Free Republic

Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts who helped design the landmark banking safety legislation after the 2008 economic crisis, defended his involvement with the now-defunct Signature Bank, which was taken over by New York state officials this week. “I worked as a member of Congress for a certain objective,” Frank said in an interview with the Financial Times. “And then having retired, not having a pension by my choice, not wanting to be a lobbyist for reasons personal, I need to make some money.”

Oh but so many climate-related firms are going to fail to make payroll! - Any one of a thousand Internet scolds. My answer: So what? Next up - Republic, which apparently had lines out the door (if you believe the Internet) on Saturday. Again: So what? Folks, bubbles attract stupidity. Stupidity is a constant in the universe; in fact it is likely the only thing that is truly infinite (with all due respect to the late Mr. Einstein.) The so-called "Chief Risk Officer" at SVB had a masters in..... public administration. Anyone care to bet if she passed any form...

At the end of 2022, SVB had uninsured deposits in its US offices of $151.5 billion, versus total deposits of $173 billion. That's 88% of all SVB deposits that didn't have FDIC insurance.

Yet another of CNBC host Jim Cramer’s hot stock market takes just fell harder than President Joe Biden stumbling up the steps of Air Force One. Cramer listed his top ten biggest stock “winners of 2023” during the Feb. 8 edition of CNBC’s Mad Money. In the ninth spot for Cramer was Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company, SVB Financial Group. Cramer characterized the institution as a “merchant bank with a deposit base that Wall Street has mistakenly been concerned about.” In Cramer’s ludicrous view, the stock was a good buy because “being a banker to these immense pools of capital...

The former president told Sean Hannity’s radio show:...Mr Trump added: “That’s without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal. And now Ukraine is just being blown to smithereens.”

Natalie Boyce was a “fit and healthy” student who dreamt of travelling the world and buying her own home. The 21-year-old from Rowville in Melbourne’s southeast — a competitive netball player and hardworking student in her fourth year of law and commerce at Deakin University — would have turned 22 on Monday. Nearly one year ago, on March 27, 2022 — her late grandmother’s birthday — Natalie died of heart failure at The Alfred Hospital, six weeks after receiving a booster dose of the Moderna vaccine. “You’ll never be the same,” her mother Deborah Hamilton, 52, told news.com.au. “No parent...

Sorry folks, other than meritocracy is not acceptable in a society where we routinely use -- and rely on -- things that are dangerous. If you'd like to go back to the 5th Century or so, then its fine. Which is where we're headed if we don't cut it out. Personally, I prefer not to get there by being poisoned due to a train derailment or freezing to death when its -5F outside. RTWT

More signs of the failure of our secular and self-centered culture Anyone who is paying attention knows that there is something deeply wrong with American society today. That much is obvious. Increasingly obvious, albeit less well known, is the fact that the fixes that all too many people are applying to heal their broken lives are not helping a thing; in fact, they’re only making things worse. In many cases, they’re the source of the problem. But when will we turn away from these spurious therapies and embrace some genuine solutions? Take, for instance, a Monday news item from WCBI,...

Spry Community Links High School, in the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list? “Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.” But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same for math. Zero kids are proficient. Spry is one...

Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner Group of mercenaries has dominated headlines in Ukraine, has reportedly been sidelined by Vladimir Putin after failing to make good on his promises of military gains. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Prigozhin's "star has begun to set" following his boasts that his forces could capture the Donetsk city of Bakhmut. The think tank said on Sunday that Putin wanted to see what Prigozhin and his previous commander in Ukraine, General Sergey Surovikin could do after the conventional Russian military had suffered disastrous setbacks. "Both efforts failed," the ISW said, as Prigozhin's attempts...

Russia has put forward a highly contentious list of security guarantees it says it wants the west to agree to in order to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine, including many elements that have already been ruled out. ...The demands, spelled out by Moscow in full for the first time, were handed over to the US this week. They include a demand that Nato remove any troops or weapons deployed to countries that entered the alliance after 1997, which would include much of eastern Europe, including Poland, the former Soviet countries of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and...

The partisan January 6 Committee’s report published Thursday ignored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) role in the failure to provide enhanced Capitol security before the protest. Instead, the Committee’s report attempted to place the blame for the riot squarely on former President Donald Trump. “Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office watching the violent riot at the Capitol,” outgoing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote in the report, ignoring the days and events leading up to January 6.

Trevor Noah exited The Daily Show Thursday night, leaving tens of people wondering what they will do without him and 329,632,000 people asking Who? Trevor Noah? The Daily Show? Comedy Central? None of that rings a bell? Yeah, me neither. Noah replaced Jon Stewart as the Daily Show host in 2015. Stewart was also a ratings failure, gathering only a little over a million viewers every night. Noah, however, seemed determined to prove there is a number less than zero and proceeded to lose about 75 percent of Stewart’s already minuscule audience.

Once again, we have seen a high-profile shooting that wasn’t stopped by gun control but could have been stopped if law enforcement and prosecutors had done their jobs. Another shooting, another law enforcement failure that gun control wouldn't solve Another shooting, another law enforcement failure that gun control wouldn't solve A gunman in Colorado Springs killed five people and injured 18, and unsurprisingly, he was already on law enforcement’s radar. In June 2021, he allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb. Neighbors were forced to evacuate from their homes, and a bomb squad and crisis negotiators were brought in....

Bright orange scooters now share — and sometimes command — Pittsburgh’s sidewalks. They’re an integral part of the Move PGH pilot project, the city’s plan to bundle transit options to help residents get around without owning a car, whether by bus, bike, scooter, zip car or more. Statistics reported by Move PGH, a year into its two-year pilot, are encouraging: People have taken more than 576,000 scooter trips for a total of hundreds of thousands of miles. They have biked tens of thousands of miles, and ridden Scoobi mopeds for more than 14,000 miles. Experience has dispelled Initial fears about...

Washington, D.C. – While on the campaign trail, Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman claims he was “very successful” in reducing crime when he was mayor of Braddock, PA. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, according to publicly available data, crime SKYROCKETED in Braddock while Fetterman was mayor. And, in 2019, the first year in over a decade that Fetterman was not mayor, Braddock’s crime rate dropped by 61 percent.

Filatiev published “Zov" on the Russian social network VK in early August. The human rights organization Gulagu helped him leave the country a few weeks later, moving him from one place to another until finally helping him reach France. He spent two days inside the Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting to be approved for entry. In Russia, he said, “I understood that no lawyer could defend me,” he said, a muscle in his jaw twitching. On his wrist, he wore a silver bracelet adorned with a crucifix. Filatiev said Russia's army is degrading by the day, unable to replace the...

It's not exactly what you think.. Joe Biden’s quick recovery from Covid will mark the end of the epidemic for all but the hardest-core hysterics. If a 79-year-old who can barely finish a sentence can beat the ro in a few days, even Molly Jong-Fast will have a tough time staying scared. Yes, another variant could change the calculus. But right now I am on an Acela from New York to Washington, about the most Covid-fearful environment left anywhere in the United States, and almost no one is masked. (Poor, poor New York Times. No one listens anymore:) ... The...

Veteran Afghanistan correspondent Lynne O’Donnell says she has never seen the Taliban more brutal or the millions of people the austere fighters again govern more wretched. “I really never expected to find it as bad and as awful as I did. It’s a very very sad, unhappy, traumatized, depressed place,” she said after revealing she was forced to retract hard-hitting reports on the fundamentalist Islamic group. “They’re worse,” she said, commenting on the changes in the Taliban since their first time in power more than 20 years ago. The Australian journalist was speaking during a phone interview after being ejected...

President Joe Biden’s Russia-Ukraine policy has been a monumental disaster. Russia’s forces are in the fifth month of laying devastation to Ukraine as Biden continues to write checks to Zelenskyy, with no end in sight.