Free Republic

Dive Brief: The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) has announced the completion of the state's first-ever diverging diamond interchange (DDI), located on Interstate 70, according to Equipment World. The DDI design eliminates left turns across oncoming traffic, improving vehicle flow and decreasing the chance of accidents. The agency also chose the DDI configuration because it could use the former interchange's cloverleaf footprint, reducing the impact of construction on the area. PennDOT said it modified the traditional DDI design slightly. Dive Insight: Design is one way transportation agencies are combating gridlock resulting from increased traffic. Other tools in DOT arsenals are...

Washington State must prepare for a nuclear attack because of the growing threat from North Korea, according to local politician. Mark Miloscia said the danger to Washington, which is the closest part of the lower 48 states to North Korea, was 'starting to become imminent'. And he warned that the threat was growing with each weapons test, urging lawmakers to back the bid for an emergency response plan when they meet tomorrow. The senator – who flew nuclear-ready B52 bombers during the Cold War – also said that America could not rely on the safeguards that once prevented hostilities with...

SEATTLE - Amazon's announcement Thursday that it's looking to base a second headquarters in new North American location garnered quick reaction from leaders across the state. While the company said that it plans to keep its Seattle space, it will spend more than $5 billion to build another "full equal" headquarters that will house as many as 50,000 employees. Cities and states have a month to apply, and the company will make a final decision next year. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray speaks at a news conference at City Hall Wednesday, June 14, 2017, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) Kshama Sawant:...

Olivia Capestany, now a senior at Seattle’s Roosevelt High, writes about the need for more political tolerance at her high school. (Editor’s note: This is the sixth essay we’ve published this year as part of Education Lab’s Student Voices program. Our Student Voices columnists are high-school and college students writing about education issues that matter to them. Know a student with a story to tell about school? Email Education Lab’s engagement editor, Dahlia Bazzaz: dbazzaz@seattletimes.com.) A week after the election, when a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat walked into our journalism class, we all thought it was...

A pastor from Chicago, James Dukes, has taken the next, almost inevitable step of calling for the erasure of prominent historical figures from public view; specifically folks like George Washington and Andrew Jackson. After the events in Virginia made it “acceptable” to erase history that some people (any peple) find offensive, it is completely unsurprising that the whole nation’s history is under attack. Did George Washington own slaves? Yes!, But should we condemn people for essentially living what was a normal life for the time? Consider, the people at that time in history didn’t think it out of the ordinary...

President Trump stepped on stage in Phoenix on Tuesday night with something clearly eating at him. Minutes into his style rally, we learned what: It wasn't the white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis who threw the nation into chaos and allegedly killed a woman in Virginia last week. Or the intractable 16-year war in Afghanistan that he just announced he's revving up. It's the media. Trump spent nearly a third — if not more— of his 90-minute rally rehashing his public remarks in the wake of Charlottesville and complaining that he was widely criticized for them....

George Washington was a slave-owner. It is clear from that fact alone, in the interest of peace and harmony, decency and fairness, sensibility and sanity, and in an effort to avoid any insensitivity toward all of our peoples, especially the indigenous and the non-citizen immigrant, let alone long-suffering great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of former slaves, that the capital city of our fair land must be re-named. Some of the leading candidates are listed below. Please feel free to add your own: Che' Guevara City Orwell D.C. Swamp City Momument Free City

If this mutinous cabal succeeds in destroying democracy it won't be because of the Democrats, it won't even be the seditious media. No, it will be the left-wing activists in Republican guise, GOP turncoats who will gleefully drive the final nail In a recent interview, Sean Hannity asked Newt Gingrich about Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell’s inability to lead, the Senate’s failure to pass an Obamacare repeal. Newt danced around McConnell’s role, its “we” he said, the President’s not a bystander, he shares the blame. After a few moments of castigating the President for Congress’s failures, Gingrich said we have...

The U.S. election season has reached a whole new level of absurdity now that Donald Trump voodoo dolls are selling like hotcakes in Seattle. Voodoo dolls are effigies into which pins are inserted so that the person made into its likeness will suffer pain. It is commonly used in the occult. However, Sally Noedell, a Bainbridge Island woman, thought of making these dolls to earn some extra cash. "At first, I made a whole bunch of political figures, but Trump became the front-running doll really fast," Noedell told the Kitsap Sun. "This is the one most people most want to...

The conversation about monuments — particularly which should stay and which should go — has eclipsed nearly all other conversations in the week following a rally-turned-near-riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. CNN's Kate Bolduan spoke to liberal analyst Angela Rye on Thursday, asking her whether the uproar was truly just about the monuments. Rye claimed that the problem ran much deeper than that: .. Rye concluded her argument by asserting that America was very close to once again being a nation of slavery: “We definitely need to learn about it so that we don't repeat it, because we're very close to repeating...

Donald Trump says removing confederate statues is a slippery slope that could get out of control. Maybe he's right—would that be such a bad thing? More than ever, old monuments to famous white American men are being threatened in the name of progress. Naturally, this has become a rallying cry on the far right, with plenty of encouragement from the most powerful man in the world. At the same unhinged press conference in which Donald Trump again blamed both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville last weekend, he also painted a picture of a slippery slope where those fighting...

by: Special to the AFRO ssherman@afro.com / (Photos of Panelists by Shantella Y. Sherman and Courtesy Photo) / August 17, 2017 0 225 The love and respect Washingtonians continue to have for legendary Go-Go artist and founder Chuck Brown shows most in the indelible footprint of his music and mentorship on both the music industry and the city. In celebration of the 3rd Annual Chuck Brown Day, which is scheduled for Aug. 19, the D.C. Public Library hosted a series of workshops and screenings, including the panel discussion, “Go-Go, As D.C. History,” where lovers of his sound gathered to remember...

Fremont's statue of communist leader Vladimir Lenin has once again come under fire. On Wednesday afternoon, a small group had gathered in front of the monument in Fremont calling for its removal. The group was seemingly led by Jack Posobiec, a pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theorist and self-described online "alt-right" activist. Posobiec Periscoped part of the gathering on Twitter. The statue's origin story is well documented.(snip)The statue was toppled in 1989 after the Velvet Revolution toppled communism in Czechoslovakia, and that's when Lewis Carpenter found it in a scrapyard. The English teacher from Issaquah then mortgaged his house to purchase and...

A Chicago pastor has asked the Emanuel administration to remove the names of two presidents who owned slaves from parks on the South Side, saying the city should not honor slave owners in black communities. A bronze statue of George Washington on horseback stands at the corner of 51st and King Drive, at the northwest entrance to Washington Park. Bishop James Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center, said he wants the statue gone, and he wants George Washington’s name removed from the park.

Even lefty Seymour Hersh agrees that the Russian fable begin in the mind of Obama’s CIA director. One wouldn’t expect Seymour Hersh, a lefty journalist par excellance, to pop the Trump-Russia propaganda balloon Obama’s CIA director John Brennan released last year. But he has. Hersh has been quoted as saying that the collusion claim is a product of “disinformation” — “a Brennan operation,” as he puts it. Hersh says that Trump is not the villain but the victim in this story, and that the press has served as a shameful stenographer for Brennan to smear Trump. It has shown no...

OLYMPIA, WASH. (August 2, 2017) — The Evergreen State College has been named one of The Princeton Review’s “Best 382 Colleges.” Published on Tuesday, The Princeton Review’s “Best 382 Colleges, 2018 Edition” includes a variety of best-of lists based on the results of a survey of 137,000 current college students. In addition to inclusion on the publication’s flagship list of 382, Evergreen is also on two additional lists, “Green Colleges” and “Best Western.” “We picked the 382 best colleges for our book primarily for their outstanding academics,” said Princeton Review Editor-in-Chief Robert Franek in a press release issued on July...

Imran Awan was born in Pakistan in 1980. He sought his education in Information Technology. He first came to Capitol Hill in 2004 working for Florida Democrat Robert Wexler. He has worked as a shared employee for Democrats as an information technologist for 13 years. He is a Pakistani immigrant, who made his home in the US in Lorton, Virginia. He has actually provided technical support for 25 other House Democrats working as a shared employee. He, also, managed to get his wife, HIna Alvi, on the House payroll. Then his brother, Abid Awan, then Abid’s wife, Natalia Sova became...

The fix is in. Did you know, corporations like General Electric Co. (GE) spend more money on lobbyists than they pay in taxes? The federal government currently taxes corporations at 35 percent. While many argue the rate is too high, you don’t hear companies like GE complaining about it. That’s because they aren’t paying it. Over the past 15 years, GE’s federal income tax rate averaged only 5.2 percent. General Electric paid no federal taxes in 2010, despite earning $5.1 billion in U.S. profits. Instead, the company claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. Meanwhile, GE executives awarded themselves more...

Earlier this week, PBS published a piece about three conservative women in the city of Portland. It’s an unusual perspective in a city that is overwhelmingly progressive. As you would expect, many of the locals aren’t kind to those with a different opinion. Helen Church became more active about her political beliefs after her son’s middle-school teacher told him that anyone who supported Trump was a racist: Up to that point, Church’s activism consisted mostly of writing letters to local and state representatives, and sometimes the White House. But as she watched people on the left continuously denigrate Trump supporters,...

In the super-charged public debate on health care, many advocates are rightly calling attention to the importance of protecting the health needs of people with disabilities. But for many in Southwest Washington who are living with a disability — and for their families — having health insurance coverage is just one part of the struggle. Severe and chronic disabilities are often associated with a significant decline in earnings. For families with children who have disabilities, for example, parents are often forced to step back from work to care for their child — making it even more difficult to shoulder high...