Free Republic

When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products. In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74% of their planted crops — nearly 6 million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change. That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13%...

More flights were canceled on Sunday, following thousands of other air travel cancellations and delays at the start of the busy Memorial Day weekend. About 1,065 flights were canceled on Sunday, with 283 of those cancellations in the U.S., according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. More than 7,000 other flights were delayed, including 1,109 in the U.S. On Saturday, more than 1,500 flights were canceled, which followed the cancelation of more than 2,300 flights on Friday. Delta Air Lines canceled 148 flights on Sunday, or about 5 percent of its flights for the day. The airline told The Associated Press on...

Car accident straight out of Dukes of Hazzard

Republicans are mad at Major League Baseball. The charge: Engaginginpolitics. A popular accusation on the right — that not capitulating to their particular ideology is pejoratively political. The intertwinement of sports and politics is well-documented . Taxpayer money put toward stadiums to house teams owned by billionaires, millions of dollars donated to predominantly Republican candidates by those team owners, the whole antitrust exemption and a congressional act protecting baseball’s right to underpay its minor leaguers. In the wake of the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, MLB’s PAC suspended political donations to both parties, lest they continue to financially...