Free Republic

Ready to go back to the 'Shattered' era, New York? The old 'drop dead' epoch and 'fun city' times? Looks like that's what's on the cards, based on this New York Post report, warning that the socialist-led city is in dire danger of bankruptcy if there's an economic downturn: New York City is careening closer to all-out financial bankruptcy for the first time since Mayor Abraham Beame ran the city more than 40 years ago, experts say. As tax-fleeced businesses and individuals flee en masse, and city public spending surges into the stratosphere, financial analysts say Gotham is perilously...

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer says that President Donald Trump calling the Democratic Party the “anti-Israel, anti-Jewish party” has “redefined chutzpah.” “For the president, who when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville in front of a synagogue and said ‘burn it down’ and he said ‘both sides’ are to blame, this is a new divisive low,” the Democrat from New York, who is Jewish, wrote on Facebook. Speaking outside the White House before departing for Alabama Friday morning, the president had said that recent comments by Democratic Rep. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota show “the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party”...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro isn’t ruling out direct payments to African-Americans for the legacy of slavery – a stand separating him from his 2020 rivals. “If under the Constitution we compensate people because we take their property, why wouldn’t you compensate people who actually were property,” the former Obama-era housing secretary and ex-San Antonio mayor said on Sunday. Castro was among the last of a pack of 2020 candidates to speak at the South by Southwest Festival in Texas, in what amounted to one of the biggest gatherings of the Democratic field yet.

Despite being the object of a huge amount of media attention, few people seem to know that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to be an entrepreneur and fell flat on her face. Her media pals certainly have no interest in publicizing the fact the she embraced socialism after she proved to be utterly, embarrassingly  incompetent at  earning her way.  Monica Showalter asked the key question on these pages last summer: “Did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's socialist fanaticism come from bitter failure in business? Now, thanks to digging by the New York Post, we know that: Brook Avenue Press, a company she founded in...

“How big a deal is it if they don’t find collusion for the president?” ABC “This Week” host Martha Raddatz asked Moran. “Huge,” said Moran. “He’s cleared. If Robert Mueller comes back, Mueller became a folk hero in the United States.”

Socialism demands a return to childhood dependence and the infantile world of subjective reality epitomized in the Green New Deal. Socialism is a tough sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on facts and a remarkably easy sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on feelings. The adult world of facts is a foreign land to the infantilized world of feelings where low-info millennial voters currently dwell. The heated political battle between Americanism and Socialism parallels the battle between parents and their children who refuse to grow up emotionally and leave the nest. Becoming an emotional adult requires embracing a...

Anchor also takes on negative New Yorker story.

It feels like Backward Day in the mainstream media this week. Case in point: The editorial board of the Washington Post published an opinion on deficit spending. The short version is that they believe there’s too much of it going on and the Trump administration, abetted by the GOP in Congress, has been burning through cash like a sailor on shore leave. In their opinion, the projected $900B deficit we’re looking at for 2019 is a sign of an unhealthy democracy. For our part, we don’t think the deficit per se is likely to cause short-term economic harm, or that...

Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is lucky he was only fired and not prosecuted for improperly leaking information to a reporter and then lying about it. Partial transcript as follows: KENNEDY: Well, let me- let me say it again. There were and perhaps still are some people at the FBI, one of whom was Mr. McCabe, who helped politicize the agency. Whe- when an FBI agent knocks at your door, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican and whether that makes a...

The Boeing 737 MAX 8, a brand new plane only registered in November, disappeared from the radar six minutes into the flight. Immediate comparisons have been drawn with Lion Air flight 610, which crashed just over four months ago, killing 189 people. Flight data showed erratic climbs and descents before the plane, also a MAX 8, came down 12 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta. More than 300 Boeing 737-MAX planes are in operation and more than 5,000 have been ordered worldwide since 2017. It is the latest iteration of the 737, the world’s bestselling plane, ever more capable of flying...

New York City is headed for financial ruin and could go bankrupt for the first time in 40 years, financial experts say. Financial experts predict that there are already signs the city is headed for financial disaster, as many individuals and businesses are leaving the city for lower tax areas and city government spending is at an all-time high. The last time the city came close to filing for bankruptcy was in 1975 when former President Gerald Ford refused to give the city a bailout package to settle its debt. “The city is running a deficit and could be in...

Despotism exhibited by Congress is a sign that America has already entered into a despotic tyranny that will end in the destruction of the Constitution along with our rights, liberty, freedom; that is unless we throw the Democrat socialists out Last Friday, the Democrat controlled house passed the partisan “For the People Act.” Although the bill isn’t over 10,000 pages long, like the Affordable Care Act, it’s still equivalent to reading a large novel, and once again Congress had to pass it to find out what’s in it. Unlike novels, the plot isn’t obvious to the reader, and the bill...

JNS.org – US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has reportedly been spearheading a resolution explicitly condemning antisemitism that he plans to introduce this week. Jewish Insider reported the development on Friday, citing “a source familiar with the plan” who said it is “just a condemnation of antisemitism. There’s nothing extraneous. The entire thing clocks in at just over 100 words.” It comes one day after the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. The House legislation was in response to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who on Sunday defended her recent remarks accusing her...

There’s nothing like a manufactured scandal to cripple your opponent when the going gets tough. Just ask President Donald Trump, hamstrung by fake news stories of unproven Russian collusion. Mainstream Media Style?The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s $1-billion-dollar-a-year taxpayer-funded state television network, seems to have come up with a winning race horse to take scandal-plagued Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reelection in October. From what appears to be a planted town hall question in Kitchener, Ont. Thursday night, the CBC was among the first news outlets to pounce on a story linking Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to the thoroughly debunked...

The poll showed de Blasio tied for last place in popularity with Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.

With a flashy name and speed-tracking equipment, state police cracked down on leadfoots in PennDOT construction zones last week in western Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that state police with Troop A issued 171 citations and 70 written warnings to alleged speedsters in Indiana County as part of Operation Yellow Jacket. Under the crackdown, a trooper gauged vehicle’s speeds in a construction zone. The officer then radioed ahead to other officers, who pulled over the offending drivers. Generally speaking, speed limits are 10 mph lower in a construction zone as a safety precaution for road crews. The officers were enforcing...

Captain Marvel is going higher, further, faster at the box office. The Marvel film easily soared past its competition for the biggest opening weekend of 2019 and the first title of the year to open to more than $100 million. It won the box office with an estimated opening total of $153 million in ticket sales at 4,310 theaters in the U.S. and Canada from Friday through Sunday. It marks the seventh biggest opening for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the second-biggest debut of a new Marvel character on the big-screen, behind only last year’s record-breaking Black Panther. Holdovers How...

President Trump's pursuit of additional border wall funding in his fiscal 2020 budget proposal will only lead to another government shut down, warned Democratic leaders on Sunday. Trump harmed millions when he "recklessy" shut down the government in pursuit of funds to build an expensive border wall, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a joint statement. But Congress refused and the president was "forced to admit defeat" and reopen the government, they added. "The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again," they warned. "We hope he learned his lesson."...

After the DOJ claimed no such document existed, the Justice Department has now unearthed a letter which Matt Whitaker delivered to the Utah U.S. attorney directing a review of how the department handled the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One situation. Jeff Sessions – who was at the time Attorney General – wrote the letter on Nov. 22, 2017 for Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber. Matt Whitaker, who was Sessions’ chief of staff at the time, emailed the letter to Huber that day, writing, “As we discussed.” He also sent Huber a copy of a letter the Justice Department’s Congressional...

Media coverage of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta has disappeared completely an astonished Glenn Greenwald remarked last week. "I'm still somewhat mystified about how Tony Podesta - intimately involved in many of Paul Manafort's slimiest and most unscrupulous practices (because K Street sleaze is 100% bipartisan) - has just vanished from the news cycle and, apparently, legal jeopardy," the Intercept journalist said along with the hashtag "MissingTonyPodesta." Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story of U.S. mass surveillance aided by former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Edward Snowden, has been highly critical of Russia investigation coverage and the Democrats'...