Free Republic

Dog Tired Dogs cage-free setting offers owner new beginning Glendale — Downsized and downtrodden, Susan Taylor was in life's doghouse. Decades ago, she had been in the prosperous business of supplying ingredients to Milwaukee's brewers. As that business began to taper off in the 80s and 90s, Taylor was one of many shown the door when her employer was snapped up by a larger company. Suddenly outside an industry for which she had cultivated a particular skill set, Taylor went on a 15-year "journey to find out what to do with my life" — a long and difficult journey that...

Gross domestic product 2012, PPP (millions of Ranking Economy international dollars) 1 United States 15,684,800 2 China 12,470,982 3 India 4,793,414 4 Japan 4,490,681 5 Russian Federation 3,380,071 6 Germany 3,307,873 7 Brazil 2,365,779 8 France 2,354,874 9 United Kingdom 2,264,751 10 Mexico 2,015,281

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama, the U.S. Senate candidate from Chicago who has become the Democratic Party's latest rising star, is drawing enough support from the entertainment industry to put on his own variety show. From comedian Chris Rock to singer Barbra Streisand to musician Herbert Hancock, entertainers have written out checks of $1,000 or $2,000 to help the 42-year-old Illinois state senator win the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Peter Fitzgerald. Film directors Rob Reiner ("The American President") and Edward Zwick ("The Last Samurai" and "Courage Under Fire") both contributed in the past three months, according to Obama's...

The nationwide shortage of ammunition has left many police departments scrambling to get their hands on the necessary rounds - with some even bartering among each other. Meanwhile, Rep. Timothy Huelskamp (R-Kansas) says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to respond to multiple members of Congress asking why DHS bought more than 1.6 billion rounds in the past year. Police Chief Cameron Arthur of Jenks, Oklahoma says, "Ammunition and assault weapons in general have skyrocketed...In addition to the fact, not only is it a lot more expensive, but the time to get it could be six months to...

Not only have they been successful, at overthrowing the corrupt Gov’t, they’ve drafted a Constitution, that will stop this from happening ever again. That’s not the best part… The best part, is that they have arrested ALL Rothschild/Rockefeller banking puppets, responsible for the Country’s economic Chaos and meltdown.

Excerpted "After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth....

SNIPPET: "New York City is the center of a public uproar as Internet blogger Pamela Gellar rises with an “anti-jihad” ad campaign." SNIPPET: "Gellar and her group are protesting the Jihad, which in definition is the religious duty of Muslims. According to the Dictionary of Islam, jihad is defined as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad . . . enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and repelling evil from Muslims.” The literal meaning of jihad, according to the British Broadcasting Network, “is struggle or effort, and it means much more than...

Iranian hackers have repeatedly attacked Bank of America Corp (BA.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Citigroup Inc (C.N) over the past year, as part of a broad cyber campaign targeting the United States, according to people familiar with the situation. The attacks, which began in late 2011 and escalated this year, have primarily been "denial of service" campaigns that disrupted the banks' websites and corporate networks by overwhelming them with incoming web traffic, said the sources. Whether the hackers have been able to inflict more serious damage on computer networks or steal critical data is not yet known. The...

In keeping with the left's blaxploitation enterprise, white Northerner Joe Biden feigned the hemistichical rhythm of a Southern black preacher for his largely black audience in Virginia yesterday: "They've said it. Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the-he said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street! They gawn' put y'all back in chains." For all the bluster of Obama, pre- and post-2008, as well as that of Attorney General...

Link only as per Bloomberg requirements Gist of Article: American Banking Association, led by former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, is setting up a huge PAC with secret bank donors to sway senate elections with the hope of killing Dodd-Frank, among other things. Most of the money will probably headed toward the GOPe.

One of President Obama’s largest financial backers is a key executive at the largest Swiss bank in the world, complicating his criticism of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Robert Wolf is president of Swiss financial giant UBS Investment Bank and chairman of UBS Americas. He has been one of Obama’s most prolific fundraisers dating back to 2006, when the former Senator from Illinois initiated his run for the White House. Wolf has bundled more than $500,000 for the president’s reelection, campaign records show. He is but one of many wealthy bankers Obama has turned to in an effort to win...

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs." Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who...

Forget the one per cent. These guys are the WHINE per cent. Several Wall Street bankers and execs have come forward to voice their discontent about just how daunting it is to survive on their six-figure salaries in interviews with Bloomberg.com. Andrew Schiff, the communications and marketing director at Euro Pacific Capital, hates traffic just like most New Yorkers, but unlike most in the Big Apple, he’s feeling the crunch from a $350,000 salary. Mr Schiff told Bloomberg: 'The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach'.

Mitt Romney sought on Friday to dispel any notion he is undesirably close to Wall Street, but said his business experience prepares him better than his rivals to be president. "I'm independent of Wall Street," the former Massachusetts governor told Bloomberg Television's Peter Cook in an interview. "By the way, I haven't ever worked on Wall Street. They were service providers to the business I was in, I was not in a Wall Street firm, although I was in financial services broadly."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is not taking advantage of an enforcement tool that could potentially hold top Wall Street figures accountable for their role in the recent financial crisis, despite its prior success. Broker-dealers, investment advisers, and others regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission are required to supervise their representatives. If a trader engages in misconduct, the SEC can sue the management with "failure to supervise." But in some of the biggest cases the SEC has brought in recent months -- against units of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup -- the agency has sued only low-level bankers....

The ugly language used by Occupy Wall Street activists and by liberals such as radio talk show host Thom Hartmann to describe bankers is disgraceful and dangerous. When one replaces the word “banker” with the word “Jew” in the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, one glimpses at the true nature and intent of the assault. Simply put, the Nazis and the German Communists portrayed Jews in virtually the same light as Occupy Wall Street activists are now portraying bankers. In reality this is the same assault on private ownership as was the one engaged in by the 20th Centuries two great...

Remember when the Tea Party threatened America with its latent violence, proven when a couple of union thugs beat up a rally attendee? Good times, good times. Via RCP, we now hear the counterpoint from the Hollywood Left, as Roseanne Barr appeared on Russia Today to lay out her vision of American politics. It’s not enough to occupy Wall Street — Barr wants to bring back the guillotine and start using it to redistribute the wealth:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “Part of my platform is, of course, the guilty must be punished and that we no longer let our...

The last three years of global recession have dealt a major blow to American capitalist ideas trumpeted throughout the world on the value of “free markets.” Wall St has been revealed as a form of casino economy, with the bankster insiders gambling with other people’s, and eventually, the government’s money in the form of bailouts. As the Republicans in Congress, scenting victory in the 2012 presidential elections, hold a gun to the Obama administration’s head and rating agencies consider downgrading U.S. government bonds in light of Washington’s possible defaulting, many ideas around the world that previously seemed implausible because of...

<p>OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Authorities say The Olympian and one of the newspaper’s photographers were targets of vandalism that included anarchist graffiti and an acidic substance.</p> <p>Police said Friday graffiti was painted at the Tumwater, Wash., home of photographer Tony Overman. The words “Overman snitch” were painted on a newspaper delivery truck and an apparently acidic substance was thrown on the exterior of The Olympian’s building.</p>

Preface: Some defendants are no longer allowed to see the "secret evidence" which the government is using against them. See this and this. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that judges can throw out cases because they don't like or believe the plaintiff ... even before anyone has had the chance to conduct discovery to prove their case. In other words, judges' secret biases can be the basis for denying people their day in court, without even having to examine the facts. Claims of national security are being used to keep the shenanigans of the biggest banks an corporations secret,...