Free Republic

The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t responding to claims by Todd Hennis, owner of the Gold King mine in Colorado that the agency coerced him to grant access to his property. Once taking over, of course, EPA’s incompetent attempts to remove debris created a massive 3 million gallon toxic waste spill from the mine. Hennis told the CBS Denver affiliate that unless he allowed the EPA to have access and authority to conduct operations on the site the agency had threatened him with daily fines of $35,000. “When you’re a small guy and you’re having a $35,000-a-day fine accrue against you,...

Earlier this week on Univision, the Spanish-language network’s Maria Elena Salinas interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at River Valley Community College in Claremont, NH. During that interview, Clinton expressed her confidence she could get a Republican-led Congress to pass her $350-billion public college plan with large tax increases on the wealthy.

The sage grouse population has exploded in the last two years, growing by nearly two-thirds from more than 49,000 males in 2013 to more than 80,000 this year. ... This is encouraging news for the bird, and for the people whose lives would be turned upside down by the federal government if it still insists on listing the critter as an endangered species on the brink of extinction. The report considered the population across the bird’s 11-state habitat, with specific news on the growth in Colorado numbers ... The report falls on the heels of a gloom and doom forecast...

The most powerful woman in California isn’t a celebrity, she’s not even someone you often see on TV. That’s because the most powerful woman in California is Mary Nichols, head of the state’s Air Resources Board. Rules set by Nichols’ agency are among the strictest environmental laws in the nation. Nichols’ goal is for every new car sold in California by the year 2030 to be zero- or almost-zero-emissions, a quest which is taking a toll on automakers selling these efficient vehicles. September will be the biggest test for the 70-year-old Nichols’ grand plans. That’s when her mandate of having...

It’s a progressive paradise.Public employees get 30 vacation days a year. Anyone who works over eight hours in a day gets paid time-and-a-half. Employees have strong rights.The minimum wage is high: 77 percent of the median wage.Environmental regulations are settled beyond the pressure of local economic interests. The forests and mountains are pristine destinations for ecotourism.Energy costs are kept high, pushing consumption down to a level deemed “socially beneficial”. Utilities have strong public backing and provide jobs to thousands.Union jobs in shipping are protected from outsourcing to cut-rate foreign competitors.The social safety net is buoyant and provides a solid working-class standard...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – School children who qualify for free and reduced lunches can receive free summer meals at thousands of locations throughout New York. Last year, almost 360,000 children participated in the summer meals program statewide, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office. Persons with disabilities, also can receive free nutritious meals and snacks at the summer meals sites. To find a free meal site near you, use this website. You can search the entire nation by clicking on "find sites."

For the past 11 years, Chief Executive magazine has been polling hundreds of CEOs from across the nation and evaluating state budgetary and economic growth metrics to determine the best and worst states for business. And for the 11th straight year, California has come in dead last. Texas repeated as the best state for business, aided by its lack of corporate or personal income taxes, and Florida, also without an individual income tax, once again finished runner-up. Rounding out the bottom five of the list were New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which remained unchanged from last year’s survey....

Congressional Republicans are poised to deal a sharp blow to their traditional allies in the business community by allowing the federal Export-Import Bank to go out of business at the end of the month. But it may only be temporary. The 81-year-old bank is a little-known federal agency created during the Depression that makes and guarantees loans to help overseas buyers purchase U.S. products, from airplanes to bridges to baby clothes. Over the past year it’s also become a surprising test of GOP purity, as tea party-backed lawmakers and outside conservative groups have denounced the bank as crony capitalism and...

The payments couldn’t help but catch the attention of the top procurement official at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Employees in the purchasing department of a VA hospital in the Bronx had used government purchase cards like credit cards at least 2,000 times to buy prosthetic legs and arms for veterans. Each time they swiped the cards, it was for $24,999. That was precisely one dollar below VA’s charging limit for purchase cards. When word reached Congress about the $54,435,743 worth of prosthetics bought under such odd circumstances over two years — the subject of an inspector general investigation announced...

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), part of the Interior Department, will decide by September 30 whether to list the greater sage-grouse as an endangered or threatened species under the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA).The stakes are huge: Greater sage-grouse (or prairie chicken) habitat covers 165 million acres across 11 western states, but that is only half of what it used to be, the federal government says. At one time, the greater sage-grouse population likely numbered in the millions, but it is now estimated to be in the 200,000 to 500,000 range.The enormous sage grouse habitat also is home to...

The rash of tough pro-vaccine bills that infected state legislatures after the Disneyland measles outbreak has largely faded, and based on the uproar in California, it’s not hard to see why. The state capitol has been flooded off and on for months with parental-choice advocates drawing thousands for protests against Senate Bill 277, which would eliminate personal belief or religious exemptions and require all children without a medical exemption to be vaccinated before entering public school. And the outcry has only grown louder as the bill nears passage, spreading beyond the issue of vaccination safety and morphing into a full-blown...

They were created almost 300 years ago by Fortnum & Mason as a pocket-sized snack for aristocrats travelling by horse-drawn carriage. But now the scotch egg has been labelled a junk food and is being removed from children's lunch boxes by schoolteachers. The traditional dish – a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and coated in breadcrumbs – is seen as too unhealthy to be part of a balanced diet at Cherry Tree Primary School in Colchester. The school has taken the unusual step of asking teachers to look through pupils' lunch boxes and remove items that are deemed inappropriate....

The war has been waged on several fronts for nearly a decade, and the aggressors are poised to declare victory over the wounded U.S. coal industry. After powering the Industrial Revolution and helping to turn the U.S. into the world’s top economic power, coal now seems to be drowning in what environmentalists call a “deadly cocktail” — a rabid, politically potent anti-fossil fuels movement, the rise of cheap, abundant, relatively clean domestic natural gas and an Obama administration that freely admits it wants to decrease coal use in America through a host of new rules. That near-perfect storm is taking...

The bill has arrived for all of President Obama's initiatives, from Obamacare to Dodd-Frank banking regulations to school lunches, and state and local governments are choking on the costs and paperwork mandated to comply with new laws, according to a new analysis. The tab: $35 billion in unfunded regulatory costs and at least 75 million hours of paperwork, according to American Action Forum, the center-right policy institute headed by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Obamacare is the biggest pain to state and local governments. The report said that just one element of the health "reform" costs states 27.1...

We currently have a Leftist campaigning nationally for president as an acknowledged Socialist and you would think that the nation’s left would now admit to the obvious – that he and they are socialists. But this isn’t the case, converse with them even a short time and you will find that they will fight you tooth and nail to deny the obvious. Numerous times Bernie Sanders has ‘outed’ himself as a socialist on the national stage, and yet leftists all over the nation deny that he’s (and they by extension) are Socialists. Go ahead and look up the definition of...

I have disturbing news to share with you from our federal government. The USDA wants Americans to remove chocolate and marshmallows and fire from our summertime s’mores. Instead—the USDA is suggesting we load up the graham crackers with strawberries and low-fat yogurt. That’s not a s’more. That’s a fruit salad with an oversized graham cracker crouton. Over the past six years the Obama administration has waged a War of Culinary Aggression against lard-loving Americans. …

Why would a country at war with islamic terrorists, indiscriminately import thousands of potential problems? Why would that SAME country also allow a porous, if not inviting, border for 'potentially hostile refugees' on the southern border while keeping the northern border hypersecure from people of a historical alliance? You can't solve a problem till there IS a problem, and it's way easier to solve if you created the problem. Remember Rahm, “never let a serious crises go to waste” Fast & furious and the porous southern border/importation of muslim refugees. It seems to be the same strategy of creating a...

Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, will announce today that he will seek the GOP nomination for president in 2016, ABC News has learned. ABC News' Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos will sit down for an exclusive interview with Santorum this afternoon. Santorum, 57, is set to reveal his presidential intentions at an event today in Cabot, Pa., near his childhood home. It will be his second run for the White House, almost four years after he won primaries and caucuses in 11 states and finished second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican...

Black freedom & opportunity in America has always required the very federal intervention the right wants to destroy The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class. The New York Times reported yesterday that “roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs.” Because Black people hold a disproportionate number of government jobs, cutbacks that affect everyone...

Back in 2009, when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act, many liberal Democrats felt it did not go far enough — that it should be even more sweeping, even more expansive, even more costly. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. "The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future," Harkin told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in December 2009. "But if we don't have the starter home, we're...