Free Republic

Well, here we go again. CNN tells us that a property tax revolt is spreading, with a nationwide movement to eliminate property taxes on the march.Most of us are familiar with the basic scenario of property taxation. Every state is replete with numerous political subdivisions commonly known as “municipal corporations.” These are counties, cities, school districts, fire districts, water districts, sewer districts, diking distraction, etc., etc. Each of these is known as a “taxing district” because state statute authorizes these districts’ legislative authority to adopt an annual budget and levy that budget as a tax on the property owners in...

BOSTON — Monica Cannon-Grant, the founder of the nonprofit Violence in Boston, plans to plead guilty to federal charges of defrauding people who donated to her organization. In a one-page document filed in federal court in Boston on Friday, Canon-Grant requested a change of plea hearing. Cannon-Grant faces a 27-count indictment on charges including wire fraud, mail fraud, making false statements, and filing false tax returns, among other offenses. Federal investigators have alleged that Cannon-Grant, and her husband, Clark Grant, “solicited and received over $1 million in donations and grants from individuals, charitable institutions and other entities.” The indictment alleged...

Embattled New York Attorney General Letitia James better mend fences — or pay up. James is set to appear before an administrative law judge Oct. 8, where she faces up to $500 in fines for having a 5-foot, 6-inch high fence in front of her multi-family home in the Clinton Hill Historic District. The brownstone is the focus of a federal mortgage fraud investigation. The city Buildings Department slapped the far-left pol with the summons July 23 after fielding at least three anonymous complaints since April which claimed the black iron fence exceeded the 4-foot height limit, records show. New...

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook should be banned from the central bank’s upcoming meeting later this month after a Trump official got her “dead to rights” on allegations of mortgage fraud, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow told “Pod Force One.” “I mean, she doesn’t understand it, but she’s been fired,” Kudlow claimed to The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode, out now. “…. She’s been fired for these allegations. The court doesn’t have to prove her guilty or not, by the way. If the president fires you, you’re fired. “The President appoints Federal Reserve governors,”...

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie says Trump should tone down his rhetoric in response to the Charlie Kirk assassination:

A witch who was paid to put a curse on Charlie Kirk days before he was shot to death has said her magic is ‘effective’. Police are still searching for the shooter after the Donald Trump ally was killed at an event at Utah Valley University yesterday. Despite Mr Kirk’s controversial political opinions his death has drawn outrage from across the political spectrum, condemning political violence and the suppression of free speech. Follow Metro’s live blog for coverage of the Charlie Kirk shooting A few days before his death, US news and opinion site Jezebel published an article ‘cursing’ Mr...

(DCNF)—U.S. job growth in the year through March was much weaker than previously reported, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revisions released on Tuesday. The U.S. economy likely added 911,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March — or an average of almost 76,000 fewer each month — according to the BLS’ preliminary benchmark revision. The report comes after job growth slowed in August, with the U.S. economy adding just 22,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, according to data released Friday by BLS. ADVERTISEMENT The jobs report revisions were even worse than the downward adjustment of 700,000 that was previously...

Editor’s note: We expected the leftist thought police at Google would declare that this editorial was “unreliable” and “harmful“— because it blasphemes the climate religion — and strip its AdSense ads from the page. And we were right! (See below.) Al Gore famously warned that sea level rise caused by man’s use of fossil fuels was going to kill us. Barack Obama implied that he had magic powers that would control surging sea levels. A fresh study shows just how dishonest this pair and the many others who did their best to misinform the public have been. Gore’s 2006 propaganda...

Environmental organizations lost their bid Tuesday to immediately access $16 billion in grant money that was frozen by the Trump administration earlier this year. In a split decision, a three-judge panel from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals found the Trump administration was within its rights to stop $20 billion from the Biden-era Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that was promised to eight groups. “While some grantees may be forced to shutter their operations during the litigation, their harms do not outweigh the interests of the government and the public in the proper stewardship of billions of taxpayer dollars,” Tuesday’s ruling...

An appeals court has overturned a federal judge’s ruling blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from terminating $20 billion in grants for several climate groups. A three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Tuesday issued a 2-1 ruling in favor of the Trump EPA’s efforts to slash billions of dollars in grant money to green groups obligated during former President Joe Biden‘s administration. The District of Columbia Circuit Court judges were Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Cornelia Pillard, who dissented. The district court “abused its discretion” by issuing the injunction preventing the EPA from rescinding the funds, the judges wrote. They...

Pastor David E. Taylor, the name-it-and-claim-it faith-healing and prosperity gospel heretic, was arrested yesterday after the FBI enacted coordinated raids on properties connected to his church, the Kingdom of God Global Church, including on his 29,000 square feet “parsonage” that he purchased in 2022 for $8.3M. Along with Taylor, Michelle Branon, 56, the church’s executive director, was also arrested, and the two of them were indicted on charges that they used forced labor to generate millions of dollars in donations. Taylor, who self-identifies as an “apostle”, claims that in 1997 he was “given the keys to the Kingdom of heaven...

One international student after another told the University of Central Missouri this summer that they couldn’t get a visa, and many struggled to even land an interview for one. Even though demand was just as high as ever, half as many new international graduate students showed up for fall classes compared to last year. The decline represents a hit to the bottom line for Central Missouri, a small public university that operates close to its margins with an endowment of only $65 million. International students typically account for nearly a quarter of its tuition revenue. “We aren’t able to subsidize...

Republicans in Congress are facing mounting pressure from both sides of the aisle about whether to extend additional Obamacare premium tax credit subsidies as part of legislation to avoid a government shutdown this fall. The popularity of the added Obamacare marketplace subsidies, which former President Joe Biden and Democrats passed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as a temporary measure, could make it difficult for Republicans to let them expire by January without facing blowback during the 2026 midterm elections. But conservatives argued that there is systemic fraud in the Obamacare insurance marketplace through the extended subsidies and are...

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday that $679 million in federal funding has been withdrawn for 12 “doomed” offshore wind projects – including three in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The scrapped funding includes $10.5 million for Connecticut’s Bridgeport Port Authority Operations and Maintenance Wind Port project, $20.5 million for New Jersey’s Wind Port at Paulsboro and $48 million for Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Terminal. The Trump administration plans to spend the withdrawn funds on “real infrastructure” and “restoring American maritime dominance.” “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Duffy said...

Run Time 54 m. / " started noticing something was off in home appraisals,” says Mitch Vexler, whistleblower and expert on property valuations. He tells Daniela Cambone: “They were inflating property values to jack up taxes, and that was feeding into trillions in school bond debt that I believe will spiral.” On the scope of the problem, Vexler is blunt: “We’re talking about $5.1 trillion in school bonds that are based on these inflated appraisals. That’s massive—this is a ticking time bomb for local governments and taxpayers alike.” He warns of consequences for the bond market: “School districts are relying...

California “First Partner” Jennifer Siebel Newsom making bank off her husband’s position is outrageous — and fresh proof that American politicians have gotten far too comfortable with the dirty dealing that pervades politics. ...Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit, Representation Project, pays her a hefty $150,000 — while raking in donations from companies that have an interest in winning the favor of her husband, California Gov. Gavin Newsom. AT&T, which has spent upward of $2 million to lobby the state on landline phone rules so far this year, forked over up to $25,000 for Representation Project’s “Flip the Script” gala. Comcast, AT&T’s competitor,...

The California High-Speed Rail Authority on Thursday announced a plan to accelerate the process of laying the first tracks on the state’s beleaguered infrastructure project. The materials will be used to install the first miles of electrified track along the California High-Speed Rail route, the first high-speed rail track to be laid in the U.S. The Authority states that the process is being accelerated and will result in track being laid in 2026. Aerial view of the Cedar Viaduct crossing in Fresno which was completed in April 2023. (California High-Speed Rail Authority) U.S. manufacturers will be able to bid in...

This is my very first solo post after years on Free Republic. Please forgive me and let me know if I got some of the "must haves" wrong. I Just received this email from a family memberand it's content absolutely terrifies me. I can't believe that real US citizens believe this poop, nor that our military gives up their time and freedoms and put themselves in harms way to defend such opinions. When elections are stolen, history shows crowds flood the streets. Trump plans to crush the protests before they even begin… Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right...

If transgenderism is a naturally occurring biological phenomenon, it should be evenly distributed across the population, instead the latest demographic report from a UCLA sexuality institute that uses CDC numbers shows that more than half of the ‘transgender’ population is under 24. The Williams Institute at UCLA law school broke down transgender demographics to find that 54% of the ‘transgender’ population was under 24 years old. Even more revealingly, the percentages fall sharply as ages rise and rise even more intensely as ages drop. After 25, transgenderism falls off a cliff, nearly disappears after 35 (and hardly exists for those...

...A private entity constructed by the Biden administration to perform semiconductor research and chock full of Biden administration members is being terminated.... ...“The Biden Administration had no authority to manipulate legislation in a way that would allow them to establish, staff, and govern a corporation to act as a government agency. ... ...Natcast was created to provide soft landings for Biden administration employees, Lutnick said.... ... a semiconductor slush fund that did nothing but line the pockets of Biden loyalists with American tax dollars,