Free Republic

We love our iPhones and iPads. We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads. We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads. And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads--and the super-high profit margins of Apple--are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States. And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them),...

We Are All Occupiers Now. If Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric and class warfare of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any closer, they’re going to start pooping on police cars. [emphasis mine] So, here we are, at the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? More than his liberal-softie sounding rhetoric in 1994 and 2002? More than his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates?...

Obama: Republicans Want to Emulate China, Roll Back Minimum Wage, Prevent Unionization By Fred Lucas January 10, 2012 Subscribe to Fred Lucas's posts (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama accused Republicans of wanting to make America more like China, of seeking to roll back the minimum wage and of wanting to prevent collective bargaining and said the GOP wants to “get rid” of clean air and water rules. Obama made the comments Monday at a campaign fundraiser at the Capital Hilton in Washington on the eve of the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. “Republicans in Congress and these candidates, they think...

Geraldo: You Shouldn't Become Parent Unless Licensed By Government By Jack Coleman Created 01/09/2012 - 7:55pm Think your government has more than enough on its hands? Geraldo Rivera wants it to do so much more. On his new WABC radio show Friday, Rivera cited an incident that day involving a Brooklyn mother suspected of killing her 3-year-old daughter, saying this (audio clips after page break) -- I swear to God, you talk about sickos, you talk about sickos. You should need to have a license to have a child. You should be vetted. I think I can't stand these stories....

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- The number of new prescription drug shortages in 2011 shot up to 267, well above the prior record and about four times the number of medication shortages in the middle of the last decade. Figures just released by the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which tracks national drug shortages, show there were 56 more newly reported drug shortages in the U.S. last year than in 2010, when there were 211. By contrast, there were only 58 drug shortages reported in 2004. As the drug shortages worsen, so does their impact on patient care, particularly...

The Right to Adulthood I've spent a lot of time thinking about why Democrats, liberals, Leftists, RINOs, Socialists, Communists and other murdering totalitarians can so handily whip up "movements," "organizations" and other "groups" to push endless versions of their "cause," when it seems so hard for Conservatives to do so. Of course, there's always the fact that the Rats first steal millions (or billions) in tax dollars to fund their efforts, which is not a small consideration. And of course, RINOs are ever alert to defocus, generalize, pander, soften and misdirect any Conservative efforts under the sabotage umbrella of "bipartisanship."...

Duluth made history last week when it became the first city in the state to pass a resolution in support of a constitutional amendment that would essentially overturn a U.S. Supreme Court decision, namely Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. The court ruled in 2010 that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional rights as individual U.S. citizens. A majority of justices also concluded that political spending was a form of free speech and that corporations should be able to spend an unlimited sum of money to influence voters, without disclosing financial details of their activities. Although Duluth is...

CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself. "He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians. Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted." Across the country,...

MARK STEYN DECEMBER 24, 2011 Elisabeth’s Barrenness and Ours Who celebrates a birth nowadays? Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.” That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if...

BEIJING — A rich Chinese couple who had eight babies with the help of two surrogate mothers has been forced to move out of their villa following a public uproar and could face a large fine for breaching strict family planning laws mandating only one child. The couple in the booming southern metropolis of Guangzhou had the children last year, according to state media, but the story only came to light after a picture of the children — four boys and four girls — was used by a photography studio in an advertisement. The story was first featured in the...

Anti-whaling activists said they had intercepted the Japanese harpoon fleet far north of Antarctic waters Sunday with the help of a military-style drone. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society spokesman Paul Watson said the unmanned long-range drone, launched from the anti-whaling ship the Steve Irwin, had located the Japanese fleet and relayed the coordinates back to the activists. Watson said Sea Shepherd, a militant activist group which annually shadows and harasses the Japanese whalers, had caught up with the fleet at 37 degrees south, 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) above Antarctic waters. No whales had been killed so far, he added. "This is...

Sierra Club, Audubon settle with SWEPCO on Turk power plantPosted by Max Brantley on Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 10:16 AM The Sierra Club and Audubon Arkansas have announced a settlement with SWEPCO, the utility building the Turk coal-fired power plant in Hempstead County. This ends legal challenges to the plant and will be reflected in a consent decree to be filed in federal court later today in Texarkana. Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, SWEPCO's parent, said in a release: “The provisions of the agreement are consistent with our commitment to renewable energy, energy efficiency and overall environmental...

A report from Syria Monday night said that soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad had opened fire on between 60 and 70 soldiers who attempted to leave the country in order to join opposition forces. Human rights groups in contact with Syrian rebels said that forces had killed over 30 people earlier in the day. The revelations on the murder of the soldiers came after Syria signed a deal to allow Arab League observers into the country. The observers would ensure that soldiers do not attack civilians, and that civilian protests do not erupt into violence.

Natalya Murakhver, a New York food writer and mother of an 18-month year old daughter, loved her premium brand orange juice -- the "100 percent pure" and "not from concentrate" kind that comes in the colorful carton and tastes consistently delicious. That is, until she said she learned from her first-time moms group that there's a "secret ingredient" in all premium orange juices that companies are not required to put on their labeling. Now, after writing Whole Foods, she refuses to buy her favorite, "365" juice, amid uncertainty about its contents. "One of the moms said she had read about...

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde has warned the Great Depression of the 1930s may repeat itself unless the EU pulls together and gets foreign help. Fresh unemployment statistics added to the gloom by highlighting the social cost of austerity. “If the international community does not work together, the risk from an economic point of view is that of retraction, rising protectionism, isolation. This is exactly the description of what happened in the Thirties and what followed is not something we are looking forward to," Lagarde said in a speech delivered to the US State Department on Thursday (15...

Census has released their new Supplemental Poverty Measure and I’m afraid that people are still getting the points about US poverty wrong. The SPM does indeed cure some of the problems with the old measures which I discussed here. But it introduces a new and quite glaring error at the same time.This is what leads such as Felix Salmon into the quite erroneous gambit of directly comparing the two methods of poverty measurement and the number of people who are poor in the US.Just to recap the argument about the old method (which is still the official method by the...

A young couple hopping railroad cars across the country was found dead under a mound of coal at a Florida power plant. Christopher Artes, 25, and Medeana Hendershot, 22, shared a passion for illegally hopping freight trains and traveling the country without a set plan...

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A woman in the border city of Laredo, Texas who was angry because she had been denied food stamps killed herself and shot and critically wounded her two children late on Monday, authorities said on Tuesday.

Playing baseball games without keeping score. Parents not allowed to cheer for one side or the other at basketball games. Refusing to use red ink to grade tests because it's too jarring. No dodgeball. Participation trophies. Telling kids, "You're special," without their doing anything to show they're special. Newsflash: You may be special to God, your mommy, and your teacher just because you were born, but the rest of us aren't impressed. The world doesn't owe you a living, a promotion, or any special consideration at all. The people who tell you otherwise are doing it because they think you're...

Mayor Mitch Landrieu and other city leaders deemed the sweep of Duncan Plaza and eviction of protestors a success Tuesday morning, just hours after New Orleans police disbanded the high-profile encampment. In a move that had been forecast for days, dozens of officers fanned out across the public square in an early morning operation, forcing out more than a hundred people, some of whom were homeless, and others who identified with the "Occupy NOLA" movement.Landrieu, speaking at a City Hall news conference, said he thought the police sweep was "well-timed and well-organized." One person was arrested, while dozens of others...

HARTFORD —— City officials say Occupy Hartford protesters must leave their encampment at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Broad Street by 6 p.m. Tuesday. Hartford Police Chief Daryl K. Roberts said protesters camping at the area they've named Turning Point Park have been notified that they risk being arrested after the deadline passes. "I don't anticipate any trouble, but I will take appropriate corrective action," Roberts said.

DETROIT (WJBK) - A teenage girl is battered and beaten inside a Detroit school restroom while other girls watch and record the whole thing. However, this isn't the first time this girl has been assaulted at school. Her family says administrators know about the fighting and chose to look the other way. School is supposed to be about reading, writing and arithmetic, but inside the walls of Detroit's Ludington Middle School a bathroom has been used as a backdrop for brutal teenage brawls. It's a game called "30 Seconds," but no one is playing. One eighth grader pummels another while...

Washington, DC, December 1, 2011 -- Only 21 percent of surveyed medical students could identify five true and two false indications of when and when not to wash their hands in the clinical setting, according to a study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC - the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Three researchers from the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany collected surveys from 85 medical students in their third year of study during a lecture class that...

As Cyber Monday draws near and debate continues about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the U.S. government has again seized a bevy of domain names it says belong to Web sites that deal in counterfeit goods. Blog TorrentFreak ran a list of more than 130 domains it said were seized by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division as part of "Operation in Our Sites." TorrentFreak called the move the largest such round of seizures to date.

Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory Friday 25 November 2011 Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday. The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital,...

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad presents The Polar Express in Durango, Colorado.The Polar Express

I'm a bit late on this one, I know, but having now waded through the European Commission's green paper on eurobonds, now laughably rechristened "stability bonds" to make the idea more palatable to the Germans, I'm not impressed. You have to get through 26 pages of waffle before you hit the relevant bit, which states simply that "in order to advance on this issue, more analytical work and consultation are indispensable. Several of the key concepts, possible objectives and benefits, requirements and implementation challenges merit a more detailed consideration and analysis". You are telling me they do, starting with the...

U.S.-based multinational corporations added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region during the 2000s, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, while cutting payrolls at home by 864,000, the Commerce Department reported. The faster growth abroad was concentrated in emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India and Eastern Europe, according to economists Kevin Barefoot and Raymond Mataloni, of the U.S. Commerce Department. "Judging by the destination of sales by affiliates in those countries," the economists wrote in a recent survey, "the goal of the U.S. multinational corporations' expanded production was to primarily sell to local customers...

Police in Denver and Salt Lake City swept anti-Wall Street protesters from their camps as demonstrators and supporters in Portland, Ore., flooded a city park area in defiance of an eviction order on Sunday. In Portland, crowds that swelled to thousands and went toe-to-toe with police moved back onto sidewalks and downtown's Lownsdsale and Chapman squares after closing Southwest Third Avenue and Madison Street overnight.

BOSTON, November 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A lawsuit that could nullify the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) has received the support of major U.S. corporations, who filed a brief opposing the law in federal court this week. A friend-of-the-court brief filed last Thursday in the case of Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argues that DOMA, which protects marriage as between a man and a woman in federal law, imposes crippling burdens on employers. Seventy employers are represented in the brief, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Google, NIKE, Levi Strauss and Co., CBS, Aetna, Blue Cross...

First, the context: Modern political science -- which readily understands imperialism, resistance, and clash of competing interests -- does not similarly understand “the wasting away of nations.� That, says David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too), is because political scientists tend to assume that people will follow their rational self-interest. In fact, they often don’t.From antiquity, he notes, a symptom of a civilization’s decline has been the destruction of children:Macedonian poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote: “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.� A 200 BCE survey of seventy-nine families in Miletus, an ancient...

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.

Copper Tumbles 6% Eric Platt Oct. 20, 2011, 2:07 PM Copper, after tumbling 4% yesterday, plummeted again on the COMEX today. It's down 6% to $3.07 per pound. Take a look: Image: FinViz Precious metals are also taking a beating: * December gold contracts: Down 2.0% to $1,614 an ounce * December silver contracts: Down 2.8% to $30.36 an ounce * January platinum contracts: Down 2.1% to $1,491 an ounce * Southern Copper Corp. is trading 1.5% lower today. (snip)

COMPLETE TITLE: STEVE WYNN Goes On Big Rant About Occupy Wall Street, Obama, Deficits, And Anger At The Government ### Classic. On the conference call for Wynn Resorts, CEO Steve Wynn went on a big rant on Occupy Wall Street, Obama, and deficits. Here are our notes in raw form. It's all mostly paraphrased. In a nutshell, he says: Deficits are killing us, our dollars are worthless, and the Democrats are bankrupting the country and vilifying anyone who's successful. So naturally, people are protesting. *snip* You're seeing it taken to the next level in Greece. People are trying to break...

Seven American makers of solar panels filed a broad trade case in Washington against the Chinese solar industry on Wednesday, accusing it of using billions of dollars in government subsidies to help gain sales in the American market. The companies also accused China of dumping solar panels in the United States for less than it costs to manufacture and ship them. The trade case, filed at the Commerce Department, seeks tariffs of more than 100 percent of the wholesale price of solar panels from China, which shipped $1.6 billion of the panels to the United States in the first eight...

Horrific footage captured on CCTV in Foshan, Guangdong province Thursday afternoon and now making the rounds on the Chinese version of Twitter, Weibo, shows a two-year-old toddler being run over by a van as she walks across the street. In the minutes that follow, dozens of passersby walk around the bleeding girl, not stopping to look at or help her. A cyclist takes a wide berth around the body to avoid the body. One woman, holding her daughter’s hand, looks at the toddler and walks past as quickly as she can. And a second truck, apparently not realizing there is...

The world's population looks set to smash through the seven billion barrier in the next few days, according to the United Nations. It comes just 12 years since the total reached six billion - with official estimates saying the figure will top eight billion in 2025 and 10 billion before the end of the century. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049451/Room-World-population-reach-7-BILLION-days.html#ixzz1aulmmPWc

The European Union is considering a roughly 75 percent cut in funding for a program that helps feed 18 million of its poorest citizens. The cuts, set to take effect after New Year's, would come at a time of rising unemployment and consumer food prices in many parts of Europe, as well as overall economic turmoil on the continent. The looming cuts already have raised fears among people who rely heavily on the program. "We poor, small people, we cannot face up to this," said Rene Waltener, 41, who is unemployed and married with four children. "We sometimes have difficulties...

Six people have been killed in a shooting at a beauty salon in California. Nine hairdressers and customers in total are believed to have been hit when a man opened fire at Salon Meritage, a beauty salon just blocks from the Pacific Ocean in the upscale seaside resort of Seal Beach. The gunman's ex-wife is believed to have worked in the salon, according to local sources. Orange County authorities rushed to the scene and seized the male suspect in a traffic stop a half-mile from the shooting. The shooter - said to live locally - was thought to have been...

The House will likely vote this week on measures to delay or weaken Environmental Protection Agency rules reducing air pollution from industrial boilers, incinerators and cement plants. House Republicans leaders have taken aim at a new EPA rule that would require cement producers, incinerators and industrial boilers to reduce their mercury and other harmful emissions by 90 percent. The rule is set to go into effect in 2013. Republican called on President Barack Obama today to urge the Democratic-controlled Senate to support a measure that would delay or weaken the new standards. Politicians also asked him to sign the bills...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee voted Wednesday to eliminate some $50 million that President Barack Obama requested for the U.N. organization that helps women and children in developing countries with reproductive health and family planning, a reflection of growing Republican anger with both the world body and its work in China. The GOP-led Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation that targets the yearly U.S. contribution to the U.N. Population Fund, an organization the United States helped found in the late 1960s. Republican administrations typically have withheld funds from the group, but Obama restored the money. The party-line vote was 23-17....

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Antibiotic resistant E. coli was much more prevalent in villages situated along roads than in rural villages located away from roads, which suggests that roads play a major role in the spread or containment of antibiotic resistant bacteria, commonly called superbugs, a new study finds. Many studies on various infectious diseases have shown that roads impact the spread of disease, however this is the first known study to show that roads also impact the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, said Joe Eisenberg, co-author and professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Researchers at the U-M...

Everyone's Asking Their Broker Today: "Why Are My China Stocks Getting Killed?" Simone Foxman Sep. 29, 2011, 1:30 PM Chinese stocks are getting killed. Why? Goldman put out the following desk note specifically in response to the flood of questions coming from investors. 1) Concerns about Chinese PMI and possible slowdown of Chinese economy. 2) Merrill note yday discussing possible slowdown in China. 3) Market selling things that worked in the past - Gold, NFLX, etc. 4) Ongoing corp governance issues. 5) Qtr end might cause wholesale selling of anything Chinese due to uncertainty of "growth issue" in China. 6)...

Via Breitbart TV. Remember that liberal tea party that Van Jones is building? Here’s one of their first big initiatives: The “Contract for the American Dream,” in which fresh-faced load-bearers for an imploding entitlement regime cheerily read cue cards calling for more weight on their backs, please. If you’re wondering how we can possibly afford “Medicare for all” when we can’t afford Medicare for some, you obviously missed this video from a few weeks ago of Jones reassuring America that we are not in fact broke, no matter how many zeroes there might be up on that national debt scoreboard....

In a Bloomberg TV interview following today's quixotic "QE3/non-QE3 announcement, which is Operation Twist 2, but not LSAP, and ushers in economic recession, even as it sends risk assets soaring, and somehow pushes the 2 Year a whopping 20 bps tighter so buy,buy, buy" and is really very much ado about nothing, the always outspoken Marc Faber had some very choice words about life, the universe and especially the residents of the Marriner Eccles building. While there still appears to be some confusions as to whether today's Fed decision to peg rates at zero for 2 years is QE3 or...

Modern feminism erupted upon Western culture in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which smeared suburban households as “comfortable concentration camps.” Friedan was a communist who knew little of housework. Her husband even furnished a maid. Yet she charged that tending the hearth repressed homemakers who would find greater contentment in roles historically filled by men. Were feminists true to their purported ideals — penetrating previously masculine domains and liberating women from reliance on men — they would adore Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. As the world actually turns, conservative women find feminists their shrillest critics. But their achievements,...

Study after study has shown that children with married parents are better off, and our society has embraced the idea that children should be raised by married adults. The latest research digs deep into this long-held belief and reveals an interesting twist. A new British study finds that kids of married parents are more intellectually advanced than those born out of wedlock, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Rather it's a reflection of the types of people who tend to get married and those who don't, . . .

Dozens of Atlanta public school educators falsified standardized tests or failed to address such misconduct in their schools, Gov. Nathan Deal said Tuesday in unveiling the results of a state investigation that confirmed widespread cheating in the city schools dating as far back as 2001. "I think the overall conclusion was that testing and results and targets being reached became more important than actual learning for children," Deal said. "And when reaching targets became the goal, it was a goal that was pursued with no excuses." Falsifying test results made the schools appear to be performing better than they really...

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia),...

"Dr. John Guillebaud, Patron of the Optimum Population Trust (a British think tank that hates human beings and wants less of them rather than allocating resources to feed, clothe, educate and help them) gives a startling speech at Cambridge University's Triple Helix Society. We secretly film as best we can..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TPj9H0_gJQ&NR=1 http://www.philipbrennan.net/2010/10/25/dr-guillebaud-promotes-depopulation-at-cambridge-university/ He's emphatic that no one calls Population Control called Population Control. I couldn't watch it all - nauseating.