Free Republic

**SNIP** In sum, at the 11th hour of a two-year reelection effort, a cabal arbitrarily decided that Biden might well lose the Democrats the White House and the Congress. So they reversed course, now claiming his dementia was so acute as to destroy their November prospects. But, mysteriously, his decline was not severe enough to imperil the American people, whom Biden must continue to lead until January 20, 2025. Furthermore, the bosses’ replacement choice, Harris, had entered no primary. She never won a single delegate. Harris also never captured a single delegate in her first and only presidential run back...

Well, I'm just full of questions this week! This one should be pretty easy: Are there any brands of automotive aftermarket power steering pumps that FReepers have had good luck with? "Good luck" in this case means proper operation and no leaks for over 50k miles, preferably over 100k miles. Slight difficulties in installation, I can overcome, as I do most minor repair work on my cars myself. And I've studied vids and forums when it comes to instructions on bleeding the steering system hydraulics, things to watch out for during installation, and so on.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – At least two people were killed and three more injured after a Russian missile strike on infrastructure in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, said Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said Saturday. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials confirmed that the death toll following a Russian strike Friday on the city of Mykolaiv, had risen to four. A child was among the victims, said the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Sienkevych.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that he “can’t argue” with claims that President Joe Biden is sticking around despite everyone but him and First Lady Jill Biden knowing that he can’t win the 2024 election because Jill Biden wants to be able to hold on to power. After comedian Larry Wilmore stated that former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s speech at this week’s Republican National Convention was one where her head was saying the opposite of what her mouth was saying, particularly when she was urging people to vote for 2024 Republican presidential candidate former...

Big Tech consumes more than many countries.. Tech giants Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh each of electricity during 2023, surpassing the consumption of more than 100 countries, new research has claimed. Analysis by Michael Thomas, shared on X, claims both Google and Microsoft consumed the same amount of energy as Azerbaijan, which has an estimated GDP of $78.7 billion. Google’s 2023 revenue stood at $307.4 billion, and Microsoft’s at $211.9 billion. The massive energy usage underscores the substantial environmental impact of these companies. But it also serves as a reminder of their sheer scale, and the positive impact...

More than a quarter million people in and around Houston remained without power as of Monday after Hurricane Beryl hit the city last week — a crisis that has sparked political pressure from both sides of the aisle and drawn new attention to Texas’s troubled grid. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is demanding answers from the state’s biggest power utility over what went wrong in the storm, which led to blackouts for nearly 3 million people across Southeast Texas for days. He has given CenterPoint until the end of the month to offer an explanation amid a broad lack of response...

USAID boss Samantha Power has some news for Americans. Another $100 million for terrorists. Today, Administrator Samantha Power announced that the United States, through USAID, will provide an additional $100 million in critical humanitarian assistance for Palestinians in dire need throughout Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Critical and dire need. So critical and so dire that we’ve been lied to and told that all the Islamic terrorists and their supporters have been starving to death for 8 months. And yet somehow it never actually seems to happen, Meanwhile, every Hamas terrorist leader is morbidly obese. Biden announced $100 million in...

Fair Oaks Ranch residents may want to brace themselves for a couple of sweaty evenings and place those backup batteries in their alarm clocks. CPS Energy is planning to cut power to some 1,300 homes in the Texas Hill Country town twice next week. The shutdowns will run from 11 p.m. until 5 a.m. Monday, July 15, and Wednesday, July 17. According to a somewhat vague statement from the San Antonio power supplier, the planned outage will accompany “scheduled maintenance improvements” in Fair Oaks Ranch which is slated to “improve the electric reliability in the area.” The planned outage is...

After five decades of inaction, the Food and Drug Administration revoked the authorization of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food on July 3, 2024. The additive bromine, used to stabilize fruit flavorings in beverages and sodas, has toxic effects and has already been banned in many places, including California, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. What was the agency’s excuse for its 50 years in limbo? The FDA insisted it was “waiting for more safety data.” Right. Consumer advocates called the FDA’s ban on brominated vegetable oil in food “a victory for public health.” Still, digging deeper, it is indisputable...

CenterPoint is a $19 billion, for-profit corporation granted a monopoly over a hundred years ago to manage and maintain the transmission and distribution of electricity across the Houston region. This regulated utility failed to deliver power to 85% of its customers during the height of a mild hurricane. In a perfect world, the Public Utility Commission would have ensured CenterPoint maintained a grid resilient enough to withstand a stronger storm. Instead, elected officials are asking the wrong questions about the emergency response. “I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews...

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has come under fire on social media over his response to Hurricane Beryl, which crashed into the southeastern United States on Monday as a Category 1 hurricane leaving six dead in Texas, and one in Louisiana, according to The Associated Press. The storm caused widespread damage across Texas with the Houston area, where millions of people lost power, particularly badly affected. As of Tuesday just under 1.7 million CenterPoint customers remained without power according to The Houston Chronicle. Abbott is currently on an economic development tour of Asia and was in South Korea on Monday when...

Tropical Storm Beryl is making a slow, ruinous passage out of Houston, where it is flooding highways and knocking out power lines. As of 3 p.m. local time Monday, as the eye of the storm moved over the western Houston suburbs, more than 2.7 million Texans were without power, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us. Much of the already flood-prone city has experienced 5 to 8 inches of rain, with some particularly unlucky neighborhoods experiencing more than 10, according to Harris County’s Flood Warning System. Homes in Houston’s lower-income northeast have flooded, one nonprofit told The Hill, as have many of...

A real-life Shakespearian drama is unfolding as the world watches First Lady Jill Biden and Hunter Biden desperately cling to power through President Joe Biden despite the doom his obvious declining mental capacity spells for the country. In an unbelievable move, the First Lady has made it perfectly clear that her husband will not be removed from the presidential campaign. In a Vogue Magazine cover released Monday, the magazine features her, not her husband, with the tagline: “We Will Determine Our Future.” The cover image is Jill in an all-white Ralph Lauren power suit dress, staring “stoically” at something out...

Federal prosecutors said they are willing to disclose whether they used a controversial surveillance program to foil a Florida neo-Nazi leader’s alleged plot to attack Baltimore’s power grid last year, but will only do so in secret, during a classified meeting with the judge handling the case. Government lawyers refused Thursday to disclose publicly whether they used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to build the case against the accused plotter, Brandon C. Russell, but agreed to a private meeting with Senior U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar where they will provide more information. Russell’s defense team remains...

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.” At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for...

It's been pretty interesting watching the carefully worded but dire warnings coming out about just how tenuous the future of reliable power is in the Empire State. On June 6, the folks who manage and operate the state's electrical grid, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), issued their 2024 Power Trends Report. One of the first things that should have jumped out at Green Gov Kathy Hochul and the climate cultists in the state legislature should have been the #mathz. That alone would have given a rational person pause, but who are we talking about, right? There's only about...

The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision. Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland. The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while...

Pelosi, Schiff, and Biden have politicized a career intelligence community position by demanding the removal of a national security professional.Hours after President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address promising to bring unity and healing to the country, his administration began a politically charged attack on a highly respected, newly appointed career intelligence official over fears he would be insufficiently loyal to Democratic partisans. The attempted purge has thus far followed the playbook publicly laid out by top Democrats and their left-wing media enablers. In a stunning violation of precedent, Biden’s National Security Agency (NSA) placed General Counsel Michael J. Ellis...

Authorities say gunfire was the cause of a fire Monday at a North Carolina power station that resulted in 730 customers to lose electricity. Emergency crews responded to the problem as a fire and equipment failure on Duke Energy’s power distribution grid, which resulted in customers in the Durham area [losing power], according to the Associated Press. The following day, the Durham Police Department responded to a call about damaged power equipment and was told the damage was the result of gunfire in the past week.

A new study by a state government has determined that the many new regulations of the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could lead to power blackouts that will impact millions of American citizens. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study, conducted in May, was carried out by the firm Always On Energy Research, on behalf of the state government of North Dakota. The report concluded that the EPA’s most recently-implemented regulations are not technologically feasible and will only lead to the forced retirement of coal power generation units. Coal and other more reliable forms of energy will be...