Free Republic

“The bigger the lie, the more likely the buy-in” -- that must be the theory underlying a plan relentlessly executed by Bill and Hillary Clinton to suck money from the public in support of a supposed “charity” currently known as “Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.” Unlike the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that was originally funded primarily by the Gates family, the Clinton Foundation was meant to take money from the general public, and from governments. So, affairs of the Clinton Foundation were never supposed to be directed by the Clinton family. But public records apparently prove that strict...

Yesterday we learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center could (fingers crossed!) implode and now The New York Times (The New York Times!) reports on the deep dark secret about travel loans to refugees that you pay for with your tax dollars. I first heard about the travel loans in 2007 and wrote about them from time to time at Refugee Resettlement Watch, but I don’t recall any major publication saying much about them and certainly not with a questioning tone about how the nine federal ‘non-profit’ refugee contractors benefit from collecting the loans. For many of you it’s bad...

The story goes like this – Lutheran Social Services is working out of the love of Christ to bring Somali refugees to MN in order to help them escape extreme poverty. That may be true in some regards, but the money involved is difficult to ignore. For example, in an article last month, 89% of the money is coming from government grants used to pay high salaries. “That supposedly ‘Christian’ charitable organization is directly responsible for the high Somali numbers in St. Cloud, and they are jointly responsible for bringing over ten thousand Somalis from around the world to colonize...

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services secretly paid out over a billion dollars in improper hospital claims earlier last month, despite auditors labeling them unnecessary previously. The payments, which were quietly announced on June 1 by CMS, totaled $1.3 billion and involved 1,900 hospitals and 300,000 claims that had been already denied by CMS auditors on two different levels as medically unnecessary. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals settled hundreds of thousands of appeals for 68 cents on the dollar. The money used to cover the claims will be taken from the...

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

Postal employees have spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on gambling, bills and other personal expenses, according to a series of reports by the U.S. Postal Service inspector general. Federal employees may use government credit cards for official travel expenses, but some used theirs to withdraw cash before hitting casinos. Nearly a dozen reports on closed travel card theft investigations were obtained by the Washington Examiner in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The small suburban independent city of Falls Church, Va.—which is treated as the equivalent of a county by the Census Bureau--had a higher median household income in 2012 than any county in the United States, according to data released in December by the Census Bureau.In the Census Bureau’s ranking of the 30 counties with the highest median household incomes, the City of Falls Church rose from the No. 2 spot in 2011 to the No. 1 spot in 2012, overtaking Loudon County, Va.While treated as the equivalent of a county by the Census Bureau, the City of Falls Church had...

The Obama administration has awarded $67 million to fund its ObamaCare “navigators,” the contractors who will receive training (but not background checks, apparently) to assist Americans in putting their private data into the ACA exchanges for health insurance. Thirteen state attorneys have already expressed considerable alarm at the issue of data security in the exchanges, but for now it’s full speed ahead: After several months of delays, the Obama administration awarded $67 million on Thursday to fund an army of outreach and enrollment workers known as “navigators,” who will help people sign up for coverage on the new state health...

A California company was given more than $100 million in taxpayer funds by the federal government – with few strings attached – to establish a network of electric car charging stations that is fraught with problems, according to a government audit. All this, despite weak demand by the American public for electric cars. While President Obama has pledged to get 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015, a new report by the Department of Energy’s inspector general found that Americans’ aversion to electric vehicles and loose department supervision led to stalling the charging network – which cost taxpayers...

The Center for Public Integrity released a new report on Obama’s 2012 bundlers yesterday: Dozens of Obama’s elite donors — many of them wealthy business figures — have been appointed to advisory panels and commissions that can play a role in setting government policy. Others have been invited to a range of exclusive White House briefings, holiday parties and splashy social events. And some have snagged lucrative government contracts that benefit their business interests or investment portfolios, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Here’s the breakdown: At least 68 of 350 Obama bundlers for the 2012 election or...

Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer's explosive new expose, has pulled back the lid on congressional insider trading, revealing the shocking regularity with which elected officials use their legislative positions to reap financial rewards. This 'honest' graft is by no means limited to using inside knowledge to play the stock market. Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, reports that members of Congress are also making a killing in real estate, using federal funds to boost their personal land holdings. Like Congress's questionable trading practices, mixing real estate investments with taxpayer money is technically legal. Actually, it's pretty easy...

A new book by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer details the startling extent of the cronyism that has pervaded President Obama’s “green jobs” push. According to Schweizer, 4 out of every 5 renewable energy companies backed by the Energy Department was “run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.” Those companies’ “political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy,” Schweizer explains. “It brought them returns many times over.” Doug Ross spotted the relevant excerpt of Schweizer’s book (h/t Ben Domenech’s Transom): When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about...

President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state. Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4. His energy development firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.

Here's a novel idea: Have Congress create a "bank" that could borrow huge sums with only a small federal outlay and would be independent of any political interference. If you believe in this miracle, you probably thought Fannie Mae was a private company that wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. We're referring to Washington's latest marketing tool to sell spending to a skeptical public, a new federal "infrastructure bank." For the low, low price of $30 billion or so, President Obama says Congress can conjure hundreds of billions in new "grants and loans" to rebuild "roads, bridges, and ports and broadband...

<p>FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street.</p>

Until alerted to the problem, city of Minneapolis posted a list of suggested tornado-repair contractors that included 22 that were unlicensed. After warning North Side tornado victims to avoid "unlicensed, unscrupulous contractors," Minneapolis officials failed to take their own advice and circulated a list that included 22 companies that were not licensed to perform home repairs

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - There were accusations of an executive slush fund, financial shenanigans and dictatorial management. But it was the $900,000 in secret sexual harassment payments that got the head of the nation's fourth-largest housing authority fired and had the mayor asking how the housing board missed it all.</p>

Multi-employer pension liabilities to be included in new accounting standards. There’s a must read op-ed today’s Wall Street Journal on how Senate Democrats might be fast-tracking another massive taxpayer bailout, this time for multi-employer union pension plan. This is a very big deal. In many industries where unions are prevalent, such as construction and trucking, it’s almost impossible to conduct business without loans or lines of credit. But it will be impossible to get loans or credit if every company is now responsible for honestly reporting the liabilities that unions have been piling on them for years. As I wrote...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Summoned back from summer break, the House on Tuesday pushed through an emergency $26 billion jobs bill that Democrats said would save 300,000 teachers, police and others from election-year layoffs. President Barack Obama immediately signed it into law. Lawmakers streamed back to Washington for a one-day session as Democrats declared a need to act before children return to classrooms minus teachers laid off because of budgetary crises in states that have been hard-hit by the recession. Republicans saw it differently, calling the bill a giveaway to teachers' unions and an example of wasteful Washington spending that voters...

Speaker Pelosi and President Obama have already spent $3.6 trillion on “stimulus,” so for them, $26 billion doesn’t rise to the level of a day at the beach, so why bring us all back to DC? Could it be because their most loyal constituency and political foot soldiers, many of whom could be facing the never before seen horror of a government employee let go due to lack of state and local tax receipts, need to be reminded whose hand quite literally feeds them?