Free Republic

Duke University has named the head of China's sovereign wealth fund to its board of trustees. The university said in a statement that Xi-Qing Gao has joined the board for a five-year term. A 1986 graduate of the Duke Law School, Gao served in various positions on Wall Street and in China before, in 2007, becoming the head of the China Investment Corp. That organization manages some $200 billion in state assets and has made high-profile bets on firms such as private equity giant Blackrock and investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Link only. Gas tax holiday talk dies; Congress eyes increase instead

The collection of ne’er do wells, clueless dolts, political hacks, and oh, let’s just be blunt and call them what they are — total Idiots — expands into an ever larger circle. While the Republic burns due to the unsavory combination of incompetence, ideological rigidity, and crony capitalism, the fools and assclowns seem ever more determined to avoid any personal responsibility for the damages they have wrought. Instead, they flail about blindly, blaming everything and everyone — except their own horrific negligence. This is financial incompetence writ on a scale grander than anything seen for centuries. As a nation, our...

RUSH LIMBAUGH: A BOMBASTIC BLOWHARD, BUT OUR BOMBASTIC BLOWHARD! I’ve been listening to Rush, off and on, for some 22 years or so, ever since my bride told me that some guy had been on Sixty Minutes and he said the things I had been saying for years. So, of course, I sent for the transcript to find out who this alter ego of mine was all about. I discovered the bride was right. I don’t listen for all 3 hours of his syndicated broadcast; some days I don’t listen at all and on others I catch him for just...

Nation's largest utility will be focus as U.S. House committee takes closer look at industry. By Claudia Grisales AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Saturday, June 14, 2008 The Pedernales Electric Cooperative will face questions from Congress this month as the U.S. House of Representatives' main investigative committee takes up the controversy that has embroiled the country's largest member-owned utility for the past year. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee plans a June 26 hearing in Washington focused primarily on Pedernales. The chairman of the committee is U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who Time magazine once dubbed the "scariest guy in Washington," partly for...

A Brooklyn gang used a scam on craigslist.com to shake down New Yorkers with the lure of discounted iPhones, police said yesterday. The scheme - which netted thousands of dollars from as many as 12 victims from all five boroughs finally came undone Wednesday night, when cops set up a sting on a Flatlands street corner and arrested four suspects.

The Dow took a 325 point plunge on Friday as Wall Street reacts to an unprecedented $10 surge in crude oil prices and the largest one-month rise in the nation's unemployment rate in two decades. Today's Market As of 2:46 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 317.46 points, or 2.52% to 12286.26, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 31.88 points, or 2.27%, to 1372.17 and the Nasdaq Composite Index lost 61.54 points, or 2.41%, to 2488.40. The consumer-friendly Fox 50 fell 21.92 points, or 2.22%, to 964.53. It didn't take long for Wall Street to erase all...

This seems to be the year of big-time plaintiffs’ trial lawyers facing bad behavior charges. The latest case is the Kentucky Three – wealthy trial lawyers who are now themselves on trial, accused of stealing $65 million from their clients in a diet drug settlement. During the ongoing – and increasingly bizarre – saga, a new excuse has been articulated by the defense attorney for Melbourne Mills, Jr.: the accused suffered from alcoholism, wasn’t involved in the case and therefore could not be held accountable.

Some people think that the reason the public misunderstands so many issues is that these issues are too "complex" for most voters. But is that really so? With all the commotion in the media and in politics about the high price of gasoline, is there really some terribly complex explanation? Is there anything complex about the fact that with two countries-- India and China-- having rapid economic growth, and with combined populations 8 times that of the United States, they are creating an increased demand for the world's oil supply? The problem is not that supply and demand is such...

"Either relativism is a genuine theory in which a real assertion is made, or else it isn't. But any attempt to assert relativism without relying on just-plain truth [absolute] would inevitably fail, because it would generate an infinite regress. And, of course, any assertion of relativism that does not rely on just-plain truth would be-self defeating. So it looks like any apparent assertion of relativism is either self-defeating or else is not a real assertion, but something more like an empty slogan." (Jubien, Michael. Contemporary Metaphysics. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997) "The only way the relativist can avoid the painful dilemma...

Barack Obama's latest revelation, "Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church," makes me wonder where the people of integrity are that witnessed Obama in the pews during one of Wright's racist, anti-American rants. Is there not one congregate of Trinity that has the integrity to tell the truth? That they personally saw Obama in the pews when Wright went on...

In my nightmares, the helicopters still come out of a dark sky, two black spots barely visible against the backdrop of night. Their swirling blades grow louder until they finally touch down on earth and fall silent. They look like giant steel bugs from another planet, bulbous robots with eyes of glass coming to take away their prey. Yes... Hillary Clinton is visiting another small-town in Indiana that most people have ever heard of. We've all heard about the bloody costs of this Democrat Civil War. We see the Victimhood of blacks, women and gays, the Not-Racist Race-Baiting, and the...

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist in the 1990s to figure that speculative investment in dot-coms with no revenues would be disastrous. The same goes for lenders giving mortgages to borrowers with no job, no income and no assets. So after surviving the tech bubble and while trying to extricate the economy from the housing bubble, why are we bent on heading into the global warming bubble? So who in their right mind would push for this? I met many of them up-close-and-personal last week at a major Wall Street Journal conference at which I was an invited...

Two elderly women accused of killing two transient men with a car so they could collect nearly $3 million in insurance money were videotaped talking about the scheme while in FBI custody, the prosecutor said in opening statements Tuesday. "It's your fault," Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, told co-defendant Helen Golay, 77, in the tape played for the jury. "You can't have that many insurers. ... You were greedy. That's the problem." Truc Do, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said the women befriended the two men and took out insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over...

A fight between NFL owners and players was simmering already, but it flared into the open not long ago when the federal judge who has presided over 15 years of labor peace invited union officials into his private chambers for coffee and conversation and left NFL owners and their lawyers waiting in the courtroom. It happened 30 minutes before the judge, David Doty of Minneapolis, began a hearing on Nov. 30 to determine whether to allow disgraced NFL quarterback Michael Vick to keep his bonuses. In papers filed in court after Doty ruled in Vick's favor, the NFL and its...

How liver surgeries cut short patients’ lives By The Tribune-Review Sunday, March 9, 2008 Hundreds of patients each year undergo liver transplants when they don't need them, and possibly never will, a four-month Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation found. One in 10 of those patients dies when they could have lived longer without the transplant. The rest - all at the rock-bottom of waiting lists - must resign themselves to an early battle with the burdensome risks of anti-rejection drugs and complications that can follow: infections, cancers, kidney damage, and high blood sugar. What's worse, a third of those patients get the...

Congregation of the Church of the Holy Organic, let us buy. Let us buy Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, 900 grams per square meter, $58 apiece. Let us buy the eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen-size. Let us purge our closets of those sinful synthetics, purify ourselves in the flame of the soy candle at the altar of the immaculate Earth Weave rug, and let us buy, buy, buy until we are whipped into a beatific froth of free-range fulfillment. And let us never consider the other organic option -- not buying...

In a move the candidate characterized as having the dual purpose of restoring “a sense of community” and “combating obesity,” Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) said one of his first policy initiatives if he is elected president will be to ask for legislation establishing government-run “labor battalions” wherein people will be called upon to “toil for the collective benefit of society.” “Americans have become too self-centered, too greedy,” Obama said. “This isn’t their fault. Our society doesn’t insist that they put aside their petty personal concerns for the good of the whole. As president I will be giving Americans the opportunity...

SAN ANTONIO — Mikal Watts didn’t have a fighting chance — politics were in his life from the start. As a toddler, he rode in a stroller as his mother marched in a farm workers’ rights march in Austin. Politics made for dinner table conversation and filled the pages of books in the family library. He attended fundraising barbecues with his parents. Before the age of 18, he knocked on doors registering people to vote. In the years since, Watts has risen from law-school whiz kid (he received a degree at 21) to nationally known product liability lawyer and political...

Bill Clinton back at centre of ethics debateBy Alex Spillius Last Updated: 3:02am GMT 01/02/2008 Bill Clinton used his influence with the president of Kazakhstan to help a business friend gain a lucrative uranium mining deal, it has been claimed. Bill Clinton: influence The report in the New York Times will raise concerns about possible conflicts of interest that the former president could face if he returns to the White House as "first gentleman" and raised the spectre of the financial scandals that dogged the Clintons in the White House. Mr Clinton has already began cutting his links to Ron...

Bankers must take long-term view of their reputation Antonia Senior: Business commentray The word banker never used to be an insult. It once stood for a pillar of the community, a captain of capitalism. But bankers’ reputations have soured as their bonuses have bloated. You cannot condemn an entire industry on the reputation of one rogue trader. But the £3.7 billion hit to Soc Gen from Jérôme Kerviel’s bad bets comes at an extraordinary time for the banking world. That hit pales beside the £67 billion writedowns that the banks have taken on their exposure to sub-prime debt so far....

PHOENIX - Arizona's 15 county prosecutors agreed Wednesday that they won't take any complaints filed under the state's new employer sanctions law to court until March 1. Though they had previously agreed to wait until Feb. 1 to bring cases to court, the prosecutors changed that agreement to give a federal judge adequate time to rule on a challenge to the law, which prohibits businesses from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. The deal also was aimed at giving people involved in the lawsuit time to appeal the ruling. U.S. District Judge Neil Wake, who was working toward issuing a final ruling...

Greenland's ice sheet shrank more rapidly last summer than at any other time in the past 50 years, measurements have shown.< >"The question is: Can we reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in time to make enough of a difference to curb this decay?"< >However, its report acknowledged that temperatures in southern Greenland during the 1930s and 1940s were at least as warm as in recent years.

Lavish Payout, Perks for Failed Mortgage CEO His Severance Package Includes Jet Use, Country Club Dues and a Hefty Payout By DANIEL ARNALL ABC NEWS Business Unit Jan. 11, 2008 — Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder and public face of troubled mortgage giant Countrywide, is eligible for tens if not hundreds of millions in compensation and perks on the sale of the company to Bank of America. During calendar 2006, the latest period available for review in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Mozilo took home $48.1 million in compensation. An early analysis of SEC filings by the Los Angeles Times suggests...

The Washington Post had a good story on the dealings of the electronics retailer Circuit City. Unfortunately, it was buried in the business section where no one will see it. It should have been plastered at the top of the front page. The basic story is that last March, the wise men who run Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea of laying off their more senior salespeople, who get $14-$15 an hour, and replacing them with new hires who get around $9 an hour. It turns out that this move was not very good for business. One of...

TWO years ago, when Eric Feichthaler was elected mayor of this palm-fringed, middle-class city, he figured on spending a lot of time at ribbon-cuttings. Tens of thousands of people had moved here in recent years, turning musty flatlands into a grid of ranch homes painted in vibrant Sun Belt hues: lime green, apricot and canary yellow ... Mr. Jarrett acquired a taste for $100 dinners. He bought a powerboat and a yellow Corvette convertible. (In a photograph on his business card, Mr. Jarrett sits behind the wheel, the top down, offering a friendly wave.) Last summer, he paid $730,000 for...

Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech. The former American Vice-President was also accused of being "precious" at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming. Many of the audience at last month's Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour...

Local toll authority likely to carry more of the burden for designing, building second wave of Austin-area toll roads The Texas Department of Transportation after February will cease awarding contracts for new or expanded roads, a belt-tightening that probably will indefinitely delay a number of Central Texas highway projects. Work on some local projects, such as widening FM 1460 between Round Rock and Georgetown, RM 2338 in Williamson County, and Texas 195, which runs from Interstate 35 in Williamson County to Killeen, will be shelved for now. In addition, the edict will force Central Texas' local toll authority to carry...

The U.S. government admitted today in federal court that the prosecution's star witness in the criminal trial of Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean – confessed drug dealer Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila – lied under oath. "He told some lies on the stand," Mark Stelmach, the assistant U.S. attorney representing prosecutor U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton said under questioning by a three-judge 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel in New Orleans

The Board of Equalization – which oversees collection of many state taxes – is one of the least-known important state agencies. But if the board gets its way, it could soon be both high profile and highly unpopular. That's because it wants the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give it a staggering number of new employees – 325 – over the next three years to serve as tax detectives hunting down the businesses and individuals who buy goods on the Internet but fail to pay the state's “use tax.” What's that? You weren't aware that you owed the state...

I was listening to the radio this morning when I heard of a bill that has been proposed in the Maryland Legislature. House Bill 30 states: From the summary: "Establishing the Maryland Education Fund; providing that after a specified date, the balance remaining on a gift certificate shall be presumed abandoned; requiring a person that sells or issues a gift certificate in the State to remit to the Comptroller the remaining balance on gift certificates on or before a specified date each year; etc." From the bill itself: (C) (1) THE BALANCE REMAINING ON A GIFT CERTIFICATE SHALL BE PRESUMED...

Virgie Arthur, the mother of former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith, has filed a libel lawsuit against a Houston TV station, CBS Studios Inc. and the late model's former companion, Howard K. Stern. The suit alleges that Stern arranged for Smith to appear in an Entertainment Tonight interview where the model stated that Arthur was complicit in Smith's childhood physical and sexual abuse. The lawsuit says the program aired on KPRC Channel 2 in Houston on Feb. 14, a week after Smith died at the age of 39. CBS Studios produces the program, which is broadcast locally on KPRC, an...

"NBC Universal topper Jeff Zucker warned Monday that new digital business models are turning media revenues 'from dollars into pennies' and revealed that NBC U booked just $15 million in revenue during the last year of its deal with Apple's iTunes," Michael Learmonth reports for Variety. MacDailyNews Take: In January 2006, NBC stated that Apple’s iTunes Store and iPod powered broadcast ratings for "The Office." How much is that worth? Learmonth continues, "Interviewed by the New Yorker's Ken Auletta at a benefit for Syracuse U.'s Newhouse School, Zucker described the impasse that led to NBC U's decision not to renew...

Excitement in Berlin yesterday as Al Gore swept into town to speak at a conference on global warming. It was good timing for conference organiser EnBW, one of Germany’s largest electricity companies, which got to piggy-back on the buzz generated by Gore’s triumph in Stockholm. But despite the high demand for tickets for last night’s slide show, not everyone in Berlin was happy. Some climate campaigners said Gore’s speaker fee – rumoured to be $180,000 – was not sending the right message. Journalists moaned after finding that his meeting with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was just a photo-op. No...

Joe Torre had a hunch it would come to this. And when the New York Yankees offered him a one-year contract with a hefty paycut, performance-based bonuses—and no room to negotiate—he was insulted and figured he had no choice but to walk away. "The fact that somebody is reducing your salary is just telling me they're not satisfied with what you're doing," Torre said Friday at a news conference. "There really was no negotiation involved. I was hoping there would be, but there wasn't. "If somebody wants you to do a job, if it takes them two weeks to figure...

Wife's Lotto secret costs years of grief If you won a $28.5 million jackpot, would you tell your spouse? Bernice Heslop won -- and didn't tell. The legal fights continue 12 years later. BY EVAN S. BENN When Bernice Heslop opened the paper that Sunday in 1995 and saw the six Lotto numbers, her first thought must have been: ''I can't believe it. I'm RICH!'' And then, the evidence suggests, another thought formed, something like: ``Hmmmm . . . no need to tell the hubby about this.'' It was a fateful decision that has tangled three people -- Heslop, her...

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- A future Super Bowl champion may someday be crowned overseas in a game witnessed predominantly by a foreign audience, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. "There's a great deal of interest in holding a Super Bowl in London," Goodell told reporters Monday. "So we'll be looking at that." The commissioner said London's new Wembley Stadium would make a great candidate for pro football's biggest matchup, given the enthusiasm overseas for the game. The NFL has been expanding its overseas presence for years by televising games around the world. It's held preseason games in numerous countries in Europe, Asia,...

Hundreds of families living in housing subsidized by Fairfax County taxpayers exceed income caps designed to ensure that only the neediest receive assistance, a review of county records shows. In the most extreme cases, Fairfax is underwriting rents for families making well into six figures: One household getting help makes more than $216,000 a year; another, $184,000. Dozens of others -- making $60,000, $70,000, $90,000 -- exceed eligibility caps. And they do so with the tacit approval of county housing administrators, who do little to encourage occupants to move on when their fortunes improve.

WASHINGTON -- Dealing with global warming will be painful, says one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. To back up his claim he is proposing a recipe many people won't like a 50-cent gasoline tax, a carbon tax and scaling back tax breaks for some home owners. "I'm trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it's going to have a measure of pain that you're not going to like," Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Meeting last week in Wyandotte County, officials from 22 states had hoped to move closer to their goal of collecting sales tax on all Internet purchases nationwide. At the end of the two-day meeting, they left empty-handed. Right now, many Internet vendors collect sales tax voluntarily at the urging of some states, but not all do. The patchwork of sales tax laws currently presents a burden on interstate commerce that courts have ruled unconstitutional. To solve the problem, several states — including Kansas — have joined the “Streamlined Sales Tax Project.” The member states are working to simplify sales tax...

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science". The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed. In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe. A motorist who has a near miss, for instance,...

Bishops Denounce Influence of International Abortion Lobby in Nicaragua Warn that they will take to the streets to Prevent Legalization of Abortion By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman NICARAGUA, September 11, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) -The Catholic bishop's conference of Nicaragua denounced attempts by foreign organizations to promote "therapeutic abortion" in the country on Sunday, and warned that they would take to the streets to protest if it was necessary to prevent the practice from being legalized, something that they have done in the past. "We know that there are international entities who are interested in legalizing therapeutic abortion in Nicaragua," said Abelardo Mata,...

The U.S. economy continues its slow death before our eyes, but economists, policymakers and most of the public are blind to the tottering fabled land of opportunity. In August, jobs in goods-producing industries declined by 64,000. The U.S. economy lost 4,000 jobs overall. The private sector created a mere 24,000 jobs, all of which could be attributed to the 24,100 new jobs for waitresses and bartenders, and the government sector lost 28,000 jobs. In the 21st century, the U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in export industries and in industries that compete with imports. U.S. job growth has...

Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times. The blueprint for such an assault, drawn up by two hackers working for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is part of an aggressive push by Beijing to achieve “electronic dominance” over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the US, Britain, Russia and South Korea.

The hourly rates of the country's top lawyers are increasingly coming with something new -- a comma. A few attorneys crossed into $1,000-per-hour billing before this year, but recent moves to the four-figure mark in New York, which sets trends for legal markets around the country, are seen as a significant turning point. On Sept. 1, New York's Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP will raise its top rate to more than $1,000 from $950. Firm partner Barry Ostrager, a litigator, says he will be one of the firm's thousand-dollar billers, along with private-equity specialist Richard Beattie and antitrust lawyer Kevin...

CARACAS, Venezuela – The Venezuelan government on Friday denied any link to a businessman who was stopped at an Argentine airport carrying a suitcase filled with nearly $800,000 in cash. The Venezuelan businessman, Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, carried the money from Caracas to Buenos Aires on a flight chartered by the Argentine government, and the undeclared funds were seized by customs agents last weekend. “We don't have anything to do with that plane or with that trip ... nothing to do with that businessman,” Venezuelan Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas told reporters. The incident has shaken the Argentine government, prompted one...

File this in the category of “Revealing Much More Than Intended.” A print ad for a new computer processor made by Intel Corp. was yanked before it ever appeared in the United States, with one minor exception. The ad’s problem? At the very least, it’s racist.

A group of Muslims in Rugby, United Kingdom are opposing plans for a pet food factory to be built in nearby Coton Park. Muslim residents in the area point out that “if the factory were to be bombed, the pork will rain down on our homes and gardens.” "Our religion expressly forbids us to come into contact with pigs in any form,” said resident, Mustaf Kilamanh. "Because of the high risk of jihadi action in this infidel land, our mortal souls are placed in grave danger. Say a bomb hurls pieces of swine into the air. If I were to...

WASHINGTON -- When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid picked up his ball and went home following his staged all-night session last week, he saved from possible embarrassment one of the least regular members of his Democratic caucus: Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Reform Republican Sen. Tom Coburn had ready a Defense authorization bill amendment to remove Nelson's earmark funding a Nebraska-based company whose officials include Nelson's son. Such an effort became impossible when Reid pulled down the bill. That Reid's action would have this effect was mere coincidence. He knew that Sen. Carl Levin's amendment to the Defense bill mandating...

Thanks to a new NFL policy, something will soon be in short supply on news-media Web sites: video of almost anything related to the NFL or its players.In a move designed to protect the Internet operations of its 32 teams, the pro football league has told news organizations that it will no longer permit them to carry unlimited online video clips of players, coaches or other officials, including video that the news organizations gather themselves on a team's premises. News organizations can post no more than 45 seconds per day of video shot at a team's facilities, including news conferences,...