Free Republic

We use alcohol in meat marinades all the time, but what if your food already had the taste without the wait? The founders of Templeton Rye Distillery in Templeton, Iowa are trying to do just that by creating pork that tastes like their famous whiskey. “We have a little motto here. My dad always told me, ‘Nothing good happens after 12 p.m.’ So, it seems like that’s when this idea was probably thought of – after we had a few drinks,” laughs the distillery’s co-founder, Keith Kerkhoff. He hopes the Templeton Rye Pork Project will be the exception to his...

Last Christmas was one farmer Greg Lear would rather forget. “Yeah, some merry Christmas,” he said of the December 19th call from his farm manager with news that all the sows, or breeding females, were throwing up and many had diarrhea. The sows survived, but within 96 hours “we probably had 500 little pigs that were dead,” said Lear. As fate would have it, the Spencer, Iowa, farm he helps run was next in line to be hit by a virus that’s killed several million piglets across the country in the last 12 months. Rising pork prices have more than...

We previously noted that both beef and pork (courtesy of the affectionately named Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus) prices have been reaching new all time highs on an almost daily basis. It is time to update the chart. Below we show what a world in which the Fed is constantly lamenting the lack of inflation looks like for beef prices...

U.S. Senator Harry Reid recognized nine years ago that connections between his official duties and the lobbying activities of his relatives could lead to ethical questions. In 2003, the Nevada Democrat publicly banned relatives from lobbying him or his staff after newspaper reports showed that Nevada industries and institutions routinely turned to Reid's sons or son-in-law for representation. Now, questions surrounding family ties are flaring again in Nevada around the Senate majority leader. He and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm...

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A virus never before seen in the U.S. has killed millions of baby pigs in less than a year, and with little known about how it spreads or how to stop it, it's threatening pork production and pushing up prices by 10 percent or more.

Republican senator Mike Lee has an op-ed decrying cronyism. But first, he says, the Republicans must purge the unseemly activity from within its "own ranks." "[T]o fix what’s broken in Washington and our economy," Lee writes in National Review Online, "a still-distrusted GOP first must end cronyism in our own ranks. The GOP has to close its branch of the Beltway Favor Bank and truly embrace a free-enterprise economy of, by, and for the people." Lee continues: Impossible? That’s what they said about earmarks. Too radical a change? These are principles we already espouse. Imagine a reformed Republican party seizing...

The European Commission has ordered EU member states to stop holding bilaterals with Russia over the pork trade and has threatened to complain to the World Trade Organization, claiming that a Russian embargo on European pork is unwarranted. EurActiv France reports. According to informed sources, France, Denmark and the Netherlands established bilateral contact with Russia in an attempt to end the embargo on European pork. The embargo, which began in January over concerns of African swine fever in European wild boar, blocks all European pork on sanitary grounds. […] Brussels “called for Europe to speak with one voice, seeing as...

Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid released the following statement today after the U.S. Department of Education approved a grant package through the Department’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) Program worth $3,725,820 for low performing schools in Nevada. “This is terrific news for Nevada and our public schools,” said Senator Reid. “This money is vital for our children as we continue to see budget shortfalls throughout school districts across Nevada. This funding will go a long way to ensure more Nevada students have high quality teachers, to help improve instruction, and to help lift up many low-performing schools.”INFORMATION ON THE...

President Obama was in Michigan last week to sign a 10-year, $1 trillion farm bill. While much of the debate has centered around the spending on food stamps, buried in the 1,000-page plan are many other provisions that are indefensibly bad policy. While some are praising, and others complaining, about slightly rolling back spending on food stamps and eliminating some of the direct payments to "farmers" (who did not actually farm), the bill goes far beyond that. This bill continues special subsidy deals to farmers in every area in the country — from corn and beans to rice and peanuts...

You hear the squeals of the pigs long before reaching a set of long buildings set in rolling hills in southern China. Feeding time produces a frenzy as the animals strain against the railings around their pens. But this is no ordinary farm. Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world's largest centre for the cloning of pigs. The technology involved is not particularly novel - but what is new is the application of mass production. The first shed contains 90 animals in two long rows. They look perfectly normal, as one would expect, but...

While the Obama Administration is still pumping resources and taxpayer money into the implementation of Obamacare, the initial disbursement of pork included in the bill was successfully doled out almost a full two years ago. And the main recipient of taxpayer largess was, once again, the UAW. The Obamacare pork came in the form of a program called the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program or ERRP. $5 billion of taxpayer money was allocated to help pay for healthcare costs to retirees between the age of 55 and 65 . Number one on the union-dominated list of recipients was the UAW, which...

Coburn Releases Annual Wastebook Highlighting Most Egregious Spending of 2013

Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) were finalizing details and hoping to schedule a press conference to unveil the deal, which …

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Chicken from China has officials on alert, including U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) As WCBS 880’s Jim Smith reported Sunday, Schumer said first, the U.S. Department of Agriculture only allowed chickens that had been processed in China to be sold in the U.S. Now, he said the USDA plans to green-light poultry raised and slaughtered in China.

Wild boars look more or less the same in Israel as they do anywhere else: stalky and hairy with big heads, long snouts, and beady eyes. So scientists had no reason to suspect Israeli wild boars were any different than their brothers and sisters roaming the Middle East, from Egypt to Iran... unlike the Near Eastern wild boars in surrounding countries, Israel's wild boars originated in Europe. After a genetic and archaeological analysis, the researchers suggest the wild boars living in Israel are descendants of domesticated pigs brought to Israel starting almost 3,000 years ago by the Philistines and other...

As it turns out, the so-called “clean” Continuing Resolution passed this week to reopen the federal government wasn't so clean after all. Included in the fine print was a $2 billion bailout of a troubled dam project on the Ohio River and a payment of a year's salary to the millionaire widow of the deceased Senator Lautenberg (D-NJ). House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) said she considers such expenditures “a small price to pay for averting a worse calamity. If $2 billion for a dam in Kentucky is what it takes to buy Senator McConnell's vote, so be it. Let's...

There are a number of URLS to look at for the story on the Pork Barrel deal that ended the shutdown. This was a $3 billion project for Illinois and Kentucky (something for Obama and something for Senator McConnell): Politico: Conservatives accuse Mitch McConnell of 'Kentucky kickback' in spending deal Marketwatch 'blog': Debt-ceiling bill funds Kentucky dam project to ire of McConnell foesThere's a little pork in that bill: The 5 most surprising provisions in the debt deal Maybe each of these stories should have their own thread. Or maybe Repbulicans should focus on the fact that the Republican Senate...

Echoing a statement made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed reporters' questions about pork inserted in the debt ceiling bill passed by Congress, CNS News reported Thursday. “What difference does it make? Why are we talking about this? We’re talking about a bill that as I said last night, I’m not asking anybody to vote for this bill on the merits,” she said. **SNIP** “My members have some of the same questions, not certainly in terms of the death penalty to the Lautenberg family, but when you have a CR, it is an...

Buried inside the new stopgap spending bill are several pork project goodies, including nearly quadrupling the maximum price of a dam project on the Ohio River that is turning into a boondoggle — up to nearly $3 billion. The bill also includes $174,000 of taxpayer money being sent to the widow of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg. The death gratuity, which has been paid to widows of other lawmakers in the past, raised hackles since Mr. Lautenberg was a multimillionaire, while the government is $16.7 trillion in debt. But lawmakers did nix one provision that was in an early draft...

To summarize: a state- and taxpayer-subsidized casino opens, files for bankruptcy in under 12 months, reopens... and is criticized for operating in a way that will prevent it from filing for bankruptcy in another 12 months? Alas, while the trend toward a "part-time" society, first exposed here in 2010 and subsequently accepted as gospel even by the slowest, dimmest and most sycophantic corners of the MSM, is nothing new, we had yet to see labor unions - those staunchest supporters of the very same policies that promote the conversion of full-time into part-time workers - lash out against the manifestations...