Free Republic

Politicians love infrastructure, but many local government projects seem awfully wasteful. We’ve all seen the questionable spending—the half dozen union guys standing around while one digs, the needless reconstruction of sidewalks, the dangerous bike‐​lane schemes on city streets, the empty city buses clogging traffic, and those digital announcement signs on highways with no useful information. Local governments are flush with cash, and they waste it. Where I live in Virginia, a local government spent $1 million on one bus stop that should have cost $20,000.

President Trump was “thrilled” that his campaign acquired Northern Virginia office space at “bargain basement” rates, a campaign official told the Washington Examiner in an interview in the plush 14th floor offices overlooking the Potomac River from Arlington, Va. But campaign finance specialists say the "steal" could violate election law, which views below-market rates for rent as an illegal in-kind campaign donation. The deal was presented as a story of real estate prowess that was a fitting reflection of the man who authored The Art of the Deal. Campaign manager Brad Parscale took advantage of a long-term lease inked in...

PRESTON COUNTY, W.Va. (WCHS/WVAH) — West Virginia State Police said Interstate 68 was shut down several hours Wednesday near the border with Maryland after threats were made to kill President Donald Trump and to blow up the Pentagon. A 42-year-old male has been detained for questioning after a search of the vehicle revealed a fiream and explosive powder, State Police said. State Police, the FBI and Secret Service are continuing to investigate. Troopers conducted a traffic stop about 10:30 a.m. for speeding in the eastbound lanes near Bruceton Mills. The traffic stop resulted in an investigation that led to the...

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Protesters repeatedly shouted "shame" as a northern Virginia county board Saturday unanimously approved a $23 million incentives package for Amazon to build a new headquarters there. The Arlington County Board's 5-0 vote came after hours of heated public testimony, news outlets reported. Supporters said Amazon's plan to build a massive facility in Crystal City will lead to tens of thousands of good jobs and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. Opponents, however, said the tech giant neither needs nor deserves public subsidies. They also said lower-income residents would be driven out by...

Amazon laid out its plans for two of the biggest economic development projects in the country on Tuesday, announcing that it will put major corporate outposts in New York City and Arlington, Va. The two locations, in Long Island City in Queens and Crystal City in Arlington, just outside of Washington, will eventually house at least 25,000 employees each, the company said in a statement. It also said the new sites would require $5 billion in construction and other investments.

The rumored announcement has emboldened Amazon’s army of critics. Did the world’s smartest company really need 13 months, and applications from 238 cities, to reach the striking conclusion that it should invest in New York and D.C.? The former is America’s heart of capital, and the latter is America’s literal capital, where chief executive Jeff Bezos already owns a house and a newspaper. Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich...

More than 3,000 foreign nationals were removed from voter rolls across 13 sanctuary jurisdictions from 2006 to 2018, according to Public Interest Legal Foundation research released Monday. The study, which collected data on 13 sanctuary cities and counties in seven different states, discovered that approximately 3,120 non-U.S. citizens had been removed, and that some of those non-citizens had cast votes in U.S. elections. The breakdown of jurisdictions and foreign voters removed is as follows: Arlington, Virginia — 145 voters Chesterfield County, Virginia — 321 voters Chicago, Illinois — 232 voters DeKalb County, Georgia — 11 voters Essex County, New Jersey...

Officials at Arlington National Cemetery announced that they had evacuated the area after a bomb threat Wednesday morning. All visitors and staff had been safely removed from the area and the emergency services are investigating, according to the statement. "We will update the public as soon as we have additional information," officials added. DEVELOPING

Two people are injured after a driver fled from a U.S. Secret Service officer before eventually crashing into an oncoming car in Northern Virginia, the agency said Sunday. The pursuit began when a Secret Service Officer sought to pull over a vehicle driving the wrong way on I Street NW in Washington, the agency said, according to a statement posted on Twitter by an NBC Washington reporter. Instead of stopping, however, the driver exited onto I-66 traveling westbound in the eastbound lane, according to the statement. The driver then collided with another vehicle traveling eastbound, before fleeing the scene on...

Almost a dozen people have been injured at a Washington-area military base as a result of a letter that contained a hazardous substance, according to local first-responders. Hazmat crews rushed to Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall and were trying to identify the substance Tuesday afternoon, according to the Fort Myer Fire Department’s Twitter account.

Investigators are looking into an apparent hazmat situation at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Ft. Myer, Virginia, after a number of people began feeling sick after opening a letter, officials said. Arlington Fire, one of the units responding to the scene, said "11 people started feeling ill after the letter was opened" in an administration building. Three patients were hospitalized and were said to be in stable condition. #Update: Ft Myer Hazmat, 11 people started feeling ill after letter was opened in consolidated admin building. 3 were transported. Condition not known. Ft Myer PIO enroute. — Arlington Fire (@ArlingtonVaFD) February...

Clicks on an Arlington, Virginia, website are originating from an internal Amazon site While the world waits with bated breath for Amazon to announce which of its 20 “finalist” cities will be awarded the pleasure of trading its tax base to Jeff Bezos in exchange for the company’s much-ballyhooed second headquarters, a small local news website may have found the answer in its Google Analytics data. ARLnow.com, which serves Arlington, Virginia, found an unusual amount of traffic to a December story about Arlington County winning an award for its environmentally friendly policies. After doing some digging, the site says the...

So from where is all this newfound interest in Arlington County’s sustainability bonafides coming? From Amazon.com, it seems. The vast majority of the traffic to the page over the past week that can be tracked came from what appears to be an internal Amazon.com page devoted to its HQ2 search. Arlington, of course, is in the running as one of the potential landing spots for the company’s second headquarters.No other page on ARLnow.com has a similar level of traffic coming from Amazon. Last week a noted NYU professor who has written about the company opined that New York City and...

A House committee on Wednesday advanced a bill that would rename Gravelly Point Park after former first lady Nancy Reagan, roiling local residents who are still upset about the renaming of Washington National Airport for Ronald Reagan 20 years ago. The bill passed the House Natural Resources Committee along party lines over the objections of Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who accused Republicans of forcing the name change despite a complete lack of local support or input. “I have great respect for Nancy Reagan . . . ,” Beyer said. “But this bill is the equivalent of someone coming in and changing the...

T he expansion of Virginia’s extensive system of high­-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes is shifting to Interstate 395. Construction is set to take off before the end of the year along an eight-mile stretch of Interstate 395, where today’s high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes are being converted into toll lanes. The $480 million project will deliver the next major milestone in the state’s vision to create a network of more than 90 miles of HOT lanes in Northern Virginia by 2022. About 45 miles of express lanes have opened on Interstates 495 and 95 within the past five years, and the state...

WASHINGTON — Drivers on eastbound Interstate 66 saw tolls fluctuate frantically and top out at almost $35 during the Monday morning commute, the first with dynamic tolling on the highway. Rush-hour tolling began at 5:30 a.m. and early morning drivers saw tolls at around $3.50. Within an hour, the tolls had risen to $10 and eventually reached $34.50 at the height of rush-hour. By 9 a.m., prices were back down to below $10, said WTOP’s traffic reporter Dave Dildine, who spent the morning driving on I-66 to report the latest conditions. “It’s going to take some time for us to...

President Trump has decided on a strategy for Afghanistan that also takes a broad approach toward tackling competing interests in South Asia, CBS News' Margaret Brennan reports. The White House released a statement on Sunday saying that Mr. Trump will address the nation's troops and the American people on Monday evening from Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, "to provide an update on the path forward for America's engagement in Afghanistan and South Asia." Officials expect Mr. Trump to announce a strategy that meets the requests of commanders in the field, allows for the deployment of around 4,000 more U.S. troops,...

Usually, the floorboards creaking above you in the middle of the night are the house settling. Or perhaps a raccoon. But for a woman in Arlington, Va., it was the footsteps of a man living in her attic. The woman, who was not publicly identified, heard noises coming from the attic of the house she rents on 22nd Street S, just outside Washington, the Arlington County Police Department said. She contacted her landlord, thinking it might be him she was hearing — “because sometimes he’s used the storage above,” she told NBC Washington — and the landlord called the police...

Earlier this month, the FBI released a new set of never-before-seen images of the aftermath of the 9/11 attack against the Pentagon.

Sen. Barbara Favola says she doesn’t want to take away your guns. She just wants to know what you’re packing. The Arlington Democrat is proposing to have the state study whether the registration of firearms in Virginia is feasible, because she believes arming police with a database of gun records would provide them with an additional tool to fight crime. But she knows even a study will draw opposition in Richmond […] “My guess is that there will not be a single Republican who will vote for this bill,” says Sen Richard Black (R-Loudoun). “The whole purpose of [the study]...