Free Republic

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will introduce legislation Thursday with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., intended to force Walmart to pay workers at least $15 an hour. The bill would institute fines for corporations that buy back their own stock unless they set their workers' base pay at that level. "Last year, 4 members of the Walton family of Walmart made $12.7 billion in 1 day. It would take a full-time Walmart worker making $11/hr over 653,000 years to make that much. Thursday, @RepRoKhanna and I are introducing legislation to make Walmart pay its workers a living wage,"

U.S.A. -(Ammoland.com)- A paper presented to the American Psychological Association found the number of mass killings, rampage killings or “mass shootings”, may be doubled by irresponsible media aggrandizement of mass killers. The desire for fame was found to be one of the main motivators of these rampage killers. From apa.org: “Unfortunately, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame,” she said. This quest for fame among mass shooters skyrocketed since the mid-1990s “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during...

[N]o elected official in the country has more aggressively sought to limit free speech rights than Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.). Now he will have to answer for it in court. ... In May this column described how Mr. Cuomo was using the state’s financial regulatory agency to intimidate insurance companies, banks and other firms into turning down business with the NRA. The gun-rights group sued Mr. Cuomo after he ordered the state’s Department of Financial Services to tell the firms it oversees “to review any relationships they may have with the National Rifle Association and other similar organizations. Upon...

Forget for a moment about “Medicare for All.” A proposal is gaining steam on the left that would overhaul the U.S. economy in a far more radical way. Known as a federal job guarantee, the plan would require the government to provide work on demand to any American at a minimum of about $12 an hour plus full benefits. Three senators and rumored 2020 presidential candidates, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, have publicly supported the idea. Their visions for the program vary, but the fundamentals of a job guarantee were fleshed out most fully in a proposal released...

Shares of utility PG&E fell 21 percent on Wednesday after the company said its insurance wouldn't cover its cost if it's found responsible for the Camp Fire. "If the Utility's equipment is determined to be the cause, the Utility could be subject to significant liability in excess of insurance coverage," the company said. The utility company also discloses that it submitted an "electric incident report" to the California Public Utilities Commission on Nov. 8, just before the wildfire.Shares of utility PG&E fell 21 percent on Wednesday after the company said that if its equipment is responsible for the "Camp Fire"...

While Georgians may not yet know who will occupy the Governor’s Mansion in January, there is something Georgians know for sure: They want Medicaid expansion. A recent AJC poll found that 73 percent of Georgians, including 51 percent of Republicans, support expanding Medicaid. Georgians know that expanding Medicaid will allow those without insurance to finally get the coverage they need and deserve. This is true for all Georgians, but is especially true for women, particularly those that live outside of metro Atlanta. The state is currently failing its women. Georgia ranks 48th among the states for health insurance coverage for...

GILGIT, Pakistan—On a July morning, Saqlain Abbas, 26 years old, stood before rows of students, Mandarin textbook in hand, while a Pakistani soldier sat silently at the back of the classroom with a gun at his side. Hanging on the wall was a collection of idyllic Chinese landscapes—the reddish-orange mountains of Gansu, the placid waters of a lake in Xinjiang. Here, at Karakoram International University, in a remote, rugged terrain that is still contested territory between India and Pakistan, the Pakistani military has been sponsoring free Mandarin courses for indigent students. “Previously, students were more inclined toward English,” Muhammad Ilyas,...

US equities fell Wednesday, turning around after opening higher.

A Florida man was arrested after police found enough explosive material to "blow up the block" when they searched his home. Officers received a tip that 37-year-old Jared E. Coburn was building bombs, and at his home they discovered mason jars filled with triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, an explosive compound using by terror groups like ISIS. Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said that the volatile explosive powder, which is used by terrorist organizations to make what they call the "Mother of Satan" bombs, had to be detonated underground at a nearby field. Coburn told police that he was making fireworks,...

...Google’s leaders conspicuously put their tails between their legs in response to employee protests... that executives were allowed to leave with nest eggs intact after being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct... A more telling loss of control was Google’s surrender to mau-mauing employees when it walked away from a Pentagon deal to develop algorithms to speed the extraction of meaningful information from... drone footage, as well as ...participate in a 10-year project to build out the military’s cloud infrastructure... The Google protests have been led by a group calling itself the Tech Workers Coalition, whose avowed purposes are ideological rather...

The number of National Instant background Check System (NICS) background checks for October of 2018 is slightly more than the number from 2017. In October of 2017, there were 2,030,391 NICS checks. In October of 2018, there were 2,086,895 background checks. This does not mean more firearm sales for October of 2018 compared to October of 2017, because the character of NICS checks has been changing.The number of NICS checks for carry permits and carry permit rechecks are now almost as numerous as the checks for firearms and any other purposes. The permit and permit rechecks for October of...

In an America that has rarely been more divided, one area of solid bipartisan consensus remains — on the need to “do something” about the threat China poses to the US-led global order. Even those who despise Donald Trump have mostly cheered the president on as he upends more than four decades of US policy on China. The most important underlying reason for this support is the fact that Mr Trump was not the one who changed the terms of engagement. China’s President Xi Jinping did that first. Under his predecessor, Hu Jintao, the mandarins in Beijing worried that using...

“We should no longer allow the Kremlin to use energy as a weapon,” Rick Perry told a news conference in Budapest... The Trump administration worked to open up the European energy market, which Russia has long dominated. America's lobbying efforts have paid off in Poland and Germany. Last Thursday, Poland signed a 24-year deal to buy liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States during a visit from Perry. It was the second major deal for U.S. LNG that the country has signed in the last few months. Weeks prior, German Chancellor Angela Merkel began making moves to open up...

“That led us to think, besides sleeping, what other things will people do in cars when free from the task of driving? And you can see that in the long association of automobiles and sex that’s represented in just about every coming-of-age movie. It’s not a big leap,” said Cohen, a director of research for the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey in England. Along with highway hookups, the report also predicts that autonomous vehicles will put prostitution on wheels. “It’s not impossible or that far-fetched to imagine the red light district on the move....

Republicans are losing their hold on upper-middle-class suburbs, and the tax reform bill may be to blame. Although a number of races are still too close to call, Democrats have taken 30 seats so far — more than the 23 GOP districts they needed to seize control of the House of Representatives. In swing districts across the country, new Democratic challengers vowed to defy the Trump administration while Republican incumbents touted the benefits of tax reform and a booming economy. But the GOP’s tax reform bill may have disenfranchised fiscal conservatives in higher-income areas, since the Trump tax cuts capped...

Watching the TV ad for this I was 80% certain this was a fairly clever SNL spoof. Let’s start with the faux Biblical intro that emphasizes that this stuffed animal is a tough guy. Then there’s the look of this thing, with the orange hair and orange eyebrows. The “secret zipper” that reveals an American flag cape is a nice touch too. But the best part is the testimonials from hardhat-wearing construction workers, Harley riding Marines and firefighters, each of whom is carrying the stuffed animal as if carrying a five-year-old’s toy is a totally normal thing for a grown...

A toy manufacturer has introduced a line of 'MAGA building blocks' that encourage children to 'Build the Wall' just in time for Christmas. The stocking stuffers from Keep and Bear, a conservative gift retailer, come with 101 pieces including a miniature President Donald Trump and a hard hat emblazoned with his 'Make America Great Again' mantra. When assembled, the Lego knock-off wall bears one of Trump's beloved phrases: 'Build the Wall'. The toy's description on Keep and Bear's website includes an extensive endorsement of the border wall that decries the migrant caravan making its way to the US, employing rhetoric...

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.

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI (Fox 32 News) - The Kansas City Health Department threw away and poured bleach on food meant for homeless people. The food was going to be distributed by a group called Free Hot Soup KC. The Kansas City Star said that the food, which included home-cooked chili, foil wrapped sandwiches and vats of soup, was destroyed on Sunday, Nov. 5, during a coordinated sting at several parks where volunteers had gathered. The Health Department said the group did not have a permit and was putting people at risk. "E. coli or salmonella or listeria can grow in...

Citing concerns about possible pension liability, Larkspur officials this week took the first step toward severing the city’s membership in the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, a wastewater organization it helped form in the late 1970s. The Larkspur City Council agreed Wednesday to give up the city’s seat on Central Marin’s six-member board of directors, which governs the infrastructure that treats sewage collected from Larkspur and other nearby areas. The council will vote on formal resolutions declaring the city’s severance at future meetings. But Larkspur’s voice won’t be completely flushed down the drain when the withdrawal is finalized, one of the...