Free Republic

“Well, I guess the Communists know that the old people living in America today are not going to make the revolution. They are not the people who count. They count on the young people, and those who control the youth are the people who control the future of this country.”—Former Communist Bella V. Dodd, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 19531/In 2010, President Obama nationalized student tuition loans by making the government the “sole provider” of government-backed college tuition loans. By doing so, Obama effectively eliminated banks as the conduit of choice for government-backed tuition-loan financing. Similarly, when Obama...

The U.S. Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued an online FAQ allowing Americans to continue funding China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).The PLA is on the verge of launching its third aircraft carrier as part of its $9 billion dollar carrier program. This hefty price tag represents a small fraction of money the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has received from U.S. investors.China “exploits United States investors to finance the development and modernization of its military” wrote then-U.S. President Donald Trump on Nov. 12, 2020, in an executive order banning investment in Chinese stocks linked to the PLA. In the order, Trump accurately...

A whole town celebrated in 2020 when, early in the coronavirus pandemic, Thomasville Regional Medical Center opened, offering state-of-the-art medicine that was previously unavailable in a poor, isolated part of Alabama. Now deep in the red two years into the pandemic, the 29-bed, $40 million hospital is among three medical centers are so new they lack full financial statements from before the crisis to prove how much it cost them.“No hospital can sustain itself without getting the CARES Act money that everybody else got,” James said.

COVID-19 cases are rising across the United States, and the country is expected to be hit with a larger wave this fall and winter when the weather turns colder, with as many as 100 million Americans infected. The virus has been defanged to a large degree compared to the early days of the pandemic, by vaccines and by new treatments like the highly-effective Pfizer pills called Paxlovid.

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hallie Jackson Reports,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said that the $500,000 the city is allocating for people seeking abortions in Chicago from neighboring states “is simply a down payment” and “a start, and not an ending.” Lightfoot said, “$500,000 is simply a down payment to help our frontline providers get over this immediate hurdle. But they tell us they’ve already seen an exponential increase in the amount of calls to helplines from out of state, just from what’s happened in Texas. And over the last week, there’s a lot of panic and fear, because...

Following a slowly growing national movement, Pennsylvania may be ready to try the idea of charging drivers a mileage-based fee to make up millions in transportation revenue lost to more fuel-efficient hybrid and electric cars. Melissa J. Batula, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s acting executive deputy secretary, said the department is working with the General Assembly to draft legislation establishing fees for those who pay little or nothing toward road maintenance. That’s because the state gets about 75% of its road money from the gasoline tax. A commission appointed last year by Gov. Tom Wolf recommended a series of steps...

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on Sunday said millions of vaccine doses will expire if Congress does not pass additional COVID-19 funding. “We are going to lose millions of doses of vaccine that will expire,” Coons told moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when asked if vaccines will go bad should Congress not approve more funds.

The nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) now promises it will refrain from funding midterm elections in the fall. However, CTCL also announced on Monday its “nonpartisan collaborative” to “help local election departments improve operations, develop a set of shared standards and values, and obtain access to best-in-class resources to run successful elections.”CTCL benefitted from approximately $350 million in donations from the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, helping the 2020 Biden win in critical cities across the nation. Much of the money was sent to democrat strongholds in swing states, distributed in the form of grants. In the end, however, hundreds...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced on Wednesday nearly $16 million in grants for groups that are at risk of being the target of hate crimes. The grants are specifically intended to support “buildings owned or operated by nonprofit organizations at risk of hate crimes or attacks because of their ideology, beliefs, or missions,” according to Hochul’s office.

Dear Marylanders, On the day that I found out I was cancer free, I pledged that as long as I was governor of this great state—and long after that—I would continue to stand with all those who are fighting this terrible disease.We have been working hard to increase access to treatment and raise awareness, and just last week, I announced my Maryland Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which dramatically expands all of our efforts to detect, prevent, treat, and find a cure for cancer so that we can save more lives. This week, we broke ground on the first part of our...

President Joe Biden is seeking more than twice as much in American taxpayer funding to defend the borders of Ukraine against Russia than he is seeking for “border security technology” at the United States-Mexico border. On Monday, Biden unveiled his nearly $6 trillion fiscal year 2023 budget.

SAN ANTONIO — Bexar County leaders will study whether Elon Musk's Boring Co. can drill a 9-mile tunnel where automated Teslas would ferry people between the airport and downtown. Alamo Regional Mobility Authority (RMA) board members voted Wednesday to negotiate a project plan with the billionaire's company. "The board has continually sought innovative ways to finance transportation projects to ensure a bright future for the community in a way that bridges technology and accelerates the delivery of needed projects," chairman Mike Lynd said in a statement. "Today's board action is the first of many discussions," he added. Musk's company already...

The White House on Wednesday warned of “severe consequences” for the country’s COVID-19 response after Congress stripped funding to fight the virus out of a government funding package. The Biden administration warned that without the additional funding, testing capacity will start declining this month, potentially requiring months of ramp up if a new variant causes another surge.

The Biden dministration is sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to northern Mexico as part of the reinstated Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, a Trump-era program requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated. The problem is, the administration won’t say how much, or what these funds are being spent on, or who is receiving them. Republican lawmakers have been asking the State Department for answers to these questions since December, but so far heard nothing in response. On Tuesday night, a dozen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Anthony...

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced this week that the city’s police may receive less or the same amount of funding in the city’s 2022 budget. “The budget is basically going to be flat,” Adams said about the police budget before acknowledging it may decrease. “There may be a slight decrease in the next few months, but it’s basically going to remain flat,” Adams claimed about the $107 billion budget.

The Biden administration on Wednesday pushed back on what it called "misinformation," saying a federal grant program meant to reduce harm to drug users does not include taxpayer funding for pipes that can be used to smoke crack or meth. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put out a statement clarifying "no federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits." White House press secretary Jen Psaki later told reporters at a briefing that reports that crack pipes would be included in the safe smoking kits being distributed...

The Biden administration never learns. The United States is still funding risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a new report shows. Research at the Wuhan lab is being sponsored by U.S. taxpayers via USAID and disgraced non-profit agency EcoHealth Alliance, which was used as a funnel for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s agency, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as the Pentagon, to go around the law and back “risky” coronavirus research. The research was not “gain-of-function” but rather the gathering of contagious coronavirus in rodents that were found to be transmissible to humans....

The Senate cut a deal on Thursday night to pave the way for passing a short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown. Under the deal, the Senate will first vote Thursday night on an amendment from conservatives to defund President Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger employers, which is expected to fall short. Democrats agreed to allow the amendment vote at a simple-majority threshold. That means if every Republican and one Democrat voted for the amendment it would be added to the funding bill.

To hear the Biden administration talk about it, there’s something for literally everybody in the 2,000-plus pages of the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better spending packages. After all, you’ll get tax breaks if you want to buy an electric bike, and there will be federal money available to you if you work as a doula, as my PJ Media colleague Rick Moran pointed out recently. But there’s one group that won’t benefit from the largesse that Build Back Better offers if the bill passes as-is: child care facilities affiliated with religious institutions. The New York Times is reporting that lobbyists...

The expected $4 billion increase in federal road and bridge funds over the next five years is raising the rhetoric against the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s proposal to toll nine bridges across the state to pay for their replacement. The department says its financial problems are so severe that using federal infrastructure funds approved Friday instead of following through with tolling would still prevent the agency from repairing hundreds of other bridges across the state. The $4 billion increase in federal funds over five years will help, the agency said, but it claims it should be spending $8.1 billion more...