Free Republic

Ohio has a lot riding on the success of Lordstown Motors. Last year, Gov. Mike DeWine declared the electric vehicle startup “the future” while visiting the plant, the site of a shuttered General Motors assembly plant near Youngstown, about six months before state officials approved it for $20 million in tax credits. Secretary of State Frank LaRose last week was the latest in a procession of state officials who, after touring the plant, lauded the company’s promise for the economically beleaguered Youngstown area. JobsOhio, the state’s private economic-development arm, has pledged $4.5 million in grants to the company. Former President...

Wednesday marks the 24th anniversary of the Ohio Supreme Court ruling the state’s school funding model is unconstitutional. Twenty-four years later, the Ohio legislature has yet to fix it. Yet less than 24 hours after Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to allow lawmakers to strike down public health orders, GOP supermajorities mobilized to override this veto. Senate Bill 22 will thereby go into effect three months from now. DeWine has expressed hope that Ohio’s health orders such as the mask mandate will already be removed by then, with COVID-19 cases on the decline and vaccines now eligible for the...

Determined to not let any tragedy go to waste, each of the broadcast networks touted President Biden’s call for gun control on Tuesday following the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado. But NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt went a step further, trying to browbeat viewers with a claim that America had experienced “more than 100” such shooting in “the last 20 years.” But back on November 8, 2018, the network claimed there were 307 mass shootings in the first 10 months of the year alone... As a nation, we have been here so many times before. More than 100 times...

Many progressives today insist that gender is fluid and that American law should abolish any distinctions between the sexes. Yet, ironically, many of these same people point to overly simplistic statistics derived from binary male-female categories to claim that women are the victims of wage discrimination and to demand more regulation, more government monitoring, and many, many more lawsuits. Surely, such a binary approach to categorizing workers and comparing wages is woefully outdated in our new woke world! According to progressive activists, sexism is the reason that the average woman earns only about 80 cents for every dollar earned by...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s dogs Champ and Major had returned to the building after the biting incident. “Champ and Major are here at the White House,” she said during the White House press briefing in response to a question about their status.

...Since that debut in mid-September, the show has experienced a loss of audience to the tune of over 1 million viewers. This amounts to a heavy drop of over -40%, more so than all other daytime programs. She has perennially been at, or near the top of the daytime ratings, but this is a significant plunge. Her last year saw Ellen at 2.6 million viewers, challenging Live With Kelly and Ryan (2.7 million) and Dr. Phil (2.5 million). This is a significant hit, and it leads to trouble in a number of areas. As far as a loss in ad...

Royal Caribbean Group today announced that it has commenced a private offering of $1.25 billion aggregate principal amount of senior unsecured notes due 2028 to be issued by the company as it continues its ongoing fundraising. The company intends to use the proceeds from the sale of the Notes to repay principal payments on debt maturing or required to be paid in 2021 and 2022, and the remaining for general corporate purposes (including to pay fees and expenses in connection with such repayments), according to a press release.

A new survey found that 42 million people from Latin America and the Caribbean region want to immigrate to the United States. “There are 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Roughly 450 million adults live in the region. Gallup asked them if they would like to move to another country permanently if they could,” said Gallup’s CEO Jim Clifton, whose company conducted the poll, in an article Wednesday. “A whopping 27 [percent] said ‘yes.’ This means roughly 120 million would like to migrate somewhere.” Then he added: “Of those who want to leave their country permanently, 35 percent—or...

Late Monday, Politico reported that Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of a handful of Republicans in the chamber who can be counted on in close confirmation votes, nixed the Biden administration’s desired nominee for deputy secretary of the Interior Department. The nominee, Elizabeth Klein, the deputy director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law, was shot down by Murkowski due to Klein’s progressive policy positions on climate and environmental issues, per Politico, particularly as they relate to the potential for extractive development in Murkowski’s home state of Alaska. The decision arrived less...

Finally, after a nationwide shortage forced fans to begrudgingly slurp bowls of lesser bran cereals, Grape-Nuts has reclaimed its rightful place on grocery store shelves. The fibrous cereal is once again fully stocked nationwide, signaling the official end to the pandemic Grape-Nuts shortage, parent company Post Consumer Brands announced on Wednesday. And to repay Grape-Nuts fanatics for their brand loyalty, Post may reimburse them up to $115 if they overpaid to get their cereal fix during the shortage. Grape-Nuts will be back on shelves in March Grape-Nuts will be back on shelves in March Grape-Nuts, the cereal made of neither...

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JPCA) is a bait-and-switch attempt that claims to help conservative news sources but would instead purge them from the marketplace of ideas, and Congress should reject it for the freedom-killer it is. JCPA would give media companies—broadcast and print—an exemption from federal antitrust laws, so they can operate in a coordinated fashion to negotiate prices that social media companies like Facebook would have to pay them to carry their content. It would ensure that these tech billionaires would have to direct some of their riches into content providers. But that’s a Big Boys’ game...

Last month, shortly after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio reached his seventh anniversary in office, I had a post giving him a “report card” on his achievements, or lack thereof. As you may know, de Blasio is term-limited at eight years, so he is now in his last year. In fact the contest to replace him is well under way, with the primary (that will likely determine the result) scheduled for June 22. My February post on de Blasio covered subjects like taxes, spending, crime, schools, and rent regulation. On all of those, his performance has been abysmal, if...

In a recent item for The Federalist, David Harsanyi considered the M16 rifle one of the five most innovative firearms in American firearm development history. Yet something equally significant can be said about the semi-automatic AR-15 derived from the M16. Second to the muskets used in our revolutionary and civil wars, the AR-15 may be the most important firearm in American political history. All told, more Americans have fired more rounds from more AR-15s for personal defense, defensive firearm training, marksmanship competitions, individual practice, and hunting than from any other rifle. For that reason, the AR-15 is the primary firearm...

@glennbeck The Boulder mass murder was terrible and tragic. But guns are NOT the problem. Clip...

So much of the angst over re-opening schools in the Covid era comes down to one issue: individual parents have very little say in school district decisions. This stems from the government having a near monopoly on K-12 education. No other area of life operates like this—not even other levels of education like pre-school or college. The result is that unions and district bureaucrats wield more power than parents or individual teachers. This imbalance has left millions of students unable to attend school this year. Yet every district includes a sizeable number of parents who want full-time school for their...

Michael Moore called the suspected Colorado shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa as “American as apple pie” in a series of tweets in which he suggested it would be wrong to classify the suspect as “Middle Eastern” and “Islamic,” even though he immigrated from Syria.

(CNN) President Joe Biden is tasking Vice President Kamala Harris with overseeing efforts with Central American countries to stem the flow of migrants to the US southern border, senior administration officials said on Wednesday, the first major issue Biden has assigned directly to his No. 2. The assignment mimics Biden's own efforts in 2014 and 2015, when he was asked by then-President Barack Obama to lead diplomatic efforts in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador after a surge of unaccompanied minors from those countries began arriving in the US. Migrants are again arriving at the border at increased levels, causing a...

Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday on “CBS This Morning” that Congress needs to act in the wake of the Atlanta and Boulder mass shootings. Harris said, “It is time for Congress to act and stop with the false choices. This is not about getting rid of the Second Amendment. It’s simply about saying we need reasonable gun safety laws. There is no reason why we have assault weapons on the streets of a civil society. They are weapons of war. They are designed to kill a lot of people quickly.” She continued, “Let us all agree that we need...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Fox News Channel Wednesday that he hasn't spoken with President Joe Biden 'since he was sworn in' - nor has he received an invitation to the White House. McConnell was trying to make the point that Biden's bipartisanship talk was just that, telling Fox's Bill Hemmer 'there's been no efforts whatsoever by the president or the administration to do anything in the political center.' A spokesperson for McConnell later clarified to DailyMail.com that the Kentucky Republican had spoken with Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken about Burma on February 1.

The Spectator’s Amber Athey reports that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem says she’s the victim of “conservative cancel culture” over her opposition to a bill making its way through the state legislature to “promote continued fairness in women’s sports”