Free Republic

When Rick Perry stumps for businesses to relocate, at least he’s cheering for his home state of Texas as the final destination. In Minnesota, we have the unusual experience of having a governor laud a corporation for moving its headquarters out of the state — and out of the country. Medtronic, a leading manufacturer of medical devices, acquired an Irish firm in the same sector, but will move its corporate headquarters to Ireland rather than transfer Covidien’s executive operations to Minnesota (via Gary Gross): “As I look at the project as governor of Minnesota, this is a good deal...

US vice-president's wife Jill Biden arrives at famine zone with two planes, a 29 car convoy and CNN Wearing a linen trouser suit, neon-green Nike trainers and a CNN lapel-mic, Jill Biden sat in the shade of an acacia tree and listened solemnly to Fatuma Adem's story. By Mike Pflanz, Dadaab 6:32PM BST 08 Aug 2011 Wearing a linen trouser suit, neon-green Nike trainers and a CNN lapel-mic, Jill Biden sat in the shade of an acacia tree and listened solemnly to Fatuma Adem's story. Watching the wife of the US vice-president touring the world's biggest refugee camp for famine-hit...

Footage of Obama on the driving range during a well-earned holiday in Hawaii reveals the Democrat’s mantra of change ought to be applied to his swing. Obama appears nervy as he addresses the ball and then lifts his head before the shot is completed, as he finishes with limp shoulders at odds with his impressive, unshakeable stance behind a podium. As a left-hander, Obama would do well to study the form and poise of Phil Mickelson, though having won a ‘major’ at the first time of asking, Obama has one trait he need not exchange with the 2004 and 2006...

“They”? Who in the hell is “they”? — Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch Recently Barack Obama got into trouble by explaining to an affluent San Francisco audience why the cash-strapped, mostly white, working classes in Pennsylvania and the Midwest do not logically vote for his brand of economic populism, but instead cling to issues that sophisticates can see are extraneous to their economic plight. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations....

Laurie David has been called the high priestess of Hollywood activism: She's raised millions of dollars for environmental causes, helped bring Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from lecture hall to big screen, and used pop-culture channels to spread the word about global warming. (snip) I woke up the morning after the election, November 3, and cried for three straight days. I couldn't stop. Not because my candidate lost, which he had, but because of what it meant for the solutions to global warming. We had just reelected a president who surrounds himself with advisors and staff culled from the oil...

Despite Prop. 82's loss, director-activist says he'll continue to back liberal causes. LOS ANGELES -- After shutting himself off from the public for nearly three months, movie director and actor Rob Reiner stepped back into the spotlight election night and declared he wasn't leaving the political stage. Voters had just handed a resounding defeat to Proposition 82, the universal preschool initiative he'd championed. Reiner had been forced to step down from the chairmanship of the First 5 California commission because of criticism about its $23 million taxpayer-financed preschool advertising campaign. He'd gone into a self-imposed exile from the media in...

The real threat to U.S. security By Rick Steves Special to The Times Rick Steves The greatest risk to our society today is not Islamo-fascist terrorism, but the people who use that term to scare us. As the human, fiscal and ecological damage caused by our nation's economic priorities grows, it's becoming clear that we're addicted to more than oil — we're addicted to military spending, too. The United States spends as much on its military as the rest of humanity combined: more than $400 billion annually (not including the hundreds of billions of dollars for the wars in Iraq...

November and December are the months when newly elected officials and their allies finally start telling voters about things they didn't want to mention during the campaign. New Jersey Gov.-elect Jon Corzine and his predecessor, outgoing Acting Gov. Dick Codey, finally 'fessed up about the Garden State's precarious fiscal health Thursday in speeches at the convention of the state's League of Municipalities. And it ain't pretty. "We're pretty much broke," conceded Codey. "We have more debt than we can afford. Next year's budget deficit is at least $5 billion. School construction and transportation funding have virtually dried up. And we...

Don't soil our publicly subsidized new HQ with your riff-raff When The New York Times and Forest City Ratner Companies open their grand new office building on Eighth Avenue, it won't have a Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's, or Nathan's, because they are specifically forbidden under terms of a land deal with the state. But a Starbucks or Cosi would be just fine. The lease, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, also bars renting space in the 52-story building for "a school or classroom or juvenile or adult day care or drop-in center." It forbids "medical uses,...

US Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who had hoped to replace George W. Bush as president yesterday, instead sat in the cold and clapped as the Republican began a second four-year term. Iowa Democratic Senator Tom Harkin patted Senator Kerry on the back shortly before the inauguration Senator Kerry had hoped would be his. As Mr Bush delivered his inaugural address, Senator Kerry, about 10m away on the steps of the US Capitol, joined other lawmakers and the crowd in repeated applause. Senator Kerry looked relaxed, at times wistful. He frequently smiled, able to hide any disappointment over what...

On Thursday evening, the basement of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church rang with passionate denunciations of institutional racism. Community leaders called for a boycott, spoke of arrogance toward blacks, and threatened a class-action lawsuit. Their unlikely targets? Institutions that the causal observer might think would be bedfellows of the black community: The Democratic Party and Air America, the country's first full-scale attempt at a commercially viable liberal talk-radio network. Something has gone terribly wrong. The launch of Air America was supposed to agitate Republicans and conservative talk-show stalwarts. Al Franken, the biggest name on the new network's bench, explained in his...

What is "Big Government?" We've been conditioned to believe these are bad words - but when Hurricane Isabel ripped through the East Coast last week, leaving many homes and businesses significantly damaged in its wake, Bush told disaster relief workers and governors of the affected states, "If you need help, let us know." This was not Bush showing his "compassionate" side... this is what the federal government does -it helps people in need. Contrary to Republican slogans against "Big Government" or "Tax and Spend Liberals," if you look at the reality, government spending is a key part of what makes...

SHEEN EMBRACED IN CANADA Sun Sep 21 2003 23:31:42 ET American actor and activist Martin Sheen had kind words for Canada when he received an award for being a Christian role model, the CANADIAN PRESS reports. "Every time I cross this border I feel like I've left the land of lunatics," Sheen said Saturday, adding he was "proud" of Canada for not entering the Iraq war. "You are not armed and dangerous. You do not shoot each other. I always feel a bit more human when I come here." Sheen, who has been outspoken recently in his opposition the U.S.-led...

<p>HYANNIS - For decades it's been a favorite of environmentalists in search of cleaner, cheaper, renewable forms of energy: harnessing the power of the wind to generate electricity. Offshore wind farms, fueled by an endless supply of blustery raw material, surely could supplant fossil fuels, particularly along the gusty coastline of New England.</p>