Free Republic

Today's "we swear we're not the Onion" story: Dick Cheney has canceled a planned appearance in Toronto ... because he fears it could be too dangerous a trip to take. "He felt that in Canada the risk of violent protest was simply too high," explained the head of the promotions company that had scheduled the April 24 event at the apparently risky Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The National Post reminds us that Cheney reportedly got stuck inside a Vancouver building for seven hours during a September speech after a protest outside indeed turned violent and a security guard was choked.

The job market is healthier than at any time since the end of the Great Recession. The number of people filing for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest since May 2008, a sign that the waves of corporate layoffs that have defined the past few years are all but over. "This is unexpectedly great news," said Ian Shepherdson, an economist at High Frequency Economics.

How whole industries disappear Take the story of Dell Computer [DELL] and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription : ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: “We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.” Dell accepted the proposal because from a...

One barrier to widespread adoption of motorcycles as transportation in the USA is that of practical advantage. In most places, two-wheeled transport offers few advantages over the four-wheeled kind. That's partly because unlike almost every other country on Earth, the practice of "lane-splitting"-riding in between lanes of stopped or slow-moving vehicle traffic-is outlawed in what is allegedly the Home of the Free. That means that in every state but California, not only do motorcyclists have to endure the privations of motorcycle travel, they also have to bump along at the maddeningly slow pace of traffic-snarled trucks and automobiles, even though...

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Republican Norm Coleman has asked federal authorities to investigate whether financial data related to his Minnesota Senate campaign donors was breached. Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan mentioned the investigation in an e-mail sent to supporters Wednesday. It was in response to cryptic warnings many got the night before informing them of the possible leak of credit card information connected to their contributions.The Coleman campaign e-mail advised donors to contact their credit card company and cancel the card at issue.

By the middle of 2008, for example, American households had build up debt of $13.9 trillion, more than double what it was a decade before. Businesses had accumulated debt of $10.9 trillion, also doubling in a decade. And financial institutions had piled up debt of $16.6 trillion, up from $6.3 trillion in 1998. And the federal government? During that same period -- drum roll -- its debt rose from $3.8 trillion to $5.3 trillion. The thing to remember is that debt is debt, no matter where it is, and unless it's paid back, all of it will get passed on...

Time was, the Baltimore Orioles' manager was Earl Weaver, a short, irascible, Napoleonic figure who, when cranky, as he frequently was, would shout at an umpire, "Are you going to get any better or is this it?" With, mercifully, only one debate to go, that is the question about John McCain's campaign.In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, McCain finds it galling that Barack Obama is winning the first serious campaign he has ever run against a Republican. Before Tuesday night's uneventful event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign's closing argument. It is...

Didn't the folks on Wall Street, who are nothing if not smart, know that someday the music would end? Sure. But they couldn't help behaving the way they did because of Wall Street's classic business model, which works like a dream for Wall Street employees (during good times) but can be a nightmare for the customers. Here's how it goes. You bet big with someone else's money. If you win, you get a huge bonus, based on the profits. If you lose, you lose someone else's money rather than your own, and you move on to the next job. If...

In terms of party principles, the Democrats have already won the election. The party's liberal base didn't have to compromise on its candidate, whereas a substantial number of conservative Republicans did. But the Republicans seem wise to have compromised, because polling showed that Obama was headed for a landslide victory if his opponent was an identifiably right-wing candidate. According to polling averages compiled by the website RealClearPolitics, at the time they discontinued their respective presidential bids, Fred Thompson trailed Obama by 12 percentage points, Mitt Romney was behind by 15 and Mike Huckabee by 17. For that matter, a recent...

MOSCOW On Nov. 9, 2007, during a special operation in the village of Chemulga, in the republic of Ingushetia, Russian special forces shot and killed an individual by the name of Rakhim Amriyev. Eyewitnesses said that they shot him in the head and placed an automatic rifle beside his body. Then, as dozens of villagers who had run out of their homes looked on, the troops used an armored personnel carrier to demolish a wall of the one-room house where Amriyev lived and announced that he had died in a shootout. You may ask how I can be sure that...

An image of an eight-year-old Knowles appears in the ad, shown sleeping soundly in bed. The Clinton campaign legally purchased the file footage of Knowles from Getty Images. Clinton's ad aimed to emphasize her experience and say she'd be a strong national security candidate. The ad was a play on a 1980s-era advertisement with a similar theme: if there was a middle-of-the-night national security emergency, who would you want to have answer the phone and deal with it? Ironically, though, the now-17-year-old Knowles would want Clinton rival Barack Obama to answer any important 3 a.m. calls coming into the White...

QUESTION: Dr. Retail, now that the Democratic presidential race has entered its long, bloody slog phase, I figured it was time to get a fresh perspective. Can you explain to me what it’s all about? DR. RETAIL: Why do you bother me with simple problems? Listen, the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s...

Congress can enforce its own orders against recalcitrant witnesses without involving the executive branch and without leaving open the possibility of presidential pardon. And a Supreme Court majority would find it hard to object in the face of two entrenched legal principles. First is the inherent power of Congress to require testimony on matters within its legislative oversight jurisdiction. So long as Congress is investigating issues over which it has the power to legislate, it can compel witnesses to appear and respond to questions. That power has been affirmed over and over in prosecutions for contempt.In modern times, this congressional...

U.S. policymakers need to avoid two mistakes, while seizing two opportunities. The first mistake would be an overreliance on military force. As the United States has learned to its great cost in Iraq -- and Israel has in Lebanon -- military force is no panacea.... The second mistake would be to count on the emergence of democracy to pacify the region. It is true that mature democracies tend not to wage war on one another. Unfortunately, creating mature democracies is no easy task, and even if the effort ultimately succeeds, it takes decades. In the interim, the U.S. government must...

Officials are telling their friends that they believe a final volley of intensive attacks by the White House will return the party to where it was before the Foley scandal, by casting the election as a choice between Democrats and Republicans over national security and taxes. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are discounting predictions of Republican demise in part because they believe they have turned out wrong before. "I remember 2004," Mr. Bush said in the interview shown on This Week. "I was history as far as the punditry was concerned." Mr. Rove has told associates that the party's turnout...

...The decision to stick it out with Hastert postpones what House Republicans will do about leadership in the wake of probable defeat Nov. 7. Will they look for leaders unafraid of tax and spending reform and who will be more watchful of aberrant behavior by their colleagues?

If Tom DeLay was blind to the perils of mixing money and politics, business and government, he was true to the tradition of his state, where the long-dominant Democratic Party plumbed all possible permutations of that intimate connection. To take but one example, consider the phone conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and George Brown, chairman of the board of Brown & Root, the construction giant, on Jan. 2, 1964, soon after Johnson became president, as quoted in "Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964."[snip] [As] Michael Ennis writes in the current issue of the Texas Monthly, "the government --...

AUSTIN - The day after U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay's grand jury indictment, his lawyer and the jury foreman on Thursday appeared to contradict the Texas politician's assertions that he was not given a chance to speak before the jury. The foreman, William M. Gibson Jr., a retired state insurance investigator, said the Travis County grand jury waited until Wednesday, the final day of its term, to indict him because it was hoping he would accept jurors' invitation to testify. DeLay said in interviews that the grand jury never asked him to testify. In a Wednesday night appearance on MSNBC's Hardball...

Putin questions Iraqi poll plan Russia's President Vladimir Putin says he has grave doubts about plans to hold elections in Iraq next month. He told Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi at the Kremlin he could not see how a poll could be held while Iraq was under "full occupation". Correspondents say the Russian leader's comments are a veiled attack on the US. However he also expressed support for government efforts to stabilise Iraq, and voiced hope Russian firms could be involved in reconstruction in Iraq. Mr Allawi is making his first official visit to Russia, six weeks before...

The C.I.A. Versus Bush By DAVID BROOKS Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency. Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration. At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served...