Free Republic

Last Night On "TingleBall", Chris Matthews continued his rants on Sarah Palin as if she was the primary culprit behind the Saturday Shootings. He put together a compilation Sarah Palin video with bits of her "Reloading Related Remarks",and in the video,there is a carefully edited bit of Palin shooting the caribou/reindeer.The shooting of the deer was the focus.Chrissy Tingles Matthews actually thinks that the average American will believe that Sarah Palin shooting the deer is the Primary Reason A Lunatic Went On A Shooting Spree In Tuscon! Could a cable news anchor BE ANY MORE IGNORANT? !!

The General Electric-Rolls Royce F136 alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter program looked increasingly vulnerable Dec. 15 when efforts to prolong the controversial program appeared to be losing steam in Congress. In separate but related actions Dec. 14-15, defense lawmakers and their aides said they have worked out a quick compromise to help pass defense authorization legislation for Fiscal 2011, not including an earmark for the engine, while a Senate Democratic appropriations proposal that included F136 language ran into growing conservative opposition. The authorization measure – stripped down after a provision to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy stopped...

General Electric and Rolls-Royce have been granted a two-week breathing space by the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) to continue tests of the endangered F136 Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine. GE-Rolls says the JPO “has enabled us to find a way to stretch the funding” for continued testing of the F136 until Dec. 17, the date earlier indicated as a possible extension by the development team. The change was made possible, the JPO says, by the program execution to date. “The JPO has modified the contract accordingly, and there is no indication that a stop-work order will be issued,” GE-Rolls...

BRISTOL — America’s most popular radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, blasted Bristol the other day for supposedly making off with some of the $3.3 trillion in loans given to businesses by the Federal Reserve during the recession. While the charge is false – even absurd given the city’s paltry place in the financial arena – Limbaugh didn’t stop there. He described Bristol to his millions of listeners as nothing more than ESPN. “That’s all that’s there: ESPN and a couple of cheap hotels,” Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated show Thursday. That was more than enough to stir Bristol’s...

An important skirmish in the battle over military spending is taking place in this industrial suburb of Cincinnati. At stake is a program to develop an alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, a stealthy, supersonic jet supposed to be the backbone of the U.S. fighter fleet for the next three decades. For the past four years, Congress has funded the development of the second engine against the wishes of the Pentagon, which maintains that only a Pratt & Whitney engine should be funded. View Full Image Reuters Congress could decide within days whether to fund a second engine for...

The failure of the F136 engine in late September resulted from a “seal clearance” in the fan that was set too tight, causing friction. “The issue with engine 008 was unique to that engine,” GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said in an email. “No modification [will be] required to other engines.” Engines 05 and 07 continue to run well in tests. The program could ill afford any bad news at this time. The Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen Norton Schwartz, appeared to open the door to a compromise with GE and Rolls Royce over the F136 when he said they...

An announced engine selection for Israel's first batch of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters has sparked a new dispute between both rival manufacturers. Pratt & Whitney says the company has received a verbal commitment by Israel to buy the F135 engine to power the first batch of 20 F-35s ordered under a $2.75 billion agreement signed last week. The General Electric/Rolls-Royce team developing the F136 alternate engine claims the selection process remains ongoing. "We fully anticipate we will have an opportunity to compete with the F136" in Israel, GE says. The controversy leaves in doubt the first potential engine selection by...

The Obama administration gave corporate giant General Electric—the parent company of NBC--$24.9 million in grants from the $787-billion economic “stimulus” law President Barack Obama signed in February 2009, according to records posted by the administration at Recovery.gov. Despite getting $24.9 million from U.S. taxpayers, GE decreased its U.S.-based employees by 18,000 in 2009, according to the company’s 2009 annual report. According to Standard & Poor's, GE took in $156 billion in revenue in 2009. GE was the primary recipient of 14 stimulus grants, a spokeswoman for Recovery.gov confirmed to CNSNews.com. These 14 grants provided GE with $24.9 million in tax...

Complete title: Obama Administration Gave General Electric—Parent Company of NBC--$24.9 Million in ‘Stimulus’ GrantsThe Obama administration gave corporate giant General Electric—the parent company of NBC--$24.9 million in grants from the $787-billion economic “stimulus” law President Barack Obama signed in February 2009, according to records posted by the administration at Recovery.gov. Despite getting $24.9 million from U.S. taxpayers, GE decreased its U.S.-based employees by 18,000 in 2009, according to the company’s 2009 annual report. According to Standard & Poor's, GE took in $156 billion in revenue in 2009. GE was the primary recipient of 14 stimulus grants, a spokeswoman for Recovery.gov...

General Electric/Rolls-Royce is investigating manufacturing and assembly data on a single F136 engine after it was damaged during a checkout test on 23 September. The alternate engine for the Lockheed Martin F-35 was shut down "in a controlled manner" after an unknown anomaly at near maximum fan speed on the test stand damaged the front fan and compressor area, the company says. The GE/Rolls team is continuing to run two test engines after inspections revealed no signs of "similar distress". Five development engines have run for more than 1,000h since early 2009. As the cause for the anomaly on the...

This could confirm what many suspected all along - the corporate heads at General Electric (NYSE:GE) would try to use their media holdings to portray President Barack Obama and his administration in a positive light in order to gain a corporate advantage. That's how former CNBC reporter and current Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino explains it in his forthcoming book, "Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street." According to Gasparino, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt had "helped his company feast off of the subsidies of Obamanomics," including the green energy initiatives and health...

Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It's now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell. Thomas Alva Edison was a genius credited with the invention of many things — the phonograph, the motion picture, the incandescent light bulb, global warming. That last credit was given by those who rank light bulbs right up there with the internal combustion engine as ravagers of the planet. The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along...

Light bulbs sprang from the brilliant mind of Thomas Edison -- a true American hero, right up there with Benjamin Franklin. But his legacy is coming to an end. General Electric, the company that he founded, is closing America's last factory for making incandescent light bulbs, victim of liberal environmental politics and zealotry. Sadly, not only will the workers be losing their jobs -- devastating another small town (Winchester, Virginia) -- but the boon created by their replacements, compact fluorescents (CFLs), will not be realized in America, where they were first dreamed up and created, but will instead be enriching...

WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs. "Now what're we going to do?" said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful. During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology,...

Taxes: While the oil and gas companies are bearing the brunt of taxation, regulation and environmental angst, others are doing just fine, thank you. If you think cap-and-trade is dead, just follow the money. According to a recently released Center for Responsive Politics review of reports filed with the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, General Electric and its subsidiaries spent more than $9.5 million on federal lobbying from April to June — the most it's spent on lobbying since President Obama has been in office. Why? As the fight over cap-and-trade grows, so does lobbying. Since January, GE and its...

Any time Erin Burnett tells a guest "You will not be back, you have to be more polite than that" you know the "guest" is telling the truth, the one commodity rarely if ever discussed on General Electric's circus station. Enter (or rather, exit) R&R Consulting's Sylvain Raynes, a structured finance expert, who at 3:10 into the clip takes on what he calls the "public relations officers" for Goldman, and asks "is it all right if I am a little critical?" Apparently the answer is no. First, Sylvain completely destroys Cramer's false "breaking news" about Goldman being long Abacus... And...

Liberal TV show host? Eager to guarantee that the post-Stack finger will be pointed at conservatives? Choose as your sole guest on the subject someone from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. That's precisely what Chris Matthews did this evening, with utterly predictable results. Right on script, SPLC director Mark Potok twice associated Austin plane-bomber Andrew Stack with "the radical right." How fraudently did Matthews stack the deck? He described the SPLC as a group "which monitors extremists"—as if the SPLC looks for wackos on the left as well as the right. View video here.

<p>It certainly is a remarkable speech. Under Immelt’s eight years at the helm, General Electric has lost almost two-thirds of its value. Earlier this year, GE was on the verge of a total meltdown. So was GE’s “leadership” to blame?</p>

Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, said on Wednesday his generation of business leaders had succumbed to “meanness and greed” that had harmed the US economy and increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Mr Immelt’s attack on his fellow corporate chiefs – made in a speech at the West Point military academy – is one of the strongest criticisms by a top executive of the compensation and business practices that prevailed before the financial crisis. “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership ... tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and...

One of the great frustrations of the libertarian-minded right is how Republicans got stuck being "the party of big business." The quotation marks around the term are at least somewhat necessary, because in many respects, it's not true. The notion that big business is "right wing" has always been more sloppy agitprop than serious analysis. It's true that historically, big business is against socialism and communism -- and understandably so. Socialism and communism were once close to synonymous with expropriation of wealth and the nationalization of industry. What businessman or industrialist wouldn't be against that? But many of those same...