Free Republic

Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Sunday suggested President-elect Donald Trump stands by his campaign vow not to cut Medicare. "I don't think President-elect Trump wants to meddle with Medicare or Social Security," Priebus said on CBS's "Face The Nation." "He made a promise in the campaign that that was something that he didn't want to do." The president-elect does plan to grow the economy and help "shore up Medicare and Social Security for future generations," Priebus said. "And if we can get 3 to 5, 6 percent growth, we'll do that," he said. "And we'll explode...

VILLA DE REYES, Mexico (AP) -- Word spread quickly through cellphone messages and shouts between co-workers that Ford Motor Co. had canceled its new $1.6 billion car plant at its sprawling 700-acre high desert site in north-central Mexico. "When I saw it on the phone, (I thought), 'Well, no, it can't be,'" said Higinio Salazar, a security guard who spent the past five months logging traffic into and out of the site and hoped to have steady work for months to come. "It was on orders of Mr. Trump," he said bitterly....

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Defense intends to move forward with its $126 billion plan to procure 12 new nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Under the plan, the Navy's existing Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines will be replaced by the developing Columbia-class submarines at an estimated cost of roughly $8 billion per ship. Pentagon acquisition undersecretary Frank Kendall voiced his approval during a recent interview with Bloomberg. "I'm hoping to have it done before I leave," Kendall said, noting his job ends when President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20. President Obama has supported the...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s top advisers have had about a dozen high-level meetings with President-elect Donald Trump’s most trusted officials, CTV News has learned. The two sides have met 10 or 12 times since the U.S. election, and as recently as Tuesday -- a five-hour meeting between Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, his principal secretary Gerry Butts, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The meetings have been mostly focused on trade, with the intention of convincing the incoming Trump administration that any tariffs on Canadian goods would hurt the U.S. economy. CTV News was...

Donald Trump pledged that his administration would be about three things, "jobs, jobs, jobs." When Ford Motor Company announced on Tuesday that it would invest $7 billion in a new U.S. plant in Flat Rock, Michigan and hire 700 new workers, Trump appeared to be keeping one of his most important campaign promises. According to experts, if Trump wants to continue on his path towards millions of well-paying American jobs, there is only so much he can do from the Oval Office and on Twitter. Trump will need buy in from lawmakers to get regulatory and tax reforms if he...

SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico -- Ford Motor Co's (F.N) abrupt move to scrap a planned $1.6 billion car plant in central Mexico has spooked a network of suppliers who bet on a growing customer base and dramatized the risk that Donald Trump's agenda poses to the country's broader economy. Many auto parts makers had started to expand in anticipation of Ford's plant in the state of San Luis Potosi, where industry is "easily 70 percent" dependent on the auto sector, said Julian Eaves, managing director of Preferred Compounding de Mexico, a U.S.-owned maker of rubber compounds operating here. "It's going...

Reflections on the future of retail… As the new year began, right in the midst of outgoing Resident Barack Obama’s ever-more-urgent pleas for a “legacy,” two announcements hit the news: the family of Sears and K-Mart will close yet another 109 K-Marts and another 41 Sears’ stores in 2017, and Macy’s will close another 68 of theirs. It was to be expected, of course. The analysts say that these stores are of an old breed that hasn’t kept up; they still use brick and mortar, unlike the darlings of the new age of retail, Amazon and Etsy et al, which...

No One Cared About Hacking until We found Out How Corrupt Liberals Are By S. Noble - January 6, 2017 US major government and military organizations are hacked all the time by endless numbers of foreign and domestic actors. Nothing was done to fix our cybersecurity. But let a privates organization like the DNC get hacked or careless John Podesta’s emails get hacked and all hell breaks loose. John Podesta left his smart phone in a cab, he fell for a phishing incident and his password was ‘passwØrd”. Hillary put our state secrets on a personal server she kept in...

As I drove around the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex during Christmas season, 2016, I stopped at four area Walmart stores.  The first one was a couple of days before Christmas.  I did not have a car until the 24th, so I only looked in the Walmart at Frankford and Marsh Ln before Christmas.  I have written about .22 at that store for a year and a half.  It has had .22 LR in stock pretty reliably during that period, so I was not surprised to see a a couple thousand Winchester Super X, a couple of thousand CCI Stingers, a...

New Sheriff Who Defeated Arpaio (With Help of Soros) Calls Illegal Aliens “Guests” Newly sworn-in Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Paul Penzone, in a January 4 interview with Phoenix TV station ABC 15, referred to illegal aliens as “guests.” Penzone , who assumed office on January 1 after defeating six-term Sheriff Joe Arpaio in November, said during the interview: We will need to work with the guests who are here in our nation and are pursuing citizenship and separate that from those who are committing crimes and make sure that we a caring community that is serious about public safety. While...

Oh no, they're making America great again! Last week, we learned that Ford was cancelling plans to build a $1.6 billion dollar plant in Mexico. Instead, the company would be investing $700 million in Michigan, creating hundreds of permanent jobs. As USA Today reported: Ford Motor announced Tuesday that it would cancel plans for a $1.6 billion Mexico plant and launch a Michigan expansion in a move that may be viewed as a capitulation to Donald Trump.

Stanley Black & Decker is opening a new $35 million manufacturing plant in the United States to help it rebuild, and perhaps more importantly "re-Americanize," the Craftsman tool brand it just bought from Sears Holdings. While the extra capacity should help get a once-iconic $2 billion a year line back on its feet, the move also potentially offers Stanley Black & Decker another benefit: shielding it from a potential surge in economic nationalism under President-elect Donald Trump. Though Stanley Black & Decker chief executive James Loree did not mention Trump by name in his comments to Wall Street analysts and...

If President-elect Donald Trump is going to meet his pledge to energize the U.S. economy, there's a simple yet tough way to do so: Put more men to work. The proportion of men in their prime working years who either have a job or are looking for one has been dropping for decades – and limiting economic growth in the process. The full brunt of the 60-year decline burst into view during the 2016 election. Trump triumphed in part by vowing to restore jobs at steel mills, auto plants and coal mines – the types of work that had once...

In Donald Trump's latest Twitter rebuke of an automaker, the president-elect threatened Toyota Motor on Thursday with a large border tax if it builds a new plant outside the U.S. The company's shares on the Nasdaq were slightly lower in afternoon trading following the message. (TWEET-AT-LINK) In response to Trump's tweet, Toyota said in a statement that the new Mexican plant will not cut its U.S. employment, adding that it "looks forward to collaborating with the Trump administration to serve in the best interests of consumers and the automotive industry." The threat about the Japanese automaker's planned new plant in...

Dan Gilbert, a developer and owner of many private companies in Detroit, has been urging the Michigan House of Representatives to approve Senate-passed bills that would give some developers and business owners more taxpayer-funded subsidies. Gilbert defended his position in the Detroit Free Press: He noted that some critics oppose the incentives for ideological reasons, or say the government shouldn't try to pick winners and losers. “That all to me is legitimate and I get that,” Gilbert said, “but there’s a lot more to this than, ‘Hey, rich guys are getting this and neighborhoods are not getting anything.’” That characterization...

Because only the worst health care laws get named after the presidents who sign them I’ve actually considered whether Trump would want the ObamaCare replacement saddled with this name. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t if it was me. The whole point of a market-oriented health care reform is that the government doesn’t run health care, so it makes no sense to tell the nation that its trips to the doctor are courtesy of a politician. Then again, Trump does like to see his name on things.

Gulftainer’s parent company, The Crescent Group, is connected to Iraq’s illicit nuclear program In a recent column, I challenged the notion that the Obama administration has been scandal free. This has been the assertion, most recently, of Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, in a softball interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The media have covered for the multiple scandals that have occurred right under their noses, and this is nothing less than willful blindness. It has applied to the Obama administration, the Clinton Foundation and recent presidential campaign, as well as going back to the Clinton administration. One largely overlooked scandal...

Conservatives who are sick of the tyranny of President Barack Obama and wary of the corruption of failed Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton have had no better ally for the past few years than Congressman Trey Gowdy of upstate South Carolina. Gowdy recently stood up with a national advocacy group for veterans and brutally criticized lame-duck President Obama for his sickening neglect of the VA healthcare system and for the way Obama’s government retaliated against whistleblowers both within the Internal Revenue Service and the VA. Said Gowdy, standing shoulder to shoulder with Concerned Veterans for America, “I don’t like bullies. Government...

A bill backing key changes in the H1-B programme that allows skilled workers from countries like India to fill high-tech jobs in the US has been re-introduced in the US Congress by two lawmakers who claim that it will help crack down on the work visa abuse. The ‘Protect and Grow American Jobs Act’ makes important changes to the eligibility requirements for H1-B Visa exemptions was re-introduced on Wednesday by Republican Darrell Issa and Scott Peters—both from California. The bill among other things increase the minimum salary of H-1B visa to $100,000 per annum and eliminate the masters degree exemption....

FRESNO — Days after Donald Trump won the White House vowing to deport millions of people in the country illegally and fortify the Mexican border, California farmer Kevin Herman ordered nearly $600,000 in new equipment, cutting the number of workers he’ll need starting with the next harvest. Herman, who grows figs, persimmons and almonds in the nation’s most productive farming state, said Trump’s comments pushed him to make the purchase, larger than he would have otherwise. “No doubt about it,” Herman said. “I probably wouldn’t have spent as much or bought as much machinery as I did.”(continued)