Free Republic

Nancy Pelosi claims protesters are "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare."

Two seasonal Yellowstone National Park concession workers have been fired after a live webcam caught them urinating into the Old Faithful geyser. > The geyser was not erupting at the time. >

ROCHESTER, Pa. -- On the first Friday of Lent, an elderly female parishioner of St. Cecilia Catholic Church began unwrapping pies at the church. That's when the trouble started. A state inspector, there for an annual checkup on the church's kitchen, spied the desserts. After it was determined that the pies were home-baked, the inspector decreed they couldn't be sold. "Everyone was devastated," says Josie Reed, a 69-year-old former teacher known for her pumpkin and berry pies. Sold for $1 a slice, homemade pies have always been part of the Lenten fish-fry dinners at St. Cecilia's, located in this tiny...

PORT HOPE -- It's only a matter of time before someone "snaps" after being pulled over under Ontario's new law forbidding smoking in a vehicle carrying a minor, a police officer said yesterday in response to a quirk in the legislation that was made evident during a weekend incident. "People got mad enough when they couldn't smoke in bars anymore or bingo parlours," Port Hope Sgt. Bryant Wood said. "Now you're telling them they can't smoke in cars. At some point somebody's going to snap along the way here." Nova Scotia is the only other jurisdiction in the country to...

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A proposed ban on smoking in most public places will be debated Monday in the Senate, and the chamber's top two leaders said Friday that the bill's chances for passage are good. "If there are no substantive amendments, I would assume it would pass," said Senate President Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican. Senate Vice President John Vratil agreed, but cautioned that opponents will try to load it up with amendments.

"Make no mistake. Tax cheaters cheat us all. The IRS should enforce our laws to the letter."

Restaurants in New York City with 15 or more outlets nationwide now must conspicuously post the nutritional content of each item on their menus. Similar legislation is coming to San Francisco and Seattle, and is under consideration in about a dozen other cities and state legislatures. At first blush, this seems like a good idea. Why not force restaurants to let their consumers know the nutritional value of what they're about to eat? If we're to believe what the public health world says about our bulging waistlines, perhaps a little more information would be a good thing. The American Prospect's...

Smoking ban, fitness tests for healthier nation By Sharri Markson April 20, 2008 01:36am SMOKING would be banned for everyone born next year, junk food would be taxed and everyone would be subjected to a fitness test by 2020. By comparison, the cost of healthy food, including fruit and vegetables, would be reduced to reflect its low environmental impact and obvious health benefits. These are just a few of the ideas from 100 of the nation's health experts who discussed the best way to combat obesity, reduce illness and promote a healthy lifestyle. Health Minister Nicola Roxon said one idea...

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage. It also includes two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who last fall ruled that the strip search did not...

Dr. Khurana says there may be broader health ramifications than asbestos or smoking. What? Now just think about that. Again, I foresee a huge higher tax on cell phone use and a higher health and life insurance premium. And maybe people (like me) that don't use cell phones unless its an emergency, would rather not be seated in bars and restaurants where cell phones are in use. Ah, can you say ban?

"It has created a little underground economy, with businessmen selling everything from a pack of skittles to an energy drink." - Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School. VICTORVILLE — With candy sales banned on school campuses, sugar pushers are the latest trend at local schools. Backpacks are filled with Snickers and Twinkees for all sweet tooths willing to pay the price. “It’s created a little underground economy, with businessmen selling everything from a pack of skittles to an energy drink,” said Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville. This has become a lucrative business, Nason...

Initiatives to encourage people to live healthier, longer lives are just creating a different set of problems. A medical friend once told me that if everybody in the UK were to stop smoking, the NHS would collapse. I thought she was offering that old chestnut about smokers and drinkers handing over billions to the state in tax, but it was more subtle argument than that. Her point was that it's much cheaper to treat a 50-year-old who's taking 18 months to die of lung cancer than it is to treat a 90-year-old who's spent the last 20 years slowly fading...

The government has a duty to look after the health of everyone and sometimes that means guiding or restricting our choices Lord John Krebs, of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Government ministers should shrug off media accusations that they are running a nanny state and introduce tougher public health measures, experts say. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics said the time had come to consider a whole host of interventions in the UK after the introduction of a smoking ban. Its proposes raising alcohol prices, restricting pub opening hours and better food labelling to fight obesity. The government said it was...

WASHINGTON — Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has a message for Americans: Quit digging your grave with a knife and fork. Huckabee shed more than 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in 2003. He has taken his personal health kick to the next level by running marathons and writing books like "Quit Digging Your Grave With A Knife And Fork." He is also using his success story to wage war on junk food in public schools in hopes of targeting childhood obesity rates. Other states, under pressure to encourage healthier eating habits for children, are developing similar school...

Three children have been removed from their parents and taken into care because they are too fat, it has emerged The youngsters were separated from their families because of fears that their weight was getting out of control. The issue was first highlighted this year when Cumbria Council revealed it had taken an eight-year-old girl from her parents because she was overweight. The council was forced to take action after the child's weight soared to more than nine stones, forcing her to wear size 16 clothes. A Freedom of Information survey of councils has revealed two children have been taken...

Cato’s David Boaz makes a strong point about just how scary John Edwards’ health-care plan is: John Edwards says that his universal health care plan will be mandatory not just for taxpayers and doctors, but for patients: You will get preventive care, and you will like it: “It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go...

Four times during the school year in Campbell County, Wyo., the school sends report cards home. Anxious parents and worried students are provided with the typical grading categories -- academic performance, attendance and a work ethic score. But here in Gillette, there's an additional grade that has some families up in arms. It's called the body mass index, or BMI, a calculation based on height and weight that indicates whether your kid is too fat. The school chooses the word "overweight." If your child scores too high, it's the fitness equivalent of a bad grade. When Taylor Barbour came home...

Richard Hebron, 41, was driving along an anonymous stretch of highway near Ann Arbor, Mich., last October when state cops pulled him over, ordered him to put his hands on the hood of his mud-splattered truck and seized its contents: 453 gal. of milk. Yes, milk. Raw, unpasteurized milk. To supply a small but growing market among health-conscious city and suburban dwellers for milk taken straight from the udder, Hebron was dealing the stuff on behalf of a farming cooperative he runs in southwestern Michigan. An undercover agricultural investigator had infiltrated the co-op as part of a sting operation that...

Dear Editor: Wisconsin's health professionals and advocates like myself have nothing but praise for the leadership Gov. Jim Doyle is showing in the fight to reduce the enormous burden of tobacco on our population. So we must protest the recent journalistic leap of logic in a statewide Associated Press story, suggesting the governor would support a statewide ban on workplace smoking that exempts taverns. In fact, he specifically said he would not support an exemption for taverns. He said if he got "95" percent of what he proposed, he'd be happy. That's how good negotiators think. But no bill has...

It is something of a clichéd tradition for a columnist to write a year-end or New Year column that makes exaggerated, sometimes humorous predictions for the next 12 months. I wrote such a column at about this time last year, with "predictions" that reflected the continuing, creeping influence of government in our lives. Unfortunately, the state of civil liberties and both economic and personal freedom haven't improved much over the past year. So I figure it's time for another round of unlikely predictions as to what we might expect from our government in 2007. --In yet another case of government...