Free Republic

Conundrum --------------------------------------------------------- Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free. "A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one, you'll probably never need one again." The definition of the word "Conundrum" is: something that is puzzling or confusing. Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America: 1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized. 2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims. 3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government. 4. Their...

John Dewey is often blamed (by me and many others) for being the cause of the long, relentless decline in American public education. In fairness, he is only the famous face of a bigger story. In the early years of the 20th century, as the Victorian era moved toward the wasteland of World War I, anxiety and ferment rippled across America and Europe. Unions were rising; revolution was preached in every capital; assassinations were common. There was genuine fear that civilization would fly apart. Edward A. Ross, a sociologist, published an influential book in 1901: Social Control: a survey of...

Once upon a time an American family’s home was their castle and the bigger the better, but growing concerns about meeting mortgage payments and the environmental impact of large houses has helped fuel a new movement of people who are happy to live small. The Tiny House Movement is a growing group of people who are happy to downsize the space that they live in and enjoy simplified lives as a result. While the average American home is around 2600 square feet, the typical small or tiny house is around 100-400 square feet.

It was the last week of the month, and Shanique Brown had already spent her $515 in CalWORKs benefits. Other programs would prevent Brown and her 18-month-old son, Armani, from going hungry, but the 22-year-old single mom had no money for a necessity so basic it is often forgotten: diapers. “I cried and cried,” said Brown, now 24. Armani is now potty-trained, but a new state bill seeks to ensure low-income parents will never face the challenge Brown did. If passed, Assembly Bill 1516 would make California the first state in the country to create a diaper assistance program for...

Using climate models and observations, a fascinating study in this week’s issue of Nature Climate Change points to a marked recent warming of the Atlantic Ocean as a powerful shaper of a host of notable changes in climate and ocean patterns in the last couple of decades — including Pacific wind, sea level and ocean patterns, the decade-plus hiatus in global warming and even California’s deepening drought Here’s the University of New South Wales news release: Atlantic warming turbocharges Pacific trade winds. Record breaking trade winds may have led to hiatus in global surface average temperatures. New research has found...

Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last. This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the planet. Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem, legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response, President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities, which some scientists warn may be too little, too late. Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may be the frequent...

Florida’s largest Obamacare exchange health insurer is boosting its premiums by 17.6 percent, a staggering increase for hundreds of thousands of Floridians. Florida Blue, the Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer in Florida, has the largest market share of any insurer operating on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The company cited higher health costs than expected due to an older customer base which is using more health services than they’d prepared for, according to Kaiser Health News. Patrick Geraghty, Florida Blue’s CEO, had previously warned that the company was under “tremendous financial pressure” and that they’d be seeking significant hikes.

The group seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies to Americans purchasing health insurance through federally run state marketplaces is asking the Supreme Court to take up the case early. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, the conservative group funding challenges to the IRS rule allowing subsidies to flow to state exchanges, announced Thursday that it was asking the Supreme Court to intervene. The challengers argue that the Affordable Care Act only allows subsidies in exchanges set up by states – an interpretation that could lead to millions of people being unable to afford coverage. Owing largely to Republican resistance, only...

53% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Obamacare, up 8% since last month. This is the largest unfavorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the survey’s four year history, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds. Only 37% of people actually have a favorable opinion of the law. Obamacare lost favorability with women, whites, and those in the low and middle income brackets, along with other groups—including Democrats. …

A study released by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) on Thursday said the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new ozone standards could cause Arkansas to lose more than 10,000 jobs, pay more than $240 million in environmental compliance costs, and shut down most of the state’s coal-fired electric generation. “Manufacturing in the United States is making a comeback, and we’re reducing emissions at the same time, but tightening the current ozone standard to near unachievable levels would serve as a self-inflicted wound to the U.S. economy at the worst possible time,” NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons said. “This rule...

Louisiana businesses and consumers could face one of the most expensive federal regulations in history, according to a new study released Thursday (July 31) by the National Association of Manufacturers, an industry advocacy group. The study, conducted for the association by NERA Economic Consulting, estimates it will cost Louisiana companies $189 billion over two decades to comply with new limits on ozone emissions the Environmental Protection Agency is slated to propose later this year. The report says the Louisiana economy stands to lose as much as $53 billion in gross state product and nearly 117,000 jobs per year if the...

PITTSBURGH —Union miners and others opposed to stricter pollution rules for coal-burning power plants proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency clashed inside and outside the city's federal building on the first of two days of public hearings on the new regulations. About 5,000 union members, led by the United Mine Workers of America, on Thursday marched to the William S. Moorhead Federal Building chanting, "Hey, hey, EPA! Don't take our jobs away!" A few members of a Pittsburgh-based union, Boilermakers Local 154, traded shouts and insults with some 300 environmental activists who stood on a nearby street corner as the...

Gov. Jerry Brown was about to leave Mexico’s capital after four days of talks pressing on the environment, and he wasn’t sure, broadly speaking, how his diplomacy might add up. Meetings held out of public view – dinner with business magnate Carlos Slim and talks with the poet Homero Aridjis and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a founder of Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, among others – were “more critical” on any number of issues, Brown said, than was on display at his official functions. “Some of the more private guys,” Brown said, were “not that optimistic” that people are interested...

A rushed team at the Department of Health and Human Services failed to plan properly or watch over contractors hired to set up and run the online health insurance exchange, setting it up for its spectacular blowout when it rolled out last October, according to a report to be released Thursday. And unless HHS acts, more problems could happen this year, the report warns. Federal officials had just three and a half years to design, build and launch the online marketplace from the time the Affordable Care Act was signed in March 2010 to the time it had to be...

Argentina has defaulted again. Argentine Finance Minister Axel Kicillof is now addressing the world from Argentina's consulate in New York City. He has delivered the news that Argentina is in default, having failed to satisfy the demands of a group of hedge fund creditors negotiating over $1.3 billion worth of debt owed to them for over a decade. "The Argentine Republic has filed for a stay [on payment] with Judge Griesa... The Judge decided that if the vulture funds said there could be a stay there would be a stay," said Kicillof. "The vulture funds were not willing to grant...

How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA A new report was released today by the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, and it is damning. All this time that climate skeptics are accused of being in the employ of “big oil” is nothing more than a projection of their own greed. Some excerpts: Over 7.9 BILLION in funding between these groups.

According to President Obama, Muslims built the “very fabric of our nation.” This is interesting because the very fabric of our nation was built during the colonial period. During this time there wasn’t a single Muslim in America. In fact, there’s no record of a mosque in the United States until 1915 when a group of Albanians built one in Maine. Obama’s rewriting of history is on one hand ridiculous and on the other hand completely understandable. This President favors Islamic socialism in the middle east and he favors socialism at home. He’s in bed with Islam because it suits...

What does the triumph of FMLN candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren, in the March 9 presidential elections in El Salvador represent for Latin America? I see his victory as very significant because it not only further strengthens the progressive current expanding through Latin America since the 1998 triumph of Chavez in Venezuela, but because he is the first president since Chile's Salvador Allende to reach the presidency by putting forward a project that he had no qualms in calling socialist. At the same time, he has explained socialism as a democratic, participatory project that is not decreed from above. This idea...

A leading air transport industry body has called for a top-level meeting with the Venezuelan president to discuss ways to restore over $4 billion of airlines' money that is trapped in the country due to its currency controls. President Nicolas Maduro's government requires airlines to sell tickets in the bolivar currency but has been slow to allow them to repatriate the earnings. IATA said on Monday that international capacity on routes to Venezuela is down 36 percent year-on-year, or down 49 percent from 2013 peaks. "Confidence in the market is falling sharply," Tyler said. "Venezuela risks becoming disconnected from the...

The “Iron Maiden." She was the staunch and sturdy leader of Great Britain who once held up F. A. Hayek’s masterwork “Road to Serfdom” and declared “This is what we believe in.” Hayek’s work is a road map for what could go wrong when individual freedoms are lost and central planning becomes the answer for every ill. When truth is bent to meet the moment and government decision making is the proposed cure all, “serfdom” is the destination. Margaret, in believing Hayek’s cautionary, also declared that Socialism cannot sustain itself. Socialism can not last because eventually “you run out of...