Free Republic

The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has revealed its ambition: to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles (EVs). Incredibly, this announcement comes as we are flooded with overwhelming evidence that EVs are a market loser. Indeed, the artificial boom and then meltdown of the EV market is a modern industrial calamity. It was created by government, social media, wild disease frenzy, far-flung thinking, and the irrational chasing of utopia, followed by a rude awakening by facts and reality. CEO of Hertz Stephen Scherr has been booted out due to a vast purchase of an EV fleet...

Google’s Gemini chatbot is as “woke” as its revisionist history image generator. The search giant’s AI software refused to condemn pedophilia when the chatbot was asked if it is “wrong” for adults to sexually prey on children — declaring that “individuals cannot control who they are attracted to.” The question “is multifaceted and requires a nuanced answer that goes beyond a simple yes or no,” Gemini wrote, according to a screenshot posted by popular X personality Frank McCormick, known as Chalkboard Heresy, on Friday. Google’s politically correct tech also referred to pedophilia as “minor-attracted person status,” and declared that “it’s...

Maine’s Department of Education is reportedly urging school districts to stop using taxpayer-subsidized electric school buses that were purchased within the last year. The districts reported problems with the new buses, which were supplied by Canada-based Lion Electric Co., last fall ... The windshields on the buses would leak whenever it rained, as the glass didn’t appear to be securely in place. concerns about mixing electricity and water from the leaking windshields led them to stop driving some of the buses. The buses, which cost about $345,000 each, were also sold with misaligned or incorrect lettering on the sides, and...

The Army and Marine Corps units that rushed to Afghanistan in August 2021 to oversee the evacuation of more than 124,000 civilians from Kabul in roughly two weeks will receive the Presidential Unit Citation, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Thursday. Troops will be able to wear the award if they were assigned to those units for those missions. But some troops told Task & Purpose that the unit awards should be paired with further individual awards for so-far unacknowledged acts of heroism by individual service members. Awarded for extraordinary heroism on vital missions, the Presidential Unit Citation is the...

In this episode of Joe Biden's World...As the mountain of evidence continues to grow that Joe Biden has likely been an international shake-down artist for decades, word now comes that White House Counsel Stuart Delery, whom the embattled president calls a "trusted adviser," is leaving the administration, as the GOP investigations continue to heat up.In a Thursday statement from the White House, Biden called Delery a "trusted adviser and a constant source of innovative legal thinking since Day One of my Administration.""Innovative legal thinking." We'll get back to that.Biden (his handlers, no doubt) also said:From his work during those early...

The latest report from the California High-Speed Rail Authority projects costs for the initial segment at $35 billion, which exceeds secured funding by $10 billion. Other segments of the system are likely to have their projected costs increase, too. The state hopes it will get more federal aid.

At about 1am on February 24 last year, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, received a troubling phone call. After spending months building up a more than 100,000-strong invasion force on the border with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had given the go-ahead to invade. The decision caught Lavrov completely by surprise. Just days earlier, the Russian president had polled his security council for their opinions on recognizing two separatist statelets in the Donbas, an industrial border region in Ukraine, at an excruciatingly awkward televised session — but had left them none the wiser about his true intentions. (snip) Later that day, several...

We should not damage America's economy by forcing citizens to choose between their jobs and their personal freedom.. American Airlines cancels 2,000 flights in four days while airline enforces vaccine mandate.. Laura Cox, a Texas resident and United airlines pilot, faces potential termination if she does not get the COVID-19 vaccine.. Imagine it’s Thanksgiving and you’re scheduled to fly home to celebrate the holiday with your family, but at the last minute, your flight is canceled. You try to get through to customer service to see if there’s another flight, but the recorded voice comes online to advise there will...

Hey Joe...

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept 7 (Reuters) - After Fahima, 30, stepped off a plane at Dulles international airport in Virginia on Aug. 26th, she asked an immigration official what would happen to her next. He shrugged, she said, and told her to find a lawyer.... ..."I was a little confused," Fahima said through an interpreter. "I didn't know that we had to talk to a lawyer and do all these things by ourselves. I thought the American government was going to take care of this." The next day, Fahima was picked up at a convention center near the airport by her...

I’ve been silent for a while. I’ve been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid. I won’t try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened. For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight. I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my...

By now, every witting person on earth knows the credibility of the United States has been disastrously damaged by events in Afghanistan. Thousands of American civilians are stranded and being held hostage by radical Islamic terrorists. Tens of thousands of brave Afghan allies are being hunted down and brutally murdered. President Joe Biden is singularly responsible for this catastrophe. His incoherent press conference on Friday, Aug. 20, was a frightening example of the alternative reality Biden inhabits. He claimed the U.S. went to Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida, and has done so. Yet less than an hour later, a Pentagon spokesman...

What happened in Kabul was deliberate. In fact, I would argue it went far better than most leftists dreamed it would. Even they underestimated Joe's uncanny ability to make the absolute worst decision in practically every situation. Our kids' grandkids will be fighting the wars that result from this and will likely do it alone. Far from being a tragedy, our abandonment of Afghanistan was one of the left's biggest foreign policy successes.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s embattled President Ashraf Ghani fled the country Sunday as the Taliban moved further into Kabul, officials said. His countrymen and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan. * * * KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Sunday and sought the unconditional surrender of the central government, officials said, as Afghans and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

You might remember back in May 2018 when sketchy porn lawyer Michael Avenetti was releasing U.S. Treasury notifications on Michael Cohen received from an unknown source within the Treasury Department. You might also remember when New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a sympathetic article after talking to the leaking treasury official. As a result the Treasury Inspector General began an investigation. Today, a U.S. Treasury employee named Natalie Mayflower Sours-Edwards was arrested and charged with leaking to numerous reporters multiple financial reports about suspicious financial transactions related to: Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, Maria Butina, and others.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information but has not yet exposed any privacy breaches, an official said on Friday. The U.S. tax agency -- whose databases include suspicious activity reports from banks about possible terrorist or criminal transactions -- launched the probe after the Government Accountability Office said in April that the IRS "routinely permitted excessive access" to the computer files. The GAO team was able to tap into the data without authorization, and gleaned information such as bank account holders' names, social security numbers,...

The rise and fall of the Art Institute of Charleston took just 11 years, carrying with it the aspirations of hundreds of young artists — and leaving some of them struggling beneath a mountain of debt. The for-profit chain of colleges opened its Market Street location in April 2007 amid fanfare from local political leaders, including then-Mayor Joe Riley, who had invited the school to train workers for the hospitality and restaurant industries.

0 The disgraced former leader of state-owned power company Santee Cooper – an entity which just wasted billions of dollars on an abandoned nuclear power plant – will receive a whopping $16 million payout from South Carolina taxpayers. You read that right … the former CEO of this colossally mismanaged public utility is being rewarded to the tune of $16 million for his role in perhaps the biggest command economic debacle in the history of the Palmetto State.

Minnesota Obamacare is calling it quits. PreferredOne, the insurer that sold nearly 60 percent of all private health plans on Minnesota's Obamacare exchange, on Tuesday said it would leave that marketplace. PreferredOne's plans were the lowest-cost options on that exchange, known as MNSure. PreferredOne cited the costs of doing business on MNSure as the reason for its surprising decision, saying that selling plans is "not administratively and financially sustainable going forward," according to KSTP.com, the website of that Minnesota TV News network.

After a year of seeing President Obama’s approval ratings plummet, the president’s pollster is offering a strikingly candid and pessimistic New Year’s resolution. Reporters should go the next “year without reporting any public polling data,” Joel Benenson, president and CEO of Benenson Strategy Group, said. His comments were made to reporter Mike Allen, who published them in his daily “Politico Playbook” morning newsletter on Tuesday.