Free Republic

President Donald Trump has an opportunity to do what Congress should be doing, but isn’t: Help Americans who are on food stamps transition to work.The farm bill—which reauthorizes the foods stamp program for five years—would have been a prime opportunity for Congress to enhance work requirements. Under current law, certain work-capable adults must work 20 or more hours per week, participate in a supervised job search or training, or volunteer in their communities in order to receive food stamps.Most food stamp recipients are exempt from these requirements. These include people over 50 years old, the disabled, and minor children and...

Astonishingly, today’s Americans expect government to care for us from cradle to grave, the way commoners once expected a benevolent king to care for his subjects. We treat people as members of groups rather than as individuals, insidiously devolving into the very class system against which the Founders rebelled. Americans are voluntarily surrendering the very freedoms that millions fought and died to establish and protect. President James Garfield once said the most common form of death in politics is suicide. After a noble 225-year history, is the American experiment dying at the hands of its own people? Many of the...

President Donald Trump signaled his support Thursday for work requirements for food stamps. “When the House and Senate meet on the very important Farm Bill – we love our farmers – hopefully, they will be able to leave the WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROVISION that the House approved,” Trump wrote on Twitter. The House version of the farm bill barely passed with a vote of 213-211 and included work requirements for single food stamp recipients. Democrats voted unanimously against the bill. The House and the Senate have to take the bill to conference, however, which will likely strip the...

During a lecture at the Library of Conservatism in Germany, British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton described conservatism as a philosophy that recognizes and acknowledges that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created, such as law, peace, freedom, civility, the security of property and family life. He contends we depend on the cooperation of others for the aforementioned to exist because we have no means or ability to single handedly attain it. He states “the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating.” “The work of creation is slow, laborious and dull.” For the African American, the journey from...

Overall enrollment in the country’s food stamp program has dropped to its lowest level in more than eight years as the economy continues to improve and the Trump administration attempts to tackle fraud in the program. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enrollment in the program dropped in March to 40,083,954. The last time food stamp participation dipped this low was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people were enrolled in the program. "As the economy continues to improve, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is...

The plane landed safely at San Jose Mineta International Airport, about 50 miles south of San Francisco. The airline says the passenger accused of smoking was turned over to law enforcement. The remaining 32 passengers were placed on other aircraft to continue their trips. Passengers reported smelling smoke, and one said he smelled marijuana. “It looked like that someone needed to smoke a joint on a plane, and he went into the bathroom, smoked his blunt, and set off the fire alarm,” passenger Jonathan Burkes said.

More than 2.2 million people have discontinued their participation in food stamps during President Trump’s first full year in office, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data on food stamp enrollment. The latest USDA data shows that since Trump’s first full month in office in February 2017—when food stamp enrollment was at 42,289,366— participation in the program decreased by 2,257,235 to 40,032,131. The continued decline in enrollment during Trump’s first full year is on pace with the steady decline in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation since 2013. Before then, participation in the federal welfare program swelled...

Video at source. Great interview on Fox. "The Left wants their slaves back."

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. has swelled to more than 42 million today. As a result of Obama Administration’s policies, the number of Americans on food stamps is now 'greater than the population of Canada.' Nationwide spending on the program is roughly $70 billion annually —20 percent of which is wasted on junk food, candy, soda, and other sugary drinks. Consider California, which spent more than $1 billion on food stamp benefits in August and September alone. The good news is that President Trump has a chance to take on food stamps in the upcoming Farm Bill, which funds...

President Trump ordered the U.S. military and the Interior Department to take immediate action to "break" the nation's dependence on Russian and Chinese supplies of critical minerals as a matter of national security. "This dependency of the United States on foreign sources creates a strategic vulnerability for both its economy and military to adverse foreign government action, natural disaster, and other events that can disrupt supply of these key minerals," read an executive order signed by the president on Wednesday.

Throughout the 20th Century, Karl Marx’s visage often appeared on communist banners in the guise of a mighty, bearded prophet, the first and greatest in an array of great thinkers that also included Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. So it may be slightly odd and amusing to think of him in his mid-20s living in Paris as the editor of a magazine. Digging into the letters and writings that Marx produced in those years, and the writings of those who knew him, always turns up something interesting—and occasionally something utterly fascinating. The year was 1844. Hoping to unite German and...

There is a move afoot to cast Christopher Columbus as an evil person instead of the person celebrated as the first to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, discovering there were two major continents not previously known to the world as it existed in 1492. In another feel-good moment, some cities are renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day. American Indians are desperate for real help, not placating moments. Naomi Schaefer Riley has defined how bad things are for American Indians and how Washington, D.C., bureaucracy is destroying the lives of these Americans in her terrific and terrifying book "The New Trail...

RUSH: This will be a great opportunity to delve into the Walter Williams column that I referred to earlier. It’s got nothing to do with the NFL. I mean, that’s not why he wrote it. It comes from way back on September 20th, about a week ago, and the title of his column… Where did this run? The link is so tiny, I can’t read it. It looks like the Daily Signal. “The Black Family Is Struggling, and It’s Not Because of Slavery.” Now, Walter Williams is a former guest host here. He’s brilliant guy, very conservative individual. Let me...

We’re not all socialists yet but we’re getting there. A majority of Democrats are, in any case. The single-payer numbers in Morning Consult’s new survey not only aren’t surprising, they’re right in line with what other studies have showed this year.

Do I smoke too much pot? It’s a question I’ve asked myself over the years, and it raised its uncomfortable head this week as I absorbed the results of the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The first thing to note about the report is the good news. One of the major and legitimate fears of those who have opposed legalization is that teen use would increase. Weed is genuinely harmful to the developing adolescent brain and those of us who passionately advocated legalization argued that making it legal would actually make it harder for teens to get...

ROANOKE, Va. (WDBJ) The contractor that maintains EBT services for Virginia's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is experiencing multi-state service problems. This has resulted in an EBT System outage. It is unknown when the system will be restored. SNAP clients can call (866) 281-2448 to check on the status of the system restoration. Clients can also call 2-1-1 to learn of food resources that might be available to supplement their needs during the temporary outage. Also, clients can call the Enterprise Customer Service Center at (855) 635-4370 with any additional questions related to their benefits.

In four years, Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag about social injustice to a full-fledged global civil rights movement. Metro spoke with Patrisse Cullors, who cofounded Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in 2013, about its evolution, fighting racism in the age of Trump, her upcoming memoir and what saying “all lives matter” really means. What is the biggest misconception you find people have about Black Lives Matter? Patrisse Cullors: That we just started a hashtag. That it isn’t a sophisticated set of ideas that would lead to a larger strategy to build out, a powerful...

We were trying to count the people standing in a breadline when William Contreras arrived. The line was forming outside of a bakery in the Caracas run-down neighborhood of Catia, about 20 people long with a half dozen more sprinting past me and our photographer, Cristian Hernández. It was a perfect illustration of the desperate situation of a country that was, a few years ago, boasting of its oil-funded socialist prosperity. Contreras was our government minder, a bulky 50-year-old alderman with salt-and-pepper hair. When he pulled up to us, he seemed oblivious to the snaking line.

From our file named "Duh." The Alabama Department of Human Resources says 13 counties that reinitiated a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program, saw an 85% drop in recipients. The counties had been exempt from the work requirement due to high levels of unemployment. But with the economy recovering, the state of Alabama restarted the work requirement on January 1 this year, which resulted in the massive drop in SNAP participants. ... Nationwide, there are about 44 million people receiving SNAP benefits at a cost of about $71 billion. The...

Are you against government-funded science? If you are, you must be against all science! That's the conclusion of a large number of parasites and freaks who went to giant costume parties all around the world dressed in white coats to give themselves a patina of authority. Here are some of the dumbest things that were said at those rallies: Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, [said] “Science matters and without science wildlife have no chance for survival...." Really? How did wildlife survive before there was "science"? Here's what retired astronaut Leland Melvin said: "...it’s a beautiful...