The Department of Energy won’t be handing over a list of employees who worked on global warming issues to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team. “We will be forthcoming with all publically-available [sic] information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team,” agency spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder told Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson. Bloomberg obtained a Trump transition team questionnaire sent to DOE officials. The news outlet reported Trump’s team wanted DOE “to list employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration’s social cost...

Dear Colleagues: As the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Transportation... Today, our agencies are calling on local education, transportation, and housing leaders to work together on issues at the intersection of our respective missions in helping to guarantee full access of opportunity across the country.

The facility will be built at the Energy Department's 890-square-mile site that includes the Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation's primary lab for nuclear research.

In this Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 photo, provided by Mel Buckmaster, Wayne Douville poses with an eight-point doe he shot in Abrams in northeastern Wisconsin. A Wisconsin hunter has killed an eight-point ... doe? WLUK-TV reports that Wayne Douville was hunting near Abrams in northeastern Wisconsin on Monday when he shot and killed a 222-pound deer that had eight points on its antlers. Upon closer inspection, the 68-year-old Douville and his aptly-named friend, Mel Buckmaster, discovered the deer had female genitalia. Jeff Pritzl, district wildlife supervisor for the state Department of Natural Resources, says the doe likely had a higher...

President-elect Donald Trump is set to nominate Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and school choice advocate, as his secretary of education. "Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate," Trump said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "Under her leadership, we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families." Official @realDonaldTrump statement re @BetsyDeVos for Education Secretary: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx92-bUWIAA6XDr.jpg:large DeVos is the former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and currently heads the American Federation for Children, which aggressively pushes for...

Education Secretary John B. King Jr. is urging governors and school leaders in states that allow student paddling to end a practice he said would be considered “criminal assault or battery” against an adult. King released a letter Tuesday asking leaders to replace corporal punishment with less punitive, more supportive disciplinary practices that he said work better against bad behavior. More than 110,000 students, including disproportionate numbers of black and disabled students, were subjected to paddling or a similar punishment in the 2013-14 school year, said King, citing the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection. Corporal punishment is legal in...

Federal bureaucrats have been in a frenzy of activity in Obama's last months of office, pushing through 4,000 new regulations that will cost consumers more than $100 million. As liberal website Politico proudly reported, "Obama's executive agencies are intent on pushing through the president's priorities without congressional interference[.]" Trump has promised to rein in our overreaching bureaucracy through attrition. His rival in the primaries, Jeb Bush, suggested three bureaucrats retire for each new hire. That might save some money, but it will not get the job done of ending corruption and bureaucratic tyranny. We have elected a man famous for...

The Donald Trump transition team is eyeing former Washington, D.C. public school chancellor Michelle Rhee for Secretary of Education, multiple sources close to the transition tell the Daily Mail. The appointment of Rhee – who has been dubbed 'Public Enemy No. 1' of the teachers' unions -- would be a bold move by the Trump team, and a signal that his administration is gearing up to take an aggressive stance on education reform. It would also cut across partisan lines. Rhee is a lifelong Democrat, and a proponent of Common Core, a set of federal education standards that is opposed...

The country needs Larry Arne, the President of Hillsdale College, as Secretary of Education. Under his leadership, the college refuses ANY federal aid. It requires all students to be literate in the US Constitution and has pioneered online courses about the Amercian governmental system to anyone at no cost.

"I worry that in a lot of cases students who are homeschooled are not getting the kind of the breadth of instruction experience they would get in school, they're also not getting the opportunity to build relationships with peers unless their parents are very intentional about it," said Education Secretary John B. King Jr. "And they're often not getting those relationships with teachers and mentors other than their parents. I do worry whether home school students are getting the range of opportunities we hope for for all kids," he said slamming the system.

On September 1, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a group of self-proclaimed “progressives,” declared in a headline on its website, “Trump’s Plan to Eliminate the Department of Education is Yet Another in a List of Terrible Ideas.”In addition to being an example of “terrible” headline writing, CAP’s proclamation is just one of many horrific and long-standing progressive mantras that have been used and reused for decades.“Donald Trump is again proposing to eliminate or drastically cut the U.S. Department of Education,” the article’s author wrote. Doing so “could mean that more than 8 million low-income students … would lose millions of...

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste. But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according...

Although the Department of the Interior says its new regulations, announced Thursday, on gas and oil exploration and production in U.S. Arctic waters constitute “a balanced approach to any oil and gas exploration in the Arctic region,” critics say the new rules will damage U.S. energy production. “The rules help ensure that any exploratory drilling operations in this highly challenging environment will be conducted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner, while protecting the marine, coastal, and human environments, and Alaska Natives’ cultural traditions and access to subsistence resources,” Interior Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Janice Schneider said...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Tuesday proposed overhauling the state’s education funding formula to provide all public school districts with a flat rate of $6,599 per student. Calling it his “Fairness Formula” in policy statements on Tuesday, Christie said aid for special needs students would continue even with any potential formula change. Schools are funded through property taxes, which in New Jersey are some of the highest in the nation because of the state’s “unaffordable and broken school funding formula propped up by special interests and misguided Supreme Court precedent,” Christie said in a statement. …

I could not figure out how to post this photo (sorry), but my wife dropped my kid off at his summer school yesterday and there was a bulletin board full of posters that read "Ramadan Mubarak." She took a picture of it today and sent it to me. She knew Ramadan was a religious holiday and asked me for it's meaning. It essentially means "Blessed month" and is also used as a greeting. She called the administrative office for the district first thing this morning and she said the woman she spoke to was horrified and very adamantly stated they...

Like a crazed serial killer, the liberal green groups are celebrating their “victory” of putting America’s major coal producers out of business — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of miners placed in unemployment lines. Several thousand more mining jobs were lost last month. Now to get their next homicidal high, the leftists have turned their ambitions on the oil and natural gas industries. Here is how the Sierra Club spokeswoman, Lena Moffit, explains the grand, green vision: “We have moved to a very clear and firm and vehement position of opposing gas. We oppose any new gas-fired...