Free Republic

Growing up on Southern California’s fault line, I learned to love the tremors that as elementary school children we felt every week. Earthquakes were terrifying and destructive, but each quake also carried an important lesson — the material possessions we traded life’s precious hours for and looked to as a security blanket could be destroyed at any instant. As I write this under a blood red rising moon, smelling acrid smoke with every breath, I’ve begun to ponder the lessons to be learned from living on this fire line that by one estimate this week turned 900,000 Californians into evacuees....

The Heinz-Kerry Water Ballet Tales of the "Botoxed Brahmin" and his bride February 05, 2004, 9:08 a.m. By Jim Geraghty Teresa Heinz, wife of Democratic frontrunner John Kerry, is one of the country's most generous and high-profile environmental philanthropists. She's given hundreds of millions of dollars to green activist groups, research centers, and nongovernmental organizations. But even eight-figure checks can't guarantee that a landowner won't have environmental fights in her own backyard. Literally, in the case of Heinz. Back in 1999, the lawn of Kentucky bluegrass surrounding Heinz's ski lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho was drying out as the region...