Free Republic

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Chrysler bankruptcy. President Obama will doubtless mark the occasion by talking about how his intervention saved the auto company. More noteworthy, however, is how the lawlessness of that intervention created tremendous uncertainty, which still chills the economy today. Todd Zywicki has written an excellent summary of President Obama’s actions in the Chrysler bailout. A shorter version goes like this. Starting under President Bush and continuing under President Obama, the federal government used TARP funds to keep Chrysler afloat. This gave the government effective control over Chrysler. As a result, the Obama administration...

The United Auto Workers announced Monday it is withdrawing an appeal of the outcome of a union vote at Volkswagen’s assembly plant in Tennessee. In a statement released one hour before the scheduled start of a National Labor Relations Board hearing in Chattanooga, Tenn., UAW President Bob King said the union decided to put the “tainted election in the rearview mirror” because the challenge could have taken months or even years to come to a conclusion. …

MOSCOW, April 21. /ITAR-TASS/. The man who earlier on Monday seized a subsidiary of Bank Zapadny in Belgorod, a city located 700 kilometers south of Moscow, has been detained, according to the press service of Russia's Interior Ministry. The man will get back his 23 million rubles (about $639,000) from his bank account, head of regional police headquarters Viktor Pesterev has told ITAR-TASS. The man has been detained, the press center of the Russian Interior Ministry reports. Pesterev, who conducted negotiations with the man, explained that he had tried to withdraw his money on Sunday, but could not do so...

This winter's brutal weather took a toll...according to a survey of economists....But the group expects business to pick up again....

Amidst ongoing corruption trials, a scandal involving top cops who've been changing crime statistics to show crime going down when it’s not, and an economy reeling from the twin salvos of runaway tax increases, and a public pension mess, Chicago has come up with a solution to their economic woes and maybe to their crime fighting woes as well. The city is going to fund giant street performing puppets, some as high as 50 feet tall, for merely millions of dollars. Yes, apparently the performing puppets that they have at City Hall, at police headquarters and crawling all over...

Less than two years after closing its Lincoln Road location, David’s Cafe on Collins Avenue stopped brewing Cuban cafecito for good. The South Beach staple closed its doors for the final time at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 20th.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thirty years after failing to convince the Supreme Court of the threat posed by home video recordings, big media companies are back and now trying to rein in another technological innovation they say threatens their financial well-being. The battle has moved out of viewers' living rooms, where Americans once marveled at their ability to pop a cassette into a recorder and capture their favorite programs or the sporting event they wouldn't be home to see. Now the entertainment conglomerates that own U.S. television networks are waging a legal fight, culminating in Tuesday's Supreme Court argument against a...

EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger has urged Germany to make use of shale gas options and added that the he saw no danger of Europe’s access to Russian gas falling victim to possible economic sanctions in the standoff over Ukraine. […] “I am against scaling back or even cutting our gas links with Russia in the coming years,” the commissioner said. “But we must pursue our strategy of diversification. […] I would also urgently press Germany to make use of the shale gas option and allow fracking projects.” …

Of all the many absurdities of the great climate change non-crisis which has been pointlessly obsessing our planet this last three or four decades, surely the most egregious is the way it has ignored one basic fact: global warming is good. No really, it is. As a few bold heretics - such as Australian geologist Ian Plimer in his book Heaven And Earth - have long been trying to tell anyone prepared to listen, the human species is designed for warmth not cold. Ice ages are something we should naturally fear; warming periods are something which for which we should...

At $3.67, US Regular gasoline prices are their highest since March 2013 having risen over 12% (40c) in the last 2 months. This must be great news, right? It must mean world demand is picking up and driving up prices of crude oil as global trade soars (amid a collapsing Baltic Dry and decelerating Chinese growth). This can't be related to "war premia" right? - as we noted here - because stocks (which always know best) have discounted all this tomfoolery. However, as the following chart shows, each time gas prices have surged up toards the Maginot Line of $3.80,...

Joey Giardello, a former middleweight boxing champion who won a decision over Rubin Carter in 1964 and then sued over how the fight was depicted in the 1999 film "The Hurricane," has died. He was 78. Giardello died Thursday of congestive heart failure at a nursing home in Cherry Hill, N.J., the International Boxing Hall of Fame announced.

This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a list of popular investing links that freepers have posted here and tomorrow morning we'll go on with our-- Open invitation continues always for idea-input for the thread, this being a joint effort works well.   Keywords: financial, WallStreet, stockmarket. Here's what others are saying about what's going on-- Gold / Silver / Copper futures - weekly outlook: April 21 - 25 Investing.com - Gold prices ended the week sharply lower on Thursday, falling below the $1,300 level as indications that the U.S. economic recovery is progressing dampened...

Today, in the year 2064, as we look back over the last 50 years, it might seem as if the Abundance Revolution was inevitable, since so much wealth was involved. After all, it was wealth just waiting to be unleashed. Yet paradoxically, on the eve of the Abundance Revolution, many of America’s leaders, on the right as well as the left, were preaching a strict doctrine of overall austerity. Indeed, as we look back and study the events of 2014, we can see the results of the Green elite’s ideologically-driven effort to squelch even the relatively small amount of prosperity...

*Famed film director Spike Lee has expressed his desire to see the Trayvon Martin story told on the big screen. During an interview with theGrio, Lee commended 27-year-old new director Ryan Coogler for bringing his acclaimed independent film, “Fruitvale Station,” the Oscar Grant story, to the big screen. He expressed his admiration for the film while stating that the film business isn’t built in favor of young directors like Coogler to succeed. “Love it…. It’s great,” Lee said of Fruitvale Station. “But it’s something that I have been doing for 15 year [sic]. I teach film. That is my job...

Environmental groups cringe as some trade unions support oil and gas drilling, pipelines PITTSBURGH (AP) -- After early complaints that out-of-state firms got the most jobs, some local construction trade workers and union members in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia say they're now benefiting in a big way from the Marcellus and Utica Shale oil and gas boom.That vocal support from blue-collar workers complicates efforts by environmentalists to limit the drilling process known as fracking."The shale became a lifesaver and a lifeline for a lot of working families," said Dennis Martire, the mid-Atlantic regional manager for the Laborers' International Union,...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration's conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.</p>

Alert shoppers are accustomed to watching food prices go up and down. But a string of forces—from droughts to diseases—is raising the cost of a trip to the grocery store at a rapid clip. And it looks like it will be a while before the price pressure eases. Some of that pressure is coming from California—the source of roughly half the nation's fruits and vegetables—where a long-running drought is forcing farmers and ranchers to cut production. After the driest year on record, large sections of farmland are expected to lay fallow this year as the Golden State copes with an...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space station astronauts got a special Easter treat: a cargo ship full of supplies. The shipment arrived Sunday morning via a Dragon, versus a bunny. "Gentlemen, the Easter Dragon is knocking at the door," NASA's Mission Control said as the capsule was bolted into place. The SpaceX company's cargo ship, Dragon, spent two days chasing the International Space Station following its launch from Cape Canaveral. Astronauts used a robot arm to capture the capsule 260 miles above Egypt. More than 2 tons of food, spacewalking gear and experiments fill the Dragon, including mating fruit flies, a...

If you had to pick the most inane, pointless, and intrusive example of government stupidity, what would you pick? We have lots of examples of regulators running amok. Regulations making it difficult for trucking firms to weed out drunk drivers.Year-long sting operations by federal milk police.Rules harassing coffee shops with bikini-clad sales staff.OSHA requirements for expensive safety harnesses for people working 11 feet off the ground. But we also have really absurd examples of wasteful spending. Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda.Doing interviews – at a per-person cost of $6,000 – about erectile dysfunction...

The latest delay to a final decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline will reinforce a White House strategy to energize President Barack Obama's liberal-leaning base before fall elections in which Democrats risk losing control of the U.S. Senate. Environmentalists, worried about the project's effect on climate change, have put enormous pressure on the president to reject the pipeline from Canada's oil sands, staging demonstrations outside the White House and protests in states where he travels. A decision to approve it now could have prompted that vocal group, which was instrumental in electing Obama in 2008 and 2012, to sit...