Free Republic

Knittnmom collapsed Saturday evening with what she thought were severe back spasms. The pain was bad enough she was screaming, and my mother NEVER screams! We took her to the hospital, where a CAT scan revealed bleeding from her descending aorta. More scans showed an aneurysm right where the aorta connects to the heart, and some kind of problem with one of her heart valves. While they were trying to get the different teams coordinated so they could do surgery, she suffered a minor stroke. Surgery is being put off while they figure out what needs done and in what...

On a recent Thursday, a group of farmers from Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska hosted a remote agriculture happy hour. There were a few dozen attendees, and nearly everyone was wearing a cowboy hat. In total, they farm more than 30,000 acres of cropland, most of it planted in soy, corn, or cotton destined for the global commodity market. The happy hour started with presentations about integrating livestock into cropping systems, but then things took a surprising turn: farmers began to discuss how they are feeding their families and communities. “Normally, between me and the consumer there is a gigantic divide...

This winter semester, more UW-Madison students are bundled up inside, counting on app-based delivery robots to feed their appetites. The maker Starship launched a fleet of thirty self-navigating campus food carriers in November. Since then, Peter Testory, the university’s director of dining, said orders have jumped more than 700 percent. Testory said there’s also a correlation between bad winter weather and service use. When the order comes in with a “ding,” dining staff prepare the food at a campus kitchen. Runners or, oftentimes, kitchen managers take the food to the delivery bots parked outside. Once runners close the lids, the...

Dane County officials declared a state of emergency Tuesday morning after rain overnight Monday broke a state record for heaviest amount to fall in a 24-hour period, according to Dane County Emergency Management. The National Weather Service estimates that as much as 13 inches of rain has fallen in parts of western Dane County on Monday and Tuesday. The official state record for rainfall in a 24-hour period is 11.72 inches of rain, which occurred northeast of Mellen in northern Wisconsin on June 24, 1946. The National Weather Service has received numerous reports of rainfall from western Dane County that...

A bunch of teens in Florida skipped school and went to Tallahassee to demand more of the same gun control that failed to save their classmates. Like petulant two year-olds, they whined and screamed when they weren’t given what they want when they want it.* In short, they failed their civics class. OK, kids. Here’s the down and dirty on what your teachers should have taught you about how the legislative process works… David! Take the Tide Pod out of your mouth! First, you were likely told (if told anything) that a citizen tells a legislator what he wants, the...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A new state report says scores of 17-year-olds voted illegally in nearly 30 Wisconsin counties during last spring's presidential primary. The Wisconsin Elections Commission report examined referrals municipal clerks made to prosecutors following the 2016 spring primary and general elections. The referrals included at least 60 cases of 17-year-olds voting in the April primary in 29 counties. The report doesn't track whether charges were filed. The report notes messages were spreading on social media during the primary season that 17-year-olds were eligible to vote if they turned 18 by the November election. That's not the case...

If you have been following this blog since last year, you know I have been saying Trump was playing 3D chess against 2D opponents. And by that I meant Trump was using powerful persuasion techniques while the rest of the field was flailing away with facts, reason, policy details, and other things that don’t change anyone’s mind. Then, in late spring, at about the time that Bernie Sanders’ flamed out, Clinton ascended to the 3D playing field and stayed there, thanks to help – I assume – from one or more weapons-grade behavioral psychologists who joined the cause. For the...

Some of you watched with amusement as I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety. What you might not know is that I was completely serious. I was getting a lot of direct and indirect death threats for writing about Trump’s powers of persuasion, and I made all of that go away by endorsing Clinton. People don’t care why I am on their side. They only care that I am. You might have found it funny that I endorsed Clinton for my personal safety. But it was only funny by coincidence. I did it for personal safety, and apparently it...

On average, Democrats (that’s my team*) use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime. On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense. If you don’t believe me, you can check the statistics on the Internet that don’t exist. At least I couldn’t find any that looked credible. But we do know that race and poverty are correlated. And we know that poverty and crime are correlated. And we know that race and political affiliation are correlated. Therefore, my team (Clinton) is more likely to use guns to shoot innocent people, whereas the other team (Trump) is...

TOWN OF WESTFIELD, Wis. - A Sauk County man and woman face multiple charges in connection with the death of hundreds of farm animals discovered in early March, the sheriff’s office said. A criminal complaint filed in Sauk County court Monday said 22-year-old Ashley Grage is facing 14 counts of mistreatment of animals in connection with the deaths of several hundred chickens, about 40 pigs and several dozen rabbits on a farm where she lived with her boyfriend. According to the complaint, Grage had been living with 27-year-old Bradley Kruse on a farm at S7004 Highway 23 where the animals...

A new cancer treatment strategy is on the horizon that experts say could be a game-changer and spare patients the extreme side effects of existing options such as chemotherapy. Chemotherapy and other current cancer treatments are brutal, scorched-earth affairs that work because cancer cells are slightly - but not much - more susceptible to the havoc they wreak than the rest of the body. Their side effects are legion, and in many cases horrifying – from hair loss and internal bleeding to chronic nausea and even death. But last week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time...

Stirring myself to the right words after One of Those Tragedies always takes a while. First, there’s the dragged-down feeling of “here we go again.” The antis rush gleefully on stage to perform their blood dances and once again, decent people need to respond to them, if for no other reason than to keep the record straight. We can’t even stop to speak with decency and sympathy for the horrible losses because to speak at all is to become political. And that’s obscene. Mass murders, whether by bomb or knife or vehicle or poison, are horrific individual tragedies. But mass...

MADISON, Wis. - A person in Dane County is being monitored for possible Ebola symptoms, public health officials said Wednesday. Public Health Madison & Dane County spokeswoman Amy Vieth said any travelers from West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been monitored as a policy since last fall. Approximately 30 people who traveled from those countries and returned to Dane County have been monitored by PHMDC, which means the agency checked in with those travelers daily to see if they were exhibiting symptoms of Ebola. Meriter Hospital officials told News 3 Wednesday afternoon that a person was...

It’s a mystery why one person can be poor but still be proud, independent, and reasonably content while the guy next door is only content to slide into a swamp of misery, blame, slovenliness, dependence, and cigarette smoke. I agree that Alchemist summed things up pretty well by observing, “Poor is a state of finance. Poverty is a state of mind.” But why? Entire tomes have been written about poverty, of course. How soul-crushing it is. How it leads to crime. How it’s everybody’s fault except the individuals who are in that state. How it’s increasingly becoming institutionalized among entire...

Artist sends the National Spy Agency a super-encrypted “mixtape.” So why would Huerta create a mixtape no one else could open? Well for one, there’s no worry that someday he’ll regret sending our nation’s protectors a whole bunch of mushy love songs that will sound really, really cheesy 10 years from now. Oh, and there’s this, which he posted on his Medium blog: “The NSA can read my stupid Facebook updates but without my consent it will never be able to listen to my kick-ass mix tape, even if it’s sitting right in front of them.” ------(Snip)------ So what would...

When I'm in a, shall we say, mellow mood with friends, I can occasionally launch into accounts of politics in seventeenth-century England. This usually results in incredulous stares, followed by, "Oh, so sorry. Fascinating story, I'm sure. But it's really just hours past my bedtime." It's a shame anybody should feel that way, though. Because even in the hands of a dreary lecturer and deadly bore (um, not saying I am one), the story of seventeenth-century England is one of riotously awful chaos -- and the birth of modern freedom. Sit down. Have another drink. Let's talk about it.

MADISON, Wis. - The city of Madison may be called on to shelter between 150 to 250 unaccompanied and undocumented children who’ve come into the country through the Mexican border. Mayor Paul Soglin told News 3 the city is working with several community organizations to find a facility to shelter the children. The city is looking for a facility of at least 90,000 square feet, like unused grocery stores. The federal Department of Health and Human Services is asking all cities with more than 200,000 people to consider hosting children. All expenses would be paid by the federal government. Soglin...

NOTE: The following document was found in the ruins of the Mount Weather complex in the year C.E. 2715 and has been in the keeping of the staff of the Interglobal History Museum since then. Although our scholars and scientists are still analyzing this material, it is believed to date from the era of Malia Rodham-Bloomberg (reigned C.E. 2044-2067) or her successor Mitt Kennedy Bush (reigned C.E. 2067-?). Below is our translation. -------------------- REPORT TO THE NATION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GUN CONTROL By the Blue-Ribbon Panel on the Current Crisis BACKGROUND: Following the Sunnyside Nursery School Massacre and similar...

CROMAGNUM ARMS INTERNATIONAL(CAI) ASSAULT ROCK-TACTICAL MODEL The assault rock is back. These have been flying off the shelf since Cain first took the tactical advantage against Abel. Get this low speed, high drag assault rock while you still can. This is next on Dianne Feinstein's list. NOW IN EXTRA TACTICAL BLACK! Features: -enhanced grip texture -easily concealable -can be thrown as fast as you can swing your arm -low tech tactical black spray paint ALL PROFIT WILL BE DONATED TO NRA-ILA

Everybody — everyblogger — is supposed to make some comment on Obama’s anti-gun announcement today. I’ve been thinking about it and here’s mine: I don’t care. It doesn’t matter whether he called for outright confication (he didn’t; not yet) or whether he actually wussed out under “conservative” pressure. (H/T D for the link even if I don’t buy its nice, hopeful content.) Yeah, it kinda ticks me off that the Washington Post, which surely knows better, calls some of Obama’s most facile propaganda (page two of this Post artitorial) a “Constitutional argument.” Constitutional argument my Aunt Fanny; Obama’s remarks about...