Free Republic

There is no such thing as free college tuition. While it may be free for the fortunate few who get a free college education, somebody pays for it, somebody always pays. And if you are wondering who that somebody is, all you have to do is look in the mirror. So, it would be refreshing if free-stuff politicians, like Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a Democrat -- the mix-and-match couple of Massachusetts politics -- actually took the time to thank the people who make their free-stuff giveaways possible. W

The administration of Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat who has been in office since 2011, projects a budget deficit of more than $5 billion over the next two years, thanks to generous pension benefits and the burden of servicing its big debt, plus falling tax revenue due to the exodus of large employers and residents reaching retirement age. Its budget woes, as well as concerns that they will be repeated year after year, helped lead General Electric in 2015 to consider moving its headquarters out of the state. Last year, it did exactly that. The state’s population is falling: Its...

More Parish Closings Nationwide - What Are We to Learn and Do? Msgr. Charles Pope • May 8, 2017 • It was recently announced that a substantial number of Catholic parishes will be closing in Connecticut. This is just the latest in a national trend that is likely to affect the diocese where you live, especially in the north. I’d like to offer some rather quick thoughts and then ponder what I think is the root cause for our decline. Bishops don’t close parishes, people do. While it may be juridically true that bishops formally certify or give recognition...

Oregon may soon become the first U.S. state to allow residents to identify as "nonbinary," neither male nor female, on their driver licenses and identification cards. Transgender Oregonians say the change would validate their identities and make them safer as they hand over their licenses at restaurants, health clinics and airports. Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles officials say they have had no opposition to the change, which they first announced plans to carry out last summer.

In 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, 54% of counties (with 11% of the population) have no murders. 69% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country. The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. As shown in figure 2, over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties.

The California Senate passed Senate Bill 54 on Monday, barring state and local law enforcement agencies from using their resources to help federal immigration authorities. Senate Bill 54, also known as the "sanctuary state" bill, passed the Senate in a 27-12 vote, CNN reported. "Our precious local law enforcement resources will be squandered if police are pulled from their duties to arrest otherwise law-abiding maids, busboys, labors, mothers and fathers," Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, who authored the bill, said in a statement. De León claimed the bill is "a rejection of President Trump's false and cynical portrayal...

The Department of Homeland Security added the entire states of California and Connecticut to its list of U.S. jurisdictions that hinder cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in detaining illegal immigrants. Both states had enacted legislation called "Trust Acts," allowing local law enforcement to ignore ICE's requests to detain certain illegal immigrants in custody.

Champagne wishes and caviar dreams, this time with a side of dissent. About three dozen demonstrators descended on the mansions of Connecticut’s 0.01% over the weekend to protest Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy’s new budget, which includes jobs cuts and changes in pension funding. As part of the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless” tour, protesters—many of whom work in the area—left mock tax bills at the ritzy homes of hedge fund bosses like Ray Dalio and Steven Cohen, asking them to pony up over $1.2 billion between both of them. “Income inequality is out of control in this country, and...

Based on the results of this year's study, if all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those treated in the award-winning facilities: Nearly than 89,000 additional lives could be saved; Over 61,000 additional patients could be complication free; Over $5.6 billion in inpatient costs could be saved; The average patient stay would decrease by half a day; Over 300,000 fewer discharged patients would be readmitted within 30 days; Patients would spend nine minutes less in hospital emergency departments per visit. If the same standards were applied to all inpatient care, the impact would be even greater.

Government finance is now the greatest source of controversy in Connecticut, owing to billion-dollar deficits and an epic debt load that ensures high taxes for many years to come. In national politics, Connecticut is deep blue: Its entire congressional delegation is Democratic, and it hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 28 years. But the GOP has recently notched strong gains in the state legislature. Though it’s far from clear which party will prevail, the fight for control of state government will depend on who can better respond to broad public recognition that Connecticut needs a new fiscal model....

The $64,000 question for Democrats seeking to fight back against Donald Trump and a Republican Congress between now and the 2020 elections is whether their recent problems in turning out their voters, especially in nonpresidential contests, can be changed by the energy of a burgeoning anti-Trump resistance. The first real answer to that question may have occurred this weekend in a special state-senate election in the “First State,” Delaware. And though it would be unwise to assume it to set a reliable pattern, in this one case Democrats passed the test. The contest was over a seat in a state-senate...

One of the good aspects of federalism is that it allows states to go their own way. As Justice Louis Brandeis put it, they can be “laboratories of democracy.” Unfortunately, that often means that interest groups will capture state legislatures and have their political allies push through foolish legislation that will harm most of the state’s residents while benefiting just a few – mainly their members. (That, incidentally, was true in the case that inspired Brandeis’ observation, New State Ice v. Liebmann. Fortunately, the majority ruled against Oklahoma’s scheme for cartelizing the ice business.) Two states, New York and Rhode...

California’s voter registration system is “highly susceptible to being compromised,” because of immigration policies protecting the Golden State’s 2.4 million illegal immigrants, authorities have told Fox News. The integrity of elections may be compromised by a lack of oversight of non-citizens registering and voting, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow for the Institute for Constitutional Government at The Heritage Foundation. “If you are talking about California, the state is apparently relying on the illegal alien to tell the state they shouldn’t be registered. There is still an honor system,” said von...

A Republican lawmaker in deep-blue Hawaii is considering switching parties to become a Democrat after she was pressured to give up her leadership role for criticizing President Donald Trump. Rep. Beth Fukumoto said Republican Party members asked her to resign as Minority Floor Leader after she spoke at the Women’s March in Hawaii. In her speech she called Trump a bully and said his remarks were racist and sexist and had no place in the Republican Party. […] In Hawaii, there are only six Republican representatives in the House — including Fukumoto — and the state Senate is all Democratic...

California may prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, creating a border-to-border sanctuary in the nation’s largest state as legislative Democrats ramp up their efforts to battle President Donald Trump’s migration policies. The legislation is scheduled for its first public hearing Tuesday as the Senate rushes to enact measures that Democratic lawmakers say would protect immigrants from the crackdown that the Republican president has promised. While many of California’s largest cities — including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento — have so-called sanctuary policies that prohibit police from cooperating with immigration authorities, much of the state does...

When the town sponsored a student essay contest on the topic of white privilege, it was intended to provoke discussion in this wealthy, overwhelmingly white community on Connecticut's Gold Coast. It did, along with no small amount of outrage. Contest organizers have been surprised by the reaction from some who say the question wrongly suggests race plays into the good life enjoyed in Westport. Residents like Bari Reiner, 72, say the question is offensive because the town welcomes anybody who can afford to live here. "It's an open town," Reiner said. "There are no barricades here. Nobody says if you're...

Submitted by Johnny Kampis via The Foundation for Economic Education,Migration patterns for 2016 show that Americans tended to move away from high-tax states and into states where residents keep more of what they earn.United Van Lines, the nation’s largest moving company, recently released its annual movers study report showing that South Dakota overtook Oregon as the top inbound destination. Generally, more people moved toward the West, and states in the Northeast saw the largest exodus of residents. The top four outbound states in 2016, in order, were New Jersey, Illinois, New York, and Connecticut.(Photo: Tax Foundation)The Tax Foundation pointed...

Mother Jones writes, "It's not easy to evict someone in California… Generally that's a good thing." But many people who read the article in which this claim appears may reach a different conclusion.Elizabeth Abel, an English professor at the University of California-Berkeley, rented her two-bedroom home to David Peritz, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Abel didn't bother to ask for references or do much research on her prospective tenant, according to Mother Jones: the fact that he was an academic was essentially good enough for her.Her trust was misplaced. Peritz failed to pay rent on time, and it...

Democrats who are having trouble getting out of the first stage of grief — denial — aren't being helped by the fact that, now that all the votes are counted, Hillary Clinton's lead in the popular vote has topped 2.8 million, giving her a 48% share of the vote compared with Trumps 46%. To those unschooled in how the United States selects presidents, this seems totally unfair. But look more closely at the numbers and you see that Clinton's advantage all but disappears. As we noted in this space earlier, while Clinton's overall margin looks large and impressive, it is...

In 2012, voters across the region liked what they saw in Barack Obama. The president won the popular vote in 24 of the 25 towns in New London County in his bid for re-election, mirroring the support he got in Connecticut and across the country. Four years later, four of those towns had had enough. In Ledyard, Montville, North Stonington and Salem, turnout went up, support for Democrats went down and Donald Trump won hundreds more votes in each town than both Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump's rival in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. They're not alone — 40...