Free Republic

President George W. Bush has rekindled the flame of Compassionate Conservativism. He did it for the children. He showed this concern for the future of American youth by vetoing the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) at 10 am this morning. SCHIP originated in 1997 as a gap insurance program aimed at covering the children of people too poor to afford good insurance, but too wealthy to land in the previous safety net. The program has cost $40 Billion over the last ten years and as of 2006, covered approximately 6.9 Million children nationwide. The program oversees fifty individual state...

Mayor McCrory questions art proposals for the future light rail system; others question whether taxpayers should be funding art at all... Charlotte: Charlotteans can add a new phrase to the city's lexicon: "plop art". "Plop art" is Mayor Pat McCrory's not-so-affectionate term for the artwork proposed for the city's South corridor light rail project, scheduled to open in the fall of 2006. The South corridor light rail will be the first of five light rail lines built throughout the city, and will run along a ten-mile corridor from Uptown Charlotte to Interstate 485, just north of Pineville. The Charlotte Area...

June 24, 2002 IMPERIAL TRANSPORTATION BUREAUCRAT SAYS YES TO LAVISH OFFICES, NO TO ARMED PILOTS Undersecretary John Magaw, the chief of the new Transportation Security Administration, has been very busy lately. He just spent $410,000 of your tax dollars installing lavish fixtures in his new office suite at the Transportation department headquarters. The Washington Post reports that "With its plush carpeting, mahogany stained doors, crown molding, and state-of-the-art conference room equipped with $109,000 worth of audio equipment, it has struck some visitors as ‘a little bit over the top.’" Incredibly, Magaw managed to spend about $132 per square foot on...