Free Republic

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Thursday he expects to see some banks fail due to their exposure to the commercial real estate sector, which has declined significantly in value following the shift to remote work. Powell said the banks that are in trouble with falling office space and retail assets are not the big banks, which were designated as “systemically important” in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. That episode, which resulted in a taxpayer bailout of the financial sector, was also triggered by unsound real estate assets. Rather, the banks at risk of failure now Powell identified...

Doctors have released a damning new report on America’s “failures” during the COVID pandemic, revealing that keeping schools closed for longer than necessary and forcing people to mask outside led the country to experience “eye-wateringly high” death rates compared to other first-world nations. Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Drexel University professor Ana Roux said the pandemic “failures began at the top” with poor communication from the federal government, which demonstrated a “surprising inability to generate reliable information, communicate it in a timely and consistent manner and translate it into sound policy.”

How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all US marriages end up in divorce. There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people...

Note: This is the fourth in a 10-part series at PJ Media examining what our nation’s top 10 law schools – according to U.S. News and World Report – are teaching. J. Christian Adams and I are undertaking a deep dive into what is being taught in these law schools. We have already covered Yale, Stanford, and Chicago. If you thought based on our coverage of the curriculums at Yale, Stanford, and Chicago that you had seen the worst of the political indoctrination that passes for a law school education these days, wait until you see the curriculum at the...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that Democrats have to answer for failures in the education system and that spending more money won’t solve the education issue. Maher said, “I also read this week in the paper, one in three children in America cannot read at a basic level of comprehension. 85% of black students lack proficiency in reading skills. We already spend a lot of money on schools, so you’re going to keep telling me more money will fix this? … And it seems like a lot of times the solutions that come from...

As the global community prepares to celebrate Earth Day, NASCAR today announced its commitment to achieve net zero operating emissions by the year 2035. The announcement coincides with the launch of NASCAR IMPACT, a new umbrella platform designed to align and advance the sport’s collective efforts around sustainability, community engagement and other impact-driven social initiatives. NASCAR plans to reduce its carbon footprint to zero across all scope 1 and 2 emissions over the next 12 years through strategic investment, collaborative partnerships, and operational changes. “As a sport, NASCAR has a responsibility to serve and impact the communities where we live...

Kids in New York schools could be doing even worse on state exams than we thought – because educrats are cloaking failure with misleading stats. An analysis by The Post of the 2022 statewide test results in English and math found that the state fudged its overall results by ignoring the nearly 20% of kids who went untested — most because they refused to take the exams altogether. So while the state Education Department claimed in October that New York state students in grades 3-8 achieved a 47% proficiency rate in English Language Arts in 2022, only 38% of kids...

EXCERPTS: Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a Marine sniper who served in Afghanistan during the American withdrawal, recounted the ordeal in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday, telling members about the moment he and a friend were hit with a "flash and massive wave of pressure" after a suicide bomb detonated at Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021. "The troops on the ground had to tirelessly work to control the crowds, day and night. The Department of State staff at HKIA (Hamid Karzai International Airport) would completely shut down processing Afghans every evening and into the morning, leaving ground forces...

The brutal, unrelenting cold that lasted for several days over the Christmas holiday froze off a sizable portion of Appalachia’s ample gas production, cutting off supply to power plants when they needed it most. Gas transmission pipelines said the gas they were promised simply didn’t show up. On the electric grid that connects Pennsylvania to 12 other states, at one point almost 25% of the capacity on the system either didn’t start up or broke while operating, leaving coal and petroleum-fired units to pick up the slack. PJM, a Valley Forge-based grid operator, is still analyzing what happened during the...

Hey capitalists! You still think your system is perfect? Well, think again! Capitalism is one of the worst things to happen to humanity and we'll show you why. Here are 10 miserable failures of capitalism: The hotel breakfast was out of waffle mix this morning: Say what you will about the gulags, they NEVER had this problem. Your Che Guevara t-shirt was delayed during shipment: Virtue signal delayed! Lame! Google Maps on your iPhone 13 Pro Max sent you to the wrong end of the park for the abortion protest: It was inconvenient. That time you stubbed your toe on...

We were swindled, fooled, bamboozled and lied to during the pandemic. The public-health establishment misled the American people about the value of masking, closures and social distancing. No one has accepted blame. Understanding how badly we failed is not only an inevitable part of the “told you so” process but, more important, a lesson for next time. Just ask the Swedes. Sweden had zero excess deaths associated with COVID-19. The United States had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida. That’s the whole story right there in a handful of words.

The Democrat National Committee (DNC) on Monday blamed Republicans for President Biden’s chaotic presidency. Fraught with massive inflation, soaring crime, and an invasion on the southern border, the DNC has displaced blame from the president onto the GOP, accusing them of standing in the way of progress.

Democrats, who have continuously had messaging problems through the current election cycle, have now blamed messaging itself for their failures months before the general election. Democrats across the country are claiming they have “done a lousy job at highlighting their accomplishments in a year plus of unified power in Washington” and are using that as the source of their problems leading up to the November midterm elections, according to the Hill.

Veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove is under fire hours before he is set to speak at a major gathering of Republicans in Missouri, Breitbart News has learned, all while his failures on redistricting nationwide become clearer. Rove, who is scheduled to keynote the Missouri Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner in St. Louis on Saturday night, is a senior adviser nationally to a group called the National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT). The GOP redistricting group NRRT, Rove wrote in a 2021 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announcing his appointment to it, “was formed in response to Democratic efforts organized in...

Legislative Democrats on Tuesday blocked an audit of COVID-19 testing failures that occurred during a spike of 1,100 nursing home deaths in Colorado during the 2020 Christmas season — the worst nursing home death rate in the nation. Democrats on the Legislative Audit Committee unanimously torpedoed the audit request by Republicans on a party line vote. PeakNation™ will remember the no-bid contract and $90 million awarded to Curative to provide the questionable testing, which reportedly produced false negatives on the most vulnerable of patients and could have led to the rapid spread of the virus. Now Coloradans will never know...

It’s not hard to remember a Biden disaster for every month of his first year at the stern … or in the basement, as the case may be. Joe Biden has been in the Oval Office (or that weird set in the Eisenhower building’s South Court auditorium with the greenscreen windows) for a year now, and he’s already managed to make his short presidency known for a long line-up of scandals, botches, and slip-ups. It’s too hard to narrow the list down to one top failure, although his disgracefully handled Afghanistan withdrawal may be the most sobering and inflation may...

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was an early critic of Donald Trump, even insisting the GOP dump Trump at the national convention in Cleveland in 2016.Hewitt grilled Trump on Islamist terror leaders in 2015 to the delight of Democrats and fellow RINOs. President Trump later laid out the greatest foreign policy successes, including the decimation of ISIS in Syria-Iraq, of any president in a generation.Since that time Hugh Hewitt has come around and President Trump even sat with him for an interview recently.Hugh Hewitt also sat down with Dr. Tony Fauci earlier this week. Hewitt destroyed him. After rattling off...

Joe Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. The gift, that is, of parallels with fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter. Most Americans have no memories of the actual Carter presidency, from 1977 to 1981, but this Baby Boomer sure does. As for you youngins, you can can look him up, and you’ll see too: He was terrible in office. So terrible, in fact, that when he ran for re-election in 1980, he was thunderously defeated, losing to Ronald Reagan by almost ten points in the popular vote and by 489 to 49 in the electoral college.

President Joe Biden made excuses for his administration’s failures on Friday by blaming former President Donald Trump. “Take a look at what I inherited when I came into office, when I came into office the state of affairs, where we were,” Biden said, repeating a familiar complaint by new presidents struggling in their first year of office.

Nearly 90 retired U.S. generals and admirals penned an open letter asking Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to resign from their positions following their “negligence in performing their duties primarily involving events surrounding the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.” “As principal military advisors to the CINC [Commander-in-Chief]/President, the SECDEF and CJCS should have recommended against this dangerous withdrawal in the strongest possible terms,” the letter states. “If they did not do everything within their authority to stop the hasty withdrawal, they should resign. Conversely, if they did do everything...