Free Republic

Last night, for the first time, I watched the movie, The Fugitive, from start to finish. The film is about a surgeon, falsely accused and convicted of murdering his wife, who escapes during a prison transfer, and is pursued by a US marshall. For Chicagoans, the film is one of the great movie portrayals of the city. But I now believe the classic moment in the movie comes in the 82nd minute. Harrison Ford, playing the falsely accused doctor, Richard Kimble, tries to lose himself from his pursuers by joining in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. This parade always draws...

NEW YORK – Wall Street's March rally is on hold after the White House rejected turnaround plans from General Motors Corp. and Chrysler and gave investors an economic reality check. Major indexes fell about 3 percent Monday, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which lost about 254 points but finished well off its lows. Financial stocks weighed heavily on the market amid worries that banks will need fresh injections of capital. Fears of an automaker bankruptcy have been looming over investors for months, and the latest developments, which included the removal of GM's CEO Rick Wagoner, made the market uneasy...

IF you think there are no consequences to hysterical, anti-corporate grandstanding in Washington, pay attention to what's happening across the pond: "This is just the beginning." So warned a public letter signed this week by a vigilante group called "Bank Bosses are Criminals." The thugs claimed responsibility for vandalizing a former financial executive's home and car in Edinburgh, Scotland. The bank official, Sir Fred Goodwin, had been excoriated by UK politicians for refusing to give up company pension benefits dubbed "obscene," "grotesque," "unjustifiable and unacceptable." The vigilantes were stoked by a former newspaper editor, one Max Hastings, who wrote a...

Data gathered by a NOAA aircraft over northern Alaska and the Arctic Ocean in April 2008 indicate that forest fires in Russia and agricultural burning in Kazakhstan may substantially contribute to springtime plumes of dirty air known as arctic haze (note the dark stripe of smoky air above and beyond the NASA plane shown in this image).Credit: J. Cozic/CIRES/NOAA Chemical Sciences DivisionData gathered by aircraft flying over northern Alaska and the Arctic Ocean in April 2008 hint that many springtime plumes of arctic haze in the region,

WASHINGTON (AP) - Day after day, reports of the dangers of climate and climate change circulate in the news, often filled with confusing data and debate. In an effort to improve understanding of climate science, a group of government agencies has combined efforts to produce "Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science."

Last weekend, Harvard University sponsored a conference called (I am not making this up) "The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences." Its purpose was to try to figure out why, since everyone knows the current crisis amounts to a failure of the market economy, the stupid rubes continue to believe in it. The promotional literature for the conference opened with That Quotation from Alan Greenspan — the one in which he suggested that there was, after all, a "flaw" in the free market he hadn't noticed before. Well, that does it, then! If our Soviet commissar in charge of...

When times start to get tough, you begin to notice that some of the businesses and people you thought would always be around are starting to fade away. Two old companies made big changes this month. One is a new car dealer on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco for nearly 60 years. The other is a ship company that has been operated out of either San Francisco or Oakland since the Gold Rush. Everyone who grew up in the Bay Area or lived here for a while has heard of Ellis Brooks Motors, mostly through an advertising jingle that...

Who is Joe the Plumber? He is Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio man looking to buy a plumbing business who came to symbolize the notion of spreading the wealth in Wednesday night's third and final presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. Earlier this week, when Wurzelbacher got a chance to speak with Obama during a campaign appearance in Toledo, he told Obama that his tax plan would keep him from buying the business that currently employs him. Sensing an opportunity during the debate, McCain cited that exchange when the candidates were asked to explain why their economic...

It was business as usual at the Cala Foods supermarket on Nob Hill this week. Customers lined up six deep at the cashiers and shoppers crowded the well-stocked aisles. So why is the store closing in 2010?The simple answer is money. Although Cala is making money, the profit margin for a large supermarket isn't large. Food costs are up, vendors are charging more to deliver products. Wages and insurance costs are rising. But more than that, supermarket sites are some of the last large real estate lots in the city. Eager developers are making such generous offers that store owners...

Now here is a Patriot Act everyone can get behind. It's called the Patriot Corporation of America Act and it rewards the companies that don't screw their employees and weaken the country by moving the jobs to China and elsewhere. In these troubled times, doesn't that sound like common sense? Government policy presently works in opposite ways. It literally assists and subsidizes the disloyal free riders who boost their profits by dumping their obligations to the home country. It's called globalization. Establishment wisdom says there is nothing politicians can do about it. But the bills introduced Thursday by three senators...

There was an old, and sadly funny joke about the Evolution of Math Quizzes that went like this: 1960s A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit? 1970s New-math A logger exchanges a set (L) of lumber for a set (M) of money. The cardinality of Set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits? 1980s A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is...

The holiday shopping frenzy is upon us, but before you race to the mall to claim your new PlayStation 3, iPod or giant flat-panel TV, you might want to heed the words of the Rev. Billy, a.k.a. performance artist Bill Talen. Talen, 47, a longtime Bay Area actor and playwright who moved to New York in the early 1990s, has since become a well-known street performer in Manhattan as the Rev. Billy, an over-the-top, fire-and-brimstone preacher with a platinum blond pompadour and clerical collar who rails against the ills of consumerism and warns of a coming "shopocalypse" if humans fail...

The Bush administration will unveil its methadone plan for the mortgage crisis today. Instead of going cold turkey and letting the free market take its course, the administration reportedly has reached an agreement with lenders and mortgage investors to freeze interest rates for a select group of subprime borrowers who made bad, greedy or uninformed decisions. "You're just giving the junkie more dope," says Christopher Whalen, managing partner with Institutional Risk Analytics, a consulting firm. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also has urged Congress to pass a law that would let cities and states sell tax-exempt bonds to refinance mortgages for...

America's most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true! Is this why they hate us? Why we hate ourselves? Is this why we seem to have no real idea who the hell we are anymore, or what it means to have a humane and thoughtful national identity, and therefore we happily scratch and claw and fight our way into giant fluorescent-lit hellpits for a chance at a $29 DVD player and some crappy plasma TVs and a pallet of heavily discounted spatulas? More broadly: Is this why we're suffering such a general feeling of...

While out for a round of golf on Monday a middle-aged couple had their game disrupted by a teenage boy bearing a grudge and a gun. The strange encounter took place at Ringenäs golf course near Halmstad in western Sweden, Aftonbladet reports. At around 5.30pm the golfers came upon a boy dressed in camouflage combat fatigues and a helmet. Before they had time to react, the boy took aim at the pair and screamed "bloody capitalists" before firing a shot into the air above their heads. "My wife ducked behind her bag. It was very unpleasant. We were scared," the...

BERLIN (AP) - German authorities are using scent tracking to keep tabs on possibly violent protesters against next month's Group of Eight summit - a tactic that is drawing comparisons with the methods of former East Germany's secret police. Scent samples have been taken from an undisclosed number of people believed to be a possible danger to the upcoming summit so that police dogs can pick out the perpetrators if there is violence, the Hamburger Morgenpost reported Tuesday. Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, confirmed the report but would give no further details. "This has happened to several suspects,"...

Industry fears costs of minimum wage boost, sick leave, health care will hurt trade - The first big hit to the San Francisco restaurant industry came three years ago this month -- a $1.75-an-hour increase in the minimum wage. The second came last Monday when the city became the first in the country to require all businesses to provide paid sick leave to their employees. The third is due in July when the city's plan to require health coverage for uninsured residents kicks in -- assuming the employer mandate portion of the ordinance survives a legal challenge by restaurant owners....

The National Labor Relations Board has filed a formal complaint against Chandler-based Bashas' Inc., alleging the supermarket operator broke the law when it changed workers' health benefits without first consulting their union. According to the complaint issued Thursday, United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 99 requested in May that Bashas' enter collective bargaining with the union about changes to the health-benefits program. But the company "failed and refused" to bargain and changed its benefits plan in June, according to the complaint. Statewide, Bashas' operates about 158 stores, including Bashas', Food City and A.J.'s Fine Foods, and employs about 14,500...

Former President Clinton on Friday called the campaign against Proposition 87 a "ruse" and charged the oil companies with making "bogus" claims that the initiative would drive up gas prices. In a rare endorsement of a state ballot measure, the nation's former chief executive chided the oil companies that have pumped $64 million into the "No on 87" campaign. "If they really thought you were going to pay for this, would they have spent all that money trying to convince you to vote against it?" he asked students at a "Yes on 87" rally Friday. Introduced by Academy Award-winning actress...

Israel’s battle against Hizballah and Hamas continues to bring out the antisemites at Daily Kos: The case against Zionism, a historical perspective part 1. The writer of this diary congratulates him/her/itself for criticizing Israel without being antisemitic—yet the entire purpose of this semi-literate diatribe is to question Israel’s right to exist. Quote : "I have decided to write this essay because I have noticed a general lack of understanding of the the history of the conflict on this board. This writing is intended to showcase where the philosophy of zionism conflicts with my own philsophy on morality(which I believe almost...