Free Republic

Arizona and Nevada are facing the first-ever mandatory cuts in the amount of water they can take from the Colorado River next year. The two states are among seven that have agreed to drought contingency plans for the river system that serves about 40 million people and 6,300 square miles of farmland from Wyoming to Southern California. The cuts are triggered by water levels expected in Lake Mead, a giant reservoir on the river at the Arizona-Nevada border. On Jan. 1, Lake Mead's level is projected to be 1,089.4 feet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said late last week. That's...

New information released in connection with the activities of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislane Maxwell with many high profile names in the mix..... "intelligent background checks" A phrase used by President Trump facing the media at the White House Friday with the President indicating talks are underway with the Republican and Democrat leaders in Congress on new Second Amendment legislation.... A 20-year old man in custody in Springfield, Missouri after he walked into a Walmart Thursday with guns, wearing body armor and dressed in a military style.... Friday night KYTV in Springfield, Missouri reporting that...

Joe Biden is being portrayed as the Democrats’ safest potential presidential nominee, despite his obvious flaws as a candidate. But one wonders how Biden’s history of swamp corruption will play if he actually faces the scrutiny of a national run. Biden’s family has gotten wealthy, like those of so many low-paid “public servants”–Tom Daschle and Harry Reid are obvious examples. How does that happen? Politico headlines: “Biden Inc. Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career.” It begins:

It is being called “the Great Grasshopper Invasion of 2019”, and it is really freaking out a lot of people in Las Vegas, because most of them don’t understand why this is suddenly happening. Unusually wet weather earlier this year created ideal breeding conditions, and now massive swarms of grasshoppers have descended upon Sin City. According to AccuWeather, there are “millions” of them, and it is being projected that they will be sticking around “for weeks”. The experts are assuring us that there is nothing to be concerned about, and that is probably true, but I have never heard of...

California had the highest out-migration flows among any other place in the country as more people look to neighboring states like Nevada and Arizona to avoid the high taxes and find a cheaper cost of living.

Last month, both Maine and Nevada did what was in the best interests of their states: They rejected bills that would have enrolled their states in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an unwise effort to override the Electoral College. In Maine, it was killed by legislators in the state House after it passed Maine’s Senate. In Nevada, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoed the bill that had been passed by members of his own party in the Legislature. The National Popular Vote compact, which is an agreement between states, requires a participating state to award all of its electoral votes...

Some things never change. Joe Biden was in Nevada for the State Democrat Party’s Brew and National Views Event on Saturday. The former vice president gave an hour-long speech where he trashed Trump and promised to bring back the failed Obama agenda. But before he got started ripping Trump he planted a wet one on his granddaughter’s lips.

Former Nevada Senate Majority Leader Kelvin Atkinson was sentenced Thursday to 27 months in prison for misusing campaign funds. He must surrender by Oct. 18. Atkinson, 50, became the first black LGBTQ state Senate majority leader in the nation this year, but he was forced to resign barely one month after the 2019 Legislature convened. He pleaded guilty the following week, on March 11, to a federal wire fraud charge, admitting to misusing some $250,000 in campaign funds.

The 2019 Nevada legislative session was historic in terms of its diversity of representation, with women holding majorities in both chambers of a state legislature for the first time in the nation’s history. But lawmakers made even more history by passing a number of bills that will improve the lives of Nevadans, including new laws on gun safety. These measures, some of which passed with bipartisan support, had been strongly supported by progressive activists for years. Perhaps one of the biggest ways in which Gov. Steve Sisolak distinguished himself during his first legislative session was his bold pursuit of gun...

The earthquakes that rocked Nevada last week could also shake up the debate on Yucca Mountain. Rep. Dina Titus pointed to the tremors as proof that the facility north of Las Vegas is not a good place to store nuclear waste. “We’ve known there are fault lines in that area and that’s been part of our argument," she said, "but this very visibly proves the point. They try to argue that there are no showstoppers. You can accommodate anything, but I believe our argument when things are flying off shelves and the earth is cracking open is much more persuasive.”...

The ground is constantly shaking in southern California right now, and this has many concerned that another large earthquake may be coming. I have been keeping my eye on Cal Tech’s recent earthquake map, and as I write this article it says that there have been 10,053 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days. I have never seen that number so high, and southern California is being hit by yet another new earthquake every few moments. Most of the earthquakes are happening out in the Ridgecrest area where we witnessed the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit on...

Damage to the earth’s crust from the magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 earthquakes that struck Southern California last week is visible in a kaleidoscopic satellite image released by NASA. The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena used satellite data to produce a map showing ruptures and displacements not visible to the naked eye — employing technology that has been developed over the last quarter of a century. The imagery was acquired on July 8 and compared with data from April 8. The earthquakes were the largest to hit California in nearly 20 years and...

Ridgecrest, California — A 6.4 magnitude earthquake is still fresh on everyone's mind in Ridgecrest and the aftershocks won't let them forget it. After the quake, rattled nerves kept Donnie Morrison's family up through the night. "We had our shoes by the bed. We had our clothes ready to go if we had to bail out real quick," Morrison said. More than 1,000 aftershocks have rocked the community. CBS News witnessed the biggest aftershock while preparing for an early morning live shot. Another struck during an interview with seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones.

Big one just hit.

The good news about Thursday's 6.4-magnitude quake... is that it happened in an unpopulated area of the Mojave Desert about 100 miles from the main San Andreas fault. The bad news? "The probability of a 'big one' hasn't changed at all," ... "You realize the last big earthquake to hit the L.A. segment of the San Andreas fault was 1680. That's over 300 years ago. But the cycle time for breaks and earthquakes on the San Andreas fault is 130 years, so we are way overdue. In any given year, the probability of the big one is 3% in any...

A cowardly Las Vegas cop who admitted that he froze in a hallway while responding to the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history has been fired, department officials said. Officer Cordell Hendrex — who was caught on body camera footage waiting in a hallway one floor below a mass shooter at the Mandalay Bay hotel for nearly five minutes on Oct. 1, 2007 – was fired March 20, a Metropolitan Police Department spokesman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Department officials declined further comment on Hendrex’s employment, but a police union president confirmed to the newspaper that the nearly 10-year...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Despite Democratic election wins across Nevada last year, Republicans are banking on President Donald Trump's enthusiastic supporters, a united GOP organization and a soaring economy to turn the state red in 2020. Though Trump lost Nevada in 2016 to Democrat Hillary Clinton and the state has trended blue in recent cycles, it's still considered a battleground. Trump's reelection campaign identified the state as one of at least four the president lost but is targeting in 2020....

President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager predicted in an interview with CBS News that the president would win multiple swing states, including at least three he lost in 2016, if the presidential election were held this week. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign chief, said the president would win Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Nevada if the election were held this week. All eight are considered to be up for grabs, to varying degrees, in 2020 and the latter three were all won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. and Trump won Florida by 1.2...

Solar power and wind power are the dominant methods of generating electricity that are acceptable to the extreme left. The left calls its acceptable methods of generating electricity “renewable energy.” The definition of renewable energy, enshrined in renewable portfolio laws in many states, tells us what the left likes and doesn’t like. It is very arbitrary. The general idea of renewable energy is that it doesn’t use fuel that could run out and it doesn’t emit CO2. But the left breaks its own rules as is convenient. For example, nuclear power doesn’t emit CO2 and running out of fuel is...

Maine legislators on Monday killed a measure that would have awarded the state’s electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. A bill to enter Maine into the National Popular Vote Compact failed in a 68-79 vote on Monday in the state House. Twenty Democrats joined Republicans in voting down the measure. The bill had been introduced by state Senate President Troy Jackson (D), and it passed the upper chamber in May. It lost a test vote in the House last month, then won a vote last week before sputtering on Monday. Maine is the second state...