Free Republic

LBANY – Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday unveiled a state budget plan that calls for big spending on education, health care, social services and big tax caps for certain sectors especially hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and economic closure orders. But, there’s a catch: The ideas will become reality only if the incoming Biden administration and Congress provide the state with a direct aid package totaling $15 billion. If not, big cuts and tax hikes and borrowing are coming, Cuomo warned as he was set to release his 2021-22 state budget plan.

Baltimore police accidentally obtained arrest warrants Friday for a lunch lady and plumber in connection to the death of Freddie Gray — whose passing went on to spark protests, riots and looting. [Snip] The clerical error led to a flood of calls from media and bail bondsmen. Jeremy Eldridge, the lawyer for the White who is not a police officer, said she has had visits to her house and that the mistake could have put her in real danger.

1. U.S. sovereign debt downgrade: first in American history 2. Federal spending (25% of GDP): highest since WWII 3. Budget deficit (10% of GDP): highest since WWII 4. Federal debt (67% of GDP): highest since just after WWII 5. Employment (58.1% of population working: lowest since 1983 6. Long-term unemployment (45.9% of total: highest since 1930s 7. Increase in non farm payroll employment (0.5%) since recovery began over 26 months ago: slowest job growth 26 months after a severe recession since WWII 8. Homeownership rate (59.7%): lowest since 1965 9. Percentage of taxpayers paying income tax (49%): lowest in modern...

Original Title:Remarks Announcing the New Special Envoy for the Colombian Peace Process Bernie Aronson ASSISTANT SECRETARY JACOBSON: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I would like to introduce Secretary of State John Kerry. SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you. Thank you very much, Assistant Secretary Jacobson. Let me say that I’m pleased the ambassador – Colombia’s Ambassador Villegas – thank you for joining us, and good morning, everybody. Shortly after I was elected to the Senate in the 1980s, I served as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. And we spent a lot of time focused on Colombia, which was...

The car that transported Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan to the hospital is wrapped in plastic on Friday as a hazmat team prepared to clean the apartment in Dallas where he had been staying. Hazmat trucks pulled up outside the apartment, five days after he was admitted to the hospital and days after relatives, including children, were confined there by state officials.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent much of Wednesday completing a report that would let the public see, in embarrassing detail, how the sloppy handling of anthrax by scientists at its headquarters here had potentially exposed dozens of employees to the deadly bacteria. But just as he was sitting down for a late-afternoon lunch at his Washington, D.C., office, an urgent call came in. There had been another accident, this one just as disturbing, if not more so — and no one in the agency’s top leadership had been informed about...

President Obama is “absolutely” the most transparent president in history, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Sunday after the White House received a letter from signed by a dozen top journalists’ groups complaining about the administration’s policies toward the media. “There are a number of steps that we've taken to give people greater insight into what's happening at the White House,” Earnest said in an interview with CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” The letter, signed by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Poynter Institute, among others, accuses the White House of "politically driven suppression of news and information about federal...

Policy decisions and politically driven censorship of the American national security establishment have helped strengthen Al Qaeda's successor and hastened the collapse of the nation of Iraq. ​The current administration and the President represented Operation Iraqi Freedom as the "wrong war," as opposed to the "good war" that was Afghanistan. The Vice President even called the end of our involvement in Iraq one of the great achievements of Obama's tenure. With the jihadi group ISIS now in control of parts of the country that together equal the size of Syria, taking over former US bases, and moving toward the capital...

“What, me worry?” seems to be the operating philosophy of President Obama as a serious crisis brews in Eastern Europe. Daniel Halper reports an almost unbelievable level of Obama nonchalance toward his national security responsibilities in the Weekly Standard: A White House official emailed some reporters to say that President Obama's team met today to discuss the ongoing situation on Ukraine. It appears President Obama did not attend. "The President's national security team met today to receive an update on the situation in Ukraine and discuss potential policy options. We will provide further updates later this afternoon," reads the full...

President Obama's healthcare rollout re-do is headed for a crucial test Saturday – and there's a lot on the line. If the federal healthcare.gov website doesn’t deliver, the president's credibility, political support and fate of his landmark health care law could be in jeopardy. If the site is able to recover from its disastrous Oct. 1 rollout, it will go a long way is restoring confidence in the program. The financial success of the Affordable Care Act rests in getting young, healthy people to sign up for the program. If they lose interest or bolt, the program will not be...

WASHINGTON — Her image has been plastered on banners in Tahrir Square, crossed out with a blood-red X or distorted and smeared with insults. She is too cozy with Egypt’s deposed president and the Muslim Brotherhood, the signs say, and should leave the country. Anne W. Patterson, a press-shy career diplomat who has been American ambassador to Cairo since 2011, suddenly finds herself a target in a dangerous political upheaval, a symbol for angry young Egyptians of America’s meddlesome role in their country’s affairs. With the Egyptian military ousting President Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday, Ms. Patterson will have to navigate...

Krauthammer on O'Rielly Factor: I think there is a bigger story here  that will in time come out.  The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is what was the president doing in those eight hours. He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he never called the CIA Director, Who does he call?  But in five hours he calls the Secretary of State. And after the phone call she...

full title.....Chelsea Clinton puts her religious roots to academic use as she lands new job as 'multifaith' leader at New York University Chelsea Clinton, who is a member of the United Methodist Church, has landed a new job at New York University as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new 'multifaith initiative,' Of Many Institute. The 33-year-old's role, which is yet to be formerly announced, will aim to develop multifaith dialogue and 'support a new generation of religious and civic leaders who. . . [will] reach across faith boundaries to solve social problems together,' explains the NYU website.

A typo is keeping President Obama from signing legislation designed to end budget-related FAA air traffic controller furloughs blamed for widespread flight delays, a congressional source told CNN Saturday. But the fix is going into effect anyway, and the system will be back to normal by Sunday, the FAA said. Apparently the holdup boils down to an "s" needing to be added somewhere in the Senate version of the bill -- it's not clear which word is the culprit. The House fixed the typo in the version it passed Friday, and the Senate plans to fix it on Tuesday, a...

Moody's Investors Service issued downgrades to 15 of the world's biggest banks Thursday, saying that they all had "significant exposure" to volatility and risk inherent in their global trading activities. Banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America were among the firms downgraded by the rating agency — a move that could require the banks to pony up billions in additional collateral to cover their derivatives transactions, and also make it more expensive for them to borrow. "All of the banks affected by today’s actions have significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has spent about $9.8 million to store $44 million in steel that it bought but did not use to build fence along the U.S,-Mexico border, according to a report from the DHS Inspector General.

Disapproval Rate for Congress at Record 82% After Debt Talks (Teaparty 40% Unfavorably) NYT Slimefest The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level on record and left most Americans saying that creating jobs should now take priority over cutting spending, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after...

By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised. Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40...

The continued stalemate in Libya is not good news for Samantha Power widely seen as one of the architects of the Libyan intervention. Power, who works with the National Security Council, has been touted as the next secretary of State if Obama is re-elected but if Libya continues to be a stalemate it will not help her case... But the original script went wrong from there with rebels advancing, then retreating like a bad Charlie Chaplin scene before the current stalemate. Stalemate is not good in that corner of the world, and a leaderless state, like Somalia can soon become...

Sacramento - An incompetent prison psychiatrist was kept on the state payroll at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a state worker with a drinking problem stuffed confidential documents in her desk and took other papers home to avoid doing the work, according to a semi-annual report released by the California State Auditor on Tuesday. The audit, the result of tips to a state whistle-blower hot line, found eight instances of what Auditor Elaine Howle called substantiated allegations of improper governmental activities. Instances of improper spending and incompetence by workers created costs of just over...