Free Republic

Obama is already showing mental and emotional fatigue - won't last another term with this weak display of performance. There is no doubt he wouldn't last another term of the presidential spotlight. The democrats will have pay a high price for his lack of 'savvy skills' thus the demise of the party.

The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation's poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time. The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income residents deeper into suburbia where decay and social and geographic isolation will...

It pays when someone else pays.I initially thought President Obama was going to turn a blind eye and neglect the housing crisis in his porktabulous $787 billion spending bill in favor of doorknobs, STD awareness, hybrid cars and abandoned mine sites. It looks like I couldn't be more wrong ... and it took an article I read at the Indy Mind blog to bring it to my attention. (Thanks a million, Arkady).Nothing apparently gets by President Obama - that is, except the truth, American values and the need to keep terrorists caged. Housing, as it turns out, is a huge...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   California: NRA Victory in San Francisco Lawsuit!   Thursday, January 29, 2009   PUBLIC HOUSING OFFICIALS DROP ILLEGAL BAN ON FIREARMS POSSESSION IN PUBLIC HOUSING An NRA-led coalition of self-defense civil rights groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) has prevailed in a Second Amendment lawsuit challenging a ban on firearm possession in San Francisco public housing residences. “This success is further vindication of the U.S. Supreme Court's Heller ruling upholding the Second Amendment as protecting a fundamental, individual civil right for all law-abiding...

I like most Mexican people, just as I like most Americans. I don’t have prejudice against them, they are God’s children, just like me. So let’s get that out of the way. What I do hate, is illegal activity. I don’t like it when people ignore our laws, and sneak into our country. Yes, yes, we are a country of immigrants, I get that, I love that, I respect that, and encourage that. But, we are not a country of illegal immigrants. Law and order should be followed in all things. What I hate more than illegal immigration, is when...

What part of illegal alien is so difficult to understand? Apparently, there are those who are either too confused, too unwilling or too incapable of understanding the meaning of those simple words. Instead, they'd rather emotionalize any debate on illegal immigration with cries of racism, discrimination and an alleged lack of compassion for our fellow human beings. They choose this course rather than honestly dealing with the established fact we are a nation of laws - laws intended and necessary to preserve civility and order for our common good. I, for one, refuse to be intimidated or influenced by such...

Riverside and San Bernardino counties added more Latino residents between 2000 and 2007 than all but three other U.S. counties, a new analysis of U.S. Census data found. The report, by the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center, also found that most Latino population growth is now from new births. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was mostly from immigration. That means no matter what happens to the immigration rate, the Latino population of Riverside and San Bernardino counties will continue to grow steadily, reaching a majority within several years, experts say. Riverside County's Hispanic population surged 60 percent between...

A Story County district court judge granted a temporary injunction this week barring the city from complying with a Freedom of Information Act request for the addresses of people participating in Ames' city-run Section 8 subsidized housing program. The writ, authored by Judge Michael Moon and filed Monday, indicates that it appears the information sought by Ames resident Joe Monahan is protected under Iowa law and cannot be released, pending a full hearing into this matter on the legality of the request. No hearing date has yet been set. Monahan said he hadn't received the ruling, yet, but said he...

For all the talk of weaving public housing residents into the fabric of the city, the Chicago Housing Authority's ambitious Plan for Transformation includes this inconvenient fact: When the plan is complete, nearly 1 of every 10 of those families will live more than 100 blocks south of the Loop, tucked amid landfills, industrial parks and a sewage treatment plant. Mayor Richard Daley declared eight years ago that Chicago would end "the failed policies of the past." Yet a Tribune investigation found that the city has pumped hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars into housing complexes that preserve the...

This was not the first thing I wanted to hear this morning, yet perhaps I don't understand the context of President Bush's speech nor his intentions back then. What I heard this morning reminded me of President Johnson's Great Society programs. Again, and hopefully I have misunderstood the background on this. The following is my partial transcription of audio clips aired 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. on 790 KABC Talk Radio September 30, 2008. I also found the text of President Bush's 2002 speech and I posted it following my partial transcript of the audio segments. President Bush's 2002...

Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs. Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents....

Hey girls, want to get skanky? Well, sashay down to your local abuse shelter and get buzzed! No, you don't have to be a real victim of domestic violence. All you need is a convincing story. Last year Hollie Cephas of Monticello, Ark. arrived on the doorstep of the Options shelter to recount her tale of woe: Her husband had beaten her to the point of having two miscarriages, he hid her insulin, and once he even called her a "fat pig." The intake worker at Options had been taught to "always believe the victim," so of course she was...

Even million-dollar housing vouchers bring crime to the suburbs. ___ What if Section 8 housing voucher recipients were given $15 million vouchers, good for use in Malibu or Beverly Hills? The only question would be whether it would take a full five seconds for elite support for this federal housing program—which provides welfare families with a monthly rental check to move from ghettos to more stable working-class neighborhoods—to evaporate. The gorgeous sea-and-mountain community of Topanga Canyon, just south of Malibu, may have gotten a little taste of what such an experiment in serious social engineering might look like. In 2000,...

As a retired college professor I may live in a bubble of comfort, but I realize full well that millions of Americans live in poverty and hopelessness. It is truly unfortunate that every scheme advanced by liberals over the years aimed at helping people out of poverty has failed so miserably. AFDC Welfare has created millions of fatherless children to their detriment and to the great detriment of society as a whole. AFDC should be converted into a temporary emergency program for new recipients. In my last column I discussed the total failure of the Section 8 Housing program, and...

We could write columns for the rest of our lives just enumerating the failures of programs inspired by liberals and liberal philosophy – the Great Society, the destruction of families by Welfare, affirmative action, the destruction of our public education system, forced busing, shutdown of drilling for oil and stopping the building of more nuclear plants, dealing with Islamic terrorists in the criminal justice system, etc., etc. Today I want to focus on liberal programs in the area of housing.

To get to the Old Allen police station in North Memphis, you have to drive all the way to the end of a quiet suburban road until it turns country. Hidden by six acres of woods, the station seems to be the kind of place that might concern itself mainly with lost dogs, or maybe the misuse of hunting licenses. But it isn’t. Not anymore. As Lieutenant Doug Barnes waited for me to arrive one night for a tour of his beat, he had a smoke and listened for shots. He counted eight, none meant for buck. “Nothing unusual for...

.. Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. ... Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic...

The Antioch Police Department has been named in a federal lawsuit alleging the department's Community Action Team unfairly targets African-American families enrolled in the subsidized-housing program known as Section 8. Filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month by Bay Area Legal Aid — a civil legal service for low-income families — the suit alleges the city and police department are engaged in a "concerted and unlawful campaign to seek evidence which could lead to the termination of participants' Section 8 voucher benefits." Four individuals and a group of Section 8 families are named as plaintiffs. The suit seeks unspecified...

BOCA RATON — A crowd of more than 500 people waiting for hours this morning for housing voucher applications were dispersed by police in riot gear at the Boca Raton Housing Authority when the applications ran out sooner than expected. The action prompted complaints that officers used excessive tactics and housing authority officials were incompetent in their planning. Two people were arrested and six to eight people hospitalized for exhaustion during the ordeal. Hundreds of people, mostly mothers who had spent more than eight hours in line, were forced to leave the property at 2333 W. Glades Road by 30...

The Section 8 housing program - is funded by the federal government and administered by local housing authorities across the nation - is supposed to provide a hand up for needy or disabled people to make ends meet. It's not supposed to be permanent and, most of all, it's not supposed to be for people with criminal records, or people who use illegal drugs, or people who invite in unauthorized tenants or people who receive unreported income to cheat the system. Yet, as we've been reporting for the last two years, all these activities are rampant in Section 8 housing....