Free Republic

Often the Joe Biden administration has claimed that COVID-19 attacked families and workers through no fault of their own, and what was needed was its progressive spending agenda, specifically helping "people of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers." In reality, however, Biden's spending, "billions and counting – has gone to unrelated causes and the administration’s COVID relief program continues to fleece American taxpayers," according to a report from government watchdog Judicial Watch. The organization reported that, "Fraud and corruption are so rampant in the U.S. government’s mammoth pandemic relief program that the Justice Department created a special COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task...

Baltimore is burning because community organizers and various thugs are tearing the city apart in the aftermath of the strange death of a young black man who was in the custody of police — and President Obama is trying to make things worse.In an incredible non-coincidence the rioting follows a weekend rally by the Occupy Wall Street-like Baltimore Peoples Assembly. There also was a first wave of rioting over the weekend. Outside activists have been flooding into Baltimore, according to reports. Police and civilians have been injured. A CVS store was looted and set on fire. Rioters chopped up fire...

A grand jury in Texas this week returned a capital murder indictment against a man accused of viciously beating his girlfriend’s 11-month-old son to death. The infant’s mother was also indicted after prosecutors say she failed to protect her children from abuse she knew was taking place regularly. Officers with the Texarkana Police Department on Sunday arrested 28-year-old Joshua Deshaun Lowe for allegedly killing Javontae Neeley. He is charged with one count each of capital murder of a person under ten years of age, aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury, and injuring a child with the intent to cause severe...

Thanks to experience with numerous hurricanes, we were prepared for the Texas power outage and no one slept in the cold at our house. When you are prepared, three days is not that bad.I have lived along the Gulf Coast my entire life, mostly in the Houston Area. I lived and worked in Louisiana when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Gustav slammed into South Louisiana and have learned from my successes and failures and those of my friends.After moving back home to Texas and a long period of relatively quiet storm activity, Hurricane Harvey was a test of different beast until...

It's time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the U.S. When most of the nation’s governors shut down nonessential businesses and directed people to stay at home, they made the mistake of keeping urban transit systems running despite a 2018 study showing that mass public transportation systems expedite the spread of infectious diseases in communities. Further, a 2011 study found that people who ride urban transit are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections...

Florida's secretary of state resigned Thursday after a newspaper obtained photos of him in blackface dressed as a Hurricane Katrina victim at a 2005 Halloween party. The Tallahassee Democrat published photos of Ertel on Thursday reporting that they had been taken at a Halloween party 14 years ago. The photos show the former secretary of state appearing in blackface, while wearing earrings, a New Orleans Saints bandanna, and fake breasts under a purple t-shirt that read "Katrina Victim". The paper says the photos were taken in 2005, two months after the devastating hurricane tore through the Gulf Coast region, killing...

Detroit hip-hop station 105.1 The Bounce says it's pulling Kanye West songs off of its Morning Bounce playlist following a recent string of erratic episodes from the rapper, including West saying he believes slavery was a "choice." The station made the announcement on its Facebook page on Thursday morning. "We feel like Kanye has gone too far with his latest statement declaring that 'slavery was a choice.' We are over it," the station wrote on Facebook. "We don't want to hear Kanye's music, we don't want to play Kanye on our show, we don't want to talk about Kanye anymore....

Kanye West revealed in a TMZ interview on Tuesday that he wanted to apologize to George W. Bush for saying in 2005 that the president did not care about black people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Kanye West said he was always told not to apologize to Bush, but that he recently saw the former president pushing his father’s wheelchair at Barbara Bush’s funeral in March, and he felt sympathy for him. “Do you know how bad I would want to go to George Bush and say I’m sorry for hurting you. I was an artist I was hurting...

Former New York Senator Malcolm Smith was yesterday sentenced to seven years in prison for bribery and related offenses. He was convicted in February. A former majority leader in the New York Senate, Smith was defeated for re-election in 2014. Smith is the latest associate of U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) headed to jail. Formal investigations of several New York politicians began in 2010 after the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) exposed corruption through stories in the New York Post, New York Times and New York Daily News. The first story, in the New York Post of January 31,...

ctress Kirstie Alley star set off what she called a Twitter "firestorm" on Friday after she challenged Obama's reasoning for not visiting the flood-ravaged state of Louisiana sooner. "On a golf course in Martha's Vineyard instead of in Louisiana?," she tweeted, along with a Fox News video flashback of Obama criticizing President Bush in 2008 for his response to Hurricane Katrina.

FLINT - Filmmaker and Davison native Michael Moore spoke before a fired-up crowd in downtown Flint today about the water crisis. In his speech he asked that President Barack Obama visit Flint, when the president is at the North American International Auto Show next week. Moore said that Obama needs to come to Flint before it becomes the president's version of Katrina, conjuring images of when President Bush flew over, but initially did not go to, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina stuck the city.

One of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers told her that Barack Obama should use a deadly hurricane to boost his re-election campaign, a proposal that she agreed to pass on to the White House, a new tranche of emails reveals. Blair and Clinton transcripts reveal global concerns of two buddies Read more Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend of the Clintons, sent a memo in 2012 presenting a strategy for turning Hurricane Isaac to the Democrats’ political advantage by contrasting it with President George W Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush's decision to nickname a South Carolina politician "Hurricane Katrina" is being criticized for what political observers say is insensitive to the victims of the 2005 disaster, CNN reports. According to the cable network, Bush was trying to make a joke about South Carolina state Sen. Katrina Shealy, who's been the only woman in the state Senate for the past three years. But in giving her the nickname, Bush conjured up memories of his brother, former President George W. Bush, and what many called his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath that killed more than 1,800...

Scott and Kimberly Roberts clung to each other in the attic of their clapboard home, praying the gale-force winds and rising flood water would not carry them away. With shaking hands, they captured the moment they were hit by Hurricane Katrina – one of the fiercest storms in living memory – on a $20 camera they had bought just days before. “I decided to film because I realised we weren’t going to be able to leave,” Mrs Roberts, 34, said. “And just in case it happened how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to capture it. “The...

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed. That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise. But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped....

Ironically, the biggest witness against the exaggerated claims of Brian Williams' Hurricane Katrina fabulism turns out to be Brian Williams himself. His diary entries in the NBC News Daily Nightly online journal from the time of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans to the aftermath several days later shows no mention of his many disputed claims. A detailed analysis of Brian Williams' Daily Nightly journal entries from August 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans until our puppy-rescuing hero was safely out of harm's way shows no references to a floating body in the French quarter, drinking floodwater, catching dysentery,...

The New Orleans Advocate reports: "NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who apologized on the air Wednesday night for lying about an experience covering the Iraq War, is now facing scrutiny over his gripping accounts of Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that burnished his nightly news bona fides almost a decade ago. Williams’ account of seeing a body float by in the French Quarter — which remained largely dry — and even a claim of catching dysentery from drinking Katrina floodwaters have raised eyebrows among bloggers and elsewhere since he took it on the chin this week over a claim that he...

A life threatening situation for Brian Williams. Fortunately the danger passes and the NBC News anchorman remains friends with his rescuer to this day. If that sounds like his story about his helicopter supposedly being hit by an RPG in Iraq, a fable that he was forced to apologize for, as well as his subsequent rescue by an army sergeant, it also sounds eerily similar to a story he told about Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The SooperMexican blog made the discovery of Brian Williams' Katrina rescue story. It remains to be seen how authentic this story is but SooperMexican...

glaringly missing from the summary was mention of $15 million in fees paid by Burkle's Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund since 2002

With the attempt to limit the deductibility of contributions to charities by high-earners, the Obama Administration has opened a multi-front attack against the American tradition of “neighbor helping neighbor” and financially successful people turning large portions of their wealth over to charities that improve the American culture in august manners. The governmental power grab competes with the attempts to control the financial sector for its significance and may exceed it in the long-term effect upon our culture. One first has to marvel at how liberals can twist logic to rationalize a tax increase. It happens regularly from the local government...