Free Republic

Do you want water or milk with that? Servers at Davis city restaurants will soon be asking that question to customers ordering kids’ meals with beverages, under a new ordinance designed to discourage sugary soda consumption. The ordinance, passed on a unanimous 5-0 vote Tuesday night, will require any Davis restaurant that offers a meal-with-drink kids’ menu to make water or milk, not soda, the primary option. Parents can still request soda at no extra charge, but must specifically ask for it. By Sept. 1, Davis restaurants must prove compliance with the city ordinance by submitting a copy of their...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping fund the creation of an implantable antenna for health care, which could be used for “long-term patient monitoring.” The government has so far given $5,070 for a graduate fellowship to work on the project, which begins June 1. The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices...

Tanning salons are already under siege – they got taxed by the health law, are newly regulated by the federal government and states, and have become dermatologists’ favorite bad guy. “It’s time we started treating [tanning beds] just like they are cigarettes. They are carcinogen delivery systems,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., at a May 20 Capitol Hill briefing on the dangers of indoor tanning. “We do not allow our children to buy cigarettes, yet the tanning industry continues to target adolescent girls. And this is not unlike what we found with the tobacco industry.” In response, DeLauro is pushing...

Back in 2009, when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act, many liberal Democrats felt it did not go far enough — that it should be even more sweeping, even more expansive, even more costly. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. "The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future," Harkin told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in December 2009. "But if we don't have the starter home, we're...

The National Institutes of Health is using hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on grants to study the best ways to get gay people to quit smoking and abusing drugs and alcohol. The University of Illinois at Chicago has spent over $435,000 since 2010 to carry out a “culturally targeted and individually tailored smoking cessation study” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) smokers, according to the grant information published by the NIH. Additionally, NIH gave the University of Pittsburgh $43,120 to study tobacco and alcohol use trajectories in “sexual-minority emerging adults” and has awarded over $178,000 to Columbia University...

Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. While I normally read it for the daily laugh, today's strip did the immense public service of reminding me how silly our government can be:

The Obama administration hopes to save the bees by feeding them better. A new federal plan aims to reverse America’s declining honeybee and monarch butterfly populations by making millions of acres of federal land more bee-friendly, spending millions of dollars more on research and considering the use of fewer pesticides. While putting different type of landscapes along highways, federal housing projects and elsewhere may not sound like much in terms of action, several bee scientists told The Associated Press that this a huge move. They say it may help pollinators that are starving because so much of the American landscape...

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) says a bill will be introduced in the House that will “put a salad bar in every single school in the United States of America.” Speaking at the Religious Action Center’s “Consultation on Conscience” event last month, Ryan told the Washington D.C. audience about efforts that will help “begin to end poverty.” […] “It starts to paint the picture of the kind of system that we want,” Ryan continued. “Now, we have a lot of school districts in Ohio and across the country, 70, 80, 90 percent of the kids in the school will be Medicaid—free...

It is every parent’s worst nightmare, and according to a report on Police State Daily and the Medical Kidnapping site; for one homeschooling family in Kentucky, it has come true. On May 6, Kentucky homesteading Naugler family had their ten children taken into the custody of the state and are now fighting to regain custody and to prove their innocence. According to the family’s facebook blog page, Blessed Little Homestead, and other sources above, the police showed up, asked to see the children, and when the mother asked to see a warrant and what the charges were, the sheriff proceeded...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a regulation for Christmas lights on Monday, deeming some holiday decorations a “substantial product hazard.”“The Consumer Product Safety Commission … is issuing a final rule to specify that seasonal and decorative lighting products that do not contain any one of three readily observable characteristics (minimum wire size, sufficient strain relief, or overcurrent protection), as addressed in a voluntary standard, are deemed a substantial product hazard under the Consumer Product Safety Act (“CPSA”),” the final rule said.The ruling applies to a variety of Christmas decorations, including “stars, wreathes, candles without shades, light sculptures, blow-molded...

Social justice looms large for many, if not most, education journalists. We care about the often substandard education of low-income children and the gap between the haves and have-nots. Take a look at the winners of the Education Writers Association awards on April 20, 2015. Most were writers who told the stories of students in poverty. Beginning this school year and going forward, measuring and describing that poverty is about to get much muddier. That’s because the main statistic used to determine poverty in a school – the number of students who receive free or reduced-priced lunches – is starting...

Head teachers are warning that schools are having to act like "mini-welfare states" in having to provide food, spare uniform and even to wash clothes and provide showers for some pupils. The National Association of Head Teachers says such welfare support is costing £43.5m from school budgets. Heads' leader Russell Hobby said it was a "hidden national scandal". A Conservative spokesman said "the number of children living in poverty has fallen by 300,000". The warning from members of the NAHT, as they gather for their annual conference in Liverpool, is that schools are having to step in with welfare support...

As National Guard troops responded to rioting in Baltimore, President Barack Obama said Tuesday that there have been too many troubling police interactions with black citizens across American in what he called "a slow-rolling crisis." But he said there was no excuse for rioters to engage in senseless violence. Obama said people in Baltimore who stole from businesses and burned buildings and cars should be treated as criminals. "They aren't protesting, they aren't making a statement, they're stealing," Obama said. Obama spoke at a White House press conference with the Japanese prime minister the day after violence broke out 40...

The federal government is calling for lower levels of fluoride in drinking water, the first update since the 1960s. The new recommendation is for 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water, which replaces the previous range of 0.7 to 1.2 milligrams, according to the Health and Human Services Department on Monday. Americans have access to more fluoride through toothpaste and mouth rinses than when the recommendations were introduced in 1962, the agency said. Because Americans are using more fluoride, officials are worried about increases in cases of fluorosis, a condition that stains teeth exposed to too much fluoride. "The...

Check out this old toy gun commercial from the 1950s or '60s and compare it to how children who play with toy guns (or even their own food or fingers fashioned like a gun) are treated today. Do you think kids today are going to want to uphold their 2nd Amendment rights after they are terrorized and suspended or expelled by their schools for chewing a breakfast tart into an L-shape or being forced at age five to undergo a psych eval for bringing a Hello Kitty bubble gun to class? Others not included here are a kid who was...

The Agriculture Department has determined that 36 pounds of food per person is wasted every month, about 21 percent of the available food in the United States. And one big reason: those expiration dates are wrong or overly cautious. The solution: Hold your nose and just eat it. Even if it is 18 months past the expiration date. It sounds yucky, but officials think they’ve got the trick to get moms to feed expired but safe food to kids and adults alike—they’ve even got an app. It’s called FoodKeeper and it is supposed to have a more accurate calculation of...

Federal agricultural officials are planning to announce voluntary programs and initiatives for farmers, ranchers and foresters meant to build on President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat global warming—and don’t require congressional approval.Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is expected to unveil plans Thursday at Michigan State University, where Obama signed the sweeping farm bill into law last year. The efforts, many of which have their roots in that law, aim to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, boost carbon capture and storage and come with various enticements, including grants, low-interest loans and technical assistance. […] Obama administration aides have said the issue of...

A friend sends along an email attachment—a handwritten letter by his 8-year-old son, Peter. It’s addressed to First Lady Michelle Obama. “It all started because he saw something about school lunches [and] how ketchup is bad for you, and that Michelle Obama wants to limit the amount of ketchup” in schools, my friend explained. When the boy’s mother reminded him he attends a private school, making the ketchup rationing a nonissue, “He said something about wanting to ‘give a voice to the voiceless.’” But ketchup is actually the least of the boy’s concerns, as he then continues onto foreign policy,...

WXAN reports Austin City Council members debated a plan earlier this month to put restrictions on smoke from barbecue restaurants. Council member Pio Renteria asked council to regulate the amount of smoke that comes from food trucks and restaurants within 100 feet of residential areas. Renteria said residents complained to him that smoke coming from BBQ joints caused them to not be able to open their windows or enjoy their backyards. …

The Food and Drug Administration is tearing into several Kind fruit and nut bars, blasting the company's claims they are healthy.Apparently there is a federal criterion for what is considered healthy, and Kind doesn't meet it, according to a recent FDA warning letter to the company.The agency singled out the labels for four Kind bars: almond and apricot, almond and coconut, peanut butter-dark chocolate and protein, and dark chocolate-cherry cashew and antioxidants.The agency took aim at several claims that the bars were "healthy," including that they were low in sodium and were a good source of fiber.