Free Republic

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) – State officials have launched Pennsylvania’s online voter registration system. The online registration application, hosted by the Department of State, is available for use by eligible citizens at register.votesPA.com. The new site also allows registered voters to easily update their voter record with a change of name, address or party affiliation, and voters may use the site to ask for help at their polling place. Governor Tom Wolf, who promised online registration when he ran for the office last year, said it will make the voting experience more convenient and accessible.

In the days ahead, millions of kids will pack their bags and leave home (hopefully for good) to go to college. For parents experiencing this for the first time: welcome to the biggest financial scam in America. Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University and an expert on college costs, puts it very plainly: "Colleges and universities may be the least cost-efficient institutions in the United States. No industry, perhaps other than prostitution, has seen less productivity improvements than higher education." As the father of two college kids I can personally attest to the astonishing rip-off of college tuition...

A Pennsylvania beauty queen is facing felony charges for allegedly raising thousands of dollars from donors whom she tricked into believing she was battling cancer, police say. Brandi Lee Weaver-Gates, a 23-year-old reigning Miss Pennsylvania U.S. International, was arrested Tuesday and charged with theft by deception and receiving stolen property, NBC affiliate WJAC reported. Her bond was set at $150,000, and she remains jailed at the Centre County Correctional Facility. Pennsylvania State Police said they began looking into the case after receiving an anonymous letter. "When confronted with what the investigation revealed, the accused advised that she did not want...

DALLAS – Despite the efforts of the IRS to contain it, a phone scam that's bilked individual taxpayers out of $14 million in phony tax debts continues to roll along. The scam has targeted at least 300,000 people, according to the IRS, and it may be gaining steam in North Texas. Dan Moore's been getting the robo-calls for two days. The recorded voice identifies itself as being from the "Internal Revenue Services (sic)." "The reason for this call is to inform you that the IRS is filing a lawsuit against you," the call continues. "It wasn't real friendly," Moore told...

The brother of Cecil, the lion killed in Zimbabwe by an American hunter last month, is not dead, a researcher monitoring the pride told Reuters, contradicting media reports that Jericho had been killed. "He looks alive and well to me as far as I can tell," said Brent Stapelkamp, field researcher for the Hwange Lion Research Project which is monitoring the lion with a GPS tag. A group called the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force posted on its Facebook page that Jericho had been killed at 4 p.m. on Saturday, a report picked up by some Western news media that was...

Caught cheating at Lotto on national television, the Serbian Lotto sweepstakes is now under investigation. Funny, they use the same machinery here in the USA too. Watch how the numbers appear on the screen on the LIVE broadcast before they are shown. Watch the consternation on the face of the spokesmodel. You can't win, if you don't play... LOL

Yahoo Travel reported on Wednesday that three women in Chechnya took ISIS for $3,300 before getting caught. They are now under investigation for Internet fraud, which seems to be illegal even when committed against the most fearsome terrorist army in modern times. The scam seems to be a combination of the Nigerian Prince con, in which a mark is fooled into giving the con artist large sums of money and catfishing, in which the mark strikes up an online romance with someone he thinks is an attractive woman (or man depending on the gender and preference of the mark.)

The current feel-good push for a $15 an hour minimum wage has nothing to do with helping workers and everything to do with advancing the goals of the left wing, especially the labor movement. This is true despite the occasionally soaring rhetoric of President Obama amid the Left's incessant whining about "income inequality," itself a particularly un-American concept, an imaginary evil that dwells only in the nightmares of left-wingers. The fact gets lost that the minimum wage itself and continuing increases in the minimum wage hurt working people.

Angie's List Inc. said Wednesday its revenue grew 11%, but it was less than analysts had expected as gross paid membership additions fell 27% for the services marketplace and consumer-review company. Despite seeing revenue growth, Angie's List has posted mostly losses since going public in 2011, as expansion efforts have ratcheted up costs. In the most recent quarter, Angie's List booked a loss of $8.3 million, or 14 cents a share, compared with a loss of $18.4 million, or 31 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue grew to $87.3 million from $78.9 million.

In June 2009, Richard and Shelly Hewson paid the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, an educational venture owned by businessman and now–presidential candidate Donald Trump, $21,490 for classes that promised to teach them how to flip homes for profit. They ponied up the high price “because we had faith in Donald Trump,” Richard wrote in a January 2015 affidavit. “We thought that if this was his program, we would be learning to do real estate deals from his people who knew his techniques.” What did the New Jersey couple get for shelling out more than $20,000 to a business bearing the famous...

Donald Trump has to put his mouth where his money is. The Republican presidential candidate will have to answer questions under oath about his net worth - and about how much money he raked in from his now-defunct Trump University, a California federal court judge ruled this week. Lawyers for The Donald had contended he didn't have to answer questions in a civil racketeering lawsuit about how much money he made from the "school" because he'd already acknowledged under oath that he had "significant involvement with both the operations and overall business strategy of Trump University." In a ruling Tuesday,...

Instead of accepting their application for benefits to begin at age 70, the agency's representative instead gives the person a six-month retroactive payment! This act resets the person's entitlement back to what it was six months prior and wipes out half a year of Delayed Retirement Credits (DRCs). The person loses 4 percent off their monthly benefit check in exchange for a six-month lump-sum payment they didn't ask for and don't want. ... "Based on SSA regulations, retroactivity is automatically applied to applications filed after FRA unless retroactivity is expressly restricted by the claimant," he wrote. "If this is a...

The Undercurrent posted a clip of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush taking question while walking through the hall at the Road to Majority Conference sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition in which he said he “embraces” the current “reduction of carbon emissions.” When asked about his climate change position Jeb said, “I continue to embrace the reduction of carbon emissions that have taken place.”

Whitehouse: "I extend an open hand, or an olive limb, to conservatives everywhere."Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have proposed a bill that would establish an economy-wide tax on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. “My bill sets the fee for a ton of carbon at $45 in 2016, the central range of the social cost of carbon as estimated by OMB, and would increase it each year at a real 2 percent. When emissions fall 80 percent below 2005 levels, the annual adjustment would fall to inflation,” Whitehouse said at the American Enterprise Institute when presenting...

Fake black NAACP President Rachel Dolezal faked her race.For years she pretended to be black, she was elected President of the Spokane NAACP, and complained of being the victim of race crimes, as a white student and as a black community leader.On Monday Rachel resigned as president of the Spokane NAACP.Rachel’s parents told Megyn Kelly tonight that their daughter is disturbed. Megyn Kelly: Last question, do you think she’s pathological?Rachel’s mother: I think Rachel has some very serious issues. Yes. No kidding.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6yQwKTC-kU

In April 2009, as the political right was finding its voice in the tea party, South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis was making the case for a carbon tax. “I’m a conservative. I believe in accountability,” he said. “Global warming is not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of facts.” He added, “We don’t want to be a party of deniers.” Most of his party disagreed. A year later, Inglis was trounced in a Republican primary, his staunchly conservative record proving insufficient to overcome this heretical deviation. On the surface, it may appear that little has changed in the...

Hillary Clinton “re-launched” her floundering campaign Saturday on Roosevelt Island, formerly and fittingly known as Welfare Island. Clinton’s desperate effort to associate herself with “everyday Americans” contrasts starkly with the crooked elites with whom she and Bill normally cavort. In fact, the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary’s elaborate slush fund, includes numerous donors and even one-time board members with dodgy backgrounds, shady dealings, and even criminal convictions that should repel rather than lure a once and perhaps future president of the United States. Peter Schweizer’s meticulously researched new best-seller Clinton Cash (complete with 635 endnotes) delineates this ultimate power couple’s...

Unresolved economic and social issues associated with wind turbines Touting the power of wind and “the possibilities to reshape our energy systems, decarbonize our economies and boost job growth,” the Global Wind Day is coordinated worldwide by the European Wind Energy Association, the Global Wind Energy Council, and various national associations. Solution Wind, a global awareness campaign is also publicizing the wind industry in advance of the COP21 (U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as “Paris 21”) climate negotiations in Paris, November 30-Decemmber 11, 2015. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was one of the three documents...

GUATEMALA CITY, June 10 (Reuters) - Three of the poorest, most violent Central American countries want $20 billion over the coming years to lift their economies with new roads and better education to curb illegal migration into the United States, according to a plan seen by Reuters. The document was given to U.S. President Barack Obama in April at a Panama City summit by the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala after a flood of child migrants from the three countries overwhelmed the southern U.S. border last year. Foreign ministers from those countries will go to Washington on June...

Three recruiting assistants for the Minnesota National Guard have been indicted for what the military has described as a "widespread scheme." They were indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Minneapolis and are accused of illegally taking bonuses for signing up new recruits. According to the indictments, Timothy Stafford is accused of fraud in kickbacks on the enlistment of 25 soldiers, and Terry Wosmek and Quinton Jones are accused of receiving kickbacks for four recruits each.