Free Republic

FIRST ON FOX: A fledgling dark money climate group poured millions of dollars last year into disruptive activist protests that blocked busy highways and destroyed famous artwork in cities across the world, according to tax filings obtained by Fox News Digital. The Beverly Hills, California-based, Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) - which has been funded in large part by Hollywood actors and producers since it was founded in 2019 - raised $6.1 million in 2022, a 165% increase from the $2.3 million it raised in 2021, the tax filings showed. The sharp increase in funding led to CEF sending $5 million...

While ignoring a cornucopia of crises in his two-plus years as Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg has found a supposed crisis that he will address, and it sounds a lot like his previously trotted-out theory that bridges are a tool of racism. Speaking with Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Buttigieg declared "we've got a crisis when it comes to roadway fatalities in America" before making his usual pivot to frame the problem as one of race. "We lose about 40,000 people every year," Buttigieg told Sharpton, adding roadway fatalities are "a level that's comparable to gun violence" for emphasis. "And we...

Line painting and other finishing touches continued Tuesday at the new Fern Hollow Bridge in the city’s East End, with a dedication ceremony planned Wednesday and completion of bridge reconstruction work anticipated Thursday, officials said. A date for reopening the bridge to traffic has not been set, according to Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesman Steve Cowan, but it was anticipated it would be within a week. The busy, 500-foot Forbes Avenue bridge, which connected Squirrel Hill to Point Breeze and Park Place, collapsed onto a popular hiking trail about 100 feet below the road in Frick Park in January. Ten...

Joe Biden has now officially taken his overcompensation for being an old white guy to the next level by handing out the first federal grants to dismantle our nation’s racist highways. That is not a typo. Rather than devoting federal resources to improving our national infrastructure, Biden is wasting millions to address the problem of “racist roads.” What makes a road racist? I’m just the messenger here, but according to MSNBC, so-called “racist roads” being targeted by Biden were “designed to facilitate white flight and deprive black communities of housing and commercial opportunities.” Fellow white dude Pete Buttigieg, who occasionally...

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is on a mission. He’s looking for highways with a racist past and is aiming to “help reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.” Buttigieg is examining interstate highways, built with federal dollars, “where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built,” said Buttigieg in a speech announcing the $1 billion “Reconnecting Communities” program. “How it was built”? What does that mean? Does that statement refer to the racial makeup of businesses and residents? This is just more of the “disparate racial results”...

The California city of Santa Monica is offering housing to black families that owned homes in the path of Interstate 10 and other urban renewal projects built in the 1950s. Beginning in January, those former residents and their descendants will receive “priority access to apartments with below-market rents in the hopes that they’ll come back to the coastal city in Los Angeles County.” Nichelle Monroe, who said in a Sacramento Bee article that her grandparents were forced out of the Pico neighborhood, said she doesn’t think the program goes far enough. She wants help buying a home of her choice....

Not for the first time, Pete Buttigieg is vowing to do something about America's "racist" interstate highway system. As absurdly silly as it might be for the Biden-tapped US Transportation Secretary to be prioritizing tackling supposedly racist roads, it was perhaps the question itself from a reporter that reached new asinine depths - made all the more laughable given the "seriousness" of the lengthy exchange related to last week's bipartisan infrastructure bill which passed through Congress.This was a real question by CNN (who else?) White House correspondent April Ryan during a Monday press briefing... amid Biden admin plans to "deconstruct...

Pennsylvania may have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make significant progress on a long list of needed infrastructure projects if the House passes the $1 trillion plan approved by the Senate and makes billions in federal dollars available to the state. Officials can’t squander this chance to upgrade roads, bridges, dams and other infrastructure areas statewide. In state-by-state estimates released by the White House, Pennsylvania stands to gain — over a five-year period — $11.3 billion in federal highway funding, $2.8 billion for public transit and $1.6 billion for bridge replacement. There’s also $171 million to add charging stations for electric...

Starting next week, billboards, social media, television and print media will carry messages urging thousands of Valley motorists, including those in the West Valley, to prepare for four years of disruptions in their driving routines. It’s not exactly Armageddon that the Arizona Department of Transportation will be heralding, but it certainly won’t be a walk in the park either, especially for car and truck traffic on I-10. West Valley motorists who need to get to the other side of the county or Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport can expect significant increases in traffic as motorists try to evade the inevitable...

Jesus Torres can see a lot from his perch in the cab of a tanker truck. Cars with blown tires on the side of the pothole-scarred roads. Overturned tankers on exit ramps curved too sharply for large modern trucks to handle. And more often than not, red tail lights snaking into the distance. “They need to add more lanes to all the highways,” he said on a recent morning on Interstate 270 just after leaving the Phillips 66 terminal in Commerce City. Far too often, Torres said, accidents on this highway through Colorado’s industrial center will cause long delays that...

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) recently released a list of some of the agency's most impactful road and bridge construction projects to drivers for 2021. UDOT will be working on 185 projects across the state in 2021, with a value of $3.45 billion over the life of the projects, many of which span multiple years. Planned improvements range from repaving rural highways and building freeway-style interchanges to widening and repaving interstates and demolishing and rebuilding bridges. The traffic delays from these projects range from overnight lane restrictions to full road closures with major detours. “These projects are an essential...

President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care. Republican elected...

Nowadays, the government needs more than gasoline taxes to fund its vast mission to expand, replace and preserve transportation routes in Washington state. Legislators have drawn up a menu of 33 tax and fee increases under the proposed 16-year Forward Washington plan, updated last week by Senate Transportation Committee Chair Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens. That way, perhaps no single cost will provoke enough public fury to torpedo the plan. “Nobody likes to be taxed, but we also want to make this fair as we spread it across different sectors,” Hobbs said Friday. His approach holds direct gas-tax hikes to 9.8...

$3.4 billion. That’s how much bad roads and congestion in North Carolina costs its drivers in higher vehicle ownership costs, according to a report commissioned by the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Fixing those roads—as well as repairing and replacing bridges, building new highways and any other large projects the N.C. DOT has on its schedule—takes money, and lots of it. Steve Abbott, a spokesperson for the N.C. DOT, said that to bring every bridge in the state to “good” condition would cost $3.8 billion, roughly 71 percent of the department’s $5.3 billion budget for the year. “As of now,...

The battle is on, as President Biden pushes a raft of tax hikes to pay for roads, bridges, green energy, and expansive new social programs. His plans are generally popular—but nobody wants to be the one footing the bill. Business groups argue that instead of raising corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure, as Biden wants to do, the government should rely on user fees such as tolls and dedicated taxes, so that people getting the benefit of the new asset bear the cost. Higher corporate taxes can depress investing, send US companies overseas and trigger aggressive tax avoidance. Douglas Holtz-Eakin,...

Amid a deepening stalemate over financing highways and public transit, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on March 12 proposed phasing out his state's gasoline tax, the second highest in the nation, and appointed a commission to recommend alternative ways to pay for the state's needs. Wolf ordered a panel of several dozen lawmakers, transportation industry representatives, transportation planners, government officials and others to deliver recommendations by Aug. 1 of funding alternatives to foot the extra billions of dollars deemed to be necessary. "Our economy, our communities and our future rely on a strong transportation system that supports our safety and growth,"...

TAMPA — Transportation planners are preparing to use new technology to try to solve an old problem — traffic crashes and congestion on Interstate 4 between Tampa and Orlando. The state Department of Transportation is designing a corridor management system that will relay real time information directly to motorists about congestion, accidents, work zones, weather warnings and even end-of-the-traffic-back-up locations on I-4 and alternate routes. The idea behind so-called connected vehicle technology is to improve traffic flow on the interstate and east-west alternatives without adding new lanes or acquiring new right of way. On Wednesday, Hillsborough’s Metropolitan Planning Organization —...

When Modesti Cooper returned home to Houston in July 2019 after more than a decade overseas with the United States military, she moved into her dream house on the corner of Nance and Grove streets in Houston’s Fifth Ward. She’d bought a parcel of land and designed the home from scratch in her downtime while touring from Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq. It was a relief to finally move in. “It’s a calm, cool, nice area,” Cooper says. “Besides the traffic, there’s no violence, no noise. It’s so quiet, it’s unbelievable. I had rockets and mortars and missiles blown over...

Joe Biden’s $2.5 trillion infrastructure spending spree will include $20 billion earmarked for actually destroying highways because they have been deemed to be racist.The administration pointed to the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans and Interstate 81 in Syracuse, New York as two examples of “long-standing and persistent racial injustice,” in infrastructure.The plan set forth by Biden would see billions spent on an effort to “reconnect neighborhoods” by destroying current highways and making sure that new projects “advance racial equity and environmental justice.”A whopping $621 billion has been touted for ‘transportation infrastructure and resilience,’ with the administration promising it will address...

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.5 trillion infrastructure bill includes funds to actually destroy infrastructure, according to reports. The White House cited the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans and Interstate 81 in Syracuse, New York, as two problematic highways going through black neighborhoods they would support destroying. Biden’s mention of the Claiborne Expressway thrilled New Orleans activist Amy Stelly who has worked to destroy the highway. “I’m floored,” she said to the Washington Post. “I’m thrilled to hear President Biden would call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway.” The White House fact sheet plans $20 billion to “reconnect neighborhoods”...