Free Republic

A housing advocacy group is slamming Denver’s new Asylum Seekers Program as “insufficient” and “a slap in the face,” even staging a protest to voice their disapproval — as the city spends tens of millions of dollars on migrant aid and slashes its emergency services budget to stave off insolvency in the wake of the influx. The surge of new arrivals has thrown the Mile High City’s city’s budget into a tailspin. More than 40,000 migrants have found their way to Denver since December 2022 — more per capita than any other US city — at a total cost of...

Here we go, 12 years of free schooling is not enough.

Of the 150,493,263 filers who submitted individual income tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service for the 2015 tax year, only 99,040,729 paid any income tax at all. Together, those Americans paid a record $1,457,891,441,000 in total income taxes -- for an average of $14,720 per taxpayer. The other 51,452,534 -- or about 34.2 percent of all filers -- did not pay a penny. Their average income tax payment was $0. This is a fundamental divide in the American tax system. On one side are those who do pay taxes; on the other, those who don't. And the divide gets...

The president’s plan to make community college free for everyone is the best news for the middle class in a long time. President Obama this month gave the best State of the Union address of his presidency but it was largely written in disappearing ink. Like the vast majority of presidential speeches, little of it lingers. But one proposal in the speech could prove historic. While Obama’s $60 billion plan for two free years of community college is dead-on-arrival in the Republican Congress, it is very much alive in American politics, where progressives now have an aspirational, easy-to-understand issue to...

WASHINGTON-With the sequester scheduled for March 1, everyone is looking for ways to save money. How about cutting the employees the federal government pays not to work for Uncle Sam? In a new report issued earlier this month, the Office of Personnel Management announced that the federal government paid over $156 million in 2011 for some of its employees to work as representatives for government unions, up from $139 million in 2010 and $129 million in 2009. In government language that would make George Orwell smile, the time that federal workers spend working for their unions and not working for...

Law enforcement are now searching for Democratic senators boycotting a Senate vote on Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair plan Thursday in an attempt to bring the lawmakers to the floor to allow Republicans to move forward on the bill. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said that Democrats were "not showing up for work" and that police were searching for them to bring them to the floor. He said the last time such an action had happened was in the 1990s and said he was not sure how much authority law enforcement officials would have to compel Democrats to show up....

St. Paul employees targeted for discipline following allegations they were loafing on the job instead of filling potholes are getting less-harsh penalties than the city had initially announced, records show. Of the 59 days of suspension the city announced against 17 workers in May, a mere five days of suspension-without-pay have actually been served, according to city records, which are not being released for all 17 workers because the process isn't over. In May, Mayor Chris Coleman made the announcement, billed as the largest disciplinary action in the city's history, following a flap when TV cameras in March filmed pothole-patching...

The $10K per-person host list of Gov. Charlie Crist's NRSC fundraiser tonight illuminates just how much the Republican establishment believes the Florida Senate primary next year is a lock. This who's who of GOP lobbyists wouldn't lend their names to such an event if they didn't think Crist would be the nominee. The only upside for Marco Rubio, Crist's Republican opponent and the former state House Speaker: If he was having any trouble formulating a message about party big-shots in Washington trying to determine what is best for Florida Republicans, that task just got easier.

Apparently, Fred Thompson had lapses of judgment during his trip to Iowa last week. No, he didn’t suggest he would bomb Pakistan. He didn’t state that he was going to “take” anybody’s earned profits, nor did he make any similar political faux-pas. That was someone else. He did, however, wear Gucci loafers and ride around in a golf cart. That’s right. According to Fox News, Thompson’s Iowa travels involved mistakes such as “wearing Gucci loafers at a country fair.” Really? That’s the mistake? Before we even get to the merits of wearing Gucci loafers (which in the video look a...

IT WAS A DANGEROUS WEEK IN WASHINGTON, something almost got done. At least I think something almost got done. Like many citizens I was trying to tune to the Immigration Reform broadcast, but there was so much interference coming in from a pirate broadcast of yet another episode of The Vagina Monologues I had to switch off the receiver and get my reports third hand. From these I understand that, although nothing got done again in Congress this week, it was "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life" . As the week that wasn't rolled along in...

IRONDEQUOIT, N.Y. (AP) - They're too loud. They hog the seats at the food court. Often they don't even buy anything. So now they're being kicked out of the mall. Teenagers? Try chess players. The new owners of the Medley Center have banned chess and card games, effectively removing a group that has been playing chess at the suburban Rochester mall for years. They can play only from 8 to 10 a.m., when the mall is open to walkers. "I really feel we've gotten jilted," 70-year-old retired salesman Ray Licata said in Thursday's Democrat and Chronicle. Mall owner Adam Bersin...