Free Republic

MILWAUKEE — The gleaming red-and-white trains sit motionless in a cavernous warehouse in Century City, an industrial neighborhood that cranked out 100 million car and truck frames in its heyday. The seats are draped in plastic; an electronic screen on one reads, “Quiet Car. 11:10 a.m. 000 MPH.” President Obama once hoped that these high-speed trains would be transporting passengers from Milwaukee to Madison, Wis., part of a broader system crisscrossing the Midwest and the nation. But Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, rejected $823 million in funding that the federal government was offering, and the Transportation Department transferred the funds...

The Department of Energy withheld troubling cost and performance data on a major stimulus award from a federal watchdog before the company servicing the award went bankrupt, according to a report released on Tuesday. The report focuses on the department’s handling of a pair of federal awards worth about $126 million for ECOtality, a San Francisco-based green energy company that declared bankruptcy in September. DOE’s inspector general, which authored Tuesday’s report, released an audit in July that expressed concerns about the department’s management of ECOtality’s $100 million stimulus award for the installation of electric vehicle charging stations. The report revealed...

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing materials and promotional items for a pair of conferences that cost taxpayers at least $6.1 million. Included was $50,000 on a parody video of the Oscar-winning movie Patton and a request to have the Washington Redskins cheerleaders appear at a kick-off event.

“My overall sense, right from day one, was it was created by people who had never created a commercial database application before," said FMS Software developer Luke Chung. Chung looked over the site and was stunned by the code and the cost - by some estimates, perhaps $200 million. Chung continued, “At $200 an hour, that would be a million man hours, 5,000 man years. I don't think they had time to use 5,000 man years. So I don't know where the money went. I don't know what these people were doing. There're not that many web pages. I don't...

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Gov. Bill Haslam says a deal to open the Great Smoky Mountains National Park parks in Tennessee for the weekend came too late for the state to send money to the federal government. The price tag? $60,000 per day.

A mere three weeks remain before the Obamacare exchanges open for business. The likely result will be the closing doors on Main Street, as shopkeepers and entrepreneurs shut down, unable to make ends meet. It’s clear that the wounded economy can’t cope with the exploding costs ahead. Ohio announced that premiums would rise in the individual market by an average of 88 percent next year. Premiums will rise 72 percent in Indiana, 125 percent in Wisconsin. Even California, with its relatively robust individual market, is bracing for increases of 66 percent. The Obamacare train wreck bearing down on us is...

With fewer than three weeks until the kickoff of the new Obamacare health-insurance exchange, Florida's 3.8 million uninsured residents still don't have answers to key questions, such as how much will the plans cost, what they will cover and how to sign up. Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature opted not to participate directly in Obamacare, making Florida one of 26 states that have left it to the federal government to set up the online "exchange" that will enable individuals and families to purchase subsidized coverage. Obamacare requires that most uninsured people purchase coverage — either through their jobs,...

ou are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad. I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A woman who embezzled $320,000 from a California state agency was later hired by the state's High-Speed Rail Authority — and she says nobody asked about her background. The Sacramento Bee (http://bit.ly/141r1Z6 ) says Carey Moore spent two years in prison after pleading no contest to grand theft in 2007. Prosecutors say she embezzled from the Department of Child Support Services. In 2011, Moore was hired by the High-Speed Rail Authority. Her job included making travel plans for officials. Her state job application didn't ask whether she'd been convicted of a crime and Moore says nobody...

Reuters) - The Obama administration has delayed a step crucial to the launch of the new healthcare law, the signing of final agreements with insurance plans to be sold on federal health insurance exchanges starting October 1. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified insurance companies on Tuesday that it would not sign final agreements with the plans between September 5 and 9, as originally anticipated, but would wait until mid-September instead, according to insurance industry sources. Nevertheless, Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for HHS, said the department remains "on track to open" the marketplaces on time on...

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought a progress report from state officials on Wednesday on the rollout of his signature health care law, stepping up his profile on the issue as the launch of a key provision of the law nears on October 1. Obama spoke by videoconference with the officials responsible for setting up new online health insurance exchanges that are at the heart of the program. These markets will offer private coverage at federally subsidized rates to individuals and families with low-to-moderate incomes. With the launch date less than five weeks away, the administration faces a daunting challenge...

Sacramento -- Dealing a major blow to California's high-speed rail project, a Sacramento County judge ruled Friday that the agency overseeing the bullet train failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises made to voters when they approved initial funding for the project five years ago. Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny said the California High-Speed Rail Authority "abused its discretion by approving a funding plan that did not comply with the requirements of the law" and has failed to identify "sources of funds that were more than merely theoretically possible." Yet he declined to immediately halt funding for the...

As much as electric car builders hail their vehicles as the future of transportation, one question they couldn't answer fully was just how well their vehicles would withstand a crash. Automakers have spent decades finessing their chassis; what happened when an engine-less vehicle went head-on into a barrier wasn't clear, and as the post crash-test smoldering of a Chevy Volt demonstrated, the batteries posed new challenges. Leave it to Tesla to provide the first hard evidence — with data from U.S. government tests showing the Model S sedan may be the most crash-proof passenger vehicle on the road today. Normally,...

The Republican Party is spending its summer engaged in traditional, old-timey fun, like this massive tug-of-war between congressional leadership and conservative members and activists over Obamacare. The leadership is diligently trying to pull the party toward an intricate legislative solution to the dispute, while the base is organizing all of its friends over to yank everyone off a cliff. That's a little strong, but perhaps not too much. There's a to-hell-with-it feel to the Republican base's opposition to Obamacare. If Democrats in the Senate or the White House won't vote to kill the program, a program central to conservative critique...

(CBS News) LOS ANGELES - In about seven weeks, Americans can start buying health insurance on the new exchanges that will be part of the Affordable Care Act. Thursday, the Obama administration announced $67 million in awards to more than 100 organizations that will help people understand their options. The key to the success of what the president himself calls "Obamacare" is getting young folks to sign up. Jordan Zavaleta is what the health care industry calls a "young invincible." He's 26 and has no health insurance, largely because it's expensive to buy on his own and he rarely gets...

Former White House adviser David Axelrod said Friday that more changes to Obamacare will be coming as the program is implemented, and that’s how it should be. Axelrod was asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” whether in the wake of delays and changes to Obamacare there would be more tweaking moving forward. “I have to believe that’s going to be the case,” Axelrod said. “Any time you implement something like this, it’s new and there’s no doubt that it’s complicated, there will be changes along — there should be changes along the way.” Axelrod said the president will fix Obamacare as...

On Thursday, CNN senior reporter John King said that the Obama Administration’s most recent delay of a key Obamacare provision that was supposed to limit consumers’ out-of-pocket expenses on deductibles and co-pays could prove seismic come the 2014 midterm elections. “This one particularly though could have a huge political impact,” said CNN reporter John King. “Because as you mention, hidden in bureaucratic language, the end result is that when these changes kick in, the Administration promised for most Americans your costs would go down. Now it is saying, at least in the short term, your costs could be higher than...

WASHINGTON — Just seven weeks before the new state insurance marketplaces are set to open under the Affordable Care Act, it’s unclear whether the long-anticipated October rollout will be a smooth operation or the "train wreck" that some have predicted. Systems testing for the marketplaces is months behind schedule, according to recent government reports. So are funding and training for navigators, the outreach and enrollment workers who’ll help people choose marketplace health plans. In a final bit of down-to-the-wire drama, the data hub, which routes information from the marketplaces to various federal databases, might not get its final stamp of...

The Chevy Volt madness continued this week with General Motors announcing that consumers will see a $5,000 decrease in the price of President Obama's favorite green wonder-car. Sales of the Volt have been dismal, with most consumers refusing to be as smitten with the car as the President and the few enthusiastic green ideologues who seemed to believe that spending approximately $20,000 more for a car (over a gas-powered rival) that can save them about $3 a day in gas makes sense. What seems to go unrecognized is the fact that the price cut comes at the expense of GM...

When Daniel Wilson learned earlier this year that the state of California wants to bulldoze his family's pear orchard to build a giant Sacramento River water diversion, he and his brother were making a major new investment in the crop. Located near the town of Hood, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the orchard has grown Bartlett pears for 50 years as the foundation of the family farm. But Bartletts are not as marketable as they once were. So the brothers were grafting thousands of trees to grow new pear varieties – Bosc and River Maid Red – to ensure viable...