Free Republic

The Trump administration plans to release guidance as soon as this month for granting states waivers to convert Medicaid funding to block grants, according to two people familiar with the matter, paving the way for a transformation of the 55-year-old program that is likely to reignite a partisan feud. The impending release comes as a surprise after the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews regulatory actions, indicated in November that block-grant instructions had been withdrawn. Lawmakers and legal advisers speculated that the guidance may have been shelved or significantly delayed. Approving state waivers to change Medicaid funding to block...

“The goal is ensuring the green economy benefits folks who are hurt first and worst by global warming,” says Oriana Magnera. In just a few months, the city of Portland will begin investing the proceeds from a groundbreaking new tax on large companies. No other city in the U.S. has such a tax. The Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, or PCEF, will raise as much as $60 million a year from a new tax on big retailers. The money is supposed to supply clean, efficient energy and jobs to people the city has long slighted. The overarching goals:...

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. 1 Corinthians 10:13 KJV The election is going to come down to who believes in Global Warming or Communism and those who do not. All the other issues they are supposedly concerned about such as healthcare or border crossings comes down to one belief, do you believe in Global Warming or...

A Portland U.S. Bank employee said she was fired after giving $20 of her own money to a customer who was broke and stranded at a gas station on Christmas Eve. The man she helped called her firing “ridiculous.” “I was a customer of U.S. Bank, I needed help, and she went above and beyond,” said Marc Eugenio of Clackamas. “I felt so bad. She was the only one helping me.” On Dec. 23, Emily James, a senior banker at a U.S. Bank call center in Portland, said she spent more than an hour trying to help Eugenio, a bank...

They use it to call it "voting with their feet" or something like that.  Indeed, people are voting with their feet by trading in their old blue shoes for shining red shoes. This is from Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas: According to an Election Data Services analysis of the Census Bureau report, "The population projections point toward a ten [congressional] seat change over 17 states across the nation by year 2020." Seven states are projected to gain one or more congressional seats after the 2020 election; 10 states are projected lose one...

I called upon the LORD in distress: the LORD answered me, and set me in a large place. The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me? Psalm 118:5-6 KJV How desperate do you have to be in your quest for power you need to support the most bloodthirsty killer on the planet. The same people who decry you are Hitler every ten minutes found themselves eulogizing and supporting the world’s closest embodiment to Hitler walking the planet. In addition, they even decried the killing of this monster even after they knew he...

VALE – More than a dozen police officers were searching for an armed man in the high desert hills on the Harney-Malheur County line Tuesday afternoon after a theft at a local ranch went awry. Travis Johnson, Malheur County undersheriff, said deputies from the Harney County Sheriff’s Office and the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office along with the Oregon State Police are pursuing an unidentified man who stole a tractor and a side-by-side recreational vehicle from a ranch north of Harper early Tuesday morning. Johnson said the incident began at about 3:40 a.m. when a man driving a stolen pickup truck...

Referring to it with happy little buzzwords such as “climate justice,” the city of Portland will soon be implementing the first (and hopefully only) “green new deal” carbon tax in the nation, which city “leaders” estimate will suck $60 million out of the economy. The money will allegedly be going toward “creating” “green energy” jobs. They say the tax will only affect The Evil Corporations™ specifically referring to Walmart. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/portland-passes-green-new-deal-carbon-tax-first-of-its-kind/

Politicians bemoan the lack of affordable housing, but their policies often create the problem. Look no further than Oregon, where restrictive zoning and mandates have yielded the lowest rate of residential construction in decades. Oregon’s population grew by nearly 400,000 between 2010 and 2019. But the state added a mere 37 housing permits for every 100 new residents, according to a report released last week by the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis. Economist Josh Lehner found that “while much of the attention is paid to rising housing costs, we know they are the symptom and not the cause of the...

A Portland woman is being charged for allegedly attacking a Muslim foreign exchange student and desecrating her hijab. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said on November 12, 2019, the 24-year-old Portland State University student from Saudi Arabia was at a TriMet MAX station on Yamhill Street in Portland. Court documents state 23-year-old Jasmine Renee Campbell approached the student from behind and grabbed her hijab. Campbell then allegedly tried to choke the victim, who was able to push herself away. Prosecutors said Campbell then “forcibly” took the victim’s hijab and rubbed it across “multiple exposed sexually intimate parts of...

Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.” Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female. Now, I want to live again as the man that I am. I’m one of the lucky...

The city of brotherly love has a new police commissioner in Danielle Outlaw. If her name doesn’t sound familiar, she was the police chief for Portland. It marks a first in the city’s history: a black female police chief. Outlaw is tapped for the job at a time when the city is experiencing an uptick in violent crime. According to the numbers crunched by the Philadelphia Inquirer, homicides and shootings spiked in 2019. The city was left with 351 murders this year. In all, violent crime reached its worse levels in nearly a decade. According to reports, the hiring process...

LA GRANDE, Ore.—In this small town in eastern Oregon, renewable energy is widely popular. But the power lines needed to transmit it aren’t. La Grande is one of many communities nationwide fighting against transmission lines being built to keep up with a surge in clean-power generation. “We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places,” Brian Kelly, who helps lead a green group in the area, said of a proposed transmission line that would run through the nearby forest. Utilities are under pressure to put...

Police Chief Danielle Outlaw has accepted a job to become Philadelphia’s police commissioner after only two years and two months leading Portland’s 1,000-member force during a time of mass political protests and community mistrust. But Outlaw said she’s ready to jump into leading Philadelphia’s troubled police department. She was chosen out of 31 candidates, including 18 from within the department. She starts Feb. 10. “While I am new to Philadelphia, I am not new to the challenges of big-city, 21st century policing," she said before she was introduced to her new city at an afternoon news conference at Philadelphia City...

The Second Amendment Sanctuary movement isn’t just sweeping the state of Virginia, though it’s certainly getting the most attention thanks to the sheer number of counties, cities, and towns that have adopted resolutions in advance of Governor Ralph Northam’s anti-gun agenda seeing action in the state legislature next month. Remember, this movement actually began in Illinois in 2018 before spreading west to Washington State, Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. In recent months we’ve seen more Second Amendment sanctuaries take root in Texas, Florida, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and even New Jersey. Now several counties in Kentucky are leading the charge in...

When Mario Arreola-Botello was pulled over, he didn't understand much of what the Oregon police officer was telling him. Botello, a Latino, non-native English speaker, was stopped for failing to signal a turn and a lane change, his attorney, Josh Crowther told CNN. What happened next sparked a years-long court battle that landed at the state's supreme court. In a November ruling, the court decided officers in the state were no longer allowed to ask questions that were irrelevant to the reason of the traffic stop. It's an issue that's often been tackled in courts across the country, but a...

New analysis of projected provincial gas tax revenues in Ontario has revealed that that source of provincial funding will fall much more dramatically than predicted just five years ago due to increased use of electric vehicles and other factors. And so, concludes Trent University professor emeritus Harry Kitchen in a new report titled Ontario’s Downward Trend for Fuel Revenue: Will Road Pricing Fill the Gap?, the provincial government must look for other sources of revenues to build transportation infrastructure. Kitchen recommends road pricing, such as tolls and HOT lanes, with funds raised earmarked for future transportation improvements, and dynamic parking...

The Cascadia and San Andreas Faults may be linked, with earthquakes on one triggering events in the other "with minimal or no separation in time," scientists have said. Chris Goldfinger and Joel Gutierrez, from Oregon State University, say their evidence showing a relationship between the two goes back almost 3,000 years. The controversial findings, which have not yet been published, will be presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco on Friday. The San Andreas Fault forms part of the tectonic boundary between the Pacific and North American Plate. It stretches about 750 miles along the east...

At a time when momentum and political pundits seem to favor Barack Obama winning the Democratic presidential nomination, other indicators suggest the LGBT community's support is still largely behind Hillary Clinton, except in Texas. And Texas is one of three large primary states remaining that pundits say Clinton must win in order to stay even with Obama in the contest to secure enough delegates to win the nomination. The latest poll in Texas, conducted by CNN February 15-17 among 529 likely primary voters, found Clinton just two points ahead of Obama. A poll just a few days earlier, by the...

This past June, masked thugs organized under the banner of anti-fascism, or "antifa," and beat up conservative journalist Andy Ngo and others in Portland, Ore. In one particularly gruesome attack, local conservative Adam Kelly got his head busted open with a baton. He suffered a concussion and needed 25 staples to close the wounds. Gage Halupowski, the 24-year-old man who pleaded guilty to second-degree assault in the attack, was sentenced to 70 months (5.83 years) in prison on Friday. "Antifa militant Gage Halupowski sentenced to nearly 6 years in prison for striking a man on head from behind w/a baton...