Free Republic

North Carolina officials are trying to figure out how to unwind parts or all of a 2014 public-private partnership that is building managed toll lanes on a Charlotte-area highway.Ever since the ink dried on North Carolina’s first transportation P3 contract, the plan to relieve severe congestion in the Charlotte region has generated controversy.Public opposition remains just as fierce today to the project that will add express lanes on Interstate 77, even though more than one report says the deal with I-77 Mobility Partners LLC, a consortium led by Cintra Infraestructuras S.A., was properly authorized and permitted.The 26-mile-long project is designed...

Joseph Farah It must be nice to be Jeff Bezos.How do you become one of the richest men in the world by founding a company that only recently gave a thought to profitability?Amazon has been around a long time. It’s one of the few Internet companies that was doing business 20 years ago, when I launched WorldNetDaily.com, now known as WND.com.But it was less than three years ago that Amazon began to achieve any profits to speak of. And, even today, you’d be shocked to know how high its revenues are and how relatively low its profits are. snip...

They’ve butted heads and talked of lawsuits as the MoPac Boulevard toll lane construction project has dragged on two years beyond its target completion date. Now the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority and its toll project contractor appear to be near a financial settlement. The mobility authority board, in a specially called meeting scheduled for Tuesday morning, will consider an agreement with CH2M, the Denver-based engineering and construction firm that in April 2013 agreed to design and build the 11-mile project. The contractor agreed then to a fixed price of $137 million. But in a March 2017 memo, written when...

Dive Brief: The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has awarded Jacobs Engineering Group a 10-year, multimillion dollar contract to design an active traffic management (ATM) system for Interstate 76 through Philadelphia, according to Traffic Technology Today. Jacobs' services for the Schuylkill Expressway will include preliminary and system engineering, design, analysis of alternatives, right-of-way acquisition and construction consultancy.The final ATM system could include occasional use of the shoulder, connected vehicle technology, variable speed limit signage and traffic jam detection and alerts. PennDOT could also implement features like ramp metering, junction control, dynamic lane assignments, and multimodal strategies in tandem with shoulder use....

On November 8th, Americans will be voting for this 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities, and honesty to our government. Let's hold Donald Trump and his administration accountable to their promises. Then again, even if he does nothing, he'll still be infinitely better than his predecessor. Please visit and sign at: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contract/

Measures to clean up Washington • Actions to Protect American Workers • Actions to Protect American Workers Since no media outlet in the country to my knowledge has or will sit down with Donald Trump before the election, and in a logical way go over and review his Contract with the American Voter, I shall do my own review. Considering what is at stake in this election, wouldn’t it be nice to have an explanation from Trump, and a critique, so the voters can make an informed decision? I think Trump is doing a tremendous disservice to himself, all his...

DONALD J. TRUMP CONTRACT WITH THE AMERICAN VOTER What follows is my 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again. It is a contract between myself and the American voter – and begins with restoring honesty, accountability and change to Washington Therefore, on the first day of my term of office, my administration will immediately pursue the following six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC: FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress;SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting...

#Megyn Kelly now has a bargaining chip that is worth its weight in gold and she can use it in the near future to negotiate her new #Fox News contract as hers is up at the end of the year. Will Kelly even re-negotiate a contract with Fox News or will she head out to broaden her horizons? On August 5 Megyn Kelly left for vacation and in the weeks that followed the ratings for The Kelly Files have dropped to the point that the show is now running neck and neck with MSNBC's #Rachel Maddow. Kelly's bargaining chip It...

ExxonMobil and British Petroleum have been facing off over the terms of the renewal of the “contract of the century” in Azerbaijan, according to sources that spoke to Reuters. BP currently operates the Azeri-Chigar-Guneshi fields in the middle of the Caspian Sea—a region that contributes a tenth of the firm’s global output. The British company has reportedly agreed with the Azeri government on the terms of a 30-year contract, but in an effort to expand its presence in the ACG region, Exxon has been pushing for a piece of the $100 billion pie.

Yes, according to TeleSurTV, El Chapo has increased the bounty on Trump's hair hat to a less-than-paltry $100 million. "He was mad," a predictably unnamed source tells the publication. "He wants Donald Trump dead and will pay any amount of money to have Donald Trump’s head." Meanwhile, the entirety of American politics wishes desperately for Donald to quietly exit the 2016 race for the White House, an exit that would essentially be a gift to the nation too precious for a specific valuation.

You can rightly complain about the things which go on inside the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department or the EPA and all of the headline grabbing controversies which erupt from them. None of them, however, may be up to nearly as much mischief as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) though it doesn’t seem to catch the attention of the media nearly as much. This week they were at it again and while a bit on the wonky side, a new wrinkle in the rules could spell big trouble for America’s employers and many, many workers....

The Satanic Temple of Detroit threw off protesters of their unveiling of a demonic statue by leaking word that the event would take place in one place but holding it in another. In addition, in an apparent attempt to weed out Christian moles who might disrupt the presentation of the statue, the Satanic Temple required everyone who had a ticket (for which they paid $25 and up) to sign a quasi-legal document in which they agreed to “transfer” their soul to Satan.​ “I agree that by signing this document under any name, given or adopted, actual or pseudonymous, I am...

Charlotte Catholic High School in Charlotte, N.C., recently informed one of its substitute teachers that he could not work at the school following the public announcement of his impending same-sex marriage, according to Catholic News Herald. The school’s decision is yet another instance of Catholic schools around the country taking measures to protect and ensure their Catholic identity. The teacher, Lonnie Billard, worked for 11 years at Charlotte Catholic High School as a dramatics teacher until his retirement in 2012. He was reportedly scheduled to begin substituting in January. But when officials at the high school learned of Billard’s public...

Furious Dish Network, Inc., customers are dropping the service, demanding refunds and besieging Dish with angry calls and emails after Fox News was dropped over a contract dispute. On Dec. 21, fans of the immensely popular Fox News, among the 14 million Dish subscribers, awoke to find out that their favorite network had been blacked out, Mediaite reports. To date, 178,000 complaint calls were made through a toll-free line Fox set up, and 140,000 emails have deluged Dish, but the dispute remains ongoing, Variety reports. The squabble involves "carriage fees" paid by providers to networks for programming. Dish claims that...

DISH FAQS Posted: Dec 19, 2014 1:50 PM CST 1. What is happening? By law, WBOC and FOX21 must negotiate carriage agreements with satellite companies like DISH. Usually, these deals are reached without any disruption to your service. In fact, our company has negotiated dozens of agreements. Unfortunately, so far, DISH has refused to reach a fair, market-based deal to carry WBOC and FOX21. Our existing agreement with DISH expires at midnight on Dec. 31, 2014. If no deal is reached before that date, you will lose live access to the shows, sports and local news on WBOC and FOX21,...

Fox News finds new way to scare its viewers, warns of Dish blackout December 15, 2014 | By Daniel Frankel Already adept at scaring its rapt audience, Fox News has begun warning Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH) subscribers that the channel, along with Fox Business News, could disappear from their program guides "any day now." The campaign features the usual TV spots, directing viewers to visit the "protest the operator" website, in this case KeepFoxNews.com. Fox News versus Dish Fox's post urged Dish subscribers to call the satellite operator. (Source: KeepFoxNews.com) A Fox News blog post notes, "Despite the undeniable demand...

. September 26, 2014 Newt Gingrich : Reflections on the Contract with America – 20 Years Later ===================================================== On Wednesday I had the privilege of meeting with S. Ganbaatar, a member of the Mongolian Parliament. When he entered the room, Ganbaatar walked up excitedly to examine a framed document that has hung for years in my offices. The document is a list of commitments to the people, signed by dozens of candidates for public office who promised to vote on a specific policy agenda if they were elected to office. It's framed alongside a picture of the candidates who signed...

Someone is pulling our leg. This has to be a joke. And the government needs to call their bluff on it. The Public Service Alliance of Canada has come forward with some pretty tall demands for their employees. These include an extra week of paid holiday every year and one cent for every hour worked by their members to be contributed to a “social justice fund” that the union would control. The government must say no to these. But they’re not even the headline material. They’re just the opening act. No, the real doozy is they want employees to be...

Does anybody have Verizon Home Phone Connect, and if you do, how do you like it? and do you find it useful? We are concerned that if we get it, our Verizon DSL might be impacted. It would be great to cut our home landline contract, but we're worried about losing the DSL. Thanks. Loving my FReeper FRiends. Happy Fourth of July.

A faction of Republicans including Sen. Lindsey Graham is agitating for party leaders to unveil a policy manifesto in the midterm elections, detailing for voters what the GOP would attempt with a Senate majority its members are increasingly confident they’ll achieve. Advocates of the strategy, which has triggered a closed-door debate in recent weeks among the party’s current 45 senators, say it would serve as a firm rejoinder to Democrats casting the GOP as the “party of no.” They say voters should know what they’d be getting by pulling the lever for Republicans in November. With many election handicappers pegging...