Free Republic

Mayor Jacob Frey (D) is seeking federal aid to help Minneapolis recover from the protests and riots that have wrecked the area. “With at least $55 million in estimated damage and far more to come, Minneapolis will need state and federal aid as it attempts to rebuild hundreds of structures after the riots following George Floyd’s death,” Frey explained on Thursday, according to the Star Tribune. The report continued: City officials are still putting together a complete tally of the destruction and cautioned that estimates are likely to rise significantly. Gov. Tim Walz and members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation are...

Canadian rap superstar Drake donated $100,000 to the National Bail Out fund on Monday, which seeks to help pay the bonds of people arrested across America as protests in response to the death of George Floyd in police custody have devolved into riots and mass looting.

The Golden State is showing its brass with more unemployed people than the entire population of Alabama. So, California’s leaders decided that this was an urgent time to bail out illegal aliens. California’s illegal alien population is its shadow economy and with many of the industries that employ them shut down, the Democrats who depend on ghost districts populated by illegals decided that something had to be urgently done to keep the illegal aliens from fleeing back across the border.

At a time when huge spending bills marked “coronavirus relief” are easily passing Congress with little scrutiny, poorly run states are asking unscrupulous members of Congress to slip in taxpayer bailouts to rescue them from years of their own fiscal mismanagement. In response, the House of Representatives recently passed a coronavirus relief bill that includes a half trillion dollars (trillion with a “t”) in unrestricted funds to bail out state governments for years of reckless expenditures entirely unrelated to the pandemic. I have the same reaction to these proposals that I had when I worked in government and people were...

According to a Fox News report, $80 million in stimulus funds intended to help small businesses struggling through coronavirus economic hardship have gone instead to Planned Parenthood, the multi-billion dollar abortion business. Under the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), Congress allocated $349 billion in federal funds to provide assistance to small businesses with fewer than 500 employees. According to the Department of the Treasury, funds may be used to pay up to eight weeks of payroll costs including benefits” as well as “interest on mortgages, rent, and utilities.” In August 2019, Planned Parenthood rejected Title X federal funding after...

CHICAGO — A detail tucked in a Fox 32 investigative report about Illinois contractors trekking across the border to build a new mansion at Gov. J.B. Pritzker's Wisconsin horse farm raised the eyebrow of somebody who knows how deals get done in America's most corrupt state. The contractor doing construction on J.B. Pritzker's Wisconsin horse farm won a $9 million coronavirus contract that was part of the state's pandemic response. The "dwelling contractor" listed on Wisconsin building permits, Bulley & Andrews, is the same company caught up in the alleged "scheme to defraud" Cook County taxpayers by removing toilets from...

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” That saying holds true more now than ever. But in the rush to “do something,” what the government does – in response to the global pandemic – actually matters. In the last few months, Washington has spent at least $5 trillion trying to mitigate the economic damage done by lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. And that’s not counting the cash the Federal Reserve is setting on fire daily. It’s easy to sneak favors into massive omnibus spending bills, so it’s Christmas in spring right now. The Kennedy Center gets a truckload of...

Blue States Will see economic ruin in Cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, these cities may start to look like Caracas, Venezuela in the weeks ahead. America is starting to reopen for business across the country — except for a handful of states where lockdown orders are expected to remain in place for weeks to come. With very few exceptions, the cities and states that have ordered their businesses to remain comatose and their millions of workers to go without paychecks are blue, blue, blue. This list includes New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, and Oregon....

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) says "the federal government has an ethical obligation to bail out my state. Admittedly, we might have been excessively generous in how we spent taxpayers' money. Perhaps this was a mistake. However, there is no need to make the people of California suffer for the miscues of their government. The federal government has an unconstrained power to create money. Failure to use this power to rescue California from bankruptcy would be a crime against humanity." Among the "miscues" are $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities, 15,000 hotel rooms leased to house the homeless along with...

After fully privatizing Deutsche Lufthansa AG a quarter-century ago, the German government will become a minority owner in an effort to rescue the country’s largest airline from economic devastation wrought by coronavirus travel restrictions. The airline group, which includes Lufthansa Airlines, SWISS International Air Lines and Austrian Airlines, agreed Monday to a 9 billion euro ($9.8 billion) bailout package in which the federal government will receive a 20% stake in the company in return for two board seats and veto power over any hostile takeover bid. Lufthansa agreed to limit dividends and management pay. The government will also give Lufthansa...

California Governor Gavin Newsom weighed in on the question of bailing out states whose budgets have been blown up by the coronavirus pandemic. Newsom told CNN’s “State of the Union” that a state bailout was not “charity” and that Congress has a “moral and ethical obligation” to help Americans across the country. The House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill last week which contained almost a trillion dollars to bail out states. It also contained goodies for all — another stimulus check, help for renters, college debt relief, and cash for illegal immigrants. Fox News: “Not to act now...

Congress is considering a $3 trillion stimulus package. HERE is an infographic of how the first $2.3 trillion was distributed. See Infographic...

Americans had a collective fit when they learned about Nancy Pelosi’s insane new “relief” bill. The massive spending package would cost us $3 trillion dollars. All of it would go to Democrat “wish lists.” Immediately, the White House promised they would never sign such a bill. Now, Pelosi is backtracking. You have to give it to Nancy Pelosi. The old gal doesn’t give two rats asses about America. When Congress was trying to pass funding to save small businesses, she held it up… twice. Then, she closed the House, preventing lawmakers from continuing to provide solutions during the crisis. Meanwhile,...

The House of Representatives on Friday evening passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, the most expensive legislation approved by that body in history, that Democrats hailed as the unprecedented response needed to deal with the pandemic and its economic fallout. The record-breaking bill narrowly passed by a 208-199 vote. Fourteen Democrats defied their party and voted "no," while one Republican, Rep. Pete King of New York, broke with the GOP and voted “yes.” “I’m thrilled," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after the bill's passage. "I'm so proud of my members. They just did something so monumental for the American...

By their own standards, the House Democrats’ Round 4 “rescue package” is a flop. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set herself up to fail by instructing her caucus and surrogates to insist that Congress prioritize testing, testing, and more testing in future rounds of coronavirus response funding. At the end of the day, Democrats scrounged up a budget for those tests amounting to less than 1 percent of the $3 trillion package Pelosi introduced this week. Instead of putting their money where their mouth is, they slapped together a leftist wish list dedicated to causes unrelated to the pandemic. It is...

"Pelosi's making us come back to vote on a pretend bill that's dead on arrival in the Senate...I think we should attack the virus, not the taxpayer." Click excerpt link for Video!

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's new $3 trillion coronavirus spending proposal is politically motivated "garbage" that "doesn't pass the laugh test," Sen. Bill Cassidy argued Wednesday. Appearing on "America's Newsroom" with host Ed Henry, Cassidy, R-La., said Pelosi tried to get away with more liberal additions to the bill once again, but this time it's hidden in the fine print. "Clearly she went to her committee chairs and she said give me that which you think maybe we can get in here – a starting point for negotiations so we’ll look reasonable when we retreat from it," he explained. "On...

• There is so much good (and also bad) analytical work appearing every day that calls into question the conventional wisdom about both COVID-19 and the hard lockdown remedy that just about every country has adopted. There’s so much that I can’t keep up, and can’t decide from day to day which items to pass along to Power Line readers. Fortunately for us, the British journalist Toby Young has put together a pretty good one-stop-shopping site called Lockdown Sceptics. Worth a look each day. Other good recent reads on lockdown skepticism include Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic (“Take the Shutdown...

National bus companies are headed to Washington D.C for a silent protest to ask lawmakers for aide as the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down a majority of their business. The pandemic has taken a toll on all travel and transportation companies, including a local charter service. Tuscaloosa Charter Service Manager Alicia Adams said the government has given $75 billion in aide to Amtrak and airline companies. National bus companies are asking for $15 billion to help survive their shutdown. Adams said they haven’t had any trips scheduled since March 15 and have none booked for summer. “When the University of...

Five Western states including California have called on the federal government for about $1 trillion in aid to states, said Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday.