Free Republic

Just perfect timing for the communist MayDay holiday release. What a surprise.

A controlled burn occurring at Marine Corps Base Quantico Sunday afternoon near the Stafford and Fauquier county line is causing moderate to heavy smoke conditions in Prince William County and other areas of Northern Virginia, Maryland and D.C. The U.S. Forest Service is conducting the controlled burn of about 2,000 acres in the area. Individuals with respiratory illnesses or medical conditions that are aggravated by smoke should remain indoors until smoke conditions clear, according to the Prince William County Police Department. The controlled burn is expected to last two days. The controlled burn appears to have caught local jurisdictions off...

Our defeat was all but inevitable, yet the transgender activists still showed up in matching shirts and waved multicolored flags. Their speakers outnumbered ours 4 to 1, but they still hissed and muttered ugly names at our side while we spoke. We had gathered for the Arlington County School Board’s meeting on June 18. For four months, the Arlington Parent Coalition had worked tirelessly to get our liberal school board and administrators to reconsider or delay the implementation of policies that would expand accommodations for transgender-identified students. Those policies were passed four years ago during the summer, when nobody was...

Thanks to almost $1 million contributed by George Soros, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti defeated the incumbent DA in Arlington and Steve Descano defeated the incumbent in Fairfax. Those two victories bring the total number of campaigns that Soros has tried to buy to at least 23. The $583,000 that Soros gave Tafti represented 78 percent of her total campaign budget. The $392,000 George sent Descano was marginally less at 71 percent of his budget. In those two true blue counties winning the Democrat primary means winning in November, too. So, what did Soros buy? Two more DAs who won’t be prosecuting “quality...

George Soros has won another and another election. This time, in the DC suburbs of Virginia — Arlington and Fairfax. Soros funneled over a million dollars into the local Democrat primaries for prosecutor. (Compare that to the measly thousands that the local candidates usually raise.) The incumbent Democrats with prosecutorial experience weren’t left-enough for the Marxist worshipper, so Soros sought to replace them with ideologues. Soros backed the “progressive” candidates who publicly echoed his neoliberal ideology, even though they lacked local prosecutorial experience, something that local voters have consistently favored when electing their representative prosecutors. But who cares about what the...

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Protesters repeatedly shouted "shame" as a northern Virginia county board Saturday unanimously approved a $23 million incentives package for Amazon to build a new headquarters there. The Arlington County Board's 5-0 vote came after hours of heated public testimony, news outlets reported. Supporters said Amazon's plan to build a massive facility in Crystal City will lead to tens of thousands of good jobs and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. Opponents, however, said the tech giant neither needs nor deserves public subsidies. They also said lower-income residents would be driven out by...

Brace yourselves … the U.S. Census Bureau just shared some information about the counties with the highest household income in the nation, and you’re in for a major shock: U.S. Census Bureau ✔ @uscensusbureau Highest counties by median household income (2013-2017): -Loudoun County, Va. -Fairfax County, Va. -Howard County, Md. -Falls Church City, Va. -Arlington County, Va. https://go.usa.gov/xPuUe #ACSdata

FULL TITLE: Doctor who spiked his pregnant girlfriend's drink with FOUR abortion pills is sentenced to three years in prison A doctor who spiked his then-girlfriend's drink with four abortion pills has been sentenced to three years in jail. Brook Fiske, 37, was almost four months pregnant when she was poisoned by Sikander Imran, 32, last year. She was began suffering contractions and was rushed to hospital where she lost her unborn baby son. Imran was arrested and earlier this year, pleaded guilty to fetal homicide in Arlington County, Virginia. On Friday, he received a three-year jail term, and 17-year...

So from where is all this newfound interest in Arlington County’s sustainability bonafides coming? From Amazon.com, it seems. The vast majority of the traffic to the page over the past week that can be tracked came from what appears to be an internal Amazon.com page devoted to its HQ2 search. Arlington, of course, is in the running as one of the potential landing spots for the company’s second headquarters.No other page on ARLnow.com has a similar level of traffic coming from Amazon. Last week a noted NYU professor who has written about the company opined that New York City and...

The owner of the Arlington gun store that opened last month despite vociferous objections from local residents has sued 64 people, including elected officials, claiming that they conspired to destroy the business, harassed the owner and landlord and mailed death threats to the 16-year-old “owner-in-training.” The suit, filed last week in Richmond Circuit Court, named seven state legislators who appealed to the landlord, on official General Assembly stationery, to refuse to rent 2300 N. Pershing Dr. to Nova Armory. The lawsuit also named Arlington County Board member Christian Dorsey, School Board member Barbara Kanninen and multiple residents who have spoken...

Detroit, you're not alone. Across the nation, cities and states are watching Detroit's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing with fear. Years of underfunded retirement promises to public sector workers, which helped lay Detroit low, could plunge them into a similar financial hole. A CNBC.com analysis of more than 120 of the nation's largest state and local pension plans finds they face a wide range of financial burdens as aging work forces near retirement. Thanks to a patchwork of accounting practices and rosy investment assumptions, it's not even clear just how big a financial hole many states and cities have dug for...

Detroit, you're not alone. Across the nation, cities and states are watching Detroit's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing with great trepidation. Years of underfunded retirement promises to public sector workers, which helped lay Detroit low, could plunge them into a similar and terrifying financial hole. A CNBC.com analysis of more than 120 of the nation's largest state and local pension plans finds they face a wide range of burdens as their aging workforces near retirement. Thanks to a patchwork of accounting practices and rosy investment assumptions, it's not even clear just how big a financial hole many states and cities have...

(Updated at 2:55 p.m.) Arlington County (Va.) Police and federal agents are searching for a man who threw a Molotov cocktail-like incendiary device inside the Ballston Common Mall. The man threw what was described as a “flaming bottle” from an upper level of the mall down to the food court. The device, said to be 40 ounce beer bottle, possibly containing gasoline or a similar substance, shattered on impact but did not explode, according to Arlington County Police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck. No one was injured. Two to three additional bottles, which “smelled like gasoline,” were found in a bag by...

Government officials in the Washington region, as well as nationwide, are looking increasingly to bus rapid transit for new transit options as they face tightening public purses. BRT plans are under way in Alexandria and Arlington County, where buses are planned to travel from Braddock Road to Pentagon City. Alexandria expects to begin construction in July and start running buses in dedicated lanes in December 2013, said Abi Lerner, Alexandria's deputy director of transportation. Arlington expects to complete its half of the system in spring 2014. Across the Potomac, Montgomery County officials have proposed a 160-mile system with 23 routes....

Charges of race discrimination are a big part of the Arlington County Board's high-occupancy toll lanes lawsuit against Virginia and the federal government, which accuses several federal and state transportation officials of civil rights violations. The board recently filed a motion with the U.S. District Court in D.C. to expand its lawsuit to include Edward Sundra, a program manager for the Federal Highway Administration. If the court accepts the board's motion, Sundra would become the fourth person charged in the lawsuit with "blatant and intentional" neglect of federal and state anti-discrimination laws. The three individuals the lawsuit currently names --...

A Republican Liberty Caucus-endorsed candidate for House of Delegates in Virginia was endorsed by The Washington Post last week. Eric Brescia, who is running in a longtime Democrat stronghold in Arlington, Virginia, impressed The Post. Brescia, who is young, articulate, and has strong libertarian leanings, has run a campaign that may well fit his far-left district during an economic crisis due in part to overspending: his campaign emphasized policies that are socially tolerant and fiscally conservative. The Post said, “[Brescia] is exactly what the Republicans need in Northern Virginia: an independent-minded thinker who has fresh and specific ideas for how...

What is it with Jim Moran? The nine-term Democratic congressman from Northern Virginia can't seem to keep his head on straight when it comes to talking about Iraq and the reasons we have ended up over there. In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, during an event at a Reston church sponsored by a peace coalition, Moran said: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this." Not stopping there, he added, "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change...