Free Republic

On Tuesday I got an e-mail from Kay Day, who is a Tea Party organizer in the Mobile, Alabama area, informing me that Mr. Hilmar von Campe had passed away on Monday night, June 18th, after suffering a massive heart attack on June 10th. Mr. von Campe, an 87-year-old native of Germany, naturalized American citizen and resident of Fairhope, Alabama, was a national American treasure who had a burden to warn this country of the danger we are in of repeating history—of walking the same path to totalitarianism that Germany walked. As he wrote in the foreword of his excellent,...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - State water regulators fined one of the world's largest cheese factories $4 million for illegally flushing waste on Merced County fields for nearly three years, creating a stink for neighbors and polluting water. The action Wednesday against Hilmar Cheese Co. by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board occurred the same day the company's co-owner, Chuck Ahlem, resigned as the state's undersecretary of agriculture, saying he needed to tend to wastewater issues. The penalty is for just less than three years of daily water pollution violations since January 2002. But it follows a record of nearly...

HILMAR, Merced County - For more than a decade, California water-quality enforcers have given the world's largest cheese factory a free ride, sparing the politically connected company millions of dollars in required sewage treatment and allowing it to foul local water supplies and the air of nearby neighborhoods. Every day, Hilmar Cheese Co. makes a million pounds of cheddar, Colby, mozzarella and Monterey Jack at its sprawling factory south of Turlock and dumps an average 700,000 gallons of putrid waste onto nearby land leased from company owners and supplying dairies. And virtually every day for the past 16 years, state...