Free Republic

Arizona’s water is running worryingly low. Amid the worst drought in more than a millennium, which has left communities across the state with barren wells, the state is depleting what remains of its precious groundwater. Much of it goes to private companies nearly free, including Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company.Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published...

NOW The Republican from South Carolina is calling for the LICENSING OF TWITTER and others: ”A consumer has no recourse, we need to fix that“

ATLANTA, Oct. 18, 2022/PRNewswire/ -- While changes in the earth's climate and actions to reduce carbon emissions receive significant attention in the news cycle, people are less familiar with how the earth's changing climate is impacting health. Today, the CDC Foundation announced a new focus to bring together young people to raise awareness about the linkage between climate and health and to engage them in their communities to better prepare for the growing health impacts from climate change. "The health and mental health impacts of our changing climate are daunting, but we must not lose sight of opportunities to come...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday said it was proposing a new rule to collect data on climate-related risks from property and casualty insurers, one of the first concrete actions in a new push to beef up financial regulation to help fight global warming. The Treasury's Federal Insurance Office said in a Federal Register notice that it was seeking public comment on the proposal, under which it would collect current and historical underwriting data on homeowners’ insurance. The zip-code level data would provide the insurance office with "consistent, granular, and comparable insurance data needed to help assess the...

The IRS is a climate agency now. The massive climate and energy law enacted by Democrats in August puts the IRS at the forefront of the effort to incentivize renewable energy across the economy. Of the nearly $370 billion of climate spending in the new law, about $270 billion will be delivered through tax incentives for electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, solar power and other “clean” energy technologies. “The IRS is at the center of it because the way that you get this cash that the federal government has basically earmarked for all these things is through tax credits and benefits...

But is that actually a good thing?Retiring on Social Security alone is a dangerous thing. That’s because those benefits will only replace about 40% of the typical worker’s pre-retirement income, and most seniors need about twice as much money to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.But the reality is that a lot of people do end up retiring solely or largely on Social Security. And it’s those same people who are apt to be the most impacted by Social Security raises.Each year, benefits are subject to a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, based on inflation levels. Since inflation has been sky-high this year,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — When you groggily roll out of bed and make breakfast, the government edges up to your kitchen table, too. Unlike you, it’s perky. It’s an unseen force in your morning. The government makes sure you can see the nutrients in your cereal. It fusses over your toast, insisting that the flour it comes from has no more than 75 insect fragments and one rodent hair per 50 grams. That’s all before you leave home. The government is going to be hanging with you on and off, mostly on, until you turn off the lamp last thing at...

Planning to fly this summer? Good luck. Delays are up. Cancellations, too. Why? Because of the pilot shortage. A pilot shortage? How can this be? Flying is a popular job. Some people fly small planes just for fun. Why aren't there enough commercial pilots? Because the government passed another dumb law. In 2009, after a Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, New York, killed 50 people, Congress decided that airlines could only hire aspiring commercial pilots who already had lots of flight time. Instead of 250 hours, now they have to have 1,500 hours! "That never made any sense," says current...

The D.C. bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence agencies have long become powers unto themselves, and a threat to our democracy.The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long history of abusing its power is once again prominent amid the continued expose by Special Counsel John Durham. His prosecution is demonstrating the FBI’s use of its power to deploy federal intelligence assets against political opponents of Democrats. The FBI routinely intervenes in politics, such as when the FBI assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign in painting former President Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset, as Durham’s investigation is emphasizing with more evidence. By getting...

Reflections on the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau... On April 29, 1945, the United States Army liberated the prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Dachau wasn’t the only such camp. Using the broadest definition, there were 44,000 concentration camps, work camps, and death camps operating in Nazi Germany by the end of the war. It wasn’t even the largest such camp; Dachau was originally only built to house 5000 prisoners, though it held as many as 30,000 at the end. But Dachau holds the distinction of being the first. Designed by Theodore Eicke and officially opened by...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government on Thursday released its long-awaited plan to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars, citing the toll on Black smokers and young people. “The proposed rules would help prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers and help adult smokers quit,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, in a statement. He added that the ban would also be an “important step to advance health equity” by reducing disparities in tobacco-related diseases. The Food and Drug Administration said eliminating menthol cigarettes could prevent between 300,000 and 650,000 smoking deaths over 40 years. Menthol...

CDC has partnered with the American Public Health Association (APHA) to create the Climate Change and Health Playbook: Adaptation Planning for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. This comprehensive, step-by-step resource is designed to supplement the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) framework and support public health departments and adaptation planners as they blend JEDI into their climate and health efforts. People throughout the United States face climate change-related health risks, but some of us will feel the effects earlier and more severely. This is because of differences in our exposures to climate hazards, our sensitivity to these hazards, and our...

... Though biofuels have been touted for their ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, assessing the environmental impact of bioethanol requires including greenhouse gas emissions related to the crops needed for its production. And "the carbon balance of ethanol relative to gasoline isn't as good as it was originally anticipated," Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told AFP. In 2005, Congress passed a "Renewable Fuel Standard," which required transportation fuel to include a volume of biofuel that increased over time. The law was further expanded in 2007. As a result, 2.8 million additional hectares of corn were...

History has a way of repeating itself. Or maybe it's that people cling to defunct beliefs, stubbornly refusing to learn from experience. Such stubbornness is on display when pundits, legislators and President Joe Biden blame inflation on corporate "greed." The fix, they claim, is price controls. But such controls would only bring further economic calamity. To explain hikes in the prices of meat, poultry and energy, many politicians and pundits say we must look no further than cold-hearted corporate CEOs padding their bottom lines at the expense of ordinary Americans. Companies today are allegedly so greedy that they use the...

When Republicans who oppose federal marijuana prohibition vote against your legalization bill, you probably are doing something wrong. That is what happened last week, when the House of Representatives approved the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act by a vote of 220 to 204. The ayes included 217 Democrats but only three Republicans, two fewer than voted for the MORE Act when the House passed it in 2020. The meager and waning GOP support for the bill suggests that Democrats want credit for trying to legalize marijuana but are not really interested in building the bipartisan coalition that would...

As part of the agreement between New York state, Erie County and the NFL's Buffalo Bills franchise, Hochul advanced a $600 million proposal from the state budget. Erie County will provide $250 million and the NFL and Bills will provide a combined $550 million to build a $1.4 billion new stadium, the governor's announcement said. the project will create 10,000 union jobs and New Yorkers can rest assured that their investment will be recouped by the economic activity the team generates," she added. The $850 million in pledged taxpayer money is the largest public contribution toward any NFL stadium.

Only recently has it been revealed that one of the "vaccines" for COVID-19, pushed by the federal government and pharmaceutical industry on Americans, many unwillingly, over the past two years can cause acute kidney injury, acute flaccid myelitis, anti-sperm antibody positive, brain stem embolism, brain stem thrombosis, cardiac arrest, cardiac failure and cardiogenic shock. And among the 1,291 adverse side effects listed in an appendix of one federal report also are central nervous system vasculitis, deep vein thrombosis, encephalitis brain stem, encephalitis hemorrhagic, frontal lobe epilepsy, foaming at mouth, epileptic psychosis, facial paralysis, fetal distress syndrome, gastrointestinal amyloidosis and generalized...

Men and women in same-sex couples are more likely to commute by public transport and less likely to drive to work than those in different-sex couples, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Exeter Business School analyzed how sexual orientation impacts on choice of transport to work, using data from the American Community Survey comprising 3 million working age households. They found a 'sexual orientation gap' that was particularly stark among men, with gay and bisexual men in same-sex couples 7% more likely to commute by public transport (for women the gap was 3%) and 13% less...

Kyle Rittenhouse supporters were not allowed to fundraise on the website. Defending oneself against attacks by the Left’s pet protesters, it turns out, is not allowed. When Rittenhouse jumped to GiveSendGo, Discover credit card cut off the ability to give money to that fundraiser. You might want to make a note of that. A “Save America” rally fundraiser by a conservative couple to oppose COVID-19 mandates was cut off. Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire set up a fundraiser for Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez’s grandmother to buy a new ceiling. But it was cut off when “someone” informed the fundraising platform...

When the history of this American era is written, the top headline will not be about election controversies or critical race theory or even COVID-19. This will be known most of all as the era when America sold out its future generations. This week, America's national debt surpassed $30 trillion for the first time, a full $7 trillion increase from just two years ago. How did this happen, and who's to blame? President Bill Clinton was no deficit hawk, but with a Republican Congress keeping him largely in line and with the dot-com boom providing record government revenues, Clinton gets...