Free Republic

The grim lesson of the devastating wildfires in California over the past week, which turned my community into ruins, is clear: private services work, and public services do not. I live in Pacific Palisades. My house is the last one standing on the corner. There is rubble in every direction. The streets along the route my wife and I used to walk in the evening are a post-apocalyptic scene. Every beautiful house we admired is destroyed; every child our kids played with is gone. A mile away, the center of town — which we call the “village” — is a...

In a Supreme Court showdown Monday over whether the homeless have a "right" to camp in public, almost no one mentioned the actual victims of that crazy idea. Homeless advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, told the court that living on the streets is a "victimless" crime. Victimless? Everyone who has to step over needles and human poop and navigate around half-conscious humans while walking to work or taking their kids to school is a victim. Every store owner whose entrance is blocked by makeshift cardboard shelters is a victim.

In a soon-to-be-aired episode of Unmuted with Marsha Blackburn, “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary revealed that he does not invest in Democrat-led states because of their left-wing policies that hurt businesses. “I'm not trying to get involved in the partisanship of this statement. Just a fact, I don't invest in New York, I don't invest in Massachusetts, I don't invest in California. In my mind, those are examples of states that are uninvestable because of bad policy,” O’Leary explained in the episode, which was shared with Townhall. “So, I’m looking for the path of least resistance. If you make it...