Free Republic

JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, said Thursday that it lost $2 billion in the past six weeks in a trading portfolio designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money. The company’s stock plunged almost 7% in after-hours trading after the loss was announced. Other bank stocks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, suffered heavy losses as well. “The portfolio has proved to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than we thought,” CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters. “There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment.” The trading loss...

Changes in the wording of Selective Service System record-keeping requirements, made days after the opening of an investigation into the alleged forgery of President Barack Obama’s Selective Service registration form, raise serious questions about U.S. government intentions. ... The Selective Service System’s new privacy rules were published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, four days after the September 16 announcement by World Net Daily that the Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff’s Office “Cold Case Posse” was opening an inquiry with full subpoena power into alleged forgery of several documents concerning Obama’s birth and draft registration. ... Changing the...

President Vladimir Putin proceeded smoothly from inauguration on May 7 to overseeing a massive Soviet-style military parade on Red Square on May 9. Putin’s choice as Prime Minister, former president Dmitry Medvedev, was easily voted into office by the Duma. On Red Square, some 14,000 men in Soviet-style gold-glittering parade uniforms and most wearing peaked hats goose-stepped to the thrill of martial music produced by a 1,100-member joint military orchestra. Tanks, self-propelled guns, missiles and armored vehicles (over 100 pieces) rolled past Putin, flanked on the stand by Medvedev and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (RIA Novosti, May 9). Putin’s speeches...

For many, the term "sheriff" conjures up images of the Old West. A few may consider a sheriff to have some form of outdated and obsolete political office. But for me and countless other patriots across our nation, a sheriff is the epitome of good and necessary county law enforcement. As documented on the Durham County, N.C., website, the position of sheriff originated in England more than 1,000 years ago, known then as a shire-reeve, who was "the steward of the King's estates, guardian of the peace, judge and jury of the Shire County (county court) and was the local...

The day after President Obama endorsed gay marriage, Mitt Romney found himself responding to allegations that as a teenager he taunted a prep school classmate who later came out as gay.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Shortly after holding a press conference this afternoon to say that authorities are not giving her the information she deserves about the shooting death of her 13-year-old son, Latonya Walker met with Jefferson County District Attorney Brandon Falls. Falls said Walker had not contacted him before she and community activist Frank Matthews held today's press conference. Falls said he met with her and Matthews today for 45 minutes. Normally, Falls said, the DA's office will not contact family members after a decision made not to file charges in a case. They never meet with family's of defendants...

Providing proof that Sheriff Joe Arpaio intends to continue his investigation of President Obama’s eligiblity, his Cold Case Posse has pressed the director of the Selective Service System not to destroy any microfilm records that may yet exist of Obama’s 1980 draft registration form. In an emergency letter Wednesday to Selective Service System Director Lawrence Romo, Mike Zullo, the lead investigator in the Cold Case Posse, asked for reassurance that the microfilm records still exist. “We would like to be assured of the disposition of the microfilm reel or reels containing President Obama’s Selective Service registration form,” Zullo wrote. “Please...

The man suspected of kidnapping four women in a Tennessee family and killing a mother and daughter was caught Thursday evening, police say. Adam Mayes, 35, on America’s Most Wanted Fugitive List, was caught in Mississippi, Union County Sheriff Jimmy Edwards confirmed. Police say the two daughters that Mayes allegedly abducted, Alexandria Bain, 12, and Kyliyah Bain, 8, were both found alive and safe. Mayes and his wife, Teresa, are charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jo Ann Bain, 31, and her daughter, Adrienne, 14. Their bodies were found buried outside the Mayes' home a week after they...

Campaign video. http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=player_embedded&v=-Czo5Vf8KZs

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has shocked Wall Street by disclosing the bank racked up $2bn (£1.2bn) of trading losses in the past six weeks and warned they could get worse. “It puts egg on our face and we deserve any criticism we get,” Mr Dimon told analysts in a hastily arranged call after stock markets closed in New York on Thursday night. America’s second-biggest bank said that the losses stemmed from a series of complex trades that were designed to hedge the bank's overall risk. Some of the losses have been offet by gains of about $1bn from...

Sometimes a trivial embarrassment can become a teachable moment. It was recently revealed that Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had self-identified as a Native American for nearly a decade — apparently to enhance her academic career by claiming minority status. Warren, a blond multimillionaire, could not substantiate her claim of 1/32 Cherokee heritage. (And would it have reflected any better on her if she could have?) Instead, she fell back on the stereotyped caricature that a relative of hers had “high cheekbones.”Not long ago, University of Colorado academic Ward Churchill was likewise exposed as a fraud...

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney's prep school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration's doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior's Inspector General's office — was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that...

Under-performing civil servants will be identified and fired under plans to rank all government officials in order of ability, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. ~snip~ Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy who is leaving to take up an American university post this month, has privately told the Prime Minister that the civil service could function effectively with a 90 percent cut in staff. He recently sent officials to “measure up” Somerset House, the main Government building in the 18th century from which Britain ruled theempire – compared to large areas of Whitehall, Victoria and Westminster today. One Downing...

Changes in the wording of Selective Service System record-keeping requirements, made days after the opening of an investigation into the alleged forgery of President Barack Obama’s Selective Service registration form, raise serious questions about U.S. government intentions. ... Changing the wording of the privacy rules alters the status of federal records, like the requested draft registration records, from “record copies” to “nonrecord copies.” Nonrecord copies are subject to disposal.

At the end of this year, Nancy Keenan will step down from her post as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the country’s oldest abortion-rights advocacy group. The 60-year-old Keenan said she is leaving out of concern for the future of the pro-choice movement — and thinks she could be holding it back. Nancy Keenan will retire as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America at the end of the year. (Sarah L. Voisin - WASHINGTON POST) In recent years, Keenan has worried about an “intensity gap” on abortion rights among millennials, which the group considers to be the generation of Americans born...

Even as John Edwards' presidential hopes dwindled, the candidate had ambitions for high office, his former senior economic adviser testified Thursday. "We talked about a more elaborate long-term goal of Mr. Edwards, which was to be a Supreme Court justice," Leo Hindery said on the witness stand. Instead of landing on the federal bench, Edwards is now a defendant in federal court. The detail about Edwards' lingering political aspirations emerged shortly before the prosecution rested its case Thursday in that trial, calling its last set of witnesses after a dramatic three weeks of testimony. Prosecutors did not end up calling...

This is embarrassing. One of Obama's new campaign ads features the story of Brian Slagle, an auto-worker in Ohio, who was worried that during the recession he would lose his job. The Toledo Blade and ABC news report that Slagle was an employee of Johnson Controls. The ad shows him getting up early to head into a job that provides for his young family. And he's really grateful to Obama for it. But should taxpayers feel the same way? Johnson Controls received $299 million in taxpayer-funded stimulus dollars to make electric batteries and open up two factories in the U.S....

A second law school, the University of Pennsylvania, has touted Elizabeth Warren as a minority faculty member in an official school publication, according to an online document obtained by the Globe.

Chairman Hastings: Documents Raise Serious Questions about Thoroughness and Independence of Inspector General’s Investigation into Drilling Moratorium Report Hastings sends letter to IG and releases documents received by Committee to date WASHINGTON, D.C., May 10, 2012 - House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) today sent a letter to Department of the Interior’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall expressing deep concern with the thoroughness of the Office of Inspector General’s (IG) investigation into whether an Obama Administration report that recommended a six-month drilling moratorium was intentionally edited to incorrectly state the views of peer reviewers, and with the IG’s...

A man police say attacked the driver of a horse-drawn carriage and took control of the reins in downtown St. Louis on Tuesday night was foiled when the horse instinctively ran back to its barn.