Free Republic

The tar sandhills near Mills in north central Nebraska, through which the Keystone XL pipeline is planned to be built. The woman seated before the row of suited state legislators in her red Husker team hoodie was choking on tears. She had grown up on a farm in Nebraska. Her parents had grown up on farms, in the days before electricity and running water, and now she said generations of toil and sweat could be destroyed in an instant by a $7bn pipeline project. A leak from the pipeline, which would run from the tar sands of Alberta to the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Home prices dropped in nearly three quarters of U.S. cities over the summer, dragged down by a decline in buyer interest and a high number of foreclosures. The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday that the median price for previously occupied homes fell in the July-September quarter in 111 out of 150 metropolitan areas tracked by the group. Prices are compared with the same quarter from the previous year. Fourteen cities had double-digit declines.

Will Baby Boomers be the last generation to enjoy the modern concept of a leisure-filled retirement? It's a worthy question to ponder in light of a new Pew Research Center report showing a growing wealth gap between young and old in the United States. Using government data over the last 25 years, Pew found that households headed by those over 65 have made "dramatic gains" in economic well-being, while those headed by younger adults have fallen steadily behind. In 2009, elderly households possessed 42 percent more median net worth than their same-age counterparts had in 1984. Young adults veered in...

Despite all the evidence of the past several decades, you still have not grasped one simple fact: that, just about a century after the last one ended, we engaged in a great civil war, one that will determine the kind of country we and our descendants shall henceforth live in for at least the next hundred years — and, one hopes, a thousand. Since there hasn’t been any shooting, so far, some call the struggle we are now involved in the “culture wars,” but I have another, better name for it: the Cold Civil War In many ways, this new...

Dustin Hoffman’s graduate is rooting for Mitt Romney. Woodstock’s attendees are donating to the Republican National Committee. Haight Ashbury’s residents are complaining about big government. The long-haired, dope-smoking, free-loving baby boomers are becoming majority-Republican and politically indistinguishable from their elder cousins in the so-called “silent generation,” according to a new Pew Research Center study. That’s the takeaway lesson from a comprehensive new study of the baby boomers’ changing political attitudes released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

Winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was never going to be easy, given the mortgage giants' market dominance and the housing lobby of Realtors, home builders, banks and others arrayed against reform. But if even a Republican House of Representatives can't take a baby step toward a private market after some $142 billion in taxpayers losses, who will? It's a question that House Speaker John Boehner might consider as he reads a letter that Florida Republican Bill Posey and New York Democrat Gary Ackerman are circulating to fellow Members for signatures. The letter supports an amendment to an appropriations...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: As I mentioned, "With his jobs plan stymied in Congress by Republican opposition --" this is the New York Times. The truth is his jobs plan is stymied in Congress by his inability to get Democrats to vote in majority for it. "-- President Obama on Monday will begin a series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: 'We can’t wait' for lawmakers to act.' According to an administration official, Mr. Obama will kick off his new offensive in Las Vegas --" where he...

Banks Not Wanting to Lend is a myth. It’s a trendy thing to blame the banks for not wanting to lend, but it’s not reality. Don’t get me wrong…most everything else might be able to be blamed on them, but not this. This is what makes the problem in mortgage and housing so fundamentally grave. It’s just not as easy as lowering rates, doing a mass refi event, or pulling Foreclosures off the market. After nearly 5 years, if there was an easy fix (such as printing trillions of dollars in order to try to create inflation) housing would be...

Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino.  The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.  The word "derivatives" sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever...

Congressman: Obama should unilaterally ‘refinance every home mortgage’ [VIDEO] By Nicholas Ballasy - The Daily Caller 11:43 PM 10/21/2011 Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran told The Daily Caller on Thursday evening that President Obama should “refinance every home mortgage” without congressional approval in order to “reset the economy.” “Absolutely, I think [Obama] should do that but there are not a lot of places where he can act unilaterally,” Moran told TheDC during Conservation International’s Oct. 20 dinner in Washington, D.C. “If he chooses to act unilaterally,” Moran said, “the likelihood is that there will be language in the appropriations bills...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The percentage of Americans who owned their homes has seen its biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The rate of home ownership fell to 65.1% in April 2010, 1.1 percentage points lower than it was in 2000. The decline was the biggest drop since the 1930s, when home ownership plunged 4.2%. The most recent decade-over-decade drop, however, only tells half the story. Home ownership during the 2000s "was really high in the middle of the decade, up to almost 70% at one point around 2004," said Ellen Wilson, a survey...

NEW YORK -- In Tiffany Spaulding's 12 years in the pharmaceutical industry, she has worked for three companies, two of which no longer exist, and relocated to four states. Now 39 and living in Brookfield, Conn., she hasn't had a promotion in five years and says she sees no chance to advance, stuck behind a wall of baby boomers. She would quit and turn her hobby of jewelry design into a business, she says, if not for the home and school loans that eat up half her salary. Spaulding, according to a new report, is a typical member of the...

Destiny Is Demography By Bill Bonner 09/16/11 Baltimore, Maryland – The San Francisco Federal Reserve bank came out with a gloomy forecast last month. Its analysts said that stocks were likely to earn paltry returns over the next 10 years. The reason cited was simple enough; stockholders don’t live forever. ‘Demography is destiny,’ said Auguste Comte. ‘It works the other way around too,’ he might have added. If they thought they were going to live longer, America’s most ubiquitous age cohort — the baby boomers — might continue to buy stocks. Instead, the cold hand of the grave is on...

LOS ANGELES – Carol Willison has made lots of financial sacrifices for her two children over the years, including paying most of her older daughter’s medical school tuition. But Willison’s generosity has reached its limits. Not only doesn’t the 60-year-old Seattle woman plan to leave her daughters an inheritance when she dies, she’s trying to spend every last dime on herself before she goes. “My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero,” Willison said. “I’m going to spoil myself now.” Upending the conventional notion of parents carefully tending...

Baby boomers who came of age during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s tended to call themselves Democrats, and as time passed, that identification strengthened. In 1969, far more in the 18- to 29-year-old age cohort — the front end of the baby boom — called themselves Democrats (35%) than Republicans (21%). A decade later, when they were 28 to 39 years old, their identification with the Democratic Party over the GOP was even stronger (45% to 19% in Gallup's surveys). But starting in the 1980s, attitudes of the baby boomers began changing. Polls found them...

They say there are only two sure things in life: death and taxes.  Thanks to unbelievable gains in medical technology in recent years however, most Americans are now able to delay the former inevitability for decades longer than their ancestors.  Because of this, at a time when America’s real estate industry is struggling, there’s one market sector that’s proving to be recession proof: senior housing.  According to a recent article in the New York Times, “[d]emand for nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and retirement communities is expected to balloon in the next two decades as baby boomers retire and the incidence...

Older people almost always seem to think they had it tougher than “kids today” do. So some older folks are striking back against the privileges enjoyed by today’s young people. And this doesn’t bode well for the future of society. Consider a recent story out of Pennsylvania. “The owner of a small restaurant outside Pittsburgh is banning children under the age of six, saying they regularly disrupted other customers’ meals,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently. “I’ve decided someone in our society had to dig their heels in on this issue,” the owner (a former teacher, luckily not of grammar)...

There is nowhere left to hide. America’s governing elites begin to internalize the magnitude of their failure to generate jobs. CBO now predicts worse than 8% unemployment until 2014. America begins to engage, seriously, with the implications of the faltering dollar and reconsider the appeal of the gold standard. From The New Yorker to The National Interest to The Washington Monthly to The Nixon Foundation, thoughts turn to gold

LEADVILLE, Colo. -- A black bear went into a tent in a central-Colorado campground and bit or scratched a sleeping teenage boy's arm. State wildlife officials say the boy was camping out with his family in the mountains near Leadville when the bear grabbed him early Friday. Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton tells KMGH-TV the boy needed medical care, but his wounds didn't appear to be life-threatening.

INDIANAPOLIS - This week on Eyewitness News, we begin what we call the Generations Project. All this week, we will look at baby boomers. If you are one, you may learn something about yourself. If you're not, perhaps you will recognize characteristics in someone you know. Either way, we hope it will lead us all to a better understanding of each other. We've all heard the term "baby boomer." But who fits into the generation? Baby boomers were born from 1946 to 1964. Their age today is 47 to 65. Like every generation, boomers have unique characteristics and values that...