Free Republic

Good morning FReepers. I’d like to tap the best knowledge base on the planet here at FR. I own a house in a beach community in the NE. Current rules state you are not allowed to own more than 1 house in your name, so people get around this by having a company purchase the property. My neighbor behind me, on the water, has a small house off to the side, so it doesn’t impede my view. I’d like to keep it that way, and purchase the house should it come up for sale. The man that owns it has...

TransCanada Corp. said Monday it plans to begin building a major portion of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline despite the Obama administration's decision to reject a key permit for the project. The company told the State Department in a letter Monday that it will begin construction of a section of the pipeline that runs from Cushing, Okla., to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The stand-alone portion of the project, which TransCanada dubbed the Gulf Coast Project, will cost $2.3 billion and will be completed in mid-to-late 2013, according to the company. The project must still receive other regulatory approvals....

COLLEGE STATION — When Rick Perry arrived at Texas A&M University in 1968, it was at the end of a summer in which Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring, protesters at the Democratic National Convention were met by a police riot and the United States reeled from the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. With its conservative culture, military tradition and focus on agriculture, few places in the U.S. might have seemed more insulated from the prevailing currents of the age. But A&M was in the midst of its own political awakening. Facing falling enrollment,...

REVIEW SUMMARY Florida Gov. Rick Scott may want to add California to his list of high-tax states from which to recruit employers. Consider the case of Accutek Packaging Equipment Companies, a privately held manufacturer of packaging equipment now based near San Diego. Darren Chocholek, the company’s chief financial officer and vice president, says he’s so impressed with Florida’s favorable tax and regulatory climate that he’s considering moving his company’s headquarters to Fort Myers. Chocholek formed a separate company in Florida and recently acquired enough industrial space in Fort Myers and Cape Coral to fill two football fields. The 133,000 square...

NEW YORK - The Al Jazeera Network plans to announce on Thursday that it has signed a deal to run its news on Worldfocus, a syndicated nightly news program produced in New York and distributed throughout the United States. The deal would help the international news network, one of the top services in the Arabic-speaking world, broaden its reach in the United States, where it so far has been available to only a limited audience. Worldfocus, hosted by former NBC News correspondent Martin Savidge, is produced by New York City public broadcaster WLIW and syndicated to a number of Public...

DETROIT -- Big financial institutions have been battered by mortgages gone bad. But a tiny Michigan bank is getting attention in the industry by turning a profit on loans without even charging interest. Its specialty: financial products that comply with Islamic law. That means no collecting interest, no short selling and no contracts that are considered exceedingly risky. It also rules out some of the activity that got Western finance in trouble — subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and the like. "When you look at the economic crisis we're in, if you were to follow Islamic or Sharia financing, you...

DETROIT Jan 26, 2006 — Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian is acquiring 12 million shares of General Motors Corp. stock, matching the number of shares he sold in December, a federal regulatory filing showed on Wednesday. Kerkorian's private equity firm, Tracinda Corp., bought 5 million shares of GM stock on Monday for an average purchase price of $21.40, or approximately $107 million, it said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Tuesday, Tracinda agreed to purchase an additional 7 million GM shares in a private transaction for $22.25 per share, or approximately $155.8 million. Those purchases would boost...

KNIGHT RIDDER NEW ORLEANS - Every five minutes or so, an Army Blackhawk helicopter hovered 50 feet above the collapsed 17th Street Canal levee Friday and dropped a 3,000-pound bag of sand. Each one vanished into the water, showing no apparent results. But after several false starts, the Army Corps of Engineers said their levee repair efforts are slowly taking hold. If there is no more rain, the breaches in New Orleans' all-important levees could be closed by Sunday, said engineer Don Basham, chief of the engineering division, from headquarters in Washington. Pumping the water out of the city is...

Yes folks, that is her real name. I think her formal name is Bunnatine, but Bunny Greenhouse has a nice ring-if you are a burlesque dancer. All kidding aside, Bunny is in a tight spot, a place she freely put herself in by speaking out against the Army Corp of Engineers contract that was awarded to Halliburton before that start of the war in Iraq. Greenhouse had been critical of Halliburton's handling of servicing US troops in Bosnia. While the Big H is primarily an oil services company, with KBR being the cash cow, they also got into the business...

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that oil production and export deals in the world's fourth-largest crude producer needed to be clarified. The country's biggest capital today is the oil industry and our oil reserves," the ultra-conservative Tehran mayor said in a radio address after winning presidential elections on Friday. "The atmosphere ruling over our deals, production and exports is not clear. We should clarify it," he added, without elaborating. Political analysts expect Ahmadinejad to make sweeping changes in the management of the state-run oil industry after repeated comments during the campaign in which he accused...

ORLANDO: Responding to an urgent request from warfighters, Lockheed Martin expanded the capabilities of its Predator anti-tank weapon and delivered 400 rounds to the U.S. Marine Corps. The U.S. Marine Corps requested Lockheed Martin to modify the shoulder-fired, short-range Predator anti-tank weapon into a direct-attack urban assault weapon. Renamed the Short-Range Assault Weapon-Multiple Purpose Variant (SRAW-MPV), the new urban assault missile has a multiple-purpose blast warhead, enabling it to defeat a variety of targets such as buildings and bunkers, as well as light-armored vehicles. "The ability of the SRAW team to field the SRAW-MPV in less than six months in...

The former chairman of the Prime Minister Paul Martin-owned company that accepted $1 million from Saddam Hussein, worked with Martin at the Paul Desmarais-owned Power Corporation. William Turner was chairman of Cordex Petroleums Inc., an oil and gas exploration and production company based in Alberta with an American subsidiary in Denver, Colo. Listed among Martin’s Public Declaration of Declarable Assets submitted to the Federal Ethics Committee are his 100 percent ownership of both Canada Steamship Lines and Canada Steamship Lines Group Inc., which owns 4.6 percent of Cordex Petroleums Inc. Martin’s mentor and senior aide to UN Secretary Kofi Annan...

Most Canadian companies look forward to the day they earn themselves a mention on the prime-time news. They hire PR firms and spend thousands to harass news editors with press releases to tout their latest acquisition, invention or foreign venture in hopes of convincing someone to give them even a passing mention on the national news–never mind the nearly unimaginable publicity of being plugged on a U.S. newscast. But when Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada found itself, in late January, the topic of a news story on America’s top-rated Fox News Channel, which draws millions of U.S. and international viewers,...

Loofah enthusiast says recordings will prove he was set upOCTOBER 20--Claiming that Andrea Mackris and her lawyers have intentionally transcribed secretly recorded conversations in a "misleading manner," lawyers for Bill O'Reilly and Fox News are seeking copies of these recordings, claiming that they will back up the cable news star's contention that he was set up by his former "O'Reilly Factor" colleague. After lawyers for Fox and O'Reilly filed the below court petition, a New York judge ordered Mackis and her attorneys to appear at a hearing Friday to disclose whether such tapes exist (and why they should not be...

Kerry-Edwards Phone Corps As a member of the Kerry-Edwards Phone Corps, you can start helping our volunteer efforts in key battleground states around the country. Members of this dedicated group of supporters make phone calls into battleground states to recruit volunteers for specific events such as canvassing and phone banking. You can join the Phone Corps and start making calls right now using our easy online tool at: http://calls.johnkerry.com

In a sworn statement to be made public Tuesday, University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman said a four-letter word used toward women can sometimes be used as a "term of endearment." The comment comes from Hoffman's latest sworn testimony in connection with a federal lawsuit against the university. The suit was filed by women who say they were sexually assaulted by CU football players and recruits. A lawyer for one of the women asked Hoffman about former CU kicker Katie Hnida being called the "c- word" by a teammate. That player was later disciplined by coach Gary Barnett for making...

Article Summary: Developer Stephen Lathrop was threatened with jail and fines for turning a DUMP into a lake and resolving a 40-year flooding problem. Mr. Lathrop was doing, at no cost to the taxpayer, what two very expensive government studies had recommended -- digging a lake or reservoir to control flooding. Stephen Lathrop and his neighbors continue to live in the bureaucratic, regulatory nightmare zone. A place where dumps are protected "wetlands" and flood control is badly needed. A government solution (from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency) is only allowed when regulators can needlessly...

Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent who is nicknamed the “Dean of the White House Press Corp”, has made some astoundingly flippant remarks about President George W. Bush that leads one to believe that her time as an effective journalist has passed and that certainly her ability to at least offer the illusion of being an objective reporter has vanished. Recently, at the Society for Professional Journalists’ annual awards banquet, this once celebrated reporter, who in the beginning of her career possessed the clear vision that every honest journalist embraces, the goal of being an unbiased reporter, has through...