Free Republic

A perspective on our president from Down Under. In Herman Wouk’s classic World War II novel, The Caine Mutiny, there is a moment when a group of the ship’s officers are getting away from the increasingly eccentric Captain Queeq by relaxing ashore. Suddenly the malcontent Lieutenant Keefer asks the others: “Does it occur to you that Captain Queeg may be insane? In fact Queeg is not insane, at least not at that time. He is simply grappling, more and more disastrously, with a job too big for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he becomes paralyzed and nearly sinks...

HOLT, Mich. (WOOD) - A woman shot a man during an apparent home invasion in Ingham County. The suspect was shot multiple times and suffered injuries to his stomach and hands, according to WLNS. He is in critical condition at a hospital.

Duncan: ‘Dumb cuts’ from sequester will cost thousands of teachers their jobs By Bernie Becker - 02/24/13 10:44 AM ET Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday that sequestration would have a devastating affect on school systems around the country. Duncan said that teachers around the country were already being informed that they won’t be retained, and that some 40,000 teachers in all could lose their jobs. Head Start and programs for children with parents in the military could also be hurt by the $85 billion in sequester cuts, Duncan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We don’t have any ability...

The nomination of Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary has uncovered a lot of dirt about the man, but it also has a lot of dust swirling, regarding the incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and Wall Street that the White House would probably prefer to have kept buried. The story surely tarnishes the President’s image as “a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street.” In Lew we find much of what President Obama publicly derides—but, as Forbes reports, is “prepared to accept from his closest associates.” In 2009, Obama said it was the “height of irresponsibility” and “shameful”...

Echos of a shoorting

Three months after winning half of the biggest Powerball lottery jackpot in U.S. history, Mark Hill still meets friends for morning coffee at a local convenience store. And that Camaro sports car Hill considered buying with his winnings? He got a pick-up truck instead. While some lottery winners fritter away their fortunes or meet tragic ends, not much has outwardly changed for Mark and Cindy Hill since they won half of a $587 million Powerball jackpot in November. They netted $136.5 million in a lump-sum payment after taxes. "They are very conservative people," said Walt Stubbs, a friend and former...

The ‘End’ Of QE – Hype Or Tripe? Interest-Rates / Quantitative EasingFebruary 23, 2013 - 07:32 PM GMT By: Andy Sutton I am going to say right up front that there is going to be quite a bit of sarcasm in this essay. I say this simply because of the ludicrous nature of our marionette-esque talking heads in the mainstream financial press in this country. They are truly amazing, taking molehills and making mountains out of them and vice versa. In one segment telling us that there in fact will be no criminal charges against anyone involved in the HSBC...

I have been puzzling over what I perceive as the growing loss of public interest in the Benghazi debacle in which an American ambassador and three others lost their lives and the former Secretary of State in a pique of anger over questions about the event said, “What difference does it make?” It makes a difference if the State Department was derelict or indifferent to the ambassador’s cables that spelled out the security threats that he and his staffed faced or, for that matter, the attacks on other diplomats and humanitarian organizations operating in what was a war zone. African...

Those looking for a reason for sluggish housing, weak retail sales, and low family formations rates, need only look at the plight of millennials (those aged 18-33). Many millennials have no job, high student debt with no way to pay the debt off, and few job opportunities beyond part-time employment in food services or retail. Millennials are the ones who Obama targeted to pay for Obamacare. Indeed, the forced inclusion of youth (who will overpay for health care) is supposedly what made Obamacare "affordable". Yet, even with the screw job on youth, the "Affordable Health Care Act" is so unaffordable...

<p>As part of the upcoming forced cuts totaling $85 billion, the Federal Aviation Administration will be required to slash $600 million from its budget, amounting to 4% of its total expenditures. Appearing at the White House on Friday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned those cuts would result in major delays at American airports.</p>

See Link But perhaps the biggest example of the Washington Monument maneuver is coming from the Defense Department, where it goes by another name. Over many decades of defense budget battles, the Pentagon has often used a tactic known as a "gold watch." It means to answer a budget cut proposal by selecting for elimination a program so important and valued -- a gold watch -- that Pentagon chiefs know political leaders will restore funding rather than go through with the cut. So now, with sequestration approaching, the Pentagon has announced that the possibility of budget cuts has forced the...

Public policy is a lot like math: No matter what the problem, the wrong answers are far more numerous than the right ones. This is particularly true on the subject of mass shootings and other firearms violence, which have stimulated a new fervor for barking up the wrong tree. Many liberals think the answer to mass shootings and street crime lies in stricter gun regulation: banning "assault weapons," limiting the capacity of magazines or, in their unrestrained moments, adopting ultra-stringent laws like those in Britain or Australia. But most of these ideas are irrelevant or impossible. Even if the Second...

A gay Fort Worth couple says a Tarrant County facility is refusing to rent them space to celebrate their upcoming wedding with a reception. The owner of the All Occasion Party Place told Ben Allen and Justin Hudgins that she would not rent to them because they are gay, they said. After learning they are gay, she said in an email to them that: "... it is because of God that I will not be a part in your reception and I know he loves you but not what you are doing." "It almost felt like a sucker-punch to the...

It's not often that we can measure something like pro or anti-American political bias in American movies, but we can today because of a unique experiment conducted by Hollywood! The reason why is because of the uneven level of quality of most movies, which can make it extremely difficult to make direct comparisons of a characteristic like political bias between them using the measure of how well they do at the box office. For example, one movie in a given genre might have good acting, but suffers from bad writing or poor direction. Another movie might have only okay acting...

The following article from Dagbladet reveals that the Norwegian Defence League was created and nurtured by the Norwegian Security Police (PST). During its early days, three of its six leaders were PST agents, and the man who initiated the creation of the NDL was an agent for multiple organizations — he infiltrated the leadership of “anti-racist” and communist organizations as well. I can’t help but be reminded of the fact that Stalin was a double agent for the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret intelligence service, before the Bolshevik Revolution. The Okhrana thus unwittingly helped engineer the overthrow of the Russian state....

Today the Jewish people celebrate the holiday of Purim. It’s an old and familiar story: An intolerant Jew-hater named Haman hatches a plan to annihilate the Jewish people in the ancient kingdom of Persia. It’s That Genocide Thing. Again. Most of the Jews in this multicultural Persian kingdom have been enlightened to the point where they enthusiastically attend royal feasts and gorge themselves off the golden plates and cups looted from the holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. But these court Jews have evolved past that old, tired Judaism. They’re all new-agey, progressive, and they know that Jewish history has moved...

A group of topless women were dragged away by police on Sunday when they protested against former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as he voted in Italy's election. The protesters, from the Ukrainian women's rights group Femen, shouted "Basta (Enough) Berlusconi", as the media tycoon was voting in a polling station in a Milan school. The same words were painted on their bodies. Police quickly grabbed the women and roughly bundled them away.

The current political wisdom as expressed by the deep thinkers at the Washington Post and the New York Times holds that President Obama stands triumphant and, as such, he is now confidently setting the national agenda. As E.J. Dionne wrote in the Post last week, “He (Obama) is free from the need to save an economy close to collapse, from illusions that Republicans in Congress would work with him readily, from the threat of a rising Tea Party movement, and from the need to run for re-election.” Is that a fact? Today the economy shows an 8% unemployment rate, which...

<p>Home prices in Broward continued their surge into the new year with the median sales prices on single-family homes jumping 24.5 percent in January compared with a year ago, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Realtors said Thursday.</p> <p>The median house price catapulted to $224,088 last month, up from $180,000 in January 2012, the group reported. The median price for condos and townhomes jumped even more — 26.5 percent — during the same period. Palm Beach County's median sales price of single-family houses also surged, up from $179,950 to $218,000.</p>

LAS VEGAS -- Police announced Saturday that they have identified an SUV and a suspect in the shooting death of an Oakland rapper on the Las Vegas Strip, which led to a fatal car crash involving a Maserati and taxi. Las Vegas police said a black Range Rover SUV was found Saturday afternoon at an apartment complex east of the Strip and has since been impounded as evidence. Police are looking for 26-year-old Ammar Harris, who they believed fired the shots in the incident early Thursday. Harris' arrest history in Las Vegas, which is extensive and violent, according to police,...