Free Republic

With everyone watching and analyzing US jobs data on Friday, there were a number of other news reports showing steeper contractions in much of the world. Let's start off with a look at the rapidly deteriorating eurozone. Markit Eurozone Composite PMI® – Final Data Markit reports Eurozone downturn continues at start of Q3 2012 The Eurozone economy remained in a downturn at the start of Q3 2012. At 46.5 in July, little-changed from 46.4 in June, the Markit Eurozone PMI® Composite Output Index signalled a contraction in output for the tenth time in the past 11 months. The headline index...

Without big government, President Obama likes to suggest, we would all be poor, miserable creatures. For starters, he claims that business became possible only because government built roads and bridges. Actually, Obama has it backwards. Private business came first, then roads and bridges. They weren’t originally developed by governments. They were developed by merchants who began establishing trade routes thousands of years ago. In the beginning, before the first Department of Public Works, there were innumerable trails. Developing trails required that somebody travel, and kings generally didn’t travel unless they were conquering new territory. If they left their territory for...

Michael Krancer, Gov. Corbett's chief environmental regulator, seems to delight in doing battle with critics of the state's oversight of the Marcellus Shale gas boom. In May, Krancer said that Delaware "smells like the tail of a dog" because of its opposition to drilling regulations proposed for the Delaware River Basin. In a congressional hearing, he challenged a Cornell University scientist to a duel over hydraulic fracturing (just kidding, Krancer said). Then there were Krancer's snarky skirmishes with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over regulation of drilling, which is traditionally a function of state agencies like Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental...

The all-time, most-viewed post on this blog is this set of cartoons showing how the welfare state begins and how it eventually becomes an unsustainable mess. The great Chuck Asay has a cartoon that takes the next step, showing what happens when the looters and moochers who ride in the wagon get pitted against those who are pulling the wagon.Since I’m not a Romney fan (for a bunch of reasons outlined here), I would have preferred if the cartoon didn’t imply anything about the current election and instead focused on the rhetorical question of what happens to a society when...

Forget the Olympics. Want to watch records being broken? Turn on the weather report. Everywhere you look, Mother Nature is grumpy. Even skeptics are starting to come around. While no hurricane or heat wave is direct proof of warming, the worldwide pattern of record-breaking weather extremes most certainly is. Accepting climate change as fact isn’t an inconsequential choice. Extremes in heat and cold are buckling highways, railroads and runways. Floods routinely overwhelm drains and streams. Sea levels could rise a foot by 2050, threatening coastlines worldwide. Adapting our infrastructure to new weather realities requires a committed population. Retrofits will take...

America is in fiscal trouble, and seems determined to making matters worse for itself. That’s why it’s long past time for an honest discussion about the “C-word.” Capitalism – an economic system that is based on the private ownership of property, as opposed to government ownership of property, and the creation of goods and services that are sold for a profit - can restore our country to fiscal sanity, and save the rest of the world. It has lifted roughly half of the world’s estimated 6 billion people out of poverty (much of this has happened over the course of...

“Do you think not getting caught in a lie is the same as telling the truth?…”—Robert Redford, “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) In the long, undistinguished annals of big-time gaffes in American politics, Barack Hussein Obama’s recent shot at small businesspeople ranks near the top. Indeed, this astonishing verbal blunder has taken on a life of its own. As a result, three weeks after the president’s ill-advised comments during a July 13 campaign speech in Roanoke, Va., much of America is still talking about his unseemly words. And they are still hard to believe. To wit: “If you’ve been...

Are you a Hotmail user? Microsoft announced a new email service that will replace Hotmail, a product that boasts 325 million customers. Further, the company hopes to woo new users away from Gmail, which is now the most popular email service. Microsoft named the new product Outlook, after its existing email for business users. That’s right, the one you’ve probably been using at the office. “There was a perception gap with Hotmail from tech enthusiasts and youth,” Windows Live general manager Brian Hall told VentureBeat, a highly regarded tech website. “Many of them wouldn’t take a second look at Hotmail...

In presidential campaign ads, President Barack Obama claims that his economic plan includes “$4 trillion in deficit reduction.” For a president who has increased the national debt more than all U.S. presidents from George Washington to George H.W. Bush combined, the claim seems incredible. Indeed, it is. A new analysis of Mr. Obama’s budget reveals the president’s plan would add $10.6 trillion in debt accumulation over the next decade, bringing the U.S. federal debt to a jaw-dropping $25.4 trillion. Still, the president and his surrogates continue to claim the Obama plan would cut spending. “The President’s proposals… include a balanced...

While Wednesday's Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day inspired an apparently record-setting number of people to display their commitment to bigotry by waiting in line for fast-food sandwiches, the demonstration designed to protest it — Friday's National Same Sex Kiss Day — turned out to be less of a draw. Organizers expected a couple hundred protesters to converge on New York's single (and closed for the summer) Chick-fil-A outpost, located in NYU's Weinstein dining hall, at 8 p.m. Unfortunately, we're having trouble finding reports on the event besides that of the New York Post's Andrea Peyser (frequently to be taken with a grain...

Domestic outsourcing or outsourcing locally such as from US to the US is on the rise, according to a recent research report by Forrester analyst Stephanie Moore, who listed five reasons why the trend is accelerating. "First, clients, who today depend on software to differentiate and grow their businesses, require contextually sophisticated developers who can communicate synchronously, interpret their fuzzy and constantly changing requirements, and build software solutions to meet those requirements. Second, clients require agility and also lightning-fast time-to-market," Ms Moore said in the report. The report lists oversubscription to India, the top offshore location, resulting in inflated prices,...

8 Years Later, Athens Olympic Venues in Decay There's still one group that loves the training pool for athletes at the former Olympic village in Athens' northern fringe. Frogs. They appear to delight in sitting on debris that floats on the half-filled pool's murky waters. The athletes village itself has fared somewhat better, turned into housing for workers. Eight years after the 2004 Athens Games, many of the Olympic venues Greece built at great expense remain abandoned or rarely used. They are the focus of great public anger as the country struggles through a fifth year of recession and nearly...

Whenever you hear about celebrity endorsements from Hollywood these days it’s usually yet another multimillionaire coming out in support of President Obama. It’s a predictable pattern, really, since conservatives don’t tend to fare very well in Tinseltown unless they get so huge, powerful and popular that the entire country comprises their primary fan base. Interestingly enough, one such star showed up this week with a very different message for the election to come. Barack Obama may have George Clooney. But Mitt Romney’s now got Clint Eastwood in his camp. Eastwood appeared at a Sun Valley fundraiser for Romney on Friday...

hot make-out session. They were to blast anti-gay-marriage comments made by Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. But gays preferred staying home to watch “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Tumbleweeds could have rolled through the Paramus Park Mall in New Jersey yesterday as a symbol for the lack of stamina in the national kissing campaign. From Georgia to California, protests drew yawns, not saliva. Even in Atlanta, the home of Chick-fil-A, only two dozen kissers showed up. And there was a similar lack of necking in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

July’s disappointing jobs numbers won’t lower employment to 2007 levels until 2025, according to The Hamilton Project, a Democratic-affiliated advocacy group. Even if President Barack Obama’s policies immediately doubled the economy’s creation of new jobs to 310,000 jobs a month, the “jobs gap” would not be closed until the end of 2016, according to an online calculator at the group’s website. The group is supported by an establishment think tank, the D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

Democrat rents farmland to telecom, sponsors legislation favorable to that telecomAn Iowa Democratic House member has raked in more than $50,000 since 2002 for hosting a cell phone tower on his property, while sponsoring a number of bills designed to boost rural telecommunications. Rep. Leonard Boswell (D., Iowa) rents out a small portion of his farmland to Chat Mobility, a telecommunications company that provides cellular coverage to rural communities in southwest Iowa. Since 2002, he has made about $5,000 per year renting out the space for a cell phone tower operated by Chat Mobility, formerly known as Lyrix Wireless, according...

CNN Money reports Chinese buying of U.S. business at record pace Chinese direct investment in the United States could hit a record high in 2012, according to a new research report released Wednesday. Total Chinese foreign direct investment in the U.S. is on pace to reach at least $8 billion this year, according to the report from research firm Rhodium Group. That would top the previous record of $5.7 billion reached in 2010, said Thilo Hanemann, research director with Rhodium Group, which tracks all acquisitions and investments in manufacturing facilities, warehouses, labs and offices by foreign companies in the United...

President Obama suggested it’s “patriotic” for well-off Americans to pay more in taxes, bringing back an argument then-Sen. Joe Biden first made before the 2008 election.

Several years ago, we discovered that on average, the rate of change in the growth rate of stock prices is often directly proportionate to the rate of change in the growth rate of their underlying dividends per share that is expected at identifiable points of time in the future. Using the math we worked out from that discovery, we found that we could often accurately forecast where stock prices would be. We say "often" because the stock market can be a very noisy place from time to time. We've observed stock prices diverge from where their expected future dividends per...

This chapter looks at the Spanish company Abengoa that received more than $2.8 billion in loans and grants—making them the second largest recipient of the $16 billion doled out through the DOE 1705 loan guarantee program. From the introduction of this serialized book, the thumbnail says: Abengoa has two solar projects: Solana and Mojave Solar. Solana’s Fitch rating is BB+. Just before Christmas, 2010, the company received $1.45 billion from the DOE for a solar thermal plant, to use parabolic trough technology in Gila Bend, AZ. Mojave Solar’s rating was BB. Yet the company received $1.2 billion in September 2011...