Free Republic

So we are in our second year of my husband's HVAC biz. He is busy like crazy (one man band) And I have a "regular" 40+ hour job with benefits that keeps the lights on and the mortgage paid.

Now that the liberal media has apparently hit a dry hole in its effort to make a collusion case against President Trump, the MSM is going to have to get more creative in accusing him of other misdeeds. Joe Scarborough has come up with an innovative idea: charge President Trump with market manipulation for talking down Amazon’s stock price. On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough said that President Trump: “lies about [Amazon], causes its stock to go down. I’ve watched enough episodes of Billions to know that if you’ve spread lies about a company or product to cause its stock prices...

Amazon is refusing to accept advertising for a pro-Trump bestselling book because it carries a picture of the President on its cover. The internet commerce giant founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post. He has been a recent target of President Trump’s tweets for biased press coverage and getting postal benefits for Amazon at the expense of other retailers. Amazon told publisher Humanix Books by email this week that its ads promoting "Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump" were "rejected because of the political content." The book by New York Times bestselling author...

He bet a quarter billion on something maybe worth 60 Million, to bully, damage, and hopefully to destroy this president, and paid $18 billion for it. Who is laughing now? Bezos, a virulent Trump hater, used the Washington Post, a paper of repute at one time, to perform regular, predictable and malevolent daily blitzkriegs on the candidacy, and after he was elected, on the presidency of the man We, the People, elected to the nation’s highest office, his family, his associates, his policies, and his ideas. In other words, Bezos and the Washington Post colluded, cooperated and conspired with the...

WASHINGTON — Amazon, you’re not alone. President Trump once accused Verizon of making “a STUPID deal” for AOL. He ridiculed Coca-Cola as “garbage” — but said he would keep drinking it. He called both H&R Block and Nordstrom “terrible.” He said Sony had “really stupid leadership” and described executives at S&P Global, a financial firm, as “losers.” Before and after he became president, Mr. Trump attacked tech firms, military contractors, carmakers, cellphone companies, financial firms, drug companies, air-conditioner makers, sports leagues, Wall Street giants — and many, many media companies, which he has labeled “shameful,” “dishonest,” “true garbage,” “really dumb,”...

Amazon and Google really do want to watch your every move. A series of patents filed by the firms 'outline an array of possibilities' for how their smart speakers could be used to better listen in on users. They suggest their always-on Google Home and Amazon Echo devices could know everything from a user's mood to their medical condition, and target advertising based on this data. The development comes amid a growing scandal involving the handling of the private data of 50 million users by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

President Trump launched a string of Twitter attacks on Amazon.com Inc. over the weekend and is reportedly looking for ways to target the monster e-commerce company. Amazon’s stock sank on Thursday after the president tweeted that “they pay little or or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” Trump’s beef with Amazon is exacerbated by the fact that chief executive Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, which has provoked Trump by its negative coverage of...

The Washington Post's executive editor, Martin Baron, is firing back at President Trump for linking -- and attacking -- the paper and online shopping and shipping titan Amazon. The Post was purchased by Amazon's founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos in 2013. "It's completely made up," Baron said in a phone interview with The New York Times, referring to Mr. Trump's attacks on the paper that have included claims that Amazon uses the Post as a "lobbyist." "I don't even know how to describe what goes through my mind," Baron said. Last week alone, the president alleged the e-commerce site...

Trade war fears and a presidential attack on Amazon are rocking Wall Street. The Dow dropped more than 700 points and the Nasdaq plunged 3% on Monday. All three major indexes are now in the red for the year. The sell-off on the first day of the second quarter came after President Trump once again attacked Amazon on Twitter. Amazon (AMZN), one of the biggest drivers of the 2017 market rally, tumbled 5%, wiping out more than $37 billion of its market value. Trump once again accused Amazon of taking advantage of the US Postal Service, and he suggested that...

...does not include the Fake Washington Post, which is used as a “lobbyist” and should so REGISTER. If the P.O. “increased its parcel rates, Amazon’s shipping costs would rise by $2.6 Billion.” This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!

When it comes to obeying laws protecting personal information, Americans have less faith in Facebook than other tech companies. That’s according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Facebook has been engulfed in a storm of criticism after it emerged that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested and exploited the personal information of 50 million of its users. The firm is trying to restore its badly tarnished image with CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently issuing a public apology. Judging by the findings of the poll, the social network certainly has serious work to do in order to restore confidence in...

In the early 1900s, Charlie Harger, a writer for this magazine, visited a small country store on “the frontier” to talk to its proprietor. (He did not mention, in the eight full pages of the story where exactly that small retailer was located, because that’s how journalism was done in those days.) The unnamed proprietor was looking out beyond his windows stocked with hoes and pancake flour, to the parcels sitting at the train depot that were mail-ordered from Chicago and New York. The rise of mail-order delivery was going to drive him out of business, he worried. {snip} Just...

Fielding questions over whether President Trump wants to go after Amazon and it's tax treatment, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that Trump is "always looking to create a level playing field for all businesses and this no different." But she added that the president has no specific policies to address that at this time. The backdrop: Axios' Jonathan Swan reported earlier today that Trump hates Amazon, which led Amazon shares to drop 6% at market open.

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Amazon has been monitoring and deleting reviews after Hillary Clinton's new book was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released. What Happened, which covers the former Secretary of State's unsuccessful election campaign against Donald Trump, was published on Tuesday. Clinton and her publisher Simon & Schuster claimed the book would offer a candid account of her failure and her own reflection on it. Reviews of What Happened have been mixed, with some suggesting it Clinton uses it as an opportunity to blame others – such as Bernie Sanders and Vladimir Putin – for her failure,...

It's rumored that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is looking to occupy the vacant stores of bankrupt Toys R Us. Having played a large role in the toy retailer's demise, Amazon now wants to acquire the toy store's skeletal remains to expand its own brick-and-mortar footprint across the country.

European regulators are clamping down on Silicon Valley companies because they are “jealous” of the success of the technology industry in the US, according to PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel. Speaking about the looming threat of regulation for these companies, Thiel said that the “threat is probably greater in Europe” and there are “good reasons and bad reasons”. “The good reasons are these privacy concerns and the bad reasons are there are no successful tech companies in Europe and they are jealous of the US so they are punishing us,” he said at the Economic Club of New York...

Amazon frightened many conservative authors this week in a mass deletion of reviews. Some authors lost almost 100 reviews on their published works. Others lost all the reviews they had ever written on Amazon. Some lost both. Information about the purge began to trickle out in the closed Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance (CLFA) Facebook group. Member after member began reporting the losses at the same time. Marina Fontaine, whose credits include the dystopian Chasing Freedom, the pro-Trump fiction anthology MAGA 2020, and moderating the CLFA page, reported many members experiencing losses. A coordinated effort was launched to contact Amazon for...

Toys "R" Us is going out of business in the U.S. The iconic chain announced early Thursday that it's seeking bankruptcy court approval to start closing its 735 U.S. stores and liquidating their inventory. Some 33,000 employees will lose their jobs as a result. Toys "R" Us Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dave Brandon said in a statement, "I am very disappointed with the result, but we no longer have the financial support to continue the Company's U.S. operations."

As cities vie to host second campus, local activists say the ‘Hunger Games’-style competition is a bad deal for everyone – except Amazon... “If you win this thing, God help you,” he said. “The backlash in that community is going to be horrific, and the person who thinks they’re going to ride that to the governor’s house or the White House is going to ride it to being unelected.”