Free Republic

Fighting against the wishes of their voters is a classic Republican pastime — and this week is no different.When they apparently thought nobody was looking, a cabal of GOP senators comprised of Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s John Curtis, Kansas’ Jerry Moran, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — who’s up for reelection next year — quietly sent a letter on Wednesday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune regarding ongoing negotiations over the party’s reconciliation package.Their concern? That the final version of the legislation containing priorities backed by President Trump (tax cuts and border security) will also include provisions fully repealing President...

The Auberge du Soleil, a five-star hillside hotel and spa with a panoramic view overlooking the vineyards of Napa Valley, appears to be first-rate in all ways but one. While the glamorous resort, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, fills rooms that routinely go for $2,000 a night with A-list celebrities and tech titans, financial records suggest it did not provide much of a return to at least two of its investors – Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul. That changed when it received millions in congressionally authorized COVID-19 relief in 2020 and 2021. he Auberge du Soleil investment,...

Proposal uses ‘hardship’ as the rubric for granting student loan forgiveness. Joe Biden’s Department of Education has proposed a student loan forgiveness plan to take effect after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. While the Department of Education puts the estimated cost at $112 billion, one analyst called it a “gross underestimate” and suggested the cost could be five times larger. An economist and public policy analyst who spoke to The College Fix also criticized the regulation as “worrisome.” The department opened comments on Oct. 31, just days before the election. The comment period for the proposed regulation just...

Instead of quoting a historical figure like Adam Smith, Daniel Kahneman or John Maynard Keynes, legendary investor Warren Buffett believes the most consequential words on modern economics came from a surprising source: former U.S. President George W. Bush. At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Bush said: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down!” Buffett deemed this quip “the 10 most important words in the history of economics,” he told billionaire Dan Gilbert during an interview at the Detroit Homecoming event at the College for Creative Studies in 2014. Here’s why Buffett believes these words had...

We have reached a stage in our societal collapse where everywhere you look there is a major dumpster fire. In fact, it is difficult to name a single major area of our society that has not become a dumpster fire. Unfortunately, conditions just continue to get even worse. These days we are being hit with one thing after another, and this has created a “perfect storm” that our politicians have no control over. For example, just look at the migrant crisis that we are facing right now. During the month of December alone, more than 300,000 migrants will be processed...

The incoming House Oversight and Government Reform chairman on Sunday tried to clarify his recent remarks to Rush Limbaugh where he called President Obama "one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times." ... "When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus, that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect," Issa said on CNN's "State of the Union." Although TARP – the program passed in 2008 intended to strengthen the...

The FDIC has accidentally released a list of companies it bailed out for billions in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse A document from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which the agency said it mistakenly released unredacted in response to a Bloomberg News Freedom of Information Act request, provides one of the most detailed glimpses yet into the bank’s big customers. BY Lizette Chapman , Jason Leopold , AND Bloomberg June 23, 2023 10:43 AM EDT Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California Silicon Valley Bank headquarters in Santa Clara, California Philip Pacheco/Bloomberg - Getty Images When federal regulators stepped...

Jackie Rahm Little, 36, was federally charged over the week in fires at two Minneapolis mosques. MINNEAPOLIS — The man who was federally charged over the weekend in fires set at two Minneapolis mosques was previously bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund, court records show. Jackie Rahm Little, 36, was apprehended Saturday night in Mankato by the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Office and taken into federal custody. In addition to setting fires at the Masjid Omar Islamic Center and Mercy Islamic Center last month, Little was also identified as the suspect who vandalized the Minneapolis district office of U.S....

Federal officials gave more than $23 billion COVID-19 aid to the nation’s top 20 nonprofit hospitals even as a 62 percent increase in their collective net assets led parallel surges in the institutions’ total profits and revenues during the 2018-2021 time period spanning the Coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report. Only two of the 20 institutions have repaid the government for the COVID-19 aid they received. “The 20 largest nonprofit hospitals in the country continued making massive profits while their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021, up from $200.6 billion in 2018. The year 2021 is...

The giant investment company's global influence on politics and economics is enormous. BlackRock is one of the most powerful organizations in the world, and its nefarious role in global economics and politics is becoming more apparent. The investment giant is pushing woke politics in the form of corporate social credit scores (ESG), which includes the dangerous “net zero” and LGBT agenda. BlackRock is also responsible for rigging the financial systems and has control over a significant portion of the world’s wealth. In order to fight back, we need to know what we are dealing with. In this article, we take...

The losses will pile up, and American taxpayers will foot the bill until they no longer can.As Congress considers raising the debt ceiling again, the nation must realize that, unlike the Biden administration’s swift response to the student debt crisis and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure, American taxpayers will not receive a bailout from a national debt disaster.Government employees, media pundits, and politicians often note the hardships people will suffer if the federal government does not make taxpayers pay off their student loan debts or cover their financial losses due to a bank failure, but they rarely mention the burden...

The Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced on Sunday that they will guarantee all deposits that were still held at the ill-fated Silicon Valley Bank when it collapsed last Friday. This is probably a good thing. SVB was the sixteenth-largest bank in the United States, with tens of billions in holdings still trapped behind its crumbling walls. Vaporizing that much money might have had dire implications for other parts of the American financial system—and for thousands of innocent customers who believed their money to be safe within SVB’s coffers. The actions these government entities have...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) supported a visa waiver for the daughter of a fugitive Ecuadorian banker in exchange for significant campaign contributions to the Democratic Party. On Tuesday, NBC 4 New York reported that Menendez, with express written support from Clinton, intervened on behalf of Estefania Isaías, who was banned from traveling to the U.S. due to accusations of visa fraud. Isaías is the daughter of Roberto Isaias, who lives in Miami and is currently fighting extradition to Ecuador for banking crimes and under investigation for...

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci has addressed attacks made on his career and reputation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last month released the book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” Speaking to Yahoo News, the director of the NIAID said, “it really is a shame that he is attacking me in my career,” when asked about RFK’s book not being “a flattering portrait of” his career. “I think if you look at my career there are not a lot of people that would be attacking my career,...

President Joe Biden appeared on the loose Friday in Nantucket. Biden spent more than an hour walking around downtown Nantucket’s cobblestone streets, popping unannounced into quaint mom-and-pop shops, appearing to make purchases and posing for photos with surprised business owners. He was accompanied by some of his grandchildren. Biden and his entire family are spending the Thanksgiving holiday on the Massachusetts island, renting a sprawling compound that belongs to his friend and billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein.

Democrats want to use stimulus money to make you into the people populating Disney's cartoon 'Wall-E.' Instead, turn it into a weapon for antifragility.Democrats’ fifth round of “coronavirus” “stimulus” will soon hand another $1,400 in government debt, plus interest, to every American man, woman, and child in 90 percent of U.S. households. It’s clear this is yet another round of hush money meant to keep Americans quiet and distracted while Democrats restructure the United States into a larger version of their failed uniparty state, California.While COVID times have been obviously worse than the four years of prosperity and freedom under...

The New York Times reported this week that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion “coronavirus relief” bill includes $86 billion for failing pension funds: Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income. The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring...

Congressional Democrats are a runaway train with a drunk-on-power conductor in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. No matter how much evidence pours in that the economy doesn't need $1.9 trillion more in debt spending, the Pelosi locomotive keeps crashing down the track toward the financial cliff. Generations will have to pay for the joyride. One of the worst features of the bill is the "blue-state bailout." Twenty-one Republican governors and one Democrat are protesting the "biased" formula for allocating some $400 billion to the states. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster complained that the bill "punishes" states that did the right thing...

Last week, I visited South Florida for four days, and what a shock: Everything was open. The beaches, the hotels, the restaurants (with some sensible safety and social distancing restrictions). The classrooms are full. The other strange thing about being in Florida was that people were happy. They were playing tennis and golf. They were going to work and getting on with their lives. Florida is a Republican, can-do kind of place. Then, there is New York. Manhattan is a morose and deserted place to be. It's as if it's boarded up. People are living their lives afraid. They are...

Medicare is functionally insolvent, people are getting way more from entitlements than they paid in, and Congress has been spending like drunken sailors for decades with no signs of stopping.Two data points explain the current debate in Washington on more rounds of COVID spending. The Biden administration’s repeated statements that “the risk is not…going too small, but…going not big enough” reflects a position Joe Biden publicly articulated while serving in the Obama administration a dozen years ago: Biden: We Have To Spend Money To Keep From Going BankruptAs to the cumulative effects of these policies, the budget resolution itself tells...