Free Republic

Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay. The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence...

<p>Perplexing but true: Mitt Romney is on the glide path to the most easily secured nomination a Republican presidential candidate has ever had — while being one of the weakest major candidates either party has ever seen.</p> <p>Paul will certainly stay in it with Romney all the way. Somebody has to. And that is not good news for the Republican Party, which will have to reckon with possibly ill-behaved Paul delegates at the convention in Tampa in August — delegates who might heckle Romney from the floor and otherwise disrupt his coronation.</p>

Las Vegas copyright infringement lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC’s financial problems grew Tuesday when the federal court in Las Vegas commanded the U.S. Marshals Service to seize more than $63,000 in Righthaven assets to satisfy a creditor’s judgment and costs. Lance Wilson, clerk of the court, signed a writ of execution requested by attorneys for Wayne Hoehn, who was sued for copyright infringement by Righthaven —but then defeated Righthaven in court when his case was dismissed this summer. Righthaven since March 2010 has filed 275 lawsuits against websites, bloggers and message board posters claiming they infringed on material from the Las...

In a press release issued this morning, the NAACP condemned 24-hour cable news channel CNN for its recently announced prime time news lineup, calling the lack of diversity in its collection of news anchors a “glaring omission.” “The NAACP is deeply concerned with the lack of African American journalists in prime time news, both on cable and national news shows,” NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said in the statement. “We have come to expect this from the likes of Fox News, but not other networks. While we understand that news is now a 24-hour cycle, most Americans get...

Company is having trouble obtaining financing for working capital. Cardinal Fastener & Specialty Co., a Cleveland-based manufacturer of screws and bolts for wind turbines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Thursday. Cardinal President John Grabner told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the bankruptcy filing is necessary because the company is having trouble obtaining "working-capital financing" from its primary lender, Wells Fargo. Grabner also told the Plain Dealer that the company is profitable and its revenues are growing.President Obama visited Cardinal, which is in Bedford Heights near Cleveland, in January 2009 before his inauguration. "Renewable energy isn't something pie in the...

He's made his name with a controversial show that catches would-be internet sex perverts in televised stings. But now Chris Hansen has found himself on the receiving end of his own hidden camera tactics, after the married NBC anchor was secretly filmed on an illicit date with a blonde television reporter 20 years his junior. Hansen, 51, has allegedly been having an affair with Kristyn Caddell, a 30-year-old Florida journalist, for the last four months. Last weekend he was recorded taking Miss Caddell on a romantic dinner at the exclusive Ritz-Carlton hotel in Manalapan, before spending the night at her...

Reported on MSNBC that Weiners office staff is packing up and leaving his office, locking up behind them. Phones not being answered. Pelosi to address at 10:45.

<p>Breaking: Federal Grand Jury Indicts Former Presidential Candidate John Edwards.</p>

NPR's CEO and president, Vivian Schiller, has been forced to resign, the radio broadcaster's media correspondent said Wednesday, following an undercover sting in which a senior executive was videotaped describing Tea Party members as "racist." On Tuesday, Schiller had condemned the comments by Ron Schiller (no relation) — NPR Foundation's senior vice president for fundraising at the time — that were secretly filmed by political activist James O'Keefe of "Project Veritas." But a Wednesday statement from the chairman of NPR's board of directors, Dave Edwards, said the board had accepted Vivian Schiller's resignation "with deep regret." It was effective immediately......

Oprah's new cable network -- which has not been able to get much traction since its blockbuster opening week -- is getting the "reboot." Network officials have quietly been telling worried advertisers that OWN, Oprah's new channel, will begin reshuffling its lineup in the next weeks and investing millions in advertising to win back faithful viewers. -snip- Advertisers like Procter & Gamble agreed to pay the network $100 million for the first three years, unprecedented for a cable channel that was started from scratch, based solely on Oprah's reputation.

Nice shaker. Looking for seismograph reports now.

Local police are now revealing that the trail to this $8.1 million pot bust began some 1,500 miles away, in Dartmouth. The captain of the vessel and the target of a federal probe is 58-year-old James Ormonde Staveley-O’Carroll, a shipbuilder and self-described firebrand liberal, whose daughter, Sarah, is married to Michael K. Matthews, the son of MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews

Is CNN becoming irrelevant? According to TVByTheNumbers.com, the self-proclaimed most trusted name in news's prime time ratings this year are the lowest since at least 1997: CNN’s woes worsened this year. Despite the somewhat bogus total reach-touting, the network hit primetime ratings lows (or at least going back to 1997, which is all we could dig up data for) for total viewers and viewers 25-54. A look at Tuesday's prime time numbers should give you an idea of just how terribly this cable network is doing. Fox New's "O'Reilly Factor" now frequently gets more viewers than CNN's extended prime...

Mark Mousilitas, Owner of Daily Kos, posted this screed on DAILY KOS about 30 minutes ago. Even the crazy nutroots are getting it now!! Join me in revelling as the insane realize what a failure Obama has been!! "Summer of 2009, Democratic lawmakers were swarmed by phone callers and town hall attendees by the then-nascent teabagger movement, furious at the creeping socialism of a government-run health insurance option. You see, Republicans were so worried that the government-run program would be so efficient, effective, and affordable that it would drive the private insurers out of business. And their teabagger allies rose...

It's schadenfreude time! Tonight, The Huffington Post comment section is awash with 2,000 (and growing) yummy, yummy tears. The Moonbats are beside themselves at the news Obama will allow a two year extension of the current tax rates in exchange for GOP support for an additional 13 months unenjoyment extension. A small but tasty sampling of anguish... UPDATE: Looks like comments are locked at 2,182 and they’re only letting you read the first 50, now. But that will give you the gist.

These are heady times for schadenfreude buffs. People who take delight in the misfortunes of others, and particularly those who love to see the high and mighty taken down a peg or two, are having a field day. Barack Obama just got his head handed to him in the midterm elections. Nancy Pelosi has been knocked from her perch. The Democratic party has taken more hits than Humpty Dumpty. If you're the kind of person who likes to see the tall poppies cut down to size, this is your year. This is not only true in the field of politics....

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will give up her gavel to a GOP successor following Tuesday's midterm election. But a whole bevy of "Speaker Pelosi" themed items are still available online, and they're about to become either collectors' treasures or trash, depending on who you ask. Among them, a "Speaker Pelosi" popcorn tin, which comes filled with three flavors of popcorn and costs $35, and an organic brown baby-doll t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "A woman's place is in the house ... as Speaker" that goes for $20. One might also consider the "Speaker Pelosi" frisbee, which costs a mere $1.99....

(CNN) - A surprising new Senate poll in Delaware shows Republican Christine O'Donnell may be in striking distance of Democrat Chris Coons. According to the new survey from Monmouth University, the surprise Republican nominee is only 10 points behind Coons, drawing 41 percent of the vote. In a previous Monmouth poll conducted two weeks ago, O'Donnell trailed by 19 points. But the latest Monmouth survey differs substantially from two other recent polls, including a Farleigh Dickinson survey released Thursday that showed a 21-point advantage for Coons and a CNN/Time poll released earlier this month that indicated a 19-point lead for...

Make mo mistake, the Sane Congressional Democrat Caucus (SCDC) knew it would come to this as far back as December 2008 even before all the trash from Obama’s election parties was cleaned up. Maryland Democrat Congressman Chris Van Hollen, the de facto chairman of the SCDC, said his Party could lose as many as 70 to 80 seats in this cycle on the same day Barack Obama would bask in the glow of happy Democrat faces oblivious to the coming disaster. The SCDC knew Obama’s support was a mile wide and an inch deep even when the polls were reporting...

Listen to this insane woman who is actually a part of writing laws for us. Jan Schakowsky thinks Republicans are extreme because they quote ancient texts like the Constitution. The tea party is full of cranks because they actually think the founders meant something when adding the tenth amendment and that insanity of insanities….they believe that free people can actually govern themselves. Hear it for yourself.

The Inter-Press Sevice (IPS) is reporting that the head administrator of the Mexican Superintendency of Tax Administration, Raul Diaz, has confirmed that his government is building a wall in the state of Chiapas, along the Mexican/Guatemalan border. The official reason is to stop contraband from coming into Mexico, but as Diaz admitted: “It could also prevent the free passage of illegal immigrants.”

Don’t fire up the Antennagate Alarm just yet, but we’re hearing a good number of reports within our geeky circle that Motorola’s brand new baby, the Verizon Droid 2, might not be so good with that whole maintaining-a-solid-signal thing. We’re not sure just how widespread the issue is — this thing did just ship two days ago after all (hell, a lot of people are just getting their mail ordered units today), so it’s a bit tough to gauge. Amongst those we know who have had’em for a day or two and who pay an nearly obsessive amount of attention...

Lawsuit Details RFC Case Number: C-R10-1356D Court Case Number: 2:10-cv-01356-RLH-RJJ File Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 Plaintiff: Righthaven LLC Defendant: Democratic Underground, LLC David Allen Cause: 17:501 Copyright Infringement Court: Nevada District Court

The left-Wing Whacko loons at Daily Kos, fresh off of their White House/Robert Gibbs mandated Drug testing, have a new outrage to be outraged about. Indiana's Joe Donnelly, the Democrat Congressman from North Central Indiana, can see the writing on the wall, and desperate to separate himself from "The Washington Crowd", is running an ad critical of what he calls "Obama/Pelosi Immigration Policies". The ad begins with Donnelly saying "I went down to the border to see for myself just how bad the situation really is..." And he ends with this, after telling about him voting for more border agents,...

Chelsea Clinton’s wedding—now dubbed “the wedding of the century”—is such an exclusive event that HUMAN EVENTS had not been able to find anyone who is actually attending the July 31 wedding. So many of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s friends and supporters are not invited to the wedding that feelings are getting hurt and egos bruised.

Al Gore was having an affair with Larry David's ex-wife Laurie David. Laurie divorced Seinfeld creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David in 2007 amidst reports she was cheating with the caretaker of their Martha's Vineyard summer home.

The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans -- coverage they know and prize -- will react to the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we're getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation. Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care...

So Spike goes on NBC's WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE last night. Hilarity ensues...as we watch Spike turn several shades of grey as he comes to terms with the fact that: *His great grandpa worked in a CONFEDERATE Colt pistol factory, that was burned down by Sherman. * He almost certainly has white blood. * His ancestors not only had 40 acres and a mule, they had 80 acres and a mule by the 1870 census. *His third cousin twice removed was a fine southern lady living in Texas. Now I have a soft spot for Spike, and his...

If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people. David Westin, president of ABC News, said this was “a difficult time for everybody” involved. Brian Rooney, an ABC reporter in Los Angeles, was let go. Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera. For...

...Beaverton Middle School teacher Jason Levin's group wants to infiltrate the Tea Party to discredit the organization. But since Levin's name has been associated with the "Crash the Tea Party" Web site, he has been harassed by people who say they belong to that group. Levin told KATU-TV that his phone has been ringing around the clock and his answering machine is recording threats...

As most of you know, ther WWZN-AM 1510 transmitter and array are located in Waltham, where there is considerable flooding due to global warming. As a result, WWZN is off-the-air today at least, meaning no Stephanie Miller on the radio, just her web site.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) was sued on Monday by a large union pension fund that accused the Wall Street investment bank of overpaying its executives. The International Brotherhood of Electric Workers fund filed the lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court, seeking to recover money for the company on behalf of other shareholders. It seeks to stop Goldman from allocating roughly 47 percent of 2009 net revenue as compensation, saying such allocations "vastly overcompensate management and constitute corporate waste." The lawsuit also wants Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and others in management, rather than shareholders, to be responsible for charitable contributions that...

Air America, the long-suffering progressive talk radio network, abruptly shut down on Thursday, bowing to what it called a “very difficult economic environment.” The chairman of Air America Media, Charlie Kireker, said in a statement that the company would file under Chapter 7 bankruptcy “to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business...” The closing did not come as a surprise. Air America, which began six years ago and has 100 affiliated stations, cycled through a number of owners and never found its financial footing. It first filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006 but managed to stay on the air....

99% of the time, I hate Jon Stewart's incessant pimping for the radical left, but this had me laughing harder than I have in a long, long time. http://www.thefoxnation.com/entertainment/2010/01/19/jon-stewart-melts-down-over-mass-race

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

VANITY Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn't deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning. Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year. Additional...

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big? In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebodys going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and hes going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But well be there to watch. I think hes Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you...

Amsterdam becoming the car tipping capital of the world?Ever seen one of those little Smart cars? They may be pretty rare in the US, but in Europe you'll have a hard time not being able to find the little buggers. Especially in the major cities of Europe, the small cars are extremely popular, as they are a breeze to park. In fact, they are so easy to park, that many owners can fit two of them in a single parking spot. Smart car owners in Amsterdam may be starting to have second thoughts about their little cars, because of an...

July 22, 2009Can the Schadenfreude, GOPGene Schwimmer One detects the acrid odor of hubris wafting from Republican quarters, the kind of hubris that leaves egg on the face of those arrogant enough to celebrate prematurely a flailing president's political demise. While pointing out favorable (to Republicans) trends, Republicans need to avoid gloating lest they have their prematurely triumphal blogs and articles thrown back at them if, Clinton-like, Obama's numbers do a complete turnaround, and Obama resumes and even intensifies his egotistical preening, while his supporters gloat, "Hey, GOP, remember when you were publishing smug "analyses" of every decline in Obama's...

Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney, who is in an Israeli jail for trying to take humanitarian aid to Gaza, says the White House has done nothing to secure her release. Speaking to Press TV from inside the Israeli jail, she said US taxpayers paid for Israel's 22-day war on the Gaza Strip. “Operation Cast Lead was made possible by the US taxpayers' gift to the Israeli war machine in the form of F16s, helicopters gunship, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and anything that kills," she told Press TV from inside the Israeli jail on Saturday. McKinney has been in...

President Obama is just killing the progressive movement. For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference, where speaker after speaker -- Obama sometimes among them -- would give rollicking denunciations of the Bush administration before packed rooms of partisans. But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year's gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America's Future Now, but that didn't prevent a sharp decline in participation. At...

[snip] Final paragraph: All must agree that the die is cast and a hard judgment made. Otherwise progressive politics will be dragged down at a general election in May 2010 that could lead to a much bigger defeat than Labour suffered in 1979. That might bring a chance for other parties to take it forward, as the Liberal Democrats are trying to do in this election. But they are not placed to enter government. Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, and as we’ve written about before, the Obama Administration is getting ready to be much tougher than its predecessor in the anti-trust realm. The terrible irony is that a large number of tech executives and workers at Silicon Valley companies supported the Obama candidacy and now it may impact them in a very direct way. All this goes double for Google, whose CEO Eric Schmidt was an advisor to Obama on technology issues. The new head of anti-trust for the US Department of Justice, Christine Varney, has already used the “m-word” in connection with...

German linguists might have to add a couple syllables to “schadenfreude” to capture the sentiments of those observing the NY Times/Boston Globe death match. People aren’t just revelling in the papers’ misfortune anymore. They can now simultaneously delight in the Times’ hypocrisy. On today’s Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle blasted the NY Times as the “most hypocritical media company in the world” for what he sees as the Gray Lady’s bullying of the employees at its subsidiary, the Boston Globe. View video here.

Paper Cuts: 'New York Times' Union Agrees In another sign of the dire situation facing American newspapers, the Newspaper Guild in New York City agreed to a 5% cut in salary for members at The New York Times, clearing the way for reductions that will affect newsroom staff and a number of other salaried professionals. The pay cut is meant to be temporary -- ending Dec. 3 -- but given current revenue trends, may become permanent. The union faced a choice between the pay cut and the loss of 80 jobs in the newsroom and elsewhere -- an increasingly common...

Hollywood, needing to cut costs in lean times, is starting to say no to its stars. For years, top movie stars often landed deals paying them a percentage -- sometimes as much as 20% -- of a studio's take of box-office revenues from the first dollar the movie makes, even if it turned out to be a flop that cost the studio millions. As a result, the biggest celebrities broke the $20 million mark. Eddie Murphy got that kind of payday for the flop "Meet Dave," which cost Twentieth Century Fox about $70 million and took in only $11.8 million...

The economy's gone bust, and so have they. Scores of professional New York women stripped of their six-figure jobs are now working as "gentlemen's club entertainers" at upscale Manhattan jiggle joints. Former Wall Streeters, fashion executives and real-estate agents are pole dancing and strip ping for as much as $1,500 a night -- but also because they like the flexible hours. Randi Newton, 28, who lives in Midtown, was a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley before the crash but was fired. "A few nights after I got laid off, I went with friends to a strip club to get drunk...

As a rookie broker at a mom-and-pop mortgage company in Federal Way, Rob Collins had a killer month writing loans in the frothy, frenzied 2005 housing market. He made $37,000. So he took $5,000 in cash and his fiancée, Heidi, to Bellevue Square. “I told her, ‘We’re not leaving here until we spend it all,’” Rob recalled this week. They spent it all right. Heidi bought a pair of designer Richmond jeans, diamond stud earrings, and some odds and ends to supplement her wardrobe. Rob, always impeccably dressed, bought clothes too, including an Italian leather jacket. Over the following 18...

Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who have applauded the Obama administration's science, energy and health care initiatives, are growing increasingly anxious that the president and Congress will subject their industry to both closer scrutiny and higher taxation. Obama's budget plan already signals changes in tax policy. And new fears were raised by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's statement Thursday that advisers to venture capital funds, private equity firms and hedge funds should for the first time be required to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission and file reports to enable the government to assess whether the funds "individually or collectively pose...

A woman who allegedly intended to artificially inseminate her wife with her brother's semen has been charged with domestic assault and battery. Pittsfield police responded to a call shortly before 4:30 p.m. Tuesday in the city's Morningside neighborhood, where the assault allegedly occurred. Stephanie K. Lighten, 26, was released on personal recognizance after denying the allegations in Central Berkshire District Court Wednesday morning.