Free Republic

There seems to be no way to get certain desired exe files (apps) to show up in the "All Programs" list in the Windows 10 Pro Start Menu. (This is common to Win 7 also, I believe, and perhaps earlier OS's as well.) I can add such exe's* to the Start Menu "tiles" in Win 10 Pro, but not to the "All Programs" list. This seems quite odd, but maybe I'm missing something? *Examples of such apps / exe files are "IV_Player" (Irfan View Player, a very handy & lightweight media file player), as well as "Wavosaur", a handy and...

Former President Donald Trump blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) ahead of his presidential campaign launch on Wednesday, asserting he would be doomed to fail in the general election after voting to overhaul entitlement programs when he was a congressman. Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, took to Truth Social to hit DeSantis’s support of legislation that took aim at Social Security and Medicare during his time in Congress :

The Associated Press periodically conducts a poll in conjunction with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research gauging the public’s views on federal spending. Given the ongoing fight in Washington between House Republicans and the White House over the next budget, these are significant numbers to keep an eye on. The latest edition of the poll was released last night and the results are a mixed bag. The good news for fiscal conservatives is that for the first time in quite a while, a solid majority (60%) of Americans agree that the federal government spends too much money and they...

click on English / Listen This is slow music - some of it "old fashioned"...but it has a calming effect on me. Maybe someone else will enjoy it. I keep it on all day now. Some great programs. Have to just tolerate she really slow music and the children's programs.

Please help bring sanity into my routine. The lock-down is beginning to act like a disease - not a horribly bad one - but a disease nevertheless. What programs are on Netflix (my brother's account, not mine) or Amazon Prime that are worth the time. I wish we could get Poirot here in the states. Thanks for any suggestions.

Besides spending tens of billions of dollars on fraud-infested programs to feed the poor, the U.S. govt wastes an additional $907M to give recipients useless “nutrition education” courses w/rates of effectiveness that cannot be assessed.

It takes a lot of courage for a president to target almost a quarter of the federal budget for reform in an election year. But this is exactly what President Trump is doing with his executive order, "Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility." We're now spending more than $700 billion per year on low-income assistance, which is more than we are spending on our national defense. And there are plenty of reasons to believe this spending is inefficient, wasteful and counterproductive. Over the last half-century, some $22 trillion has been spent on anti-poverty programs and yet...

A multi-billion-dollar government program launched by Obama to help families hit by the housing crisis squandered millions on parties, employee bonuses, cars, and superfluous data storage. The program is known as Hardest Hit Fund and operates under the Treasury Department, which does little to oversee it and sits by as federal audits expose pervasive fraud and waste. The findings of the latest probe were released this month by the inspector general of another reckless Treasury gem, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Obama’s disastrous initiative to rescue the nation’s ailing financial institutions. The findings are documented in an exhaustive 93-page...

Sade Alvarez-Gibson, 15, raps into a studio microphone in a makeshift booth made of blankets, while Oladele Kiambu, 17, records: “Keeping my mind focused / I’m controlling my reality / My grind’s an everyday thing / It’s something that I do casually,” she raps. Just feet away, Kamal Muhammad — wearing headphones and a face full of determination — sits in front of a computer monitor, rhythmically tapping on a keyboard, eliciting sounds of a synth and a drum kick. “This is my first time making a beat,” the 12-year-old said proudly. All three are hoping to break into the...

With 10 years remaining in its $12 billion road-building program, the Illinois tollway intends to start training workers to help finish the job. The aim is to increase the number of minorities working on tollway projects through a center teaching construction-related skills, officials said at a meeting Wednesday. The program is in the early stages, with diversity department planners still figuring out logistics, including funding. About $400,000 is allocated for 2017, although several tollway board directors advised staff members to budget for more. A 2015 tollway study concluded that blacks, Hispanics and women are underrepresented compared to whites when it...

A number of sources attribute jokes about government programs being the closest thing to immortality to President Ronald Reagan. At least one source traces the humor back to a United States senator in 1933. That is an apt starting point because it was in that year President Franklin Roosevelt took office and worked to create — among other relief programs — the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC long ago folded but its Michigan-specific derivative, the Michigan Civilian Conservation Corps, survived. And it continues today as an at-risk youth program despite having been defunded in the past. As the 2016 fiscal...

Here's the message "A web page is slowing down your computer. What would you like to do? -stop it- -wait- " Nothing on what program, or time estimates. Never had it before. Is there something I can do. Thanks. BTW I turned on the computer.

Federal taxpayer funds continue to flow to a slew of U.S. universities that are spending the cash on programs that promote anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-American viewpoints, according to a large group of Jewish and civil rights organizations that are now pushing Congress to rectify what they call a systemic problem. Taxpayer funds have been allocated to universities under Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HEA) since 1965. However, Congress and the Education Department have exerted little oversight, leading these funds to be spent on biased educational programs that promote radical views about Israel and even America, according to the...

David Brooks makes a good point and then a bad point in his take on the so-called reform conservative agenda. Today, millions of Americans are behaving in ways that make no economic sense: dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock. They do so because the social guardrails that used to guide behavior have dissolved. Giving people in these circumstances tax credits is not going to lead to long-term thinking. Putting more risk into vulnerable peopleÂ’s lives may not make them happier.The nanny state may have drained civil society, but simply removing the nanny state will not restore it....

December 31, 2013 4:00 AM Good Ol’ Boy, Inc. Reality shows about gold miners, ax men, and ice-road truckers are a far cry from the Kardashians. By Victor Davis Hanson The hysteria over Duck Dynasty reminds us that cable TV is currently inundated with working-class, white-guy reality shows. Top-drawing, relatively low-cost realities showcase gold miners, oil drillers, hunters, locomotive drivers, off-the-grid backwoods eccentrics, fishermen, crabmen, truck drivers, ax men, moonshiners, or the new generation of Beverly Hillbillies. The list of the particular subspecies of the muscular classes is endless. These shows share a few common themes. They do not take...

President Obama defended the government’s internet surveillance as a “modest encroachment” on the privacy of Americans, but he maintained that the programs initiated by George W. Bush help keep Americans safe, adding that he increased oversight of the surveillance. Obama warmed to the Bush-era Patriot Act programs after taking office. “We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards, but my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks,” the president told reporters. “And the modest

The fiscal cliff negotiations seem to be foundering on Barack Obama's insistence on higher tax rates on high earners and House Republican leaders' insistence on opposing them. The president believes he has a mandate from voters for his position, and House Republicans believe they have a mandate from voters for theirs. The real argument here is over the size and scope of government. Under Barack Obama, federal outlays -- the technical term for federal spending -- have increased to 24 and 25 percent of gross domestic product. That's a higher level of federal spending than in any year since 1946,...

Six weeks into his new job as an MSNBC host, Al Sharpton has made it crystal clear he despises members of the GOP. So far he has begun one third of his shows hatefully saying, "Hey, Republicans" (video follows with transcript and commentary): October 5: "Hey, Republicans, the people want fairness. Can't you hear them?" October 3: "Hey, Republicans, looks like you've been stood up." September 30: "Hey, Republicans, you sure you want to go after this president's leadership?" September 29: "Hey, Republicans, the people are speaking. Isn't it about time you started

The prospect that Congress's proposed 12-member super committee might not do its budget-cutting job properly has provoked anxiety among the defenders of discretionary spending programs in the federal budget. The new budget deal provides that if this so-called "Super Congress" can't agree on some combination of entitlement cuts, tax increases and program reductions to slow the growth of the federal deficit, then spending cuts will kick in automatically, with half the cuts coming from non-defense discretionary spending. I've already read newspaper accounts about how these mandatory cuts in discretionary spending may gut a host of programs, from job training initiatives...

The federal government may have staved off the imminent threat of default Tuesday when President Barack Obama signed a bitterly fought budget deal, but the woes and uncertainty for states have just begun. In California, some of the most likely cuts include nutritional programs for low-income women and children, the federal portion of the controversial high-speed rail project, clean drinking water programs, and subsidies for farmers. Also potentially at risk are federally funded university research projects and military bases, policy-watchers said Tuesday after hastily reviewing the plan to cut national spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years. None of the...