Free Republic

In addition to the off-year elections to be decided this November in Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, a number of ballot initiatives will be voted on in other states. Perhaps the most consequential measure appearing on the November 2023 ballot, at least when it comes to fiscal policy, is found in Colorado, where voters will be asked whether they want to weaken the nation’s strongest tax and expenditure limit in exchange for property tax relief. Proposition HH, which was referred to the November ballot by Colorado lawmakers with the support of Governor Jared Polis (D), would weaken the state’s Taxpayer’s...

Legislative Democrats have been scheming to kill Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, since before it was added to the state Constitution in 1992. Hardly a year goes by without a bill, proposal, “listening tour,” or lawsuit hatched to enable state legislators to spend money TABOR denies them. Now, they’re at it again. This time, they’ve proposed a Rube-Goldberg ballot initiative called Proposition HH. Some of its superficial details might seem novel — like lipstick on the proverbial pig — but it’s only the latest gambit in a political long-con that has gotten very, very old. That’s why the...

August eight just came and went. Supposedly, now the date has significance to neo-Nazis. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and "Heil Hitler" is HH, or "88." The number has long been used as a neo-Nazi symbol. The link to August 8 is tenuous. Nevertheless, there is a leftist meme started on MSNBC that President Trump ordered the U.S. flag to be raised on August 8, following is lowering in response to last week's shootings, as a message to his neo-Nazi supporters. Despite Trump's support of Israel and Jews, or rather in part because of it, "progressives" regularly...

Black people in Pittsburgh were feeling poorly about crime: Too many of them were in the news accused of killing, robbing, assaulting, jacking, shooting, stealing, rioting, breaking, burgling, harassing, intimidating, threatening, fighting, throwing, running, stoning, smoking, drinking, escaping, drugging, firing, and destroying. So in 2011, black leaders got together to do something about it: Not stop the crime. Just stop reporters from letting us know about it. Because it is a little-known fact of psychology that drawing attention to black crime actually causes more black crime -- which draws more attention, which creates more crime. And on and on until...

Board members of California's Oakland Unified School District unanimously voted on Wednesday to cease suspending students for what they call "willful defiance." Those behaviors can include swearing/yelling at teachers, refusing direct orders, texting, and storming out of class, to name a few. The reason? Concern that too many black students are being suspended for willful defiance. One sophomore student, Dan'enicole Williams, told the San Francisco Gate, "They never take time out, if someone is sleeping in class, to ask what’s wrong. They may be acting that way because they didn’t eat the night before.” "We’re getting pushed out of schools,”...

SNIPPET: "Literature that is required reading for ICNA members and that is provided at its conferences prominently features a host of radical scholars and an ideology that casts the practice of Islam as incompatible with the West. As members advance into deeper stages, they are required to master more strident texts, ICNA bylaws show. In addition, the group's extremism, which has included glorifying the death of another young Muslim American convert in a Pakistani jihad, and its admitted links to the radical Pakistani organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, continue unabated. Jamaat-e-Islami has pledged itself to conquering all spheres of human life, including economic,...

On the flight home this morning, I was unfortunate enough to have a bleeder sit next to me. By bleeder, I mean he was invading my space because he was large and his body was spilling over into my seat. I've seen worse cases than what I had today but let's hear your experiences.

As some of you know, The group of friends here at Free Republic known as the Hobbit Hole thread, have been contributing to a small project to buy pocketknives and other needed tools for our deployed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It started out as care and comfort packages, and grew into pocketknives because we learned that while sweets and snacks were good, there were very practical tools, such as a good pocket knife, that our troops didn’t have unless they purchased them themselves. Handy items that would actually help them do their job. Since we started we have...