Free Republic

A couple of folks have asked if my forecast, described here, is out in left field. That prompts me to offer a comparison of my economic outlook to two survey averages. The Wall Street Journal surveys (subscription required) 54 professional forecasters, mostly from financial institutions. The National Association for Business Economics surveys its members, with 47 participating in the latest tabulation, from a somewhat more diverse group of companies. Here’s my forecast compared to the average of these two consensus forecast surveys: Near term we’re all pretty close, but I’m more optimistic about next year. The most important point: recent...

Sorry to post a vanity but I got the parite virus that somehow got on my laptop. I rarely use it for too much and rarely surf the web with this laptop. I lost my desktop icons and was stumped. I have AV programs I have bought for my other machines like Spybot and PC Tools and Iolo System Mechanic to name a few. I was just lazy on this machine because it came with Norton. The machine is about 2 years old so my mistake.

BARI (Italy), March 1 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev who traveled to the southern Italian city of Bari received on Sunday a symbolic key to Italy's Russian Orthodox Church from Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. The handover of the church complex was agreed during the then Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Russia in March 2007. On April 17, the city council of Bari unanimously voted to hand the 100-year-old church to the Italian government so it could subsequently become Russian property. A century ago Grand Princess Elizaveta Fyodorovna first raised the idea of building the church to welcome...

Reporting from Sharm El Sheik, Egypt -- The Obama administration intends to spend most of a $900-million Palestinian aid package on support for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, rather than in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip communities that were badly damaged in the recent weeks-long Israeli offensive, a State Department official said Sunday. Robert A. Wood, the department's chief spokesman, said that about $300 million of the money will be spent on humanitarian relief for Gaza, and the remainder will help offset the Palestinian Authority's budget shortfall and fund its economic development, security and other projects in the West...

The president-designate's gaze passed swiftly over the faces of the cameramen. All were doing their best to retain a professional demeanor. None were entirely successful. The overwhelming majority of them, like the majority of their brethren in journalism, had supported the deposed administration. Few had any sympathy for the views of those who were to replace it. Yet each of them had volunteered for his assignment, knowing full well what had come to pass. "I wish it could have been otherwise, but the late president gave us no choice. He had decided to place himself and his associates above the...

It's time for the grassroots conservatives gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference to again lead the fight for the principles of freedom that have propelled America to greatness. "Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." ~ President Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801 There has been a constant battle throughout history between those who wish to control others and those who...

Top aides to President Obama yesterday defended the ambitious plans laid out in the administration's proposed $3.6 trillion budget for next year, calling the spending necessary to reignite the economy and put the country on a path to sustainable growth. Speaking on the same program, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called Obama's proposed budget "probably the biggest rewrite or transformation of our federal budget since the New Deal." The Republicans who have vowed to oppose Obama's budget say the rush of deficit spending and targeted tax increases would further damage the nation's floundering economy. "You don't raise taxes in a...

All one need do is watch the news regarding politics and religion during the holidays to discover that there is indeed a culture war going on in America. The reason the war exists at all is because secular progressives cannot stand practicing Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Evangelical Christians or Christianity, they do not want to answer to God for their behavior, and the concept of a natural connection between Jews and Christians as it relates to the birth of our nation, the U.S. Constitution and service to Jehovah is even more repugnant to them. In addition, secular progressives are on a...

Anderson Cooper did a piece for 60 Minutes tonight on the Mexican drug cartels, and generally he did a good job in presenting a concise overview of the issues. However, the segment failed to address the horrific violence perpetrated by the drug cartels on the U.S. side of the border in cities such as Phoenix, AZ and Atlanta, GA, and failed to address the role by U.S. financial institutions and money managers in laundering some $38 billion in drug money for the cartels every year. Cooper interviewed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano who recognized that the drug cartels pose an...

As I was finishing up David Denby’s new book, I received, as one does in the Internet age, the news that T-Shirt Hell, the company whose contribution to the last election was the “Retarded Babies for Palin” T-shirt, has decided to throw in the towel. The owner says he “can’t take the stupidity anymore.” No, not the stupidity of his T-shirt slogans, but of the hate mail he receives. You’d think he might have anticipated that a nanosecond after the Muse descended to deliver the “Retarded Babies” thigh-slapper. But no, it wasn’t the hate mail over the Palin shirt but...

A new study shows that states that consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption. "When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. "Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things...

American International Group (AIG: 0.4299, n.a., n.a.%) and the federal government will announce a major restructuring of the insurance giant’s government bailout Monday morning that will commit the Treasury Department to invest up to $30 billion in new equity in the company if it needs it, a person familiar with the negotiations told FOX Business. The company will also give large stakes in two subsidiaries to the Fed, to repay most of the $38 billion it has borrowed from the central bank under an existing $60 billion credit line, the person said.

Fairness or Prudence? The pugnacious little devil that he was, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912, ran against his own handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, split the Republican vote, and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, formerly President of Princeton University, is the only man ever elected United States President to have possessed a PHD. Much more subdued in personality than Roosevelt, but no less rigid, his unwillingness to placate the Republican coalition, and specifically Henry Cabot Lodge, the United States of America never became member of the League of Nations, Wilson’s own brainchild conceived to protect the world from war....

I’ve been asked to moderate a private seminar at UC Irvine next month that has a very provocative title: The Climate Change Dilemma — and Why People Hate Al Gore.” The seminar is being sponsored by Prosperitas, a small new group of “wealthy peers” which is partnering with with UCI’s Merage School of Business to explore hot topics. Hot, indeed. Virtually every time I write about the weather — and every time I write about climate change or global warming — I get lots of comments from readers, many which express a disgust or hatred of Gore, who shared the...

President Obama's leadership is "one of the best opportunities that Americans have had in decades," declared a civil rights activist addressing an overflow crowd at a gathering sponsored by the official newspaper of the Community Party USA. The Peoples Weekly World last weekend held its 35th Annual African American History Month celebrations in Connecticut, drawing large crowds in both Hartford and New Haven, including high school students who participated in an arts competition with the theme "Dear President Obama, My dream is ... ." Panelists at both events spoke about and took questions on this year's theme: "Building the Momentum...

Global government is on the way – or maybe not. Is Hope still around even after the Obama election? Maybe not. The U.S. is not the only country experimenting with made-to-fail stimulus packages. The European “Union” is also going through tough economic times as well. And why is that? Well, one big reason is the old Soviet bloc countries having been relying on credit issued from western nations. Think they can pay it back now that the western nations need to pay back theirs? Not on your life. It’s gotten so bad that the “rich” nations of Europe have basically...

It was bad enough last week when the powers that be decided that Sarah would have to lose her baby, but Big Love jumped the shark tonight when Sarah declared to Barb that she was glad she had lost her baby, and Barb concurred. That occurred at 9:51 eastern time, and we turned the TV off that very minute.

The real world is a dangerous place filled with dangerous people. Severe myopia can be fatal. Mr. Magoo makes an amusing cartoon character, but a lousy role model. Jimmy Carter bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Magoo. That is why I am deeply troubled when Barack Obama begins to resemble Jimmy Carter.

By now you’ve probably heard that the Senate approved an amendment a few days ago to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine.” Republican Senator Jim DeMint’s amendment passed by a comfortable margin of 87-to-11. Although one would think it’s important to know which senators cast their votes in favor of censorship, we can’t find a single news report that calls out their names. So we’ll do it:

On 13 September 1993 in a public ceremony in the presence of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and US President Bill Clinton, with Mahmud Abbas signing for the Palestine Liberation Organization, foreign Minister Shimon Peres for the State of Israel, Secretary of State Warren Christopher for the United States and foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev for Russia, the Oslo Accords were signed The accords tied Israel to making one-sided concessions and tied the PLO to nothing. The Destruction of Israel is still called for in their charter and terrorism was formalized as a legitimate way of obtaining political...