Free Republic

You can tell a lot about a nation by the condition of the infrastructure. So what does our infrastructure say about us? It says that we are in a very advanced state of decay. At this point, much of America is being held together with spit, duct tape and prayers. Our roads are crumbling and thousands of our bridges look like they could collapse at any moment. Our power grid is ancient and over a trillion gallons of untreated sewage is leaking from our aging sewer systems each year. Our airports and our seaports are clogged with far more traffic...

Forget the marble pillars, this time there will be a giant 16-foot sculpture of Obama made out of 15.5 tons of sand at the Democratic National Convention. Building a giant sand sculpture of a living leader might be considered a bit tacky with its worshipful implications, but building one during a hurricane in South Carolina is in particularly bad taste. But if nothing else, at least Obama has found one “Shovel Ready Project”. And this isn’t even the creepiest giant Obama sand sculpture ever made. The winner of that particular competition is still Sudarsan Pattnaik with this nightmare made...

TOMBSTONE — The City of Tombstone is embroiled in another dynamic showdown. The “Town too Tough to Die” is now squaring off against the U.S. Forest Service in what could be the fight of its life, a battle over water rights. On Friday and Saturday, a group called the Shovel Brigade will gather in Tombstone and head to the Huachuca Mountains to make repairs to the city’s waterline, which was damaged by mudslides and boulders after last summer’s Monument Fire flooding. While the 26-mile waterline — fed by springs in the Huachuca Mountains — has been Tombstone’s main water source...

It would cost $852 quadrillion dollars to build a real Death Star That's 852 with 15 zeros following it. I know, that figure is insane. You know what that means. It means Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader were rolling in the money like filthy rich rappers. I guess ruling the Galactic Empire isn't so terrible when you're ballin'. Finally putting some questions to rest, the smart folk over at Centives calculated how much iron it would take to build the planet-destroying space station and even figured out how long it would take to build. Here's the reality-check breakdown: • Based...

An agitated moose ran down and stomped a well-known Bush pilot from Willow, but he was saved when his wife grabbed a shovel from their pickup truck and whacked the big animal until it backed off.

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree. You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global's Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. In the president's view, extending the payroll tax cuts...

President Obama used to be fond of "shovel-ready projects." He's also demanding that Congress pass his jobs bill immediately because 9% unemployment is a crisis, and, by the way, he's for making the U.S. less reliant on energy from tyrants. So how about putting 20,000 Americans to work on a North American energy project that's as shovel-ready as they come? Sorry, Mr. Obama is voting present. The $7 billion project is TransCanada's Keystone XL, a 1,700-mile underground pipeline that would deliver 830,000 barrels of heavy crude oil a day from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. TransCanada filed an...

Obama: "We Have Lost Our Ambition, Our Imagination" "We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge," President Obama said at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Tuesday.

We hear a lot these days about the need for “shovel ready jobs” and the lack of them, as well as the “do-nothing Congress”. For those who want answers, not excuses, let’s visit some of the places where job preventers work.

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama, in a speech to supporters in Dallas, Texas, today attacked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), challenging the conservative lawmaker to come to Texas and tell the president what he did not like about the $447-billion American Jobs Act. “Yesterday, the Republican Majority Leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, said that right now, he won’t even let the jobs bill have a vote in the House of Representatives,” Obama said in prepared remarks released by the White House. “I'd like Mr. Cantor to come down here to Dallas and explain what in this jobs bill he...

Rather than just getting a Hallmark greeting card on a birthday or any old generic calendar holiday, the company is aiming to bring some encouragement to the masses of unemployed right when they need it most. The greeting card giant created a line of sympathy cards that targets people who recently lost their jobs. With the national unemployment rate staying steady at nine per cent, the company thought there was an untapped audience. 'People in times of need with always need to connect,' said Hallmark's creative director Derek McCracken to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. 'When the consumers have...

Investigators said they are still searching for the source of the manure.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Drawing a bright line with congressional Republicans, President Barack Obama is proposing $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue as part of his long-term deficit reduction plan, according to senior administration officials. The president on Monday will announce a proposal that includes repeal of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, nearly $250 billion in reductions in Medicare spending, $330 billion in cuts in other mandatory benefit programs, and savings of $1 trillion from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said. The plan includes no changes in Social Security and does not include an...

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans unexpectedly pledged an immediate review of President Barack Obama's jobs proposals on Friday as he launched a public campaign for urgent passage of his day-old $447 billion program of tax cuts and new spending. "The time for gridlock and games is over," the president declared. "Nothing radical in this bill," Obama told a large crowd at the University of Richmond on the afternoon after his dramatic speech to Congress. "Everything in it will put more people back to work and more money back in the pockets of those who are working. Everything in it will...

Team Obama Trips on its Shoelaces Before Fall Campaign Kickoff “It's been a long time since Congress was focused on what the American people need them to be focused on. I know that you're frustrated by that. I am, too.” -- President Obama in an email to political supporters asking them to watch his speech on the economy next week. Maybe House Speaker John Boehner did President Obama a favor by rebuffing his request to give an economic speech to a joint session of Congress at the same time as a long-scheduled Republican presidential debate. The most notable prior occasion...

A solar energy company that intends to file bankruptcy received $535 million in backing from the federal government and has a cozy history with Democrats and the Obama administration, campaign finance records show. Shareholders and executives of Solyndra, a green energy company producing solar panels, fundraised for and donated to the Obama administration to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, a key Obama backer who raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president’s election campaign, is one of Solyndra’s primary investors. Kaiser himself donated $53,500 to Obama’s 2008 election campaign, split between the DSCC...

Shovel ready, it turns out, doesn't always mean shovel ready. In the first year of the Obama administration, the federal government awarded Austin a $1.9 million stimulus grant for a project the city called "shovel ready": a 3.2-mile concrete bicycle trail along the northern portion of Walnut Creek in North Austin. More than two years later, there is only a clear-cut, 20-foot-wide swath, along with some partially buried metal rods and concrete along the creek. Work has stopped and will not resume anytime soon. The city, after fearing it would lose the federal money, is starting over. Oversight of the...

There was a time when our nation was capable of large, visionary construction projects.Huntington Lake, Calif. — Our politicians love soaring platitudes followed by little, if any, action. The more Americans are promised shovel-ready stimulus projects, new sources of power, and other fantasies, the more we accept that bureaucracy, regulations, lawsuits, and impact statements will prevent much from ever being done. The president himself, after demanding nearly a trillion dollars in borrowed money for his budget, confessed that his “shovel-ready” projects had proved not so shovel-ready after all. Much of the vast sum of borrowed money instead went to subsidize...