Free Republic

They laugh at it now — the conversation that set in motion their move to a city that neither of them had ever seen. “What about Sacramento?” Cat Perez asked her wife, Aja Blue. “What about Sacramento?” Blue responded. After a decade of renting in San Francisco and a brief stint in Los Angeles, Blue and Perez became part of a great migration to one of the last affordable urban areas in the state. Drawn by lower housing prices, Bay Area residents are pouring into California’s capital and its surrounding areas, trading a temperate climate for triple-digit summers; hustle-and-bustle for...

...I want to believe in alt power, because sun and wind are free -- just as petroleum is free. It's only the extraction and distribution that cost...

Two federal studies add up the corn fuel's exorbitant cost. The Obama Administration is pushing a big expansion in ethanol, including a mandate to increase the share of the corn-based fuel required in gasoline to 15% from 10%. Apparently no one in the Administration has read a pair of new studies, one from its own EPA, that expose ethanol as a bad deal for consumers with little environmental benefit. The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and...

Clean energy and federal standards are hot topics in the nation's capital these days. One issue tossed around by policy wonks is the possibility of creating a national standard for how much electricity must be obtained from renewable resources. However, any consideration of a federal renewable electricity standard (RES) must start with a basic truth about energy production and usage: Markets talk; mandates shock. Take a look at the federal mandate to add ethanol to gasoline. Most people (except those in Congress) agree it helped lead to last year's global food-price explosion while also degrading the environment. Not to mention...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States has one of the world's most advanced but also most complicated health care systems, plagued by widespread waste and costs that have escalated as the US population ages, experts say. Venturing where others have failed, President Barack Obama is now proposing to spend 634 billion dollars on reforms aimed at expanding health care coverage among the nearly 46 million uninsured Americans. How he should do it -- and whether it should be done at all -- are likely to be the subject of fierce debate. But, in the words of one economist, the system...

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – When you travel from state to state, some differences are readily apparent: the landscape, people's accents, use of the word "dude," you name it. But you can't know what it truly costs to live in a place until you get hit with the whole megillah of taxes.

A new poll released Thursday reveals that a large majority of people – 73 per cent – prefer to watch movies at home on DVD, VHS or pay-per-view. The same poll found that only 22 per cent of people preferred to see movies the old-fashioned way – in a movie theatre. The numbers may provide fodder for those who believe the proliferation of at-home entertainment technologies is permanently changing moviegoing patterns.