Free Republic

When the state-imposed manager of Detroit, Kevyn Orr, starts the job on Monday he will wade into a city of crumbling neighborhoods where police fail to respond to some calls, arson fires burn out of control and residents scour charred buildings for scrap metal to sell. Except for the business district and a cultural area including a university, museum and some theaters, the city of Detroit, population 700,000, is in bad shape. Orr, a Washington, D.C.-based bankruptcy lawyer, will have the official title of "Emergency Financial Manager." But his remit as an unelected administrator will range far beyond money. His...

Politicians and basketball coaches know that you never answer the question a reporter asks you; you answer the question you want to answer. So it was with an opinion piece in the March 17 edition of The Washington Post titled “Is Capitalism Moral?” The newspaper assigned Steven Pearlstein, a business columnist who doesn’t seem to care much for businesses, to answer that question. But Pearlstein didn’t seem to want to. Instead, he made his piece broader, writing about the broad problems in American politics today. “Careening from debt-ceiling crisis to sequestration to a looming government shutdown, the nation is...

The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance. In...

The Senate will vote Wednesday afternoon on whether to force the White House to start allowing public tours again — one of a series of high-profile showdowns senators have scheduled as they push to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

(CNSNews.com) – The municipal government of Washington, D.C. received a $1.8 million federal Community Transformation Grant in 2012 to promote healthy lifestyles in the city.Among the things the city would do with the money, as listed on its application, was increasing the "availability of fruit and vegetables to employees in their workplaces."Administered through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the grant was awarded in September 2011, which is the beginning of fiscal year 2012.According to the CDC, the grant is intended to target “approximately 445,000 residents living in the District of Columbia, focusing on racial/ethnic minority, low-income, medically underserved, and...

The finger pointing and the blame game of Washington gets old, but a messy representative democracy is better than an efficient dictatorship. This past weekend, I toured Washington with my 5th-grade son, Robert, his classmates and their mothers. I've been to Washington more times than I can remember, but each visit fills me with hope and inspiration. It's not just the city, which in the summer is hot, humid and buggy and in the winter can be bone-chilling (as it was this weekend), but it's what the city stands for: a city created to house the federal government of...

A poet laureate comes to Washington. Yawn. In the world capital of the sound and fury that often signifies not very much, the disciplined sentiments of a poet sound as alien as a tax cut for millionaires. We live in a city of argument, one-upsmanship, and winners and losers playing a power game where rhetoric rules without eloquence. Pragmatism trumps poetry every time. We have no majesty, none of the grace notes of language and no call for a poet to memorialize events, celebratory or tragic. But wait. Natasha Trethewey, the newest poet laureate, wants to change that. By moving...

It’s easy to pity Kremlinologists. These are people who spent years, even decades, studying the Soviet Union. Their job was to explain why that country did the things it did, even though those actions so often seemed counterproductive. Suddenly, though, the USSR dissolved and the Kremlinologists were out of work. Louis Michael Seidman hopes to join them on the unemployment lines. He’s a “professor of constitutional law” at Georgetown University. That means students pay more than $60,000 per year to hear him lecture. Nonetheless, Seidman apparently wants to end his cushy teaching gig. “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution”...

David Gregory walks free while Iraq vet was jailedIt’s been more than a week since police in Washington, D.C., opened an investigation into NBC’s David Gregory’s possession of a “high-capacity magazine” that’s prohibited in the District on on national TV. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier’s spokesman refused Monday to respond to whether Mr. Gregory had even been interviewed yet. This is a rather curious departure for a city that has been ruthless in enforcing this particular firearms statute against law-abiding citizens who made an honest mistake. In July, The Washington Times highlighted the plight of former Army Spc. Adam...

Even after request was denied by Police, NBC News anchor David Gregory displayed what he said was a high-capacity gun clip on Sunday's broadcast of "Meet the Press," and is now being investigated by police according to Washington's Metropolitan Police Department on Wednesday.

What has happened to my country? I am old. I am 77. I pay to live in a gated community because I am scared. “Bravo Roberto” near my home serves from a cooked-from-scratch, delicious menu, items not bought from a food service truck, not served up by a chain restaurant that loads Americans up on heavy doses of salt to achieve its number one rating. In these tragic times, food, friends, family, God, prayer and Christmas are about all we have left. And “Bravo Roberto” serves up every day in Florida’s St. Lucie West a product we have allowed ourselves...

nspired by concerns of unemployment, the economy, Benghazi, and matters of foreign policy; organizers are promoting a “Massive Anti-Obama Rally @ Obama’s Inauguration Day.” Their goal? 500,000+ protesters armed with signs identifying the reason for their participation in the rally. The invitation expresses the following: “If you are unsatisfied with President Barack Obama’s reelection win and you further feel that he will ultimately destabilize America completely, then let us join together with bold Anti-Obama signs clearly stating our main grievances…

<p>When Janice Coe, a homeless advocate in Loudoun County, learned through her prayer group that a young woman was sleeping in the New Carrollton Metro station with a toddler and a 2-month-old, she sprang into action.</p> <p>Coe contacted the young woman and arranged for her to take the train to Virginia, where she put the little family up in a Comfort Suites hotel. Then Coe began calling shelters to see who could take them.</p>

The new Judicial Watch blockbuster feature documentary, The District of Corruption, directed by Stephen K. Bannon, lays bare the lawless and unconstitutional Obama administration and makes the case for more openness, integrity, and honesty in government and leads the way for changing the climate of corruption that has gripped Washington, D.C. for far too long.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An Iranian-American man who U.S. officials say has links to Iran's security forces pleaded not guilty in federal court on Monday to plotting to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington in a bomb attack. , 56, who was arrested on September 29 in New York, faces several charges including conspiracy to murder a foreign official, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism. Another man, Gholam Shakuri, was also charged in the plot but is believed to still be in Iran. U.S. officials said he is a...

An interesting glimpse at Paul Ryan’s wife, from the Washington Post: Janna Ryan, wife of Republican vice presidential pick Rep. Paul Ryan, is the poster girl for Generation X women who wanted to have it all.Ryan, 43, like many of her 40-something peers, is a stay-at-home mother with an impressive resume. She prefers her husband’s hometown, Janesville, Wis., to Washington and remains out of the political limelight.But Janna Christine Little Ryan hails from Oklahoma, a state known for its Will Rogers’s common-sense ideals mixed with a smidgen of Wild West attitude.She grew up Madill, Okla., in the southern part of...

In a first for any American public school system, education officials in the District of Columbia have set new achievement targets for students based on race and income with lower goals for black, Hispanic and poor kids and higher ones for whites and Asians. Washington D.C. officials are simply following a national trend implemented by the Obama Administration, which is paying states to adopt different education achievement goals for different groups of children. The administration is just “trying to be realistic about what’s achievable,” according to a U.S. Department of Education (DOE) official quoted in the mainstream newspaper that reported...

The Washington region has emerged from the recession looking even more affluent compared with the rest of the country, boasting seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes in the nation, new census numbers show. With a median household income surpassing $119,000, Loudoun County heads the list. Fairfax County, at nearly $106,000, is second. Both have held the same positions for several years running. More surprising, Arlington County leapfrogged from the fifth spot to third, with a median household income of almost $101,000, a $6,000 gain in one year. Four in 10 households in the county are single...

The District of Columbia government Thursday will launch a campaign that advocates say is a first of its kind: A series of ads "promoting respect for the District’s transgender and gender-non-conforming communities." One of the ads features Kisha, a trans woman who lives in D.C. The ad quotes Kisha, saying, "I love wandering through Smithsonian museums, eating on H Street with friends, and going to shows at Howard Theatre."

At least five people were injured at the L'Enfant Plaza metro station during the Tuesday morning rush hour due to a malfunction on an escalator, officials say. D.C. Fire officials say that three people were taken to area hospitals for treatment after the accident, which happened just after 8:30 a.m. The other two injured people were treated at the station. Metro spokesperson Cathy Asato says that they believe a bag or piece of clothing belonging to a customer caught a side panel of an escalator, detaching it and causing some people to lose their balance. Several pictures and reports on...