Free Republic

Much has been written about Obama’s controversial appointments, not only to the federal bench, but to key cabinet positions, as well as to the unaccountable (and probably unconstitutional) “Czar” positions. Much of the criticism has dwelled on the Obama administration’s lack of vetting when filling these rolls—but that’s not the issue. To the contrary, the Obama team did investigate thoroughly and they choose precisely. When an administration repeatedly nominates hard-left individuals, it’s not a vetting error—it’s a pattern. We should not allow the media to portray these appointments as a series of errors; but rather, we need to realize that...

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres. “They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.” Figueres added that the...

A fiery Al Gore urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to reject the Keystone XL oil pipeline, calling the controversial project an “atrocity.” “This should be vetoed. It is an atrocity. It is a threat to our future,” the former vice president said during a Center for American Progress 10th anniversary event in Washington. Gore criticized the Canadian oil sands that the pipeline would carry, arguing that approval of the project would be akin to a desperate drug addict looking for fresh veins. “Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and legs give out,” said...

Barack Obama promised his administration set a new standard in transparency: I will also hold myself as president to a new standard of openness .... Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency. Obama even issued a memo My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government. He declared his to...

A House committee has launched an investigation into whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency’s own internal watchdog — something that Republican lawmakers said could run afoul of the law.The science committee has asked Ms. Jackson to turn over all information related to an email account under the name of “Richard Windsor,” which is one of the aliases identified by a researcher looking into the EPA.The committee has also asked the White House’s lawyer and EPA’s inspector general to look into the matter and report back by...

I need a quick list of all the Communist and Marxist ties in the Obama administration for use at a meeting tonight. Something beyond his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, and appointee Van Jones. I know this topic is rich, and I hope other FReepers can help me tie it altogether in one neat package. Thanks in advance.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal magistrate refused Wednesday to order the White House to provide BP PLC with emails by a former top adviser to President Barack Obama about the administration's response to last summer's massive Gulf oil spill. A lawyer for the oil giant had argued that emails by Carol Browner, Obama's former adviser on energy and climate matters, and three other officials in the Executive Office of the President could shed light on the White House's role in estimating the rate of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the company's blown-out well. But U.S. Magistrate...

Bicycles instead of cars? Dense apartment clusters instead of single homes? Community rituals instead of churches? "Human rights" instead of religious freedom? The UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) which met June 3-14 [1996]in Istanbul, painted an alarming picture of the 21st century community. The American ways-free speech, individualism, travel, and Christianity-are out. A new set of economic, environmental, and social guidelines are in. Citizenship, democracy, and education have been redefined. Handpicked civil leaders will implement UN "laws", bypassing state and national representatives to work directly with the UN. And politically correct "tolerance"-meaning "the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism"...

White House: With cap-and-trade seemingly dead and EPA's regulatory authority under attack, the administration's climate czar is abandoning ship. Too bad she's not taking the administration's energy policies with her. Carol Browner, former EPA director now serving as a senior Obama adviser for energy and climate change, a formerly nonexistent position created to avoid Senate confirmation to a real position, has decided to hang it up. Or she's been thrown under the bus, depending on your point of view. As a "czar," she was a prime mover for climate change and the administration's war on carbon. But when cap-and-trade legislation...

Updated 9:48 p.m. Carol Browner, an key adviser to President Obama on energy and environmental issues, plans to leave the White House, an administration official said Monday night. Her departure comes as something of a surprise. Browner had been deeply involved in negotiations over climate legislation, which passed the House but died in the Senate. And she had been a key part of the team helping to deal with and stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years under President Bill Clinton, she had been...

Three Republican senators demanded Friday that the White House explain last-minute editing changes to an Interior Department report on the BP oil spill that falsely implied that a group of independent experts had endorsed a political decision to temporarily halt all deepwater oil drilling. The senators, members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called for hearings into the matter, contending that the White House had manipulated science for political ends, a claim Democrats frequently made about the George W. Bush administration. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a report this week asserting that officials in the office of Carol...

Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green-jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP. One of the Beltway's most entrenched and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama's own federal BP oil-spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should she get? Pushing the question should be a top priority of the new House GOP majority. Not least of all because Washington insiders are still buzzing about possible White...

Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green-jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP. One of the Beltway’s most influential, entrenched, and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama’s own federal BP-oil-spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should a woman who circumvented the Senate confirmation process and boasts a sordid history of abusing public office get? Pushing the question — and shining a bright, hot spotlight on...

It’s not just a band of flannel-shirted environmentalists any longer; it’s become a big-money, major player in Washington power politics and American elections. Starting today, the Washington Examiner is publishing a five-part special report in association with Pajamas Media on “Big Green”: the alliance of the Democratic Party, environmental groups, and activists in the progressive movement. It’s not just a band of flannel-shirted environmentalists any longer; it’s become a big-money, major player in Washington power politics and American elections.In this first of our five-part series in coordination with the Examiner, we consider how the consensus for environmental regulation in the...

Interviews with Leader Boehner & Carol Browner By Meet the Press MR. GREGORY: You talk about all the work here being done for safety. Did the White House do any economic analysis about what a moratorium--what impact it would have on jobs in the Gulf Coast?MS. BROWNER: There is, there is an economic analysis being done. It'll be ready later...MR. GREGORY: But it was never done before the moratorium was put in place? Because those who are down there say, "You know what, the moratorium by the Obama administration is far worse than the spill itself."

The administration has decreed a six-month moratorium on exploratory drilling in the Gulf, based on a report that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wrote for President Obama. Salazar claimed that a panel of seven experts selected by the National Academy of Engineering had peer reviewed his report. It turns out, though, that the seven experts never saw the recommendation for a moratorium, and in fact oppose it:The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported...

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

ROBERT, La. — After failing again to stem the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP scrambled Sunday to make some progress in ending the spill that the president's top energy adviser said was the biggest environmental disaster the U.S. has ever faced. Six weeks after the spill, oil giant BP PLC said that its latest plan to cap the well wouldn't capture all the crude fouling the Gulf. And the relief wells currently being drilled — which are supposed to be a better long-term solution — won't be done for at least two months. "Well, the relief...

'The science is settled," we've been told for decades by zealous proponents of manmade-global-warming hysteria. But we now have mountains of documents from the world's leading global-warming-advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. Yet the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled. Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation and coverups to "hide the decline" in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. Never mind what The Atlantic's Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science e-mail files of the U.K.'s Climatic...