Free Republic

Most people ask for a raise in the privacy of their boss's office. But one gutsy Wells Fargo employee emailed the CEO directly — and copied some 200,000 other Wells Fargo workers on the note. On Tuesday, the Charlotte Observer reported that Tyrel Oates, who it says works in an Oregon office of Wells Fargo processing requests from customers trying to stop debt-collection calls, sent such an email to CEO John Stumpf. His plea was not just to get a raise for himself. His proposal to Stumpf? Use the company's profits to give every employee a raise of $10,000. According...

According to the Pew Research Center, half of Americans think business owners should be required to provide their services for same-sex weddings even if doing so violates their religious beliefs. In a September poll from the group, respondents split down the middle on the following question: If a business provides wedding services, such as catering or flowers, should it be allowed to refuse those services to a same-sex couple for religious reasons, or required to provide those services as it would to all other customers? The number saying businesses should be required to provide such services included a majority of...

An underfunded independent from South Dakota has turned the Senate race there upside-down, giving Democrats a renewed hope of holding the seat — or at least preventing a Republican pickup. But while former Sen. Larry Pressler, who served nearly a quarter century in Congress as a Republican, won't say who he'd caucus with, he told The Hill Wednesday that, if elected, he'd be a "friend of Obama" in the Senate. "I don't regret those votes, ‘cause on that day, that's how I felt," he said of voting for Obama twice, a detail used by Republicans as evidence Pressler is now...

"There's a sense possibly that the world is spinning so fast and nobody is able to control it" First, Community Organizer Barack Hussein Obama stole a country when he emerged from the shadows and in Hollywood style gained the Oval Office as prize with no credentials, no expertise of any kind other than that of on the streets of Chicago, public-funded rabble rousing. It should go down as the first time in living history that a politician, girded by sources outside the country, became president, if only in title. That’s the breathtaking trajectory of how Obama captured then began to...

In 2007, Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, Inc., published a book titled “The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company,” laying out five principles that comprise his market-based management philosophy, to which he attributes the exponential growth of Koch Industries. As political observers are likely aware, the success of Koch Industries has enabled the Kochs to spend millions of dollars funding libertarian ideological initiatives and Republican political campaigns, something Democrats are not enamored of. Sen. Harry Reid most famously has attacked the Kochs — using them as a caricature for the villainous one percent...

From Greenpeace’s “Save the Arctic” page. COPENHAGEN — Danish toy maker Lego said Thursday it won’t renew a deal allowing Shell to hand out Lego sets at its gas stations in some 30 countries, following a viral campaign protesting Arctic drilling. Environmental activists Greenpeace launched in July a video showing an Arctic landscape with a Shell drilling platform made of Lego bricks covered in oil. Lego CEO Joergen Vig Knudstorp said the protest “may have created misunderstandings among our stakeholders,” adding the company didn’t want to be embroiled in the environmental campaign. The world’s largest toy maker “should never...

As a hub of international shipping and travel it stands to reason that Miami might be at a higher risk to report a case of ebola. It also stands to reason that since Miami's economy is dependent on tourism a reported case of ebola could have serious business consequences. So it's not surprising either that Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and the county commission are taking extra precautions to prepare for the possibility of ebola in the 305. Come to think of it actually, it's not that surprising that they seem to have no idea what they're talking about either. The...

I attended the Gun Rights Policy Conference at O'Hare during the last weekend in September.   After the conference, I visited friends and family in Wisconsin.   Wisconsin has always had legal open carry of firearms, but only recently enforced the law against scofflaw governments in Madison and Milwaukee.   I decided to celebrate Wisconsin's return to the rule of law and the enforcement of constitutional rights by openly carrying on my trip through most of the state. At my first stop to fuel, on I-90 between Milwaukee and Madison, I told the clerk what I was doing, and asked him to...

A copy of the 3rd Party Report has been released and is now posted at the web site Sifferkol.se Link: http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf Key findings: COP of COP of 3.2-3.6 over a 32 day period and isotopic change in nickel and lithium was found to have changed substantially after run. The authors conclude, "Once again, even in the most conservative scenarios, we have values that allow us to conclude that the reactor studied here may not be considered a conventional source of energy." UPDATE: From Rossi on the Journal of Nuclear Physics: To all the Readers of the Journal of Nuclear Physics:...

Those looking for good news on the fight against Ebola will not find much encouragement from Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command. As Jim Garamone of Department of Defense News reports, Kelly told an audience at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday that, if the disease reaches Central America, "it’s literally, ‘Katie bar the door,’ and there will be mass migration into the United States." He also said with certainty that "there is no way we can keep Ebola [contained] in West Africa." “By the end of the year, there’s...

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”—Christopher Manes, Earth First! “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal Should flights coming from West African nations be cancelled and our borders closed? According to Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the answer is “No, absolutely not.” “When you start closing countries like that, there is a real danger of making things worse,... governments could fall if you isolate them.” What kind of logic is...

This is why the World Health Organization believes there could be more than a million Ebola cases by January. A study conducted by the CDC in Liberia has found that ignorance and incompetence, plus unalloyed fear is contributing to the epidemic in Liberia. Washington Examiner: A new and remarkably candid on-the-ground audit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the Ebola crisis in Liberia said that doctors and nurses have fled hospitals in the infection zone and that obstacles to killing the virus remain. The analysis of four remote Liberian counties conducted by local and CDC officials that...

Liberal groups are building a grassroots army in Iowa and New Hampshire in hopes of stopping a Hillary Clinton coronation in 2016. While the progressive groups don’t have a candidate, they are hiring organizers and opening offices as if one will emerge. At a minimum, the groups hope their efforts will push Clinton to the left. And if the political winds blow just right, the activists hope Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will take the plunge — and turn their organizing work into the foundation for her candidacy. Officials form Democracy For America, a liberal group, are getting involved in local-level...

Rebels claim that Moscow closes borders for volunteers from Russia and suppliers of freights to Donbass. To supporters of "the Russian spring" arises more and more questions from law enforcement agencies. Experts consider that the power intends to interfere further with private initiatives in the help to rebels of DNR and LNR. According to the field commander from DNR Oleg Miller, initially, when the Ukrainian crisis only inflamed, people with the weapon weren't allowed to pass neither in, nor out. But, as he claims, the border wasn't protected effectively that gave the chance to carry out big convoys with people...

The Associated Press, in partnership with GfK, a German market research firm, jointly released a poll. No big deal there, as people release polls every hour or two, especially in election season. But this one was considered unusual, because it revealed a truth that scared the American Left to their very core: Americans don’t appear to trust government to solve their problems anymore. As with every poll, interpretation is dependent on whether we trust the questions to have been asked objectively (we don’t), whether the respondents were given a comprehensive and clear array of possible answers to choose (they never...

Police confiscating Americans’ hard earned cash, as well as a wide variety of other valuables, without an arrest or conviction is a disturbing and growing practice throughput these United States. Since cops get to keep the seized funds and use the money on pretty much anything they want, the practice is becoming endemic in certain parts of the nation. The theft is often referred to simply as civil forfeiture, or civil asset forfeiture. Incredibly, under civil forfeiture laws your property is “guilty until you prove it innocent.”The extent of the problem came to my attention last summer after reading an...

Cadillac sales continue to sputter at General Motors. In fact, the brand is the only make at GM that has seen a year over year sales decline for the period ending in September at a time when the auto industry was booming. Specifically, Cadillac has logged in 127,837 sales for the first nine months of 2014 compared to 133,414 in 2013 for a sales decline of 4.2 percent. GM will now offer frequent flyer miles to help spur sales at the division. The marketing move at GM follows a decision to relocate Cadillac's sales team to New York City....

Liberals often live in a fantasy world that ignores the real world right in front of them. They continue to pour trillions of dollars into poverty programs despite the fact that poverty persists and grows. Their go to solution for failing and failed government schools is always spend more money rather than embrace solutions that actually work such as charter schools or voucher programs. It’s no surprise then that their tired solutions rarely ever solve the problems they are ostensibly focused on. Strangely, that dynamic exists even when the problem itself is fiction. The perfect example of this is the...

We are destroying our economy in order to satisfy the environmental lobby, while other countries like China and India are polluting away As the global warming alarmists tell us that “the science is settled, there is no debate, and government bureaucrats are going full-speed ahead with taxation plans that will further weaken our already suffering economy, honest and wise politicians like Delegate Scott Lingamfelter of Virginia ask, “let’s see the physical science, not the political science before we strap Americans with huge taxes as the Obama Administration wants to do.” We should not formulate public policy such as carbon tax...

Because while according to the BLS survey employers have almost never had more open positions, they have also decided to put an abrupt stop to hiring, something which certainly points to a major disconnect in the US labor market. In fact, according to the JOLTS report, its far less tracked "Hirings" number plunged from 4,934K to just 4,640K. This was the lowest number of monthly hiring since January's "Polar Vortex" ground the economy to a halt. What's worse, the 294K plunge in monthly hiring was the biggest monthly drop since June 2010, and was the third biggest monthly plunge in...