Free Republic

TOLEDO, OH -- President Barack Obama decried Republican opponent Mitt Romney's opposition to the 2009 auto industry bailout before a crowd full of autoworkers gathered here for Labor Day. Surrounded by some 3,000 supporters - many of whom were sporting United Auto Worker t-shirts - in a high school gym, Obama said he had made sure to stop in Toledo, a major auto industry hub as part of his campaign across the country in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. "I wanted to stop here in Toledo to spend this day with you," he said as the...

Dear Better Business Bureau: I’m writing about a plumber I hired in 2008 to fix my pipes. The name of his business is Barack H. Obama & Co. Despite many assurances on Mr. Obama’s part, and despite spending far beyond what I wanted on the project, my toilets are still full of . . . well, they’re not fixed. And now I’m told there’s some question as to whether I can fire him. I want to say, right up front, that Mr. Obama inherited a real mess in my house. The plumbing was in worse shape than it had been since, gosh, the...

Obama planted the seeds for all this when he publicly announced a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. His deadline is fertile ground for jihadis who know that their "window of opportunity" for murder is closing. We should expect the bitter harvest of "green on blue attacks" to produce a bumper crop of American casualties -- unless we hire a new commander in chief who knows how to fight a war and win. --- Oliver North is the host of "War Stories" on Fox News Channel, the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance, and the author of "American Heroes in...

One of the nation's top credit rating agencies said Friday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of municipal finances in California because of what it sees is a growing threat of increased city bankruptcies and bond defaults. The report also noted the potential for ratings downgrades to fiscally distressed cities, counties, school districts and special districts throughout the state. Moody's Investors Service issued a report saying that the growing fiscal distress in many cities in the nation's most populous state was putting bondholders at risk.

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Vice President Joe Biden has clarified a comment he made earlier today in which he said presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney would "put you all back in chains" by unshackling Wall Street. "And I'm told when I made that comment earlier today in Danville, Virginia, the Romney Campaign put out a Tweet, you know Tweets, and went on the air, went on the airwaves saying 'Biden's outrageous in saying that - I think I said, instead of unshackled, unchained or - anyway, outrageous to say that, that's what we meant. I'm using their own words. I got a message for...

President Barack Obama today criticized the newly minted Republican team of Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan, telling a hometown crowd the pair is trying to sell an economic plan of "trickle down fairy dust" that doesn't work. When talking about Ryan, Obama first said "no, no, no, no" to the boos that came from the crowd of about 1,000 younger supporters at the Bridgeport Art Center. "My opponent and Congressman Ryan and their allies in Congress, they all believe that if we just get rid of more regulations on big corporations and we give more tax breaks to the...

The Solyndra “scandal” is trotted out every few months as part of the big-vs.-small-government debate in this country, but it is not and never was a scandal. The federal clean-energy loan program that the infamous solar-panel maker was a part of was designed to finance risky ventures, and Solyndra was a reasonable risk: an innovative manufacturer with huge private backing and an opportunity to transform the industry. But the industry transformed itself first. Silicon prices plunged, Solyndra’s advantages vanished, and the firm went bust. It happens. The Bush and Obama Administrations both selected Solyndra from 143 applicants for the program’s...

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt.The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you — you think you did well because of...

A Chinese auto parts company, Wanxiang, has come to the rescue of cash-strapped A123 Systems, an American high-tech lithium-ion battery maker and centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “green jobs” revolution. Wanxiang can acquire up to an 80% of the company in return for an investment of up to $450 million. The recipient of a $249 million “green technology” grant from our federal government, A123, believing their own (and everyone else’s) hype about the millions of electric vehicles that would soon be filling the nation’s highways (it will happen, but not soon) set about proving an old adage: stupidity and waste...

A123 Systems Inc., a struggling, U.S. government-backed manufacturer of advanced batteries for electric vehicles, is turning to one of China's largest auto parts makers for a bailout. A123 was the first company to open a factory in the U.S. using funds from an Obama administration program to encourage domestic production of advanced batteries. The Wanxiang investment may allow the A123 to move forward with plans to build a second facility and draw the remainder of a $249 million Energy Department grant. The company, partially owned by General Electric Co., likely would keep its U.S. headquarters and operations while giving the...

President François Hollande has proposed a 75 percent tax on income over 1 million euros. Under current tax laws, two hypothetical couples with two children each and comparable annual incomes, as expressed in euros, would have more take-home pay in New York City than in France. Under the Hollande proposal, the French couple’s take-home pay would be considerably lower.

In country after country, increased government spending acted more like a depressant than a stimulant. - Policy makers in Washington and other capitals around the world are debating whether to implement another round of stimulus spending to combat high unemployment and sputtering growth rates. But before they leap, they should take a good hard look at how that worked the first time around. It worked miserably, as indicated by the table nearby, which shows increases in government spending from 2007 to 2009 and subsequent changes in GDP growth rates. Of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, those...

The U.S. economy lost 1.2 million jobs between June and July. But that’s not how it got reported. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs figures for July, it said the economy gained 163,000 jobs. So what gives? It all has to do with what’s known as “seasonal adjustments.” The U.S. economy follows certain predictable patterns in hiring and layoffs. School districts always let workers go for the summer and hire in the fall. Retailers always staff up for the Christmas holidays and lay people off afterwards. Students always flood the labor market in June. So if we...

Forget the Olympics. Want to watch records being broken? Turn on the weather report. Everywhere you look, Mother Nature is grumpy. Even skeptics are starting to come around. While no hurricane or heat wave is direct proof of warming, the worldwide pattern of record-breaking weather extremes most certainly is. Accepting climate change as fact isn’t an inconsequential choice. Extremes in heat and cold are buckling highways, railroads and runways. Floods routinely overwhelm drains and streams. Sea levels could rise a foot by 2050, threatening coastlines worldwide. Adapting our infrastructure to new weather realities requires a committed population. Retrofits will take...

President Obama’s top economic aide described the July jobs report — which shows a small increase in the national unemployment rate — “further evidence” that the economy is recovering. “While there is more work that remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression,” Alen Krueger, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote. He made the White House’s oft-repeated caveat that  “it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report,” but offered today’s numbers as a...

Barack Obama and the US has a lot of close and strong allies in the world. And all small countries punches above their weight according to the president. From the show Detektor, Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR. Host is Thomas Buch-Andersen.

The Obama administration says one reason the U.S. economic recovery has been so slow is that it is still suffering from the aftermath of the financial crisis. But the U.S. is not the first country to suffer a recession and a financial crisis. And the U.S. recovery is doing worse than all of them. In a new research note, JPMorgan points out that since 1970, Japan, Finland and Sweden have all gone through what the U.S. is currently going through. And all three of them had recoveries stronger than America’s. The above chart compares the economic recovery — as measured...

(CBS News) Beginning today, up to 47 million women may be eligible to get free access to preventive health care services as that provision of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Under the new provision that goes into effect August 1, 2012, women will be eligible to receive the following eight services without paying a co-pay: Well-woman visits, Contraception and contraceptive counseling, Gestational diabetes screening, HPV DNA testing, Annual sexually transmitted infections (STI) counseling, HIV screening and counseling, Breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling, and Interpersonal and domestic violence screening and counseling.

Market clout of top doctors, hospitals drives up premiums. As legislative leaders close in on a major health care cost-control bill, key efforts to attack one of the most-cited reasons for rising medical spending — the market power of caregivers who demand high prices for their services — appear to be in jeopardy. In a 2010 report, Attorney General Martha Coakley blamed the leverage of the best-paid providers as a main driver of health care costs. She found that insurers pay some hospitals and doctors twice as much money as others for similar care, because they have name-brand recognition or...