Free Republic

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh blamed the City’s surging murder rate on local businesses. “First of all, most of this City’s retail businesses are open too late,” she lamented. “Keeping your doors open after dark is asking for trouble. This is a time when people should be at home with their families and not be forced to go out to buy things.” “Second, their prices are too high,” she continued. “If merchandise didn’t cost so much people wouldn’t be forced to commit crimes just to be able to afford groceries and liquor. It shouldn’t surprise us that people would use the...

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said President Donald Trump was a real estate developer, and therefore “not really a business person.” BRENNAN: At the DNC in 2016, you called Donald Trump a “risky, reckless and radical choice” and the country you said couldn’t afford to make that mistake. BLOOMBERG: Did I say that? BRENNAN: It was a memorable quote. Has he done anything to make you reconsider that? Do you think he’s doing a good job? BLOOMBERG: I think he, it’s, I would give him an incomplete grade. Some of the things that...

Unless lawmakers can work a small miracle, a referendum question on raising the minimum wage will be on ballots in November. Beacon Hill has limited time to get an acceptable compromise solution through the normal legislative process and avoid an expensive and contentious campaign on the issue. And the proponents of the higher minimum have the prerogative to reject any half measure they believe falls short of their goals. The big player in this initiative is called Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition that includes unions, community activists and clergy. Their petition would gradually raise the state’s minimum wage from the...

As an innovator and early adopter of freeways, California became the symbolic capital of car culture. But the ease of movement conferred by the massive postwar freeway building boom was short-lived, turning the dream of car travel into a nightmare of congestion and long commutes. The story of how Californians went from getting around to getting stuck behind the wheel is deeply entwined with the history of the urban freeway, an enterprise that advanced earlier and on a larger scale here than anywhere else in the country. Half a century ago, there was reason for optimism about cars. Los Angeles...

Philadelphia’s mayor’s office and Police Department have begun separate investigations into the arrest of two African American men waiting to meet an acquaintance at a Center City Starbucks on Thursday after a video of the incident was widely shared on social media, triggering national outrage.

The people most responsible for the much-hyped gender pay gap are women. Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, a chance for liberals to lament that women in America make only 80 cents — or 81 cents in Nevada — for every dollar a male makes. Activists say a woman has to work more than 15 months to make as much as a man did in 2017. The hyper-liberal National Partnership for Women and Families calculates this by comparing the median annual earnings of men and women working full-time. Democrats and the national mainstream media take this as proof positive that America...

Great read. That’s the CEO of Twitter. You know, the dude deciding who American gets to hear from and who America doesn’t. He’s tweeting this: Interesting take: “Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win”

So we are in our second year of my husband's HVAC biz. He is busy like crazy (one man band) And I have a "regular" 40+ hour job with benefits that keeps the lights on and the mortgage paid.

What happened at YouTube’s headquarters, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. As of right now, the only person to die during the attack was the shooter herself. That’s a good thing. It’s a shame others were hurt, but at least they weren’t killed. She bucked the narrative here by being pretty much the opposite of what we’re told mass shooters are, but so be it. I suspect the real takeaway is that anyone can be crazy enough to go on a shooting rampage. But that won’t stop tech company CEOs from using this to try...

On the heels of President Trump blasting American mega-corporation Amazon over its low tax liability, Sen. Bernard Sanders on Sunday backed up the president and said the company’s “power and influence” in the U.S. economy has grown too large. The Vermont independent said Amazon, which owns The Washington Post and Whole Foods, produces its own TV shows and films, and reportedly could move into the pharmaceutical sector, is at least partly responsible for the sharp decline in American retail. Mr. Sanders was asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” program whether he thinks Amazon has gotten too big. “Yeah, I...

President Donald Trump has had a splendid first year in office. He has the economy moving again and at a healthy pace, some 2.6 percent in the most recent quarter. Unemployment is down, the stock market is up and the economic signs are mostly healthy. Well, for the stock market that was until last week. That was the week in which the President announced his intention to slap a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum. The market tanked, and more problems are said to be coming internationally. It appears the world does not...

When a cryptocurrency start-up that promised to revolutionize the fruit and vegetable industry shut down last month, it left behind one word on its website: penis. When a virtual currency company called DateCoin recently tried to entice investors for its initial coin offering, it posted a Facebook ad that featured a reclining woman in a swimsuit with text over her body that read, “Touch my I.C.O.” And after the North American Bitcoin Conference in January, which highlighted 84 male speakers and three women, the official conference party was held at a Miami strip club. Virtual currencies and blockchain, the digital...

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back. Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back...

SmartAsset.com On Thursday, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq rose between 1.2% and 1.6%. "The S&P 500 has been up more than 1% in four of the last five trading days. This is a feat that has not occurred since October 2011," noted Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading. 2. It ain't happening: A Chinese takeover of the Chicago Stock Exchange has been blocked by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The deal was first announced in February 2016, and had been in regulatory limbo for two years. The SEC said it was unable to obtain all the information...

Earlier this year, Bob Smith, owner of the Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School, opened his mailbox to find a notice from the state of California threatening to shut him down. The notice said that Bob was violating state law by admitting students to his horseshoeing school who hadn’t first graduated from high school or passed an equivalent government-approved exam. A few months later, Esteban Narez, a ranch hand working odd jobs, applied to attend PCHS’s eight-week course. He’d heard from other PCHS graduates that shoeing horses was a great way to turn his love of working with horses into a stable...

The media will make of the State of the Union speech what it will -- which won't be much, given the media's agenda to discredit or oust the president delivering the speech. We might turn our eyes, briefly at least, in another direction: what could be called American capabilities. These in the end matter more than rhetorical flourishes, legislative proposals or even the disharmonies of the Grammy Awards. (Hillary Clinton -- really!) American capabilities and successes are growing, enhancing respect for what Americans can achieve when they put their minds to certain matters: something they haven't done for years....

President Trump on Friday touted the growth of the American economy since his election, and told countries and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the U.S. is "open for business" now that his administration has slashed regulations and lowered corporate taxes. "The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America," Trump said. "America is open for business and we are competitive once again." "When the United States grows, so does the world," Trump said, repeating his pledge to always put "America first" and encouraging other world leaders to put their own countries...

FedEx joins the growing list of companies who are celebrating the GOP Tax Cuts and Jobs Act by sharing the profits with employees, and investing in America. Today, FedEx announced that it will invest over $3.2 billion in bonuses, wage increases, employee benefits, and new jobs. The official announcement states that FedEx will: "Over $200 million in increased compensation, about two-thirds of which will go to hourly team members by advancing 2018 annual pay increases by six months to April 1st from the normal October date. The remainder will fund increases in performance- based incentive plans for salaried personnel. A...

California’s Democrats are on an accelerated path of destruction of the once Golden State. In Parts l and ll of my series on how California’s leftist Democrats have turned the Golden State into a sh*thole, I explain how California’s ruling party is doubling down on business-destroying policies, energy destroying policies, education destroying policies, and policies destroying California’s abundant natural resources. The new law claiming sanctuary state status is blatantly unconstitutional, as is “legalizing” marijuana. But Wait!!! There’s More!!! Democrats have proposed an Assembly Constitutional Amendment authored by two uber-leftists, Assemblymen Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, to extort...

Southington — Oz Griebel, a petitioning candidate for governor who once led the state Transportation Strategy Board, told an audience of construction executives and union members Friday that Connecticut must embrace electronic tolling and higher gasoline taxes to preserve and improve its transportation infrastructure.At a transportation forum for Democratic and unaffiliated candidates, Griebel offered the broadest prescription for how to stabilize and grow a special transportation fund now projected to hit insolvency by 2022, leaving the state unable to borrow money to address a growing backlog of transportation needs.Many of the Democrats, unlike the Republican field at a similar event...