Free Republic

Iowa was supposed to be make-or-break for Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor essentially moved his campaign there late last year, and Never Back Down, his allied super PAC, spent tens of millions of dollars knocking on doors in the state. “We’re going to win Iowa,” DeSantis declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Dec. 2. But in the week before the all-important caucuses, Scott Wagner, the recently installed head of the super PAC, was doing something that aides found puzzling: He was literally doing a puzzle. In the headquarters of Never Back Down in West Des Moines, Iowa, Wagner was,...

It may seem like small potatoes at a time of political lawfare, gross government mismanagement leading to at least 1,000 dead in Maui, the prospect of continuing war in Ukraine, and high inflation, but the government’s use of its powers to beset us on a daily basis and make life more expensive, less efficient, and more dreary is evident every day. Two things that come to mind -- and there are, I concede, many more -- are urban bike lanes and administrative fiddling with everything from light bulbs to home appliances. In my neighborhood we have an online site, Next...

Before its collapse Friday, wokesterism surrounded Silicon Valley Bank like a miasma.The wokesterly attentiveness didn't per se destroy that mid-sized bank, given that most banks play these games and the big ones are very loud about it.As I noted earlier, Johns Hopkins University professor of economics, Steve Hanke, put his finger on the problem more precisely in an email:[T]he real SVB issue was terrible banking and risk management that resulted in a massive duration mismatch between SVB's liabilities (read: deposits) and its assets (read: long-dated bonds). The mismatch was stupidly not hedged. SVB was a poorly run bank, a disaster...

New rule lets money managers factor in 'climate change and racial justice' ... Joe Biden is being sued for his scheming to inject politics into retirement accounts – the savings millions of Americans have set aside for their own senior years. ... That would let those managing retirement accounts to use "environmental, social, and governance" factors in their management of others' money. ... "Imposing ESG factors not only violates the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which governs the operation of retirement plans and protects the hard-earned savings of millions of employees from mismanagement and abuse, but undermines...

Federal regulators on Tuesday ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay a $1.7 billion civil penalty and more than $2 billion in compensation to customers for what they say was "illegal activity affecting over 16 million consumer accounts." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Wells Fargo "repeatedly misapplied loan payments, wrongfully foreclosed on homes and illegally repossessed vehicles, incorrectly assessed fees and interest, charged surprise overdraft fees," among other things. Thousands of customers lost their vehicles and homes due to the bank's activity over the course of several years, the federal regulators said. The $1.7 billion fine will go to the...

Republished with permission from Michael P Senger attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. To date, we still don’t have especially good studies on the actual causes of excess deaths by state and country when the world first went into lockdown in spring 2020. For political reasons, these deaths were all generally been lumped together as “Covid deaths,” but this coding was appallingly sloppy. According to the World Health Organization’s initial coding guidance, if a decedent had either tested positive—using a PCR test later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false...

Nearly $100 billion at minimum has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, the U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday. The estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, said Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, in an interview. The Secret Service didn’t include COVID-19 fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department.... ...Most of that figure comes from unemployment fraud. The Labor Department reported about $87 billion in unemployment benefits could have been paid...

The recent admission by Melissa DeRosa, secretary to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), that the management of the COVID pandemic was bungled and then covered up, has brought demands that Cuomo be impeached and prosecuted. The admission was contained in a phone conversation with the state’s leading Democrats in which DeRosa apologized for causing political difficulties for the Party. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said “a tragic error in judgment followed by intentional deception cannot be swept into the ‘memory hole.’ Nine thousand people needlessly died because of this error. Honesty in the early stages of the pandemic could have led to...

There’s a pivotal war for power unfolding in Austin. Amid scenes of citizens forced out of their homes, iconic businesses shuttering from suffocating taxes, uncontrolled homelessness scattering across town, intensifying lawlessness spreading on the streets, and defunded police officers leaving their jobs, some citizens are now arising to take city hall back from the all-Democrat Austin City Council who helped create the current reality in Texas’ capital. For this November’s local election, 20 candidates are running for just five available seats on the city council. All of the incumbent Democrat councilmembers trying to stay in power this year are facing...

U.S.—Trump voters who say they are being increasingly targeted and harassed for supporting the president have turned to wearing hydroxychloroquine necklaces to ward off Liberals. Liberals, who are notoriously terrified of the tiny white pills, tend to cower and run away in terror upon seeing hydroxychloroquine. According to clinical studies, Trump voters who wear necklaces strung with hydroxychloroquine are 63% less likely to be attacked by a leftist on the way home from work or the grocery store. "We didn't know what else to do," said local Trump fan Judy Jugglebumkins as she loaded a cart of GOYA foods into...

At a time when huge spending bills marked “coronavirus relief” are easily passing Congress with little scrutiny, poorly run states are asking unscrupulous members of Congress to slip in taxpayer bailouts to rescue them from years of their own fiscal mismanagement. In response, the House of Representatives recently passed a coronavirus relief bill that includes a half trillion dollars (trillion with a “t”) in unrestricted funds to bail out state governments for years of reckless expenditures entirely unrelated to the pandemic. I have the same reaction to these proposals that I had when I worked in government and people were...

Many of my friends are calling me wanting to know what the hell is going on with NRA, as if I ought to know. But all I know is from past observation and from what I’m reading almost daily in newspapers or internet blogs. Mind you, I’m on the outside: I am not, and never have been, on the NRA Board of Directors. But to try to answer them I wrote this encapsulation. Here’s how the situation looks to me. If what follows is not substantially true or seems unfair, I hope somebody on the inside hastens to correct me....

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif), Chairperson of the House Financial Services Committee, asked Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan if the scandals that have plagued his bank "might prove that it is too big to manage. We see a pattern here. Customers have been abused and money has been wasted or misspent. Where's the accountability?" Waters wondered "whether the idea that banks can be trusted is no longer valid for our modern economy. Greed has gotten us into this mess. Maybe it's time the government steps in to run all the banks and replaces the profit motive with a more socially just...

In fiscal year 2018, $137 billion was paid “improperly” by the federal government, according to a recent report. That number sums all the improper payments by what the government calls high-priority programs. They are programs with improper-payments estimates exceeding $2 billion annually.If it makes your head spin, it should.Always the optimist, I have tried hard to find some good news in this year’s number. I have been tracking such improper payments for a while, and I am happy to report that, while they grew dramatically between their FY2013 level ($106 billion) and FY2015 ($137 billion), they haven’t gone up since.Now...

A volunteer for Special Olympics Oregon in Cottage Grove is demanding answers from the nonprofit’s CEO after $50,000 specifically meant for the Cottage Grove events appears to have gone missing.

Mali’s elephants, Africa’s northernmost herd and adapted to life in the country’s harsh desert, were in desperate need of protection. The animals live in an unforgiving landscape southeast of Timbuktu, enduring sandstorms and blistering temperatures. To survive, they trek in search of food and water across what is thought to be the biggest migratory range of their species, more than 12,400 square miles. But it wasn’t only climate change endangering the elephants. It was also poachers. They were being slaughtered in staggering numbers as ivory traffickers took advantage of a security vacuum in the region, with 163 killed since 2012,...

In the 1970s, Kenya had about six times as many elephants as Zimbabwe, and today Zimbabwe has three times more elephants than Kenya (see chart).  What happened that caused the dramatic reversal in elephant populations in the two African countries?  Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) explain in their excellent article "Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community": "Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in...

Buenos Aires (AFP) - A judge on Thursday ordered Argentina's former president Cristina Kirchner to stand trial on charges of financial mismanagement. It is the first of several cases against the combative 64-year-old leftist leader to go to trial. A string of cases targeting Kirchner and her rival, current President Mauricio Macri, are clouding Argentine politics ahead of mid-term elections later this year. Kirchner is accused of ordering the central bank to sell dollar futures at artificially low prices, causing Argentina to lose hundreds of millions. She denies wrongdoing. Kirchner's defenders say she should not be prosecuted for a mishandled...

Highway 41 to Yosemite National Park is closed at Fish Camp, the California Highway Patrol and park officials reported Tuesday. Caltrans reported the roadway is closed eight-tenths of a mile south of the park at Summerdale Campground. The agency doesn’t project the roadway reopening until March 10. A washout Feb. 9 eroded the southbound shoulder of the highway, said Caltrans spokesman Cory Burkarth. Since then, Caltrans has had one-way traffic controls in place while agency workers inspected the roadway several times a day. On Tuesday morning, Caltrans workers noticed the northbound lane was starting to sink and banned tour buses...

QUITO, Ecuador (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than 60 mayors from around the world have joined forces to create an alliance dubbed a 'global parliament' to demand a more powerful role in the management of city growth and urbanisation. Speaking on the eve of the United Nations Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, on Sunday, the mayors outlined a united vision in which local government would lead the global response to rising urbanisation. ... She said the feminisation of politics at local government level had already achieved more livable cities and that the group had to work for more women...