Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said that “Energy would be cheaper if we just built a bunch of coal plants,” but “decarbonization is a trade-off.” After Klein said that Texas builds tons of green energy, in part due to its regulatory structure, writer Andrew Sullivan said, “But why aren’t you producing energy from fossils and green energy?” Klein answered, “Because I think climate change is a problem.” And “if you build a lot of coal plants, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., revealed on Sunday that he is being placed on the House Republican Steering Committee in exchange for supporting Kevin McCarthy for House speaker. Donalds revealed the new appointment during a Sunday appearance on "Sunday Morning Futures" with Maria Bartiromo. His appearance followed an epic 15-ballot election for McCarthy to become House speaker. To become speaker, McCarthy had to make concessions to a small group of hardliners who refused to support him until he yielded to their demands. "I’m frankly just happy that it’s all over with, and that we got something transformational and sound for the...

... 75,000 “excess deaths” during that period, 17,000 more than the number officially attributed to covid-19, the disease the virus causes. While several experts said some of the excess deaths in the analysis were almost certainly unrecognized fatalities from covid-19, the review suggests that many patients suffering from serious conditions died as a result of delaying or not seeking care as the outbreak progressed and swamped some hospitals. Normally, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. But in the early months of the pandemic, some hospital departments were nearly devoid of the heart, cancer, stroke...

House Speaker John Boehner is playing a heroic role right now. In his efforts to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, Boehner is aggressively taking on President Obama's leadership ineptitude on the economy. In essence, Boehner is pushing a Republican policy to wrap up a debt-limitation bill and extend the Bush tax cuts in one fell swoop before the election -- and before all the last-minute, crisis-oriented political machinations that would come in a lame-duck Congress, threatening another credit downgrade and leading to a business-hiring freeze and plunging stock market, all of which happened last year. Tax-cut certainty is...

Ancient trade-off may explain why humans get HIV 19:00 21 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi A protein that protected our human ancestors against a virus that ravaged other primates may now be responsible for our susceptibility to HIV, a new study suggests. The discovery could help scientists predict which viruses found in other species are most likely to cross over and lethally infect humans. The idea that early humans had an immune system that differed from other primates first came about after biologists sequenced the chimp genome. The chimp sequence contains 130 copies of a virus called Pan...

Ending AMT not worth tradeoff Peter A. Brown Ideas that are attractive on paper sometimes turn out not to be worth the risks in the real world. That's because the premise on which the proposals are based is badly flawed. That's the case with the recommendations of the president's tax-reform panel. In its obsession to eliminate the alternative minimum tax, it has come up with some very questionable tradeoffs. The suggested changes, if implemented as a unit, might well be good for the country. After all, who doesn't favor a simpler, fairer tax system that provides the right incentives for...