Free Republic

Two Weeks to Flatten Became Eight Months to Change the Election In 1845, Congress established Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. The Act sought “to establish a uniform time” for Americans to cast their ballots for president. Historically, voters needed to provide a valid reason – such as illness or military service – to qualify for absentee ballots.But Covid served as a pretext to overturn that tradition. Just 25% of votes in 2020 occurred at the polls on Election Day. Mail-in voting more than doubled. Key swing states eliminated the need to provide a valid...

The Biden administration's Department of Energy announced Monday that it would distribute $6 billion in grant funds to a number of climate projects, according to a department press release. The funds will be dispersed to 33 projects across the country as part of Biden's "Investing in America Agenda." The grant program aims to "decarbonize energy-intensive industries, reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, support good-paying union jobs, revitalize industrial communities, and strengthen the nation's manufacturing competitiveness." Only projects that demonstrate a commitment to an "equitable and inclusive clean energy future" by "develop[ing] and ultimately implement[ing] a comprehensive Community Benefits Plan" are eligible....

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro blocked the name of Maria Corina Machado, the winner of the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD) primary, from appearing on the July election ballot. Recent polls show that she is favored to defeat Maduro in that election. Machado expressed a willingness to step aside and allow Dr. Corina Yoris to run in her place, but Maduro rejected her as well. Presidential Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said "obviously, we're deeply concerned by the Venezuela National Electoral Council's decision to prevent the registration of either of the democratic opposition party's candidates. You can't have a democracy if the ruling...

A Texas appeals court on Thursday overturned the illegal voting conviction of Crystal Mason, who was given a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for federal tax evasion. The decision by the Tarrant County-based Second Court of Appeals means she is formally acquitted of the felony voting charge. The court said in the decision that there was no evidence Mason knew she was ineligible to vote when she cast her ballot — which is a condition that must be met in order to convict her of illegal voting. Mason has...

The programs in fiscal year 2023 that went unreported to the government watchdog, which has tracked trillions of payments made in error in 2003, fell under the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Anew Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reveals that federal agencies have reported about $2.7 trillion in "total improper payments" since the fiscal year 2003 and $236 billion in fiscal year 2023 alone but that “government-wide estimate potentially does not represent the full extent of improper payments.” The reason the fiscal year 2023 total doesn't tell the full story...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that a key plank of President Joe Biden’s agenda to lower costs is by “creating incentives to dramatically improve the use of clean energy in the United States” and “over time, this will help lower household energy costs.” Host Andrea Mitchell asked, “[H]ow can you — I know you’re in Georgia today — help get the message to people that the economy is better and improve it even more, get those grocery prices down, help bring down the prices that people are feeling at their kitchen table?”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Wednesday that Pennsylvania may enforce state law requiring envelopes for mail-in ballots to be dated and include the voter's signature. In Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP v. Chapman, the plaintiff sued the then-acting secretary of the commonwealth in 2022 regarding Pennsylvania’s decision to void mail-in ballots that are either missing a date on the outer return envelopes or have an incorrect date. Pennsylvania counties were ordered by a lower court following a Republican lawsuit in 2022 to reject undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots. The issue was then appealed...

This week, Harvard University has shut down a Bill Gates-funded geoengineering experiment. The controversial Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, run by professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch, aimed to study the potential future implementation of geoengineering by crop dusting sulphuric acid into our stratosphere. Nice. Even if you put aside the almost instant validity such an experiment would give to conspiracy theories like chemtrails and HAARP, it still sounds a bit too much, playing with our thin air like that — in an unprecedented, and potentially catastrophic, manner, too. But let’s not kid ourselves. The plug wasn’t pulled over...

Embattled Los Angeles developer Shangri-La Industries, which has left a trail of unpaid debts, unfinished projects and foreclosure threats since it took $114 million from the state to convert motels into housing for the homeless, is now accusing its former chief financial officer of embezzling millions of dollars to fund an extravagant lifestyle. Shangri-La, which is being sued by state housing authorities for breaching the terms of its agreement under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature Project Homekey program, alleges in a lawsuit that former CFO Cody Holmes, 29, engaged in bank fraud and check kiting in 2022 and 2023 with Shangri-La’s...

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence. “President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election,...

by CAPT. SETH KESHELAs Election 2024 bears down upon us, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term Black Swan flung around. An unfortunate reality of living in the post-2020 world is that we have come to expect government-inflicted bullshit that has no place in a free society, like ours was founded to be. You remember this drill – while many of your friends who still won’t fess up today were diving under their beds to hide from a virus that only infects you while you are walking into a restaurant or boarding an aircraft, you were watching local small business die on...

A home belonging to a family of Pakistani migrants was set ablaze in the German town of Wächtersbach on Christmas Day 2023. Phantasmal right-wingers were immediately blamed for the arson. The family members, meanwhile, were depicted as victims of so-called Islamophobia and xenophobia. This narrative, agreeable to European leftists and the liberal media, recently went up in smoke. A convenient spark The fire began around 1 a.m. on Christmas morning and did roughly $379,000 in damage. The fire brigade found anti-migrant slogans scrawled inside the smoldering ruins. Der Spiegel reported that the words "foreigners out" had been spray-painted on some...

Senate Democrats were left red-faced at a hearing on climate change as their 'expert witness' proved to be anything but when faced by veteran senator John Kennedy. Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse invited Olympic skier Gus Schumacher to give his perspective as the committee considered the impact of climate change on the recreation industry. But it was all downhill for the 23-year-old as he struggled to answer basic questions and could not remember his tweets claiming the war on drugs was designed to jail black people, and calling for the police to be abolished. The excruciating exchange continued with Schumacher insisting...

THE LAWSUIT: A class action securities lawsuit was filed against New York Community Bancorp, Inc. that seeks to recover losses of shareholders who were adversely affected by alleged securities fraud between March 1, 2023 and February 5, 2024. CASE DETAILS: The filed complaint alleges that defendants made false statements and/or concealed that: (1) the Company was experiencing higher net charge-offs and deterioration in its office portfolio; (2) as a result, NYCB was reasonably likely to incur higher loan losses; (3) as a result of the foregoing and NYCB's status as Category IV bank, the Company was reasonably likely to increase...

“It’s too easy to forge a deed and record it,” Real estate attorney Richard Alembik told WSB-TV. “It’s a big problem nowadays, because of the fact that e-filing, the e-recording of deeds is so easy. It’s very easy to record forged deeds.” Alembik said notaries don’t check the identification of the people who submit the documents to verify if they are the rightful homeowners. Victims of fraud who have proof to be the rightful homeowners can still be ordered by a judge to move out and pay fines, according to the outlet. An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of...

An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of his house and arrested when an alleged swindler used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of the property. Charles and Charmaine Allman lived in the same Stone Mountain, Ga. home — located 16 miles east of Atlanta — for the last two decades before officials told the couple Tuesday that they no longer owned the house and had to vacate. “They made us feel like we were squatters,” Charmaine Allman told WSB-TV. “Just tossed my stuff out like it was trash.”

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates. Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real? No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is...

David Spring is a former leader of the Washington State Democratic Party. He was the East King County Representative to the King County Central Committee and Training Advisor for King County Democrats – where he taught hundreds of volunteers how to run political campaigns using the Democratic Database called Votebuilder. Spring was on the Board of the WA Progressive Caucus – which is the largest caucus in the WA Democratic Party and ran the WA for Bernie Sanders website, where he published articles and videos teaching thousands of Sanders supporters (most of whom had never been Democrats) how to take...

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit challenging a District of Columbia law allowing “noncitizen residents” to vote in local elections. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that a group of seven citizen plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the legislation. Their lawsuit against the D.C. Board of Elections, filed on March 14, aimed to block the 2022 law passed by the Council of the District of Columbia. They argued that “noncitizens” do not have a fundamental right to vote in the United States and that allowing them to cast ballots and hold office in...

If you don't follow far-left Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren on X, you should — if only for 24 hours. Hilarity reigns, as Warren never misses a concocted opportunity to rail against "profiteering" corporations, "the rich" not paying their "fair share," and "free" this and "free" that.Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have long pushed for a wealth tax that would begin with billionaires. Unlike Sanders, who believes billionaires shouldn't even be allowed to exist, Warren "only" thinks they should be taxed to smithereens (See: wealth redistribution).Now Warren, along with leftist Democrat Reps. Pramila Jayapal (WA) and Brendan F. Boyle...