Free Republic

You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they're governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS's workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX's—and more than twice as expensive. So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That's horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight. "UPS Vs....

The debate agitating many in New Jersey right is whether or not the state’s Governor, Chris Christie, is actually doing much to reform the state as it needs to be. I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with him during his campaign for the Republican nomination against Steve Lonagan. Having no interest in the politics of politic, he sounded like a big government Republican to me. With that in mind, I was nicely surprised by the turn that Christie’s campaign against Corzine took and by some of his policies. He talked about small government, the need for reforming New...

* No more new drugs today than 60 years ago * Diversification push as blockbusters stumble * 200,000 jobs could go across the industry * Can biotech and contract research pick up the pieces? LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - At just 28, Duncan Casey has already been from the university science bench to the world of Big Pharma research and back again. Now working in an Imperial College lab tucked behind London's famous Science Museum, he has no illusions about the prospects for researchers in the pharmaceutical industry. "The unit I used to work in -- GlaxoSmithKline's place in Harlow...

Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post. A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process. And in the meantime, they’ve also...

On a July afternoon in 2006, Patrick Hale microwaved a bag of popcorn for his two young children and sat down with them to watch television. When he got up to change the channel, he heard a strange noise behind him, and turned to see his 23-month-old daughter, Allison, turning purple and unable to breathe.

In response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., is asking the Interior Department's inspector general to review “the extent to which the oil and natural gas industry exercised influence” over the development of drilling safety regulations.

The media industry may be going through some rough times, with the landscape changing day to day, but at least one aspect is business as usual: big paydays for the people at the top. Top executives at the country’s largest media companies continued to reel in multimillion-dollar pay packages in 2009, a year of widespread cost-cutting throughout the industry. In several cases, the packages even increased from the year before.

We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street's money with it, and the government can't really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what's...

Desperate to balance their budgets, school districts on the Peninsula and in the South Bay are increasingly turning to furloughs. But faced with no-school days at unconventional times, parents are scrambling for child care, worrying about how their children will remember square roots and feeling left out of the decision-making. While a handful of districts, including San Jose Unified, began furlough days last year, hundreds more statewide are proposing the unpaid leaves as they struggle with their worst budget crunch in decades. If labor unions agree, millions of schoolchildren will get from one to five fewer days of school in...

My party challenges the whole basis of the Progressivist vision of this country's future. We challenge their attack on American exceptionalism. We challenge their claim that bureaucratic centralization is the only way the US can meet the economic and social challenges of our time.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to purchase sixty Remington Model 870 Police RAMAC #24587 12 gauge pump-action shotguns for the Criminal Investigation Division. The Remington parkerized shotguns, with fourteen inch barrel, modified choke, Wilson Combat Ghost Ring rear sight and XS4 Contour Bead front sight, Knoxx Reduced Recoil Adjustable Stock, and Speedfeed ribbed black forend, are designated as the only shotguns authorized for IRS duty based on compatibility with IRS existing shotgun inventory, certified armorer and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

Washington (AP) - After a sleepless, overnight flight to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month, President Barack Obama made a not altogether surprising admission. He was tired. Who could blame him? The president was on his ninth foreign trip to his 21st country; he added a 10th trip the following week. The year had been bookended by the two most intense periods of his young presidency -- the early decisions to bail out the nation's banks and automobile industry, steps the president deemed unpopular but necessary, and his December orders to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. troops...

Something big just blew up in baytown texas

I hold an executive position at a private corporation located on Long Island, NY (250+ employees). On Thursday, November 19, 2009, two casually dressed gentlemen showed up at our facility (unannounced) and asked for the Human Resource Manager.They, unilaterally, determined that our company had a connection to the public safety and national security concerns of the United States. As such, they are requiring us to provide them with 100% of the Form I-9 - Employment Eligibility Verifications for all our current employees and employees who have been terminated within the past 12 months.The purpose of the form is for an...

The White House may want to diffuse its spat with the Chamber of Commerce, but Big Labor clearly has no such intentions. Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and chairwoman of the five-union federation Change to Win, slammed the big business lobby and its president, Tom Donohue, in a letter delivered today to House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the committee.

WASHINGTON — Democrats lost a big test vote on health care legislation on Wednesday as the Senate blocked action on a bill to increase Medicare payments to doctors at a cost of $247 billion over 10 years. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, needed 60 votes to proceed. He won only 47. And he could not blame Republicans. A dozen Democrats and one independent crossed party lines and voted with Republicans on the 53 to 47 roll call.

Federal, state, and local government spending will be 42 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2009, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s huge–more than 4 out of every 10 dollars of everything produced in America now gets channeled through governments. How does that compare to other advanced nations? Chart 1 shows that total government spending in the United States is somewhat less than the average of the 30 industrial nations in the OECD, but that the U.S. advantage is shrinking. During the 1990s, the U.S. government size was about 10 percentage points smaller...

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy. According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology. "We're saying that maybe the...

President Barack Obama on Thursday selected for ambassadorships in Europe two of his presidential campaign's biggest fundraisers, extending a pattern of rewarding political supporters. Obama chose career foreign service officers to head U.S. embassies in Latvia, Benin and Zimbabwe. Obama said he will nominate William Eacho, chief executive officer of Carlton Capital Group, a private investment company, to be ambassador to Austria. Eacho raised more than $500,000 for Obama's presidential run; he and his immediate family also donated $226,000 to federal politics in 2007-08, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

It took Gregory Dunham 3 years to build, and it cost him 300.000$. But then he’s also got a 3.429 m (11 ft and 3 inch) tall behemoth of a contraption sporting 500hp and a whooping top speed of 65 mph. World's largest arcade machine. The machine is 13 feet tall, has about a 70-inch screen.