Free Republic

The Weather: Regulations finalized by the California Air Resources Board establish the nation's first state-run cap-and-trade regime. Despite Solyndra, the state will gather solar panels while it may. The 262 pages of regulations implementing California's 2006 global warming legislation, Assembly Bill 32, approved by CARB last Thursday, will probably reduce employment more than it reduces emissions. The only thing it will cap is economic growth by bleeding a patient that is already hemorrhaging red ink. Signed into law in 2006 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cap-and-trade regulations are intended to force California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels...

Wow...that was a good shake...it went on for quite a while. Everybody ok?

FUNERAL home workers in the Colombian city of Cali got the shock of a lifetime when an apparently dead 45-year-old woman suddenly started breathing and moving as they prepared her for burial. Local media said the woman had been declared clinically dead at a medical facility after having been hospitalised in serious condition with a neurological condition. "The instruments the patient was connected to gave no blood pressure or heart rate readings,'' said Miguel Angel Saavedra, a doctor at the clinic where the woman was treated.

[NOTE: Posted here at this time for archival purposes.] Note: The following text is a quote: YOU ARE HERE: Home > Reports > Consular Affairs Bulletins > Report Warden Message: Possible Attacks in Colombia CONSULAR AFFAIRS BULLETINS Americas - Colombia 9 Oct 2009 The following Warden Message was distributed by U.S. Embassy Bogota on October 9, 2009: This Warden Message is to advise American citizens traveling to or residing in Colombia that the U.S. Embassy has received information that attacks against Government of Colombia facilities may take place in Cali and Santander de Quiilichao on or about October 12, 2009....

Carly Fiorina, whose rocky tenure as chief executive of Hewlett Packard ended with her firing, is making serious preparations to run next year for the Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Fiorina's candidacy would be her first foray into elective politics and would turn California's Senate contest into one of the most closely watched in 2010.

Washington and Wall Street seem to be treating California as if it were a sideshow in the financial circus of these turbulent times. It’s not. California is home to the largest manufacturing belt in the United States and to Silicon Valley, the nation’s largest high-tech center. California is America’s most populous state with 38 million people. Its GDP of $1.8 trillion is the largest in the U.S. Its economy is bigger than those of Russia, Brazil, Canada, or India. And it’s collapsing. Major California counties are ground zero in the continuing mortgage meltdown: Los Angeles County with 5.32 percent of...

MONTEREY, Calif.- From gun stores to sheriff and police departments across the nation, there's a shortage of ammunition. It's no different on the Central Coast. Ammunition for handguns and rifles are hard to find. Keith Hennessy works at the Outdoor World Sporting Goods store in Monterey where it's simple economics that has kept many popular types of ammunition in short supply.

Mammoth Lakes just hit an unusaul two moderate in the last hour.. Sorry I tried to do an imagae but wee need are resident quake person. This area is of particular interest due to some of the geophyisics of the area. So I got a ping from USGS to 2 quakes over 4.0 in th last two hours. To me this is big because.....this area of Cali has hundreds of lil 1 or 2 point quakes in the area meaning non alarming but this is the first time in 2yrs of my memory we have had 4.0 or higher.

Warriors and wusses I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on. I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

How God is cleaning up 'worst city in world' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 12, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com No one will ever mistake Cali, Colombia, for an Amish community, but it's way more peaceful than it was 10 years ago, when God began to transform it. As home of the world's largest drug cartel, it was the murder capital of the world, with an average of 15 homicides a day. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency called the cartel the largest, richest criminal organization in history. It terrorized the 2 million citizens with a kind of lawless violence not...

SAN FRANCISCO - California has a housing bubble, but it may not pop with a bang, UCLA researchers said in a quarterly economic forecast. “There is no reason that a house should be worth 40 percent more today than it was two years ago,” UCLA Anderson Forecast economist Christopher Thornberg wrote in a report. “This is a bubble.”

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - The co-founder of the Cali drug cartel, which at its peak ruled the world's cocaine industry, was sent in handcuffs on a plane Friday to the United States to face trial for drug trafficking and related charges. Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, known as "The Master" for his genius in concealing cocaine shipments, was indicted in Miami in 2003 along with his brother, Gilberto, on charges of drug smuggling, money laundering and obstruction of justice. The brothers face maximum life sentences if convicted. Gilberto was extradited three months ago. Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, surrounded by armed guards, walked slowly...

A Cali cartel leader in detention in Miami and his brother -- who is awaiting extradition to the United States -- are offering federal prosecutors a deal: Leave our relatives alone and we'll plead guilty. In exchange they are also offering new information they claim to have about unsolved murders in Colombia and corrupt judges, lawyers and government officials. The offer was published Sunday in the Colombian magazine Semana. The article -- online at www.semana.com.co -- cited a five-page letter sent Dec. 7 to U.S. Attorney Marcos Jiménez in Miami by an attorney for drug lord Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, who...

LASER ETCHING IDENTIFICATION PROPOSED FOR HANDGUN AMMO If a proposal from the California Attorney General's Office is enacted, all handgun ammunition possessed in public or sold or imported into the nation's most populous state will be laser etched with an individual serial number. TRhe high-tech tracking system would require all cartridges in a box packaged for retail sale to have matching identification numbers. The package would be scanned and the information linked to the identity of the purchaser. The micro-stamping system used to etch the serial numbers was developed by Seattle-based Ravensforge Inc., whose technology was subjected to a successful...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show. Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press. One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech...

This California recall has enabled us to take a close look at the inner workings of California politics, and of some of the shadowy interests which manipulate teh GOP to serve the interests of a numerically small but very noisily ideological group of malcontents from within the party. I have taken the time to come up with links to articles and excerpts of what is contained within so as to provide FReepers with some of the connections which exist between various individuals and groups within the California Republican Party, as well as the beliefs espoused by each.When reviewing these excerpts...

Software executive Stuart Vance is an opponent of the attempt to recall California Governor Gray Davis (D). Vance thinks he has an ingenious way to derail the recall election: make it an absolute impossibility to conduct with a list of recall replacement candidates so long that none of the approved voting machines could handle a ballot of that size. Think of it as "a denial-of-service attack on the recall," says Vance, referring to the term when Internet servers get so swamped with activity that they crash because of the overload. He wants more than 1,000 people to run in the...