Free Republic

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Tuesday that his agency is looking for “creative ways” to give public school students access to more meals, including a way to provide them breakfast, lunch and dinner year round. “We have focused on efforts to try to figure out ways in which we can expand in those time periods when youngsters may not have access to school meals,” Vilsack said in remarks at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. That includes giving students access to meals “across the school day, across the school year and across the calendar year,” he...

n a small San Joaquin Valley neighborhood surrounded by miles of nut and citrus groves, six electric vehicle charging stations sit abandoned. Their parking spots are empty, their screens shattered. Over five short months and with nearly $2 million, the state powered a fleet of Teslas and Chevy Bolts that lent residents of this isolated community a transportation lifeline. Then one day at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cars vanished.

The company that produced Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s TLC reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” received $1.2 million in state tax credits for filming in Alaska through a government program Palin signed into law as governor in 2008. The Anchorage Daily News first reported the story in February, but after an analyst at the Tax Foundation posted a blurb on the group’s blog linking to the piece Tuesday, Palin faced a fresh heap of criticism from Washington conservative pundits who may have been a bit late to the fight, but were not shy to throw punches. The state legislature passed...

Mercedalia Diaz was tired of being an illegal immigrant, living in fear of arrest and separation from her young son. So she filed an application to work legally in the United States — in effect, turning herself in. After a permit was denied, Diaz landed here, in U.S. Immigration Court in Los Angeles, nervously fielding questions from a federal judge: If you don't get permanent residency, would you agree to leave the U.S. voluntarily? Do you promise not to return without a visa? What would you do with your son? ... Then Diaz told her story to Judge Bruce J....