Free Republic

Raising the capital gains rate will put a stranglehold on risk taking and available capital President Obama just told the country during his State of the Union address that he is going to increase the capital gains rate again in order to raise revenue for new spending programs. Given that Obama already knows that raising the capital gains rate actually REDUCES revenue, we are left with a President who believes that we can pay for increased spending by reducing revenue. He acknowledged this in 2008 during a televised debate against Hillary Clinton, but went on to state that rates should...

Rajan: "Today, debt is making it difficult for developed countries to resume pre-2008 growth rates" http://t.co/hi4QoAqSA8 — Project Syndicate (@ProSyn) January 18, 2015 Today, debt is making it difficult for developed countries to resume pre-2008 growth rates, let alone restore the levels of GDP that would have been attained if the subsequent Great Recession had not happened. Meanwhile, industrial countries’ overall debt/GDP ratios are continuing to grow. In emerging markets, slow growth in the advanced economies has shut down a traditional development path: export-led growth. As a result, emerging markets have had to rely once again on domestic demand. This...

Matt Lewis has a column today over at the Daily Beast headlined, "You Betcha I Was Wrong About Sarah Palin: It’s time to admit that, whatever their motivation was at the time, the Alaska governor’s critics always had a point." I don't really disagree with much of what Matt says when it comes to noting that Palin's speaker-circuit pandering and Hee-Haw witticisms have become cringe-worthy—speaking as a Christian, I was pretty dissappointed last year when Palin referred to waterboarding as baptism for terrorists. As usual, Matt makes some very good points so I encourage you to read his column. However,...

Properly installed arm brace at Sig Sauer booth at the Shot show. On 16 January, just before the Shot Show, the BATF published an open letter on the subject of "The Redesign of "Stabilizing Braces". The letter was supposed to "clarify" the increasingly muddy, irrational, and stupid law. A combination of the thwarted original intent of the legislation, combined with continued bureaucratic desires to "grow the rice bowl*" and the irrational belief of disarmists that any additional regulation is good, not matter what, has resulted in our arrival at this point. The National Firearms act regulation of short barreled...

WINDSOR HEIGHTS, Iowa — When former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee walked into Walnut Creek Church here on Sunday night, fresh off his gleaming navy-blue bus, he was greeted by the crowd of suburban evangelicals as a visiting celebrity rather than a 2016 presidential candidate. Waiting in line to get their copies of the Republican’s latest book signed, a handful of the attendees shared recollections of Huckabee’s spunky 2008 bid for the White House, when he won the Iowa caucuses and seven more states before bowing out. But most of the conversations focused on Fox News, where Huckabee had been perched...

Last year Austria's largest bank, Erste Bank, sent shudders of Credit Anstalt through the European Banking System. This year it is Austria's 3rd largest bank that is scaring investors senseless. On the heels of the Swiss National Bank's decision to un-peg from the Euro, Raiffeisen Bank's Swiss-Franc-Denominated mortgage worries have resurfaced (along with Russian/Ukraine writedowns) and nowhere is that more evident than the total collapse of the bank's bonds (from over 95c to 65c today). Even after the ECB Q€ (and some apparent intervention to weaken the Swissy) bonds kept free-falling. Perhaps, The Freedom Party's demands for a bailout will...

The University of Pennyslvania is now offering a “Wasting Time on the Internet” class that will earn students credit. The class, literally named “Wasting Time on the Internet,” is being taught by Professor Kenneth Goldsmith this Spring 2015 semester. In 2010, Professor Goldsmith also taught “Uncreative Writing: Robotic Erotica/Erotic Robotics: Scribing a Non-Expresssive [sic] Sexuality.” Goldsmith writes for his new class that “students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs. “Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory,” the description adds.

"Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values ​​of the state," said Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Slovakia is the country that had its commemorative Euro coin depicting two Christian saints, Cyril and Methodius, at first rejected by the European Commission, which told Bratislava it would need to re-design the coins and remove Christian symbols, including halos and a cross-adorned stole. Eventually the Slovakia Euro was issued with halos and crosses. This...

The American public should encourage Obama to take up a new occupation as a voiceover artist What does it take to be a great narrator for documentaries? The ability to read a teleprompter with conviction. While the majority of Americans may not believe that President Obama has the last quality in hand, most will agree that the first is his best attribute. He is a teleprompter reader par excellence. Though it may be a useful skill, it doesn’t take the place of being a leader, even a poor one. The latest attempt by the president to convince citizens that climate...

Medical retainer agreements between physicians and patients will not be considered “insurance” in Michigan under a recently passed bill signed into law on Jan. 15 by Gov. Rick Snyder. The idea is to ensure that this innovative way for families to obtain routine medical services at lower costs will not be stifled by the extensive state regulatory structure currently imposed on conventional health insurance policies that cover expensive non-routine care. The rationale for this alternative is that while insurance coverage may be advisable for catastrophic illnesses and injuries, it makes less sense as a way to pay for routine primary...

A tsunami struck the country this morning. A tsumani of stupid. I wasn't sure what to do with it all, so here are some of the best bits. Politico makes an issue of Huckabee complaining that women at Fox News swear while at work, apparently referring to them as "trashy." “My gosh, this is worse than locker-room talk,” Huckabee continued. “As we would say in the South, that’s just trashy.” Neither Huckabee nor Politico seems to have met Hillary, who is said to swear "like a sailor." Sara Nelson writes about the book in Tuesday's New York Post, revealing the...

In the dramatic video from inside the New Hope, Minnesota city council chambers, one of the council members reacts to the sound of gunfire outside of the doors by drawing his own weapon and preparing to defend his colleagues.  Link to video: It is clear that the council member on the left of the screen has considered this sort of scenario, and is mentally prepared.   Immediately after the shots are fired, you hear a voice saying, "Get down!, Get down!".  As the video progresses, and shows the councilman with the handgun on the left, it is clear that he...

In 1942, America didn’t have special-operations units. To solve that problem, the U.S. government turned to its Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. At the time, no technology for underwater combat swimming existed in a military-operational form in the American arsenal. The OSS Maritime Unit (MU) would have to develop it and the teams needed to use it, overnight — with a whopping budget of $500. The rest of the story here.

Climate Czar Revrunt Sharpton's Word on Super Blizzard One!

There is a madness to walking through a blizzard and discussing Global Warming. A theory according to which we should be sliding toward the tropics, awash in fleeing polar bears and Florida style temperatures, instead of frantically shoveling our driveways. To believe in Global Warming while stamping the snow off your boots is not a matter of science. It is a matter of faith. The scientist sees what is, while the believer has faith in what he cannot see. The scientist does not see Global Warming in a blizzard. The Warmist does. To see Global Warming while walking through a...

According to Dr. Gilbert Ross, Medical and Executive Director, American Council on Science and Health… Smoking is America’s most important, and preventable, public health problem: It is estimated that almost a half-million of us will succumb prematurely to smoking’s deadly effects each year, with twenty-times that number sickened. Among our 43 million smokers, over half try to quit each year, yet less than one in twenty succeed. The FDA approved products—patches, gums, and drugs—help “boost” that to about one in ten, an abysmal “success” rate of 10 percent. Yet, the official line, from the FDA and the CDC on down,...

Auschwitz is not some place that existed a long time ago. It was yesterday There was some serious irony when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew gathered together with French President Francois Hollande and a Russian delegation led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff, along with leaders from Germany and Austria to participate in the January 27 ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Russian troops. I suspect that an entire generation or two born after that year, 70 years ago, may have little or no knowledge of what Auschwitz was. It was a Nazi death camp...

Every girl’s life matters to Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett only so long as those lives can be exploited for publicity Are first lady Michelle Obama and her mentor Valerie Jarrett, who is her husband’s senior advisor, complicit in a publicity stunt making it appear that they champion women’s rights? While Michelle Obama seized the spotlight by not wearing a head scarf when meeting with Saudi officials in Riyadh yesterday, Jarrett was sending out this message on Twitter: “Every girl’s life matters. Every woman should be able to go about her day and be safe and treated with respect.” The...

A former U.S. Army Ranger sniper and author of a best-selling book about his combat tour in Afghanistan said yesterday that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl should be executed if found guilty of deserting his unit in 2009.“I think he should definitely be put to death,” said Nicholas “Irv” Irving, the author (with Gray Brozek) of The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers, said on this writer’s radio show. “He’s given a lot of information to the enemy and he should pay the price.” Since being released last year, Bergdahl has received two promotions and about $300,000 in...

What can I say; sometimes the predictions are just wrong.That doesn’t always stop us from pretending that our prediction was more accurate than it really was:It appears that the model used to forecast New York’s  Snowmageddon II was just wrong. A National Weather Service official says the agency will evaluate its storm modeling after a storm that was predicted to dump a foot or more of snow on many parts of New Jersey and the Philadelphia region delivered far less than that. So, using the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) instead of the U.S. Global Forecast System (GFS)...