Free Republic

John Mellencamp has issued a blunt, powerful statement calling for gun control in America. Posting on his social media channels, the 72-year-old singer/songwriter writes, "Excuse me for stating the obvious truth. I do so out of love for this country and the pain of learning, once again, that children have been killed by gun violence. "If we as a country want to find the collective will within ourselves to change our gun laws, let’s stop playing silly political games. Show the carnage on the news. Show the American people the dead children and others who have been struck down. Show...

- The U.S. Treasury Department today announced new vehicle classifications that will allow more vehicles to qualify as SUVs and get the newly updated EV tax credits. - The new rules consider the Cadillac Lyriq, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Tesla Model Y, and others to be SUVs and thus eligible under a higher $80,000 MSRP limit. - The rules change is retroactive, so anyone who bought a vehicle since January 1, 2023, that now qualifies can claim the credit.

Huge crowd and of BLM protesters at Met Gala.

An Aspen teen and his parents were charged Monday with giving cocaine and alcohol to underage high school students during parties at their home near Aspen Highlands, according to court documents. Joseph Lipsey IV, 19, was arrested Monday on his way to Aspen High School, and his mother Shira Lipsey, 44, was arrested at her home. Both were charged with multiple counts, including felonies, and released after each posting $100,000 cash-only bonds. Lipsey is the same teen charged in January with two counts of felony vehicular assault after he was alleged to have been at the wheel of a Tesla...

2019 is slated to produce an extraordinarily long list of multi-billion-dollar IPOs from San Francisco Bay Area heavyweights like Lyft, Uber, Palantir, Pinterest, Airbnb, Slack, Postmates, and Instacart. The result will be a massive and sudden injection of liquid cash into a region already infamous for both the nation’s priciest real estate as well as a vast and growing wealth gap between rich and poor neighbors. On stage at Monday’s event, a three-hour catered affair titled “Tech IPOs effect on Bay Area Real Estate” held in DocuSign headquarters, Deniz Kahramaner, a big data real estate agent at the tech real...

It’s okay, the 1 percent only pays 41 percent of California’s income taxes. And half the state pays no income tax at all. No one will even notice they’re gone. Prop. 30, approved by voters in November 2012, raised state income taxes retroactively to Jan. 1, 2012, on singles making more than $250,000 and married couples making $500,000. It raised rates by one, two or three percentage points through 2018, bringing the top rate on incomes above $1 million to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Bryan Goldberg, who founded the Bleacher Report sports website and sold it to...

Note Video included at article link. SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) - The Internal Revenue Service has launched a new global program to target what it calls “high wealth individuals,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said Monday. “Through our new global high wealth operating unit we are taking a unified look at the entire web of business and economic entities controlled by high wealth individuals so we can better assess the risk such arrangements pose to tax compliance,” Shulman said at the National Press Club on Monday. Shulman said the IRS is using “our robust and evolving enforcement program that ensures that everyone pays...

The majority of the taxpayers in our country believe it a foregone conclusion that taxes will rise substantially in the near future and that the Bush tax cuts will soon be no more than a footnote of political history. You don't need to be a genius to see that the government will have to raise more revenue to pay for seemingly infinite spending, but before we resign ourselves to higher taxes, we should consider defending the Bush tax cuts against the left. Two of the most oft-cited objections to the Bush tax cuts by the left are that it helped...

chorus: Obama beautiful morning Obama beautiful day I've got an Oh Bama feeling Everything's O bama K He's the bright golden haze on the meadow He's the hope of John Stewart and Leno His ethics are high, but not pie-in-the-sky He thinks before talking, and tries not to lie All our children are waiting for clean air All the polar bears want is just their share The world needs to heal from the this peril and war Not the mav'rick please earth screams we don't need no more! We need Barry to bring us together We're tired of 8 years...

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland (AP) -- They're not as loaded as Leona Helmsley's pooch, but three Maryland canines are plenty rich enough to live high on the dog. The dogs -- named Buckshot, Katie and Obu-Jet -- inherited $400,000 and a house in Hagerstown with the death last year of owner Ken Kemper. Altogether, their estate is worth about $800,000. The beagle and two Labrador mixes were strays when Kemper adopted them. They now live at their house with caretaker Roy Grady. They might not be aware of their wealth, but they do know that on one night a week Grady treats...

Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory By Jonathan Duffy BBC News Online Magazine The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organisation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever. Given its reputation as perhaps the most powerful organisation in the world, the Bilderberg group doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations. Telephone inquiries are met with an impersonal female voice - the Dutch equivalent of the BT Callminder woman - reciting back the number and inviting callers to "leave...

Sent by his American parents to a posh Swiss boarding school in the foothills of the Alps, an 11-year-old John F. Kerry did what most any other kid would do - he learned to curse in Italian. ``Spaccare la faccia, porco,'' Cam Kerry remembered his older brother saying, a phrase which, loosely translated, means ``Shove it in your face, pig.'' But John Kerry wasn't any normal kid. Just a few years later, tucked in another high-brow boarding school - this one the exclusive St. Paul's in Concord, N.H., a teenage Kerry helped form a debating club and won a prize...

<p>A majority of America's well-off households are independent, goal-oriented and confident.</p> <p>NEW YORK (Money Magazine) - After a year in which Americans endured a terrorist attack, layoffs, a stock market swoon and news of billion-dollar corporate swindles, we wanted to gauge the mood of affluent Americans. Are they worried? What, if anything, are they changing about their financial lives? How much is enough to feel rich? What do they think their chances are of becoming wealthy? What's the best way to do it? What does affluence mean to them, anyway?</p>