Free Republic

Two Of The Biggest Problems In The Financial System Will Hit In 2013 Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2013Jan 14, 2013 - 03:11 AM By: Graham Summers This week is options expiration week: the week in which various call and put positions will expire. Wall Street is notorious for using these weeks to gun the markets this way and that in order to insure that the greatest number of puts and calls expire worthless. So expect the market to be even more volatile than usual this week. Outside of this, the investment world is slowly emerging from its Central Bank policy...

A White Plains, N.Y., home highlighted on the infamous Journal News interactive gun map was burglarized Saturday and their gun safe was damaged in an attempted robbery. The burglars were unable to open the safe. It is not clear if the thieves thought the safe stored other valuables or if they were actually seeking to steal a gun. New York Newsday ran with the story under the headline “Journal News gun permit map used by burglars to target White Plains home?” Below is NYS Sen. Greg Ball’s press release. Even if this story is proven to have nothing to do...

Dear FRiends, We need your support to keep FR going strong. Please keep those cards, letters and donations coming in. Your loyal support makes Free Republic possible and your continuing participation makes FR the number one independent pro-life, pro-family, pro-small government, pro-defense, reader funded grassroots conservative forum on the Net!! And we're going to need FR now more than ever to combat the current crop of Marxists and progressives who have infested our government and institutions and who are dead set on destroying the final remnants of our beloved constitution and our God-given liberty!! Click the link above to donate...

With the debate over gun violence reshaped by the shooting deaths of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school last month, lawmakers across the country are pushing proposals to arm teachers in the classroom. But many of them may be wasting their time. More than a third of the states already allow teachers and other adults to carry guns to school. In most cases, all you need is the equivalent of a note from the principal — you usually don't even need law enforcement approval. NBC News reviewed the firearms and education laws in all 50 states...

REPORT: Assad Has Left Syria For A Warship In The Mediterranean Robert JohnsonJanuary 13, 2013 Russian warship sent to Mediterranean in July After nearly two years of conflict and 117,000 displaced Syrians UPI reports Syrian President Bashar Assad and his family have left the country and live aboard a warship manned with Russian security. UPI cites an Al-Watan report claiming Assad's family are somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea and that the semi-deposed president travels back to the country by helicopter for meetings and receptions. From UPI: When he flies to his embattled country, the president lands at undisclosed locations and...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said it is “frightening” that the Obama administration has never included progressive economists, who have “been right about everything so far.” “I think it’s frightening that at no point in this administration have there been any serious representation of what you might call the progressive economist wing, which is a pretty big part of Obama’s support,” Krugman said Sunday in an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. … Krugman, a Keynesian economist, has long advocated for more stimulus spending, saying the $833-billion stimulus package of 2009 did not spend enough. …

Aside from regulated hunting exceptions and those individuals who are deemed in danger by the police commissioner, all U.S. civilians should be banned from owning any kind of gun, argued former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in a radio interview today. “I don’t believe that in our society that we should have guns,” said Koch, a Democrat, speaking on New York WABC Radio’s “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Continued Koch: “If I had my way I would pass such a law except to allow hunting and target practice and you lay out safety precautions for that. “And if you need...

MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky, a long-time left-wing writer and activist, told Al-Jazeera that he does not believe President Barack Obama has a “moral center,” and that he is running a “global assassination campaign” using drone warfare. “There’s some nice rhetoric here and there, but you look at the actual policies, they’re pretty shocking,” Chomsky said, speaking of President Obama. “The drone assassination campaign’s a perfectly good example. It’s just a global assassination campaign.” …

Jennifer Rubin does a nice take-down here of the increasingly despicable Colin Powell, who smeared his former party on Meet the Press by accusing Republicans of a “dark vein of intolerance.” Thus says the first black Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, the first black Secretary of State, the sometime mentor of the first black woman to serve as Secretary of State… all under Republican sponsorship. Thus says the back-stabbing lout who deliberately let the innocent Scooter Libby twist in the wind, and then get convicted, when one word from Powell would have ended the investigation. Thus says the...

Obama: 'I'm a pretty friendly guy, I like a good party' By Justin Sink - 01/14/13 12:54 PM ET President Obama on Monday said his difficulties driving bargains with congressional Republicans had little do with the personal relationships he has with members across the aisle, instead arguing that partisan politics were to blame. "I'm a pretty friendly guy. I like a good party," Obama said during his press conference Monday at the White House. He joked that, "now that my girls are getting older, they don't want to spend that much time with me anyway, so I'll be probably calling...

A gunman yesterday prepares to shoot a Bronx livery driver over a measly eight bucks after the victim didn’t understand his demands, cops and the wounded man’s family said. Cabby Raphael Martinez, 54, of the Dominican Republic, was about an hour into his shift when he was attacked in his vehicle at 5:10 a.m. on White Plains Road and Lafayette Avenue in Soundview, a dramatic moment caught by the car’s security cam.

Tony Zerilli, alleged to be the underboss of Detroit's biggest crime family, is breaking his silence on one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American historyA man who federal agents say is a main character in the infamous unsolved mystery about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is breaking his silence after decades of refusing to answer questions. The reputed gangster says the union leader was buried in a field in suburban Detroit -- about 20 miles north of the restaurant where he was last seen. Eighty-five years old and barely able to walk, Tony Zerilli never thought this day would...

Action star Jackie Chan has once again sparked controversy by branding America the world's "most corrupt" country in a TV interview. His comments were slammed by The Washington Post's foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher as "anti-American" and a reflection of China's insecurity about itself. Chan told Phoenix TV that China has been bullied by international powers for a long time and only began making progress in recent years. Chan added that while China has a corruption problem, so do other nations, including America. "If you talk about corruption, the entire world - America - has no corruption?" said the actor....

FORTUNE -- You can't blame middle-income Americans for wondering whether the new "fiscal cliff" deal really protects them from big tax increases in the future. That's essentially what President Obama promised in championing the hike in rates for high-earners signed into law on January 2. Still, the politicians and pundits keep talking about how our steep deficits and mountainous debt will rise even after the new revenue is counted. So it's only natural for the folks to ask the obvious question: Now that the affluent are paying far more, where's the extra cash supposed to come from? The answer is...

An explosive new coroner's report reveals Hollywood star Natalie Wood was likely beaten aboard her yacht before he went overboard and drowned in 1981. The Los Angeles County coroner's examination of the Wood case also found flaws in 'every major' finding of the previous autopsy report that led medical examiners to rule the Hollywood star's death an accident. It's the latest step toward settling the question of whether Wood was murdered, or whether she accidentally fell overboard on her 60-foot yacht and drowned - as the original police investigation concluded. The new coroner's examination asserts that bruises found on the...

Sen. John McCain, prominent among the Washington ranks who have questioned former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s suitability for the top Defense Department post, said Sunday he will not exert his power to block Hagel’s nomination. “No,” he told CNN when asked directly whether he would block the nomination in the Senate. “I plan to make a judgment as to whether I think he’s appropriate to be Secretary of Defense or not.” Each senator has the power to prevent a nomination from advancing to the floor, and one of McCain’s close colleagues, Sen. Lindsey Graham, has suggested he would put President Barack...

THE GREAT RETARD manages to prove over and over again that without TOTUS he is fully capable of proving all by himself that he is the only IMBECILE in the room!!!

If there is one city in the world that represents all the hope, change, ideology and character of Barack Obama, it is his adopted home of Chicagoland. Where other than Chicagoland can a lazy, pot-head, communist, racist, beneficiary of Affirmative Action rise to be the most respected position in the city…..a Community Organizer? It’s no small accomplishment to become a Community Organizer in Chicagoland. With all the Minister X’s and Rhyming Reverends on every corner being held down by ‘the man,’ it takes some real talent…and connections…to rise to the highly-esteemed level of Community Organizer. But that is exactly what...

If or when the Pentagon lets women become infantry troops -- the country's front-line warfighters -- how many women will want to? The answer is probably not many. Interviews with a dozen female soldiers and Marines showed little interest in the toughest fighting jobs. They believe they'd be unable to do them, even as the Defense Department inches toward changing its rules to allow women in direct ground combat jobs. In fact, the Marines asked women last year to go through its tough infantry officer training to see how they would fare. Only two volunteered and both failed to complete...

Ironic it is that “anti-trust” is a very common phrase inside the beltway. It is growing outside as well. When applied to people and institutions, “trust” means the confident expectation of them doing something specific, such as keeping their word, being honest, not stealing from you and deferring to your personal prerogatives. The antithesis of trust – or anti-trust, to abuse the term – requires either violating the basic principles of trust or being of such low character as to never earn trust. Congress doubled down on their anti-trust personae. One should never trust any politician. By their nature, they...