Free Republic

Hugo Chavez was one of the most evil socialist dictators ever. He took the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela, and turned it into a disaster of misery and poverty in only five years. How bad? The people had no food or toilet paper. And critics of Chavez were tortured and murdered. Isn't socialism wonderful? But it gets worse. Just like Fidel Castro, Chavez got filthy rich based on the misery of his own people. His family made billions. Then this evil dictator died of cancer. He turned the country over to his handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro. Maduro ran the...

IN A SENSE, Damian Monda grew up in The Jungle. But in the 1960s, it wasn’t yet an infamous homeless camp, Interstate 5 hadn’t been completed, and it wasn’t even known as The Jungle. It was just a neighborhood of abandoned old homes. But there were homeless people there, even then. Damian and his brothers and their friends would hike down the hill from Pacific Tower, where his family lived in the doctors’ quarters, to explore the empty homes. Entering them was like a dare. “It was dangerous and it was cool, and we were always afraid that we would...

As has already been established, the homelessness problem in Los Angeles has long since reached epidemic levels. Officials estimate that there are currently more than 36,000 displaced individuals living on the streets of the City of Angels. So in addition to people dumping trash all over the streets, there are homeless people literally relieving themselves on the pavement, with growing deposits of excrement constantly needing to be cleaned up and fears of disease rising. So what’s to be done? The obvious answer is toilets, right? More toilets open to the homeless population should tidy up the situation nicely. But...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A bizarre scene was caught on camera in the East Village. A man allegedly tried to attack an MTA bus and its driver.

Boise will ask the Supreme Court of the United States to hear its appeal in the case of Martin v. Boise, the “camping lawsuit” that stemmed from a city ordinance that banned sleeping in public places. The city filed a petition to the court to ask for it to extend the deadline for the city’s writ of certiorari, which is an order of a higher court to a lower court to send documents of a case so that the higher court may review a decision. That request starts the review of the case and the process for determining if the...

Seattle’s City Council is made up of 8 Democrats and one Socialist. That breakdown gives you an idea of how progressive the city’s residents are. But with seven out of nine City Council seats up for grabs this fall, one issue is making liberal voters consider new options: homelessness. Today the Seattle Times profiled three Seattle voters, two of whom are progressives who are now thinking about what a vote for a left-leaning candidate could mean for their neighborhoods: Until a few years ago, Christi Muoneke didn’t pay much attention to Seattle politics. “I couldn’t even tell you who...

There is something wonderfully childlike in the inability of California liberals to figure out what to do about the frightening rise in homelessness. If the circumstances were different, you might refer to their naivete, ignorance, and stupidity as endearing, adorable, even cute.But their utter disconnect from reality has real-world consequences for tens of thousands of people who are victims of their idiotic policies.National correspondent for the Los Angeles Times Matt Pearce tweeted out the grim statistics: Spikes in this year’s homeless counts across California: -Los Angeles 🆙 16%-San Francisco 🆙 17%-Orange County (since 2017) 🆙 43%-Ventura, San Bernardino and Kern...

Los Angeles has experienced a 16% increase in the homeless population over the last year, the latest sign of severe income inequality and a worsening housing crisis plaguing California. There are now more than 36,000 homeless people in the city of LA, and nearly 59,000 across LA county, a 16% and 12% uptick respectively, according to an annual LA county report released on Tuesday. The county “point-in-time count”, conducted by thousands of volunteers in January each year, is an estimate of the number of people living on the street, in tents, in cars and in shelters. The sharp increases paint...

Cops are people who sometimes have to take on thankless dirty jobs, because someone has to take out the trash, but now that they're coming down with typhus-like illnesses, based on the multiplication of the homeless population and the accompanying rats, one wonders how fair this is — or, more to the point, if maybe leftists making policy wanted it this way. According to ABC News: At least one officer with the Los Angeles Police Department has contracted the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, Salmonella typhi, and another one is showing typhus-like symptoms, the police department announced on Thursday. The officer who had...

A recent business trip to the liberal-run capital city of Texas left me impressed with the food, music, and overall quirky “weirdness” that is Austin, but it also left me generally disenchanted at the difficulty its working citizens must have in enjoying ANY of it. Why? Just take a walk, anywhere, and you can’t miss them - sleeping in the streets, sitting on sidewalks and benches or wandering aimlessly about. Stop for a second and, like clockwork, one will probably approach you, begging for some “spare change” or “a couple bucks” to “get home” or “buy something to eat.” If...

Seattle is overwhelmed by garbage and filth, but the city’s leaders won’t admit it. Over the past few years, Seattle has become a dumping ground for millions of pounds of garbage, needles, feces, and biohazardous waste, largely emanating from the hundreds of homeless encampments that have sprouted across the city. Now, the Emerald City is on the verge of a full-blown public-health crisis. Last year saw a 400 percent increase in HIV infections among mostly homeless addicts and prostitutes in the city’s northern corridor. Public-health officials are sounding the alarms about the return of diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and trench...

Philip Ray Lester, 61, was identified by police as the assailant and arrested after the street brawl on Tuesday in a quiet residential section of Fresno, California. Police say that Lester sparked the brawl by going up to an area where another homeless man was encamped and trying to tear down his tent. The other man confronted him with a metal rod from a bed frame and Lester faced him down with a baseball bat, police say. Video shot by horrified residents shows the two men squaring off in the middle of the street, near the intersection of Michigan Avenue and...

Venice is now home to the largest concentration of homeless anywhere on L.A.'s Westside, with nearly 1,000 non-domiciled people. During the past 18 months, several encampments have swelled in more residential areas where homes can easily sell for eight figures and up. Tents, many of them equipped with mini refrigerators, cupboards, televisions and heaters, vie with pedestrian traffic. Residents who live near the encampments say mail regularly goes missing. Break-ins have jumped. Hypodermic needles and human waste are appearing on sidewalks and at local playgrounds. Residents have complained to police about harassment and even physical assaults. "This is more of...

With swelling transient encampments abutting seven-figure homes, the beachside enclave has emerged as a flashpoint for the inequality shaping Los Angeles — and a real-world test case for the liberal ideology of the area’s showbiz residents. After the first attack, Randy Osborn figured it was just his turn. Tire slashings in his east Venice Beach neighborhood had become commonplace. But when his vintage Land Rover was hit a sixth time in the course of a few months, Osborn, who runs a small virtual reality company and has lived in Venice for seven years, began to worry he was being singled...

The latest fad in criminal-justice activism is the concept of “survival crime.” The theory holds that the homeless, the poor, and people of color commit property crimes and low-level infractions in order to secure their basic survival. Any enforcement of these laws is thus a violation of their basic human rights and should be relaxed—that is, local governments should stop enforcing any laws that “criminalize homelessness” and “criminalize poverty.” Survival crime theory is the flipside of Broken Windows theory. They deal with the same class of offenses—mainly property crime, drug possession, and public nuisances—in precisely the opposite way. Broken Windows...

George Opudo used to drive for Uber. Picking up and dropping off customers at Union Station in Washington, just steps away from the U.S. Capitol, he’d look at homeless people and think: “That’d never be me.” But in September 2017, Opudo lost his car, his job, and all of his worldly possessions. With no place to go and no food to eat, Opudo was homeless. “I was so hungry, I didn’t know what to do,” Opudo told The Daily Signal. Walking around Union Station, he asked a woman where he could find some food. “She said, ‘Go down to the...

New Mexico has had an uptick in homelessness, and it’s at the top nationally when it comes to the percentage of people experiencing chronic homelessness. In New Mexico, about 12 of every 10,000 people were experiencing homelessness, an increase of 2.8 percent from 2017. About 42 percent of them had been continuously homeless for a year or more. Only the District of Columbia had as high of a percentage of chronically homeless people. The problem has long vexed the state’s largest metro area, Albuquerque, as well as other communities around New Mexico. Albuquerque’s mayor has highlighted homelessness as one of...

Homelessness in the U.S. increased in 2018 for the second straight year after being in decline for 7 years previously, according to the Wall Street Journal. The small 0.3 percent increase from last year comes as the economy is booming and unemployment is at its lowest point in decades. The homelessness rate is included in an annual report given to Congress Monday conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD secretary Ben Carson called the rise in homelessness last year relatively muted, saying that for it “to be relatively flat is actually pretty good” given the rise...

On January 1, 2014, Colorado legalized the medical and recreational use of Marijuana. They claimed that it would add millions of dollars to the state’s revenue via state taxes which includes a 2.9% sales tax, 10% special sales tax and 15% excise tax, meaning the state would collect $27.90 for every $100 of recreational marijuana sold in the Rocky Mountain state. In April 2014, 19 year old foreign exchange student Levy Thamba plunged off a hotel balcony and died after eating legally purchased marijuana laced cookies. After eating just one cookie, Thamba became agitated and ran out onto the balcony...

According to a press release sent out by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, nine individuals have been charged "with a dozen felony counts for allegedly offering money and cigarettes to homeless people on Skid Row in exchange for false and forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms." "The defendants are accused of engaging in the solicitation of hundreds of false and/or forged signatures on state ballot petitions and voter registration forms by allegedly offering homeless people $1 and/or cigarettes for their participation, prosecutors said. The alleged offenses occurred during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles," the release...