Free Republic

As America remembers her honored dead this Memorial Day weekend – those who died in uniform defending our great cause of liberty – many hearts are troubled about what we have come to. The idea of liberty on which our nation was founded seems to hang in tatters. The genius of our forefathers in giving us a government that was to be limited, constitutional, and federal appears all but extinguished. The indispensable ingredient of liberty, an independent people of good character, seems at times to be disappearing into a sorrowful sunset. But I would like to suggest a few things...

A growing number of Indian women are buying guns in order to protect themselves from untoward situations Dr Harveen Kaur carries a lightweight .22 revolver in her bag every time she leaves her house and is of the opinion that the police is unable to protect her. She thinks that the surge in attacks against women is one of the many reasons why women in India are enticed to keep weapons. It is estimated that there are around 40 million guns in India, making it the second largest country to have such a huge weapon count after United States. Most...

The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent because another 522,000 adults quit looking for work and are no longer counted. In the weakest recovery since the Great Depression more than four-fifths of the reduction in unemployment has been accomplished by a dropping adult labor force participation rate—essentially, persuading adults they don’t need a job, or the job they could find is not worth having. In the first quarter, growth slowed to 2.2 percent and was largely sustained by consumers taking on more debt, and additions to business inventory. Gains in manufacturing production have not instigated stronger improvements in employment largely...

When Doug Imbruce wanted to start an interactive video company in 2009, he had no luck finding investors in New York. So he moved to Silicon Valley — where venture capitalists were receptive to his pitch — and founded Qwiki. But in February, he decided that being so far away from the nation’s big media companies was stifling his start-up’s growth. So he moved back to New York, bringing the company with him. Qwiki, with 15 employees, now operates out of a SoHo loft space. “We went to Silicon Valley because they understood how big we wanted to get,” Mr....

I just finished reading Brian Sullivan’s Reform battles rollback as Romney pledges to repeal Obama's financial regulations regarding the differences between Romney and Obama on the financial services regulations known as Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. Sullivan’s piece is mostly what you would expect from a mainstream media outlet. It’s a topical check list of “On the one hand Romney wants, on the other hand Obama says…” that is just a series of campaign infomercials disguised as balanced analysis. (Please see my personal plea at the end of this article for USA Cares this Memorial Day- and please... give generously)     And it illustrates what’s really...

How many things are in a person's pocket that they don't even know about? We take money for granted -- most people can't tell us which way George Washington is facing on the quarter. They can tell us that Ben Franklin is on the front of the hundred, but they can't tell us that Independence Hall (where he helped draft the Constitution) is on the back. One might think that as denominations get smaller and more common, the pictures on them would become more famous and well-known. The ten-dollar bill features Alexander Hamilton on the front. Since he was never...

Conservative super-PACs are attempting to gin up disillusionment among President Obama's supporters and keep their turnout low in November's election, in part by highlighting his ties to Wall Street.Within the past month, three separate ads — two from the American Future Fund and one from Crossroads GPS — have assailed Obama from broadly comparable perspectives. Especially striking are the American Future Fund ads which make the kind of anti-Wall Street argument heard largely on the left. The outside groups' message contrasts with the one being pushed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, who has called the Obama's "the most anti-business...

Tony Blair's decision to openly court Rupert Murdoch to win power and ensure favorable coverage during his decade-long tenure as British prime minister will come under scrutiny when he faces a media inquiry on Monday. The inquiry, ordered by Prime Minister David Cameron after Murdoch's now defunct News of the World tabloid admitted hacking phones, has tarnished Britain's elite by laying bare the collusion between politicians, the police and the media. Blair kicks off an important week at the Leveson inquiry by answering questions about his often obsessive media management which included courting Murdoch. The inquiry has so far focused...

As the lone Democrat seeking to challenge Elizabeth Warren in the Senate primary in Massachusetts, Marisa DeFranco has been ridiculed, admonished and, worst of all, ignored. But for the moment, Ms. DeFranco, an immigration lawyer with high energy and a scrappy band of volunteers, is enjoying a burst of momentum. She surprised party insiders by collecting enough valid signatures by the May 1 deadline — more than 10,000, gathered everywhere from town meetings to town dumps — to qualify for the Democratic primary on Sept. 6. If Ms. DeFranco clears one more hurdle — winning 15 percent of the delegate...

Union Statistics: What You May Not Know | LaborUnionReport.com Monday, May 28th, 2012 HomeLaborUnionReport Updates DAILY NEWSGeneral NewsProject Labor AgreementsPublic Sector UnionsUnion BossesUnion HypocrisyUnion OrganizingUnion StrikeUnion Violence Legal UpdatesNLRB Watch National Right to Work Political Updates EconomyEnvironmentalismHealth CareImmigrationMarxism/Socialism Union Corruption Union Corruption Report The Blogroll Filed Under:  LaborUnionReport Updates Union Statistics: What You May Not Know September 15th 2011   ·   1 Comment Tweet Sharebar Tweet The folks at UnionFacts.com have a ‘vital statistics‘ page that provides some good information about unions that many Americans may not know. Here is just some of the information:Financial Information Annual Dues Paid to Unions: $8,217,838,676 Total...

Naveen Jindal-led Jindal Steel and Power's (JSPL) ambitious $2.1-billion investment plan in Bolivia is all but over as the company has said it is "not hopeful of continuing" with the project, which was touted as the biggest foreign investment plan in the Latin American country. Through its subsidiary Jindal Steel Bolivia (JSB), the company had in 2007 secured 40-year development rights to the El-Mutun iron ore mine, which holds reserves of around 20 billion tonnes, considered to be one of the largest untapped iron ore deposits in the world. However, with no commitment from the Bolivian government over supply of...

Yen-yuan direct trading to start in June Exchange rates between yen and yuan will be determined by their transactions, departing from "cross rate" system Japan and China are expected to start direct trading of their currencies as early as June as part of efforts to boost bilateral trade and investment, according to reports. With the planned step, exchange rates between the yen and the yuan will be determined by their transactions, departing from the current “cross rate” system that involves the dollar in setting yen-yuan rates, Kyodo News said on Saturday. The two governments are eyeing setting up markets in...

The French aided the Americans in their revolution against their British oppressors. Now Benoît Pous-Bertran de Balanda, the descendant of a French general who fought for the Americans, is trying to help his wealthy countrymen escape what he calls the tyranny of a new Socialist government primed to severely tax the rich. And France’s loss could be New York’s gain. Mr. Pous-Bertran de Balanda, 30, is a broker for wealthy French clients looking to buy apartments in Manhattan. With the election of the Socialist François Hollande as president this month, the wealthy in France are suddenly scrambling for places to...

TORONTO: Research In Motion Ltd is preparing for a major restructuring beginning in the next couple of weeks that will see it eliminate at least 2,000 jobs worldwide, the Globe and Mail reported on Saturday, citing unnamed sources. The Canadian newspaper, citing several people close to the company, reported that the next round is layoffs is said to be planned for around June 1 - a day before the BlackBerry smartphone maker's first quarter ends - but some expect the announcement even earlier. One person familiar with the company's plans said the layoffs may cut even deeper than 2,000 jobs,...

Krugman, Fingleton, and Japan By James Fallows May 26 2012, 10:22 AM ET /snip This is a case I sympathize with, and have made various times -- for instance, in the Atlantic two years ago. I am sure that Fingleton has noticed that Paul Krugman, long a skeptic of the "Japan is stronger than it looks" view, now agrees. Or so a new interview with Martin Wolf in the FT suggests: The conversation turns to the Japanese crisis of the 1990s. In retrospect, I [Wolf] suggest, the Japanese seem to have managed the aftermath of their crisis quite well. He...

If you get home delivery of this newspaper, and I hope you do, it arrives in a plastic bag. There's a reason for that. Despite Southern California's reputation for sunny weather, occasionally rain does fall. And then there's that pesky marine layer - the so-called June Gloom - plus your neighbor's poorly aimed sprinklers, and maybe even some residual tears after another early Lakers exit from the playoffs. So your newspaper needs protection. So do your rights. But the L.A. City Council doesn't believe you should have the right to choose paper or plastic when lugging your oatmeal and bran...

The provision of primary medical care and medicines to about 9 million people is at risk of collapse due to the accumulated debts of the National Organization for the Provision of Health Services (EOPPY), as the government has reneged on its promise to settle all arrears to private suppliers of the old insurance funds that now comprise EOPPY by the end of March, totalling 1.7 billion euros. Pharmacists last week decided to indefinitely suspend dispensing medicines on credit, protesting the accumulation of debts of 540 million euros for prescriptions up to March. The insured now have to pay themselves for...

Political uncertainty and fears of a Greek eurozone exit that have recently come on top of the protracted recession and choking lack of liquidity seem to have accelerated the downturn in the real economy, which is near crash condition. Together the rise of the black economy and the freeze in payments, the clearest sign of disintegration is in public revenue collection. After showing a timid rise in the beginning of May, it nosedived right after the May 6 elections. By May 20 the fall was in the order of 20 percent, with taxpayers putting off paying dues and the practice...

The number of taxpayers making more than $200,000 declined in 2009 for the second straight year, government figures Friday showed, with almost four million American filers falling into the category of people who are at the most risk of facing higher tax rates at year's end. The Internal Revenue Service said 3.92 million individual-income tax returns reported adjusted gross income of $200,000 a year or more in 2009. The peak year was 2007, when almost 4.54 million Americans fell into the highest income category. President Barack Obama has proposed that Bush-era tax cuts should expire for households making more than...

Spain is spiralling into the vortex of debt-deflation. This has nothing to do with Greece. It is not the result of fiscal extravagance over the past decade, or other such Wagnerian myths. The country’s collapse is the mathematically certain - and widely predicted - result of ferocious monetary and fiscal contraction on an economy struggling to deal with a housing bust. In Spain, unemployment has reached 24.4pc, or 32pc in Extremadura. More than 1.5m households have no earner at all Monetary tightening by the European Central Bank caused Spanish real M1 deposits to fall at an 8pc rate in mid-to-late...

Skip Foppiano of Morada Produce is praying for cool weather. The San Joaquin County grower and packer is thick into cherry harvest season and is short on labor - 20 to 30 percent fewer pickers than he had last year. If it gets too hot, his smaller-than-usual workforce won't have time to get all the cherries off the trees before they rot. Farmers across California are experiencing the same problem: Seasonal workers who have been coming for decades to help with the harvest, planting and pruning have dropped off in recent years. With immigration crackdowns, an aging Mexican population, drug...

California has a “single-subject rule” limiting ballot propositions to just one issue. This is to reduce confusion and prevent massive proposals from being enacted. Thus, it’s no surprise the tax increases on this November’s ballot do not also contain government-reform measures. But there’s nothing stopping the backers of these proposals from endorsing companion legislation designed to soften the burning revulsion that so many people feel for state government, at least enough to allow one or more of the measures to pass. In fact, I think that’s exactly what voters need to see before they agree to pay more taxes. According...

The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade could postpone the start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August, a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said. Unveiling a newly refurbished ice-class rig that is poised to begin drilling two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said Friday that the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations. The company's $4-billion program is designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States' most important new inventory...

Strong messages from the head or the IMF, the head of Deutsche Bank, and the president of the Bundesbank are highly likely to drive Greek voters away from New Democracy and Pasok in the June 17 elections. The Guardian writes It's payback time: don't expect sympathy – Lagarde to Greeks. The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens. In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists...

More lawsuits are brewing at Dunkin’ Donuts. A franchisee is suing the coffee-and-donut chain for racial discrimination, in particular against “Asian Indian American women of color.” Priti Shetty, who is Indian American, filed a suit in New Jersey state court last week against publicly traded Dunkin’ Brands, accusing it of a poor track record with people of color.

Now that we're halfway through the second quarter of 2012, how has the expected future changed for the U.S. stock market earnings changed from the beginning of the year? Our chart below reveals the answer!   In this chart, we see that compared to our snapshot from 19 January 2012, investor expectations for earnings in 2012 have dimmed, especially for the first three quarters of the year. Meanwhile, they appear to expect that 2013 will provide a much better environment for the S&P 500's earnings per share. As for why they expect that the future will play out this way...

Former FDIC Chief Bair: JPMorgan Worth More in Pieces Friday, 25 May 2012 12:13 PM By Forrest Jones JPMorgan Chase and all other big banks should be broken up, says Sheila Bair, former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Big banks today are hard to manage, as evidenced by JPMorgan's recent $2 billion hedging loss, and they don't add too much value for shareholders anyway. Breaking them up would benefit all involved and create a more efficient financial services industry, Bair writes in a Fortune column. "Whatever economies the megabanks achieve from their size are more than offset by...

Guido Westerwelle is supposed to be the German version of a libertarian. Currently serving as Foreign Minister, he was the chairman of the supposedly pro-market Free Democratic Party for 10 years and Wikipedia says he was known as a “proponent of an unlimited free market economy.” Sounds like a good guy, right? Just the type of person who can explain that Europe’s problem is too much government. The kind of policy maker who can argue for cutting back the welfare state, slashing tax rates, and ending bailouts.That’s the optimistic spin, but now let’s look at the column Westerwelle wrote for...

Taxes must be raised. Either that, or teachers and cops will be laid-off, and the people of California will suffer. So says Governor Jerry Brown, as he seeks to convince Californians that they should vote themselves higher taxes. The Golden State’s circumstances are dire, yet Jerry Brown is facing the crisis with an approach that’s nearly forty years old. He was saying this same thing – leveling these same threats - back in 1978. We’ll go back to the 70’s in a moment, but first let’s put California in its current context. Despite how anybody feels about our 31st state,...

The Obama campaign blasted presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney Friday for his comments on a visit to an inner-city school that smaller class sizes are not a guarantee of a good education. “I’m not sure what universe he’s operating in,” said Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, speaking to reporters on behalf of the president’s reelection campaign. “It’s clear that Mitt Romney is out of touch with reality.” Mr. Romney visited a charter school in west Philadelphia Thursday and, during a roundtable discussion with teachers, noted that a McKinsey Global Institute study found that class size was not a factor when...

Niall Ferguson: Why Wall Street Should Win the Battle With Obama May 28, 2012 1:00 AM EDT Wall Street deserves to win its battle with the White House. Print Email Comments (0) I’ve seen this attack ad before. Nearly 80 years have elapsed since Franklin Roosevelt savaged the “stubbornness” and “incompetence” of “the rulers of the [stock] exchange” and the “unscrupulous money changers” in his first inaugural address: “Stripped of the lure of profit ... they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers ... The money changers have...

Ericynot wrote: You really ought to know, especially if you don't like foreign aid in general, that Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. In 2010, the most recent year I checked, we gave them $3.175 billion in economic and military aid. That's more than $61,000,000 a week. When we're $16 trillion in the hole, are you OK with that?- As Predicted Democrats Abandoning ObamaDear Comrade Y-I’m ok with it. You know how much a freakin’ aircraft carrier costs? A new Ford class carrier costs about $12-$14 billion and carries about 75 aircraft.Israel however has about...

It’s graduation season, and prominent political and media figures are making the rounds to give commencement speeches at colleges across the country. The president, administration officials, progressive members of Congress, left-wing television talking heads, liberal columnists, etc., are spewing so many feel-good platitudes that you’d think doing so was an Olympic event and they were training for the gold in London. The one thing missing from these speeches is reality. As such, and since not even an online college has asked me to deliver a commencement address, I’ll give mine here. Graduates, congratulations on successfully completing college. Since I was...

France's new president, François Hollande, has put the German chancellor on the defensive with his growth agenda. Now Angela Merkel is planning to strike back. She is calling for structural reforms to save the euro with a six-point plan aimed at harmonizing austerity and growth in Europe once again. The more European leaders talked at a dinner last Wednesday, the grimmer Angela Merkel looked. One after another, they spoke out in favor of the joint assumption of debt and against the strict austerity course Berlin is calling for. The chancellor stared silently at the man who was responsible for this...

This euro crisis is now getting extremely serious. Events are happening quickly, closing-in on policy-makers and threatening to engulf us. Across the single currency zone, fears are rising and, even in the most moderate nations, populations are becoming more restive. History is locked on fast-forward. Some say that seemingly arcane economic policy debate doesn't matter. In the UK, in particular, but across much of the rest of Western Europe too, the political and media classes have long displayed a tendency to roll their eyes whenever anybody with even a smattering of economic insight has had the audacity to show it....

Miles, pints and ounces should be abandoned in favor of a fully metric system because visitors to the Olympics will think Britain is living in its “imperial past”, a former Tory chancellor has said. Lord Howe of Aberavon, who served in Baroness Thatcher’s cabinet, called on ministers to end the “deeply confusing shambles” of using a mixture of metric and imperial measures. He said the lack of any attempt by the Government to clarify the arrangements was the “most glaring omission” from the Queen’s Speech. During debate on the speech in the House of Lords, he said: “Weights and measures...

The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Barack Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years. "Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. SNIP So how does Obama measure up? If one assumes that TARP and the takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the government as one-time budgetary...

NEW DELHI: India said it may stop European carriers from flying into the country if the European Union bans airlines from the South Asian nation that boycott the EU's new emissions fee system. "We will take retaliatory actions to counter steps taken by the EU. If Europe bans our carriers we will ban theirs as well," the senior government official, who did not want to be named, told reporters late Friday. The EU in mid-May gave India and China a month to comply with the airline carbon emissions fee system across the 27-nation bloc, or face penalties for flights into...

The Government is drawing up plans for emergency immigration controls to curb an influx of Greeks and other European Union residents if the euro collapses, the Home Secretary discloses today. In an interview in The Daily Telegraph, Theresa May says “work is ongoing” to restrict European immigration in the event of a financial collapse. People from throughout the EU, with the exception of new member countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, are able to work anywhere in the single market. However, there are growing concerns that if Greece was forced to leave the euro, it would effectively go bankrupt and...

Sectors that traditionally have offered teens their first paying gig — fast-food chains, movie theaters, malls and big-box retailers — have now become the last resorts for out-of-work college graduates or older Americans forced back into the labor force out of sheer financial necessity. The resulting squeeze has left students on the outside looking in.

What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse? The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II. Chodorow, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, authored the paper "Death and Taxes...and Zombies," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Iowa Law Review. Chodorow notes that, while the...

The U.S. economy may be improving but Americans are still bogged down by massive debt burdens with little or no savings, a study finds. One out of five families owes more on credit cards, medical bills, student loans and other unsecured debt than they have in savings, according to a new University of Michigan study, USA Today reports. At the end of 2011, the number of families with no savings rose to 23.4 percent from 18.5 percent in 2009, the study finds. "The people who were down and out, without much money, in the recession have ended up staying there...

The effort to preserve Selfridge Air National Guard Base’s 24 A-10 aircraft gained some altitude Thursday when the Senate Armed Services Committee embraced a provision that would block budget cuts to the Air National Guard. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his committee had unanimously approved an annual defense bill that rejects proposals to eliminate Air National Guard aircraft and personnel across the nation, including proposed cuts at Michigan bases. The cuts proposed by the Air Force would have eliminated the A-10 jets in the 107th Fighter Squadron at Selfridge — and the 560 military...

This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today: Remember the housing meltdown? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy....

source material cannot be posted, see link below

Interestingly, Gallup didn’t lead with the finding on social conservatism from its latest survey, but that may be because the bounce upward followed two straight declines in the same series. The focus on economic conservatism is a little more dramatic, if consistent: Americans are more than twice as likely to identify themselves as conservative rather than liberal on economic issues, 46% to 20%. The gap is narrower on social issues, but conservatives still outnumber liberals, 38% to 28%. …In the same poll, on Gallup’s standard measure of ideology — not asked in reference to any set of issues — 41%...

Ah, the Obama economy. Sort of like the Carter economy but without that horrific toothy grin to entertain us.But as a young man during the Carter years, I can attest to the fact that it was virtually impossible to find a decent job. Even McDonald's was hiring adults desperate for a paycheck to feed their families.For teenagers in Washington, D.C. and California, finding a job just got a lot harder: As summer break approaches and school seasons conclude, teens in California will have a more difficult time finding a job than their demographic counterparts in every other state, according...

In a way, the fact that those in the professions - architect, doctor, teacher, engineer - support Obama while executives and business owners back Romney reveals how our economy has changed over the last few decades.Construction, mining manufacturing, farming, fishing -- these are traditional blue collar jobs. And Romney is blowing away Obama in those categories.Another big and growing category is retail sales persons. Here again, Romney has a wide lead over the president.The president leads among service workers and professionals. What these people might have in common is their membership in a public or private union or professional...

Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama has not anticipated. After all, if Romney's record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama's record in public equity — and that record is not pretty. Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters — leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal...

Few people will develop cancer as a consequence of being exposed to the radioactive material that spewed from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year — and those who do will never know for sure what caused their disease. These conclusions are based on two comprehensive, independent assessments of the radiation doses received by Japanese citizens, as well as by the thousands of workers who battled to bring the shattered nuclear reactors under control.