Free Republic

So, one of Planned Parenthood’s Northwest affiliates is looking for a nurse practitioner or certified nurse midwife to provider “reproductive health services,” including chemical or “medication” abortions, to a ‘broad-based population” in Vancouver, Washington, and Salem, Bend, and Milwaukie, Oregon. Rarely do stories come along that capture so many of the hot trends, but the fear is that this may only be the first. Doctors quitting the abortion business leading to a national shortage of abortionists. Check. The industry looks to non-physicians to fill in the shortage. Check. Using chemical abortions to bring abortion to more lightly staffed, under-equipped offices....

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

**SNIP** Bourbon’s popularity has surged ever since the amber liquor became a star of Mad Men. Magazines such as GQ and Bon Appétit have devoted pages to articles on bourbon cocktails. The Manhattan and Old Fashioned have become fashionable again. President Barack Obama recently proposed a “Bourbon Summit” with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. “Whiskey has gone away from being seen as an old man drink,” says Mahesh Patel, a structural engineer who owns 4,000 bottles of whiskey and sponsors an annual tasting conference in Las Vegas. Sales of bourbon are growing at a dizzying rate. Domestic sales of Kentucky-made bourbon...

If you of a certain age, you may remember the great American heyday of kids’ breakfast cereals. It was a glorious time — a time when supermarket aisles as long as basketball courts teemed with boxes of sugary goodness and when we were all free to buy Count Chocula cereal every day of the year.Those days are long gone. Still, since 2010, Americans have at least been able to look forward to seasonal distribution of Count Chocula cereal — and Franken-Berry, and Boo-Berry — during the September and October run-up to Halloween.Now, even this tradition is imperiled because some hipster...

[SNIP] All of which brings us to the latest popular lament among pundits, politicians, and even some in the business world: the perceived lack of engineers and/or ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. President Obama has said “We need more engineers,” so has Hillary Clinton, and then Lockheed Martin executive Stephanie Hill recently stated that “we’ll lose” if we don’t produce at least 1 million more ‘STEM’ grads. About all the handwringing, readers can relax. Indeed, there’s nothing to this story or alleged shortage. Price signals work. They always do, and they do because one of the underlying purposes...

Obamacare, as its advocates increasingly point out, has succeeded in expanding the number of Americans with insurance. Even though this achievement came at enormous cost, still leaves millions of Americans uninsured, and dumped millions more into Medicaid, this is still one of the few “successes” that the health-care law can claim. However, health insurance and access to health care are not the same thing. And evidence is growing that Obamacare is likely to make it harder for us to see a doctor or otherwise obtain care. Of course, we already know that the limited network of physicians available through most...

Having traveled to well over 100 countries, I have seen some pretty shocking signs of poverty around the world.In parts of Asia, it’s not uncommon for parents in poor villages to sell their children for bags of rice… or for children to be stolen outright and sold as orphans to unsuspecting foreigners.In Africa, I’ve seen people who are so destitute they intentionally mangle and gash their own bodies just to give themselves good cause to shock foreign tourists into donations.But I’d have to rank poverty in Cuba as the most extreme.Going to Cuba is like going back in time....

Don’t panic. Your prices will probably go up because the free market is awesome and capable of signaling where it needs the most bacon when, and to whom it is most valuable, so there won’t be full bacon stoppage. Or, bacon lines. Though if you were going to queue up for something, certainly that’d be it. 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...

One of the primary narratives associated with comprehensive immigration reform has nothing to do with the millions of low-skill workers that would be granted an opportunity to compete against Americans for jobs. As a letter sent to the president and Congressional leaders signed by more than 100 chief executives of major tech companies and trade associations indicates, there is a shortage of highly-skilled American labor that drives reform as well. Yet as The Atlantic’s Michael S. Teitelbaum reveals, that narrative is a lie.“A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations...

Amnesty is being driven, among others, by big businesses claiming they cannot hire enough high-tech professionals. These are (or posture as) major donors to members of Congress. So these businesses are twisting arms on Capitol Hill. The compromise is that Democrats get amnesty for illegal aliens if business gets more high-tech foreign workers. However, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech professionals in the USA. Businesses do not need immigration reform. On August 30, 2013, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published a review of this question in its journal Spectrum, titled "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth."...

Five years ago this month, two pilots aboard Colgan Air Flight 3407 made a series of fatal errors as they descended near Buffalo, N.Y. The plane spluttered in mid-air, tilting unnaturally, then made a terrible grinding sound as it fell near-vertical from the sky. It hit a house, exploding loudly; neighbors could see the flames from blocks away. All 49 people aboard the flight perished, as did one occupant of 6038 Long Street, which was totally destroyed. Tragedies trigger calls for action. Unfortunately, such pleas are often more emotional than rational, resulting in bad policy. The legislation passed in response...

Madison — In a bit of a political mismatch Thursday, Republican Gov. Scott Walker will meet with President Barack Obama, while Walker's opponent will skip the chance to be seen with the nation's highest-ranking Democrat. Walker plans to greet Obama at the airport Thursday and talk to him about the state's propane shortage. Walker isn't attending the event Obama is headlining at a GE plant in Waukesha as he touts themes he hit in Tuesday's State of the Union address. Mary Burke, the Democrat challenging Walker in the Nov. 4 election, will not be at the airport or the Waukesha...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday it is working with the three manufacturers of intravenous saline solutions commonly used to hydrate hospital patients to address a shortage caused by a spike in demand. To cope with the shortage, healthcare providers are using substitute products such as oral hydration fluids or smaller IV saline bags with slower drip rates when appropriate, said Bona Benjamin, director of medication use quality improvement for the American Society of Health System Pharmacists. "We have heard from our members all over the country that the shortage is serious," Benjamin said. "People are able...

Let me tell you why you can't find any .22 ammo. Yes, people are buying it and selling it online. Yes, people are hoarding it. But these alone are not enough to make the supply at gun stores as low as they've been. The manufacturers are cranking out .22 as fast they can. 24/7. Wide open. Some are still backlogged for over a year. Where is it going? Why isn't it reaching the smaller stores like it used to? Here's the secret: IT IS.You see, when your local gun dealer tells you he only got a few boxes of .22,...

Obamacare is intensifying the doctor shortage – though not in ways that were anticipated. Everybody seems to have expected that Obamacare would sign up some 30 million people who don’t have health insurance, and they would overwhelm doctors’ offices. But these people – especially the young and healthy whose sky-high Obamacare premiums were supposed to finance everybody else’s subsidies – have stayed away. They know a bad deal when they see one. Although the young and healthy aren’t going for Obamacare, the doctor shortage is intensifying, because government intervention generally is making it more expensive and difficult for doctors to...

<p>Here’s a sobering thought for you. A global wine shortage may be around the corner.</p> <p>According to a report released this week by Morgan Stanley Research, there was a global undersupply of about 300 million cases of wine in 2012, the largest deficit recorded in almost 50 years.</p>

ObamaCare 2016: Happy Yet? The website problems were finally solved. But the doctor shortage is a nightmare. By Bradley Allen Oct. 22, 2013 7:04 p.m. ET Three years after the disastrous launch of the Affordable Care Act, most of the website troubles finally have been ironed out. People are now able to log on to the government's ACA website and to most of the state health-insurance exchanges. The public has grudgingly come to accept higher insurance premiums, new taxes and increases in part-time workers who were formerly full-time. But Americans are irate anyway—because now they're seeing the health-care law's destructive...

The US Congress, entrenched in a titanic budget battle, managed to come together Thursday to pass legislation that prevents a market shortage of helium. In a rare show of consensus between feuding Democrats and Republicans, the Senate unanimously passed a bill approved earlier by the House of Representatives that cancels closure of the national helium reserve. The closure had been planned for October 7, but manufacturers and the medical industry had expressed concern that the move would hurt them. The Federal Helium Program, operated under the Bureau of Land Management, supplies some 42 percent of the lighter-than-air gas used in...

<p>When you're running low on toilet paper and getting desperate, what do you do?</p> <p>If you're the Venezuelan government, you take over a toilet paper factory.</p> <p>On Saturday, Vice President Jorge Arreaza announced the "temporary occupation" of the Paper Manufacturing Company's plant in the state of Aragua. The aim, he explained, is to review the "production, marketing and distribution (of) toilet paper."</p>

There were chaotic scenes in Haifa, where an estimated four thousand people lined up from 6am outside the city's sports arena which had been designated as a main regional distribution centre after riots had broken out at small collecting points the day before.