Free Republic

The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move....

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what? Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources. The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy. Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree -- as even the alarmists will...

A new state bill aims to shield certain information about California’s High-Speed Rail project from the public. Supporters say it’s about protecting sensitive records, but critics think it puts the brakes on transparency. ... [O]pponents...say the project is too costly. They note the state has already spent about $15 billion on it over the last decade and a half, while the total cost projections for the full project have ballooned from the original $45 billion estimate presented to voters in 2008 to anywhere between $88 billion-$128 billion today. Inside California Politics Correspondent Eytan Wallace reports a new state bill would...

It refers to the circle of self-enrichment through which political donors and special interests bag cash from government spending — then kick some of that cash back to politicians’ campaigns. That’s the only way to explain why the high-speed rail project persists in the Central Valley, even though almost nobody wants it and nobody is even pretending the state can afford it. Fraud is also the only way to explain how California spends nearly half a billion dollars on an overhaul of the 911 emergency system, only to find that the project doesn’t work. And when you double state spending...

An official in Fulton County, Georgia, has announced the county will challenge the legality of the FBI’s search and seizure of 2020 election records. Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said the effort will seek to “force the government to return the ballots taken.” Arrington said that the county’s attorneys are expected to file a motion in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia to fight the action of Trump’s Justice Department and the FBI. The FBI served a warrant last Wednesday at the Fulton County election office, near Atlanta, Georgia, taking 700 boxes of election materials as it probes alleged...

It might surprise you to learn that the Trump administration has restored millions of dollars in funding to pro-abortion groups, including Planned Parenthood. Last spring, federal monies designated for the “Title X Family Planning Program” had been frozen — a move widely celebrated by pro-life advocates. The federal program, which dates to 1970, is a welfare subsidy that ostensibly offers “family planning services” to low-income individuals. Groups who facilitate these offerings include the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Advocates for the program claim that the federal funds provide critical services for the poor — birth control, sexually transmitted disease testing, cancer...

Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who shot and killed a Minneapolis woman was hit by her car in the episode. “The officer was hit by the vehicle. She hit him,” Noem said. “He went to the hospital. A doctor did treat him. He has been released, but he’s going to spend some time with his family.” She said there would be no pause in the Trump administration’s immigration actions in the city. Earlier in the day, outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) railed against the Trump administration after an Immigration and...

As he enters the final chapter of his time in office, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy chose to mark Christmas Eve, one of the holiest and most sacred nights in the Christian faith, commemorating the anticipation of the birth of Christ, by publicly advancing his administration’s abortion agenda. Rather than acknowledging the profound spiritual significance of the evening for millions of Christians, Governor Murphy instead announced a $22 million funding commitment to “protect and grow” access to abortion through what his administration calls the Reproductive Health Access Fund, an abortion slush fund designed to funnel taxpayer dollars to abortion providers....

The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday evening to pass the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which will make it a crime for sex-change surgery and hormonal treatments to be provided to minors. The bill, authored by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), makes it criminal to “knowingly perform, or attempt to perform, genital or bodily mutilation on another person who is a minor” with penalties of up to ten years in prison. It further protects minors from chemical castration or hormonal treatments. Parents who facilitate, consent to, or transport the minor to receive sex change surgeries could also be charged. This...

Woman who helped build the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset exposes ESG labels we’re all a scam based on nothing to make money “They're lying to the public. They've manufactured a climate crisis. It's a multi-trillion dollar industrial complex.” She explains how ESG labels were slapped onto funds with no data, no evidence, and no accountability. Desiree Fixler “In 2020, I got my dream job as the chief sustainability officer at Deutsche Bank. That’s when I saw the fraud, everything was a marketing scam. The bottom line is this: we could not issue this annual report. It was a legal...

On the heels of Minnesota’s still-unfolding massive social services fraud scandal, a whistleblower is exposing a similar scheme occurring among the Ohio Somali community, which she says dates back over a decade and totals millions in stolen taxpayer dollars. In an interview with Fox News Digital, Mehek Cooke, an Ohio attorney and conservative commentator, said that "Minnesota was just the tip of the spear." She said that providers within the Ohio Somali community have confided to her that they have been pressured to join in a "massive" Medicaid fraud scheme that involves doctors "rubber stamping" home health care payouts to...

As the old aphorism goes: “Don’t tax you; don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.” Nobody likes paying taxes, but most Americans accept them as a necessary evil and are willing to pay their fair share, unless politicians waste those tax dollars in extraordinarily—well—wasteful ways, or steal them outright. I refer, of course, to California, where, as the classic Eagle’s song Hotel California goes: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” California, it’s no secret, is in deep financial trouble. In 2022, Gavin Newsom bragged about a $97.5 billion dollar surplus. By the...

DrOzCMS@DrOzCMS·8hYou’ve probably heard the news by now: Minnesota fraudsters stole over $1 billion from Medicaid. And you deserve an explanation.Our staff at CMS told me they’ve never seen anything like this in Medicaid — and everyone from Gov. Tim Walz on down needs to be investigated, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel. Based on what we know now, this is a clear dereliction of duty.First, the facts:In recent years, Minnesota Medicaid launched several new programs, including Housing Stabilization Services, which helped disabled homeless individuals, and Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention, which reimbursed therapy costs for families with autistic...

In July 2019, Minnesota state officials spotted early signs of fraud that would eventually siphon away more than $1 billion in taxpayer money, but they quickly faced pressure from leaders of the charitable group Feeding Our Future to stop asking questions, according to multiple former employees at the Minnesota Department of Education.

Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, including the Attorney General, were handed over $53,000 in campaign contributions by fraudsters who ripped off taxpayer cash meant to feed children. AG Keith Ellison, his councilman son, mayor Jacob Frey, Representative Ilhan Omar and others received cash from the scammers who siphoned off some $250 million, largely through nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Many did so after meeting the crooks, raising questions about how much they knew. “I’m not here because I think it’s going to help my re-election,” Ellison said during an encounter with Somali business leaders, two of whom later became criminal defendants linked to...

California’s move to abandon a plan revamping the state’s antiquated 911 system, after spending hundreds of millions on the project, has critics fuming.... But after spending around $450 million to build out the system, Cal OES halted the project last year due to “operational difficulties,” citing issues with the regional approach and stating it would pivot back toward the statewide approach.... Several of the four technology companies the state originally contracted with to develop the regional 911 system have accused officials of failing to effectively manage taxpayer dollars. Redesigning and installing the new statewide technology cost “hundreds of millions ......

The 42-day federal shutdown forced by Democrats thrust the economics of Obamacare into the limelight, and exposed an uncomfortable truth: An insurance industry whose executives are increasingly liberal donors has seen its earnings soar with the injection of taxpayer-funded subsidies that propped up Barack Obama's signature health program from collapse. The nation’s largest health insurance companies have seen good business since Obamacare was first passed in 2010 and fully implemented in 2014. This has come in no small part because of federal government subsidies to the insurance industry, which government estimates show totaled $1.8 trillion in 2023 alone. Those subsidies...

A new study from a pair of think tanks has found that massive amounts of money, taxpayer dollars that are meant to combat the ongoing homelessness crisis, are in fact being used to further the left’s political goals. This might explain why the homeless problem seems to get worse each year despite the fact that we throw billions of dollars at efforts to solve it. FOX News reports: A new study just exposed the corruption behind America’s homelessness crisisFor years, Americans have been told that “compassion” for the homeless meant writing ever-larger checks – more money, more programs and far...

The Soros clan, along with other family foundations of the liberal elite, Knight, MacArthur, Ford, Omidyar, and the Rockefellers, have announced that they’re teaming up to fight investigations by the Justice Department. While Alex Soros, George’s son, bragged that he would not give in, “over my dead body”, the presidents of the MacArthur and McKnight Foundations have declared that everyone needs to dust off their “crisis plans” and put their “legal teams on speed dial” ahead of a crackdown. What are they afraid of? The Unite in Advance coalition was formed so quickly by the big liberal grantmaking groups funding...

The Democrats are pretending this shutdown is about your health care. It’s not—it’s about fraud. They want you to believe the sky is falling—your health care is going to double in cost (or go away completely, depending on the day), and low-income ObamaCare enrollees are going to get left out in the rain. These are scare tactics, designed to cover up for the proposal they’re really pushing: an extension of temporary COVID-era subsidies, riddled with fraud they’d rather not admit exists. As many Americans know, ObamaCare operates by households purchasing health insurance through the exchange. Based on the enrollee’s income,...