Free Republic

Amid a series of layoffs, tech companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sponsor foreign workers for employment-based green cards due to stringent labor rules designed to protect U.S. workers. The process, governed by the Program Electronic Review Management system, mandates job advertising to ensure U.S. workers are not adversely affected. However, President Joe Biden's administration is considering a green card rule change that could significantly alter this landscape. The proposed exemption could be applied to a broad range of tech occupations including, notably, software engineering -- which represents about 1.8 million U.S. positions, according to U.S. labor statistics data...

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will take a historic step toward easing federal restrictions on cannabis, with plans to announce an interim rule soon reclassifying the drug for the first time since the Controlled Substances Act was enacted more than 50 years ago, four sources with knowledge of the decision said. The Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to approve an opinion by the Department of Health and Human Services that marijuana should be reclassified from the strictest Schedule I to the less stringent Schedule III. It would be the first time that the U.S. government has acknowledged its potential medical...

Des Moines, Iowa — The Iowa House has voted to set limits for the pay of temporary nursing staff working in Iowa hospitals and nursing homes. A traveling nurse could be paid no more than 150 percent of the statewide average wage being paid to full-time healthcare staff who provide nursing services. The bill is a priority for House Republicans, who contend temp agencies are reaping too much of the extra money the legislature has provided nursing homes. Representative Timi Brown-Powers, a Democrat from Waterloo, is a therapist at Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo, She says the bill addresses a...

Since there seems to be some confusion on this point: "Free Republic advocates a return to constitutionally limited government, reserving all government powers not expressly delegated by the constitution to the United States to the States respectively, or the people, emphasizing sovereign state governments, local government, self-government and self-rule, while restricting government powers to only those enumerated in the constitution and maximizing individual rights and liberty as originally envisioned and established by our Founding Fathers and secured and defended by the blood of patriots and statesmen for over two hundred years."

Yhe Missouri Democratic Party on Wednesday said a social media post suggesting that a house covered in Trump flags should burn was inappropriate. The party said the staff member responsible was disciplined after it deleted the post from its official account. “It was inappropriate and was immediately taken down on our own initiative because it did not represent the need, even in these divided political times, for spirited yet constructive dialogue,” Matthew Patterson, the party’s executive director, said in a statement to The Star. “The staff member in question has been appropriately reprimanded.” Patterson’s statement did not identify the staff...

They're flying to the coast to visit his mother.

Like the title says. Thanks!

Moscow’s long-looming attack on Ukraine has officially begun, and it appears Russian President Vladimir Putin is invoking a fight against Nazis as justification for the invasion. Putin announced the “special military operation” in Ukraine early on Thursday, which was preemptively met with a sharp response from Ukraine’s Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelensky. In his address Putin said: “It’s goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.” Putin has been making Nazi claims against Ukraine since at least...

From another site: "We have a young man named Tyler Christman from Carthage Central School in upstate NY who was seriously hurt in a jv football game yesterday. He is currently in upstate medical fighting for his life. This family and Tyler are a big part of our Carthage community and need all the prayers they can get. Thank you all."

Three judges have rejected a sneak claim by business groups to double the inflow of foreign visa-worker graduates into the jobs needed by American college graduates. “This is a terrible decision for the [visa worker] community,” lamented a June 9 tweet by Cyrus Mehta, a New York-based immigration lawyer. “The DC Circuit just killed the hopes of not counting dependents against the green card cap,” mourned David Bier, a migration advocate at the business-funded Cato Institute. “What that does is it lowers the supply of [foreign] workers coming in,” Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, told Breitbart News July...

The nation’s biggest tech corporations joined forces with the United States Chamber of Commerce and the outsourcing industry to keep foreign visa-holders in American jobs even as about 16.4 million Americans remain jobless. Executives with Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, HP, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Microsoft Corporation, Twitter, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, Michael Bloomberg’s New American Economy, and other corporations have filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit to ask a federal court to keep more than 90,000 foreign visa-holders in the U.S. workforce. The lawsuit was first filed in 2015 by Save Jobs USA, a...

Please pray for my brother-in-law Joe, who has had complications after back surgery. (I don't have any details yet - heard yesterday through the family grapevine.)

A bid to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use moved one step away from the governor’s desk Tuesday, after a Senate committee narrowly agreed to send the proposal to the full Senate for debate. The proposal by Democratic Rep. Cedric Glover, of Shreveport, would make possession of up to 14 grams of marijuana — a half-ounce — a misdemeanor carrying a fine up to $100, even for repeat offenses, and end the possibility of jail time. “Possession of small amounts of marijuana should not lead you to jail, and it should not lead you to becoming...

CASPER, Wyo. — Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill into law on Tuesday which will allow the sale of recreational marijuana to begin on Jan. 1, 2022 in the state. Montana voters passed an initiative during the 2020 General Election which made it legal for adults to possess up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use starting Jan. 1, 2020, according to Montana Free Press. While that initiative allowed residents to cultivate up to four marijuana plants per household, with Gianforte signing House Bill 701, residents will only be able to cultivate two plants per household. House Bill...

A federal judge in Massachusetts is going to make Twitter explain whether or not it is a “state actor” or a truly private company, and the effects could be significant in reigning in Big Tech’s oppression of conservative views. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who invented email, ran for US Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and made allegations of voter fraud on Twitter. These tweets were then deleted by the far-left tech giant. Later it was discovered that they were deleted at the direction of government employees of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office. Discovering this, Dr. Ayyadurai filed...

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc's Google said on Friday it was leading about 30 companies and trade groups in opposing a lawsuit that seeks to stop over 90,000 spouses of highly skilled U.S. visa workers from having jobs in the country. The organizations contend undoing employment authorization for spouses would cause financial havoc for families, because most made life choices such as having children or buying homes based on the expectation of two incomes. A federal judge in Washington is expected to decide in the coming months on the lawsuit challenging the work permits tied to H-4 visas, which are issued to...

Republican congressmen on Wednesday introduced a bill that would decriminalize cannabis federally, direct federal regulators to develop rules overseeing its sale and grant safe harbor to financial institutions that bank with the industry. Reps. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, and Don Young, R-Ark. introduced the bill, entitled the Common Sense Cannabis Reform for Veterans, Small Businesses and Medical Professionals Act, pitching it as an overdue corrective to outdated federal cannabis policy. "With more than 40 states taking action on this issue, it's past time for Congress to recognize that continued cannabis prohibition is neither tenable nor the will of the American electorate,"...

CLAIM: President Joe Biden said in his 2021 speech to Congress, “Immigration has always been essential to America.” VERDICT: FALSE. The United States won World War II, created a middle-class economy, invented many new technologies, revived racial equality, and landed astronauts on the moon during the long period of low migration between 1925 and 1970. [...] In 1955, pro-migration groups began claiming the United States was a “Nation of Immigrants,” but immigrants were only 7 percent of the population in 1955, down from 15 percent in 1910. New arrivals slowly rose amid the Cold War as Congress welcomed people fleeing...

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed a new law legalizing marijuana in the state Wednesday. It will go into effect on July 1, making Virginia the 17th state and first in the South to legalize cannabis for adult use. "We are moving forward in a way that promotes equity, provides a clean slate to those with prior convictions, and reinvests in the communities harmed by over-criminalization," Northam tweeted, along with a photo from the bill signing. Northam had sent a prior version of the bill back to state lawmakers with recommended changes that included moving up the date it would go...

Idaho GOP Sen. Mike Crapo is stepping back from his initial show of support for the Democrats’ farmworker amnesty bill, which threatens America’s rural communities by giving employers a low-wage, no-rights foreign labor force for a wide variety of agriculture jobs. “Even though Senator Crapo has said he’ll work on a Senate version of the bill, we should add he won’t support the existing House-passed version,” Lindsay Northern, Crapo’s communications director, told Breitbart News. She continued: "Senator Crapo supports helping Idaho farm producers with problems they have under the existing system, such as concerns over liability and the fact dairy...