Free Republic

As higher education undergoes dramatic changes thanks to the coronavirus, reformers should aim higher than expanding online education. Now is a propitious time to end the dominance of accreditation agencies in higher ed and create a GED-like equivalency exam for a college degree. Many students want a traditional college life: living on campus for four years, attending classes, and socializing. But for the majority of students, what matters most is learning and getting a credential for a good job or ready for graduate education. These students genuinely desire knowledge but don’t always need other aspects of the traditional college experience....

I’ve been tempted to tweak my liberal friends with the mischievous thought that COVID-19 is actually a Trump five-dimensional chess plot to destroy universities, unionized K-12 public education, and Hollywood (since TV and movie production is largely shut down too). Colleges and universities were already facing mounting financial pressure because enrollment is steadily declining and certain to get much worse in the coming decade (the result of falling birthrates back at the time of the housing crash in 2008-09). Add to this the financial hit they are taking right now because of the virus, on top of the huge loss...

Nearly all GOP Senators and top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are quietly backing the S.386 outsourcing bill pushed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), according to Hill sources. “There isn’t a single Republican in the U.S. Senate that will stand up against outsourcers,” said an advocate for more legal immigration. “I don’t think the GOP is going block the bill,” a Hill source said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, between magazine photoshoots and throwing the first pitch at baseball games, seems to have forgotten the cardinal rule of medicine – first, do no harm. By downplaying the effectiveness and highlighting the alleged dangers of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), it can be argued he has cost American lives and will cost more, coming as he has between real doctors and real patients and real-world experience with a drug that has been safely used to treat conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis for six decades without any serious side effects. Fauci is in love with clinical studies, which are fine...

MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi tried to twist Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s remarks to NBC’s Today in March to claim that conservatives have a “fetish” about debt. Huh? Filling in for the insufferable Chris Hayes on Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s All In, Velshi inundated viewers with propaganda. He spewed that GOP leaders were “pretending that there’s just not enough money to help Americans. They say we cannot afford another large relief bill.” Still, he later levied a bizarre accusation that the GOP was “deceiving Americans” and conforming to a “conservative fetish about poor people getting freebies and running up the...

The media continues to publish polls that assume a turnout completely different from 2020. The latest CNBC poll, which has Biden up by 6 points, is no different. Highlights - significant oversampling of younger voters, undersampling of older voters. The CNBC poll oversampled 18-49 year olds by 20%, compared to 2016 turnout.The CNBC poll undersampled 50+ year olds by 15%, compared to 2016 turnout.The CNBC poll undersampled Republicans by 8%, compared to 2016 turnout. SEE THE DATA...

Patrick Rooney, Founder of Old School™(Natural Health / Success / Freedom), interviews businessman and experienced gold investor Joe Grande about the reasons people should consider investing in gold and silver, and how to get started.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama used her podcast to thank the pandemic "for opening our eyes to a new way of distributing the nation's wealth. Barack always thought it would require an act of Congress to implement the kind of redistribution needed to achieve social justice. But the unilateral power wielded by almost every governor during the COVID crisis showed that it could be accomplished much more easily than he thought." "In state-after-state we saw governors decreeing which businesses were essential and which were not," she observed. "Declaring a business nonessential effectively confiscated an owner's right to earn an income...

Washington Post owner and Big Tech mogul Jeff Bezos is looking to make good on his $10 billion “Bezos Earth Fund” eco-extremist pledge to fight climate change. Vox Recode reported that “Bezos has quietly started a new company that appears involved in the historic push” to combat "human-induced" climate change. Specifically, Bezos started a new venture company called Fellowship Ventures LLC, which applied for the “Bezos Earth Fund” trademark in July. According to Recode, this was “a move that suggests the LLC will be key to his plans, or perhaps even run the charitable program outright.”

VIDEO If your Tesla car runs out of electricity on the road miles away from the nearest charging station, what do you do? This video shows what actually happened in this situation.

CNN’s newsroom tried to downplay the impressive Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) July jobs report, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow wasn’t having any of it. During Friday’s edition of CNN Newsroom, co-anchor Poppy Harlow kicked off a contentious interview with Kudlow with negative spin, asking Kudlow: “Does the slowdown worry you and the president?” Kudlow immediately slapped back at that idea: “I don’t know that there’s a slowdown. I mean, these jobs numbers will go up and down.” Harlow interrupted Kudlow to strangely point out last month’s jobs numbers: “4.8 million jobs were added the prior month.” Kudlow...

Transcript.. (CU News) - "I'm outta here. I just thought it's this place. It’s crazy that the lockdown still exists, right? There's the homelessness (issue) that’s completely out of control. There's the overpopulation problem that’s also out of control. Just the way they're handling these problems is so bad. I'm upset with the federal government's handling of this coronavirus too. So many people are just financially screwed right now. I think people should be, and I don't wanna say people should be held accountable, but I think people should make decisions based on the way the place they live handles...

In March 2020, just weeks before California Gov. Gavin Newsom was “negotiating” a $1 billion mask deal with a Chinese company, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien announced that the Trump administration was “looking at” investments in blacklisted Chinese military companies by the state’s public employees retirement system, known as CalPERS. There were also questions about the relationship between CalPERS’ Chief Investment Officer, Chinese-born U.S. citizen Yu Meng, and the Chinese Communist Party. CalPERS executives vigorously defended Meng, even posting a long defense of their investments in China on their website, but Meng suddenly stepped down Wednesday, effective immediately. In a...

Elizabeth Warren is demanding an investigation into Kodak hoping to position the Kodak loan as a Trump scandal. Yet it appears the media made the mistake by publishing a market changing article ahead of schedule. Day traders capitalized on this mistake, which drove up the stock. See screenshots of the article the media deleted...

Good economic news is never bad enough for the liberal media. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released an impressive report on job growth in July. Specifically, “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 1.8 million in July, and the unemployment rate fell to 10.2 percent.” In context, economists had forecast a 1.48 million job increase and the unemployment rate to hover at 10.6 percent, according to CNBC. That means predictions were off by roughly 320,000 jobs. CNBC’s headline read: “Payrolls increase by nearly 1.8 million, topping expectations despite coronavirus resurgence.” Instead of giving the American people straight reporting on the...

As my friend and colleague, Mike Ford, reported earlier, after Democrats tried to hold up signing a Congressional relief package to play games and get some of their long term agenda items, President Donald Trump has decided to go around them with executive orders that do the following: President @realDonaldTrump's first executive order today provides a payroll tax holiday to Americans earning less than $100,000 per year. pic.twitter.com/0VQGowNmx2— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 8, 2020 -Suspend Payroll Tax through remainder of 2020, for those making less than $100,000.00, retroactive to August 1st. If reelected, his intent is to make these...

President Trump's effort to break the Congressional deadlock on the next iteration of coronavirus relief by threatening to issue an Executive Order has Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) incensed. "His insistence that the coronavirus relief bill be focused on stimulating the economy after it was shut down to slow the spread of the contagion is too narrow," he said. "We want to include bailouts for states that have crippled their economies with reckless spending and high taxes. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees in my state who could face layoffs, pay cuts, or deferred pensions if federal...

"indefinite leave of absence" Part of the statement late today from Liberty University, a Conservative Christian institution, regarding its President and Chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr........ A US counterintelligence official says that China, Russia and Iran will try to interfere in the 2020 presidential election..... An Air India Express plane repatriating people stranded by the coronavirus crash landing in southern India..... The Russian military mission in Syria says it retains the right to strike back..... The US Special Envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, is leaving his post....His replacement is the current US Envoy to Venezuela Elliot Abrams... The presumptive Democrat Presidential...

2020 has definitely been a chaotic year so far. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted life all over the planet, we have witnessed a horrific economic downturn, and civil unrest has been raging in major U.S. cities for months. But the good news is that we appear to have hit a pocket of relative calm here in August. Yes, global events are still going crazy, and the bizarre explosion that we just witnessed in Beirut is just one example. But compared to what we experienced during the first half of 2020 and compared to what we will experience during the...

Credential inflation refers to an increase in the education credentials required for a job—for example, a job that used to be done by high school graduates but now requires new hires to have a college degree. Credential inflation has been going on for decades. One of the earliest mentions of it is in professor Randall Collins’ book The Credential Society, published in 1979 and republished last year; two recent studies give a sense of how widespread it has become. The first, a study by Burning Glass, looked at the education level of current workers compared to the education level listed...