Free Republic

Presidential campaigns are long in the making, quick to be forgotten. But one part of them lives on for years: the victor’s promises. President Barack Obama paved his path to re-election with fewer promises than in 2008. The ones he did lay down, though, are meaty, legacy-shaping for him and consequential to ordinary lives today and for generations to come, for better or worse. They also are extraordinarily difficult to achieve in a time of gridlock grief and budgets that are tight when they are not paralyzed. … Whatever a candidate’s promises, legacies are made by how a president manages...

After months of fierce negotiations prior to President Xi Jinping’s Moscow visit (March 22-24) China and Russian signed an agreement on supplying 24 Russian Su-35 fighter jets to China and for the joint construction of four Lada-class diesel submarines. The purchases are China’s most significant from Russia in the past 10 years, the Interfax news agency reports, and are intended to provide a basis for future bilateral military cooperation. [Editor’s Note: Su-35 is Russia’s most advanced 4th generation multipurpose fighter jet. The Lada-class submarine specializes in anti-submarine defense and conducting independent missions against enemy subs and ships in coastal, narrow...

Proposed amendment to CISPA says Internet companies' promises to protect customer privacy were legally enforceable. But then Republicans vote it down.

Ex-IRS agent sentenced to prison in murder-for-hire plot A former IRS agent who opened a tax preparation business was sentenced Friday to nearly 24 years in prison for defrauding clients out of more than $11 million and then attempting to hire a hit man to kill four of them. Steven Martinez, 51, of Ramona was sentenced in San Diego federal court to 286 months in prison and five years of supervised release. He was also ordered by District Court Judge William Hayes to forfeit all the property, including a home in Mexico, and other possessions that he purchased with clients'...

(CNSNews.com) – If you sell a gun to your son, “there’s something wrong with your family," says New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In a radio appearance on Friday, Bloomberg, a gun control activist and co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, praised the legislation that is now moving forward in the Senate. The bill would require universal background checks for most sales of firearms, including those online and at gun shows. “The only thing it would not cover is if you sold a gun to your son, for example,” Bloomberg told radio host John Gambling. “Number one, I don't know...

I don’t generally publish end-of-year predictions, mainly because I usually am wrong (a failing that does not seem to prevent any number of others from doing so, however). But last year I made an exception when I predicted that the biggest economic story of 2013 would be the death of the full-time job in the American retail service sector. But this was not really an exception to my rule about predictions, because this was not really a prediction at all, at least in the sense that a “prediction” is an educated guess of some future uncertain event occurring. Late last...

DPA Much of Germany's energy supply still comes from burning brown coal. Europe's once celebrated cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions has languished. The economic crisis has caused the price of emissions licenses to plummet, and a recent remedy to the problem has been rejected by EU lawmakers. Climate policy expert Felix Matthes tells SPIEGEL ONLINE that an opportunity has been squandered. The European Parliament on Tuesday voted down a proposal to make it more expensive for companies to burn fossil fuels, in what environmental advocates are calling a major setback in the fight against climate change.

Commodity prices have been falling since September, culminating in a rout over the past two weeks. That is a classic warning for the global economy. It is becoming ever clearer that the roaring boom in global equities since last summer has priced in an economic recovery that does not in fact exist. The International Monetary Fund has had to nurse down its global growth forecasts yet again. We are still stuck in an old-fashioned trade depression, with pervasive over-capacity in manufacturing plant and a record global savings rate of 25pc of GDP. German car sales fell 17pc in March. That...

Statement from Chris W. Cox on U.S. Senate Defeat of Manchin-Toomey-Schumer Amendment Today, the misguided Manchin-Toomey-Schumer proposal failed in the U.S. Senate. This amendment would have criminalized certain private transfers of firearms between honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution. As we have noted previously, expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools. The NRA will continue to work with Republicans and Democrats who are committed to protecting our children in...

Austerity has become almost like a four-letter word in some circles. It’s used to describe policies meant to reduce government spending and debt that may be painful in the here and now -- measures such as cuts to social services, or that lead to job losses in the short-term. A key piece of empirical research policymakers have used to justify “austerity measures” has been a 2010 study by two Harvard economists, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, about the downside of high debt. Well now another set of academics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst have replicated the study. They...

TALLADEGA — Nearly 1,000 guns seized by Talladega police, Talladega County Sheriff’s Office and the Talladega County Drug and Violent Crime Task Force were auctioned off to federally licensed gun dealers Tuesday afternoon. According to Talladega Police Chief Alan Watson, the sale netted a total of $98,700, which will be divided between the three agencies based on who had seized the weapons in question. According to auctioneer Johnny Vetra, 30 to 40 dealers from Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky came to look at the weapons, which ranged from a flint-lock pistol to .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol that frequently retails for...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A strengthening housing recovery and robust auto sales contributed to moderate growth across the United States in late February and March, according to a Federal Reserve survey released Wednesday. All of the Fed's 12 banking districts grew moderately and growth accelerated in two districts — New York and Dallas — from January and early February. The survey suggests the economy performed better in March than recent government data on hiring and consumer spending indicated. That could mean the weakness may be temporary.

en. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said Wednesday he fears a "train wreck" as the Obama administration implements its signature healthcare law. Baucus, the chairman of the powerful Finance Committee and a key architect of the healthcare law, said he fears people do not understand how the law will work. "I just see a huge train wreck coming down," Baucus told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a Wednesday hearing. "You and I have discussed this many times, and I don't see any results yet." "Small businesses have no idea what to do, what to expect," Baucus said. Citing anecdotal...

Bank of America Corp. BAC shares dropped Wednesday after first-quarter results fell short of expectations and showed the financial giant was struggling to boost growth in its core lending business. Revenue dropped 8.4% when an accounting charge related to the bank's debt was excluded. First-quarter profit of 20 cents a share was up strongly from a year earlier but came in two cents short of Wall Street's expectations. The results show that despite the bank's efforts to shrink its size and balance sheet, growth remains elusive amid low interest rates and intensified government regulation. Battle of the Banks It's that...

Apple (AAPL) tumbled to its lowest level in over a year as investors continued to dump shares of the tech company amid worries over second-quarter iPad mini shipments. The once-darling tech giant of Wall Street shed more than 3 percent Wednesday, falling to its lowest level since last January, following a report from DigiTimes that iPad mini shipments could fall 20 to 30 percent quarter-over-quarter to 10 to 12 million in the June quarter due to "lacking demand in the market." "We continue to see risks to [Apple's] consensus estimates, primarily with respect to the June quarter," wrote Edward Parker...

Denver Public Schools has quietly put the rest of its controversial variable-rate bonds with swaps on the market to sell as fixed-rate debt. Five years after issuing a 30-year, $750 million school pension bond that turned into a financial quagmire for the district, DPS is selling $519.8 million in fixed-rate, refunding certificates of participation (COPs), set to price during the week of April 15, according to an announcement Friday from Fitch Ratings. ... DPS "fixed out" — or issued debt at a fixed interest rate — half of the original $750 million in debt in 2011, and paid nearly $42...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks fell hard on Wednesday, retreating after the prior day’s rally amid disappointing results from companies including Bank of America Corp. B. of A. shares slid 4.1% after the lender reported first-quarter earnings below Wall Street’s estimates as its mortgage business weighed. Caterpillar Inc.was down 2.4% after Macquarie downgraded the construction-equipment maker to neutral from outperform. At 2 p.m. Eastern, the Federal Reserve will release its Beige Book, which offers an economic analysis of its 12 districts.

A suspect-who-shall-not-be-named-a-suspect is not now in custody. The non-suspect is just sitting around a hospital, or some other undisclosed location, under heavy guard, being fully cooperative with law enforcement officials, who paid testament to his cooperation by raiding his apartment and taking away bags of material. But newspapers with strong ties either to the Least coast or the Left coast want to emphasize to you that there are NO SUSPECTS in “custody.” Nor is there a connection between the suspect-who-shall-not-be-named-a-suspect and his raided apartment-that-shall-not-be-named-his-apartment.  There is only a Saudi national with his favored visa status, who is fully cooperative, and...

Let's hope this is a trend. Washington Examiner: The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is reportedly the first union to officially call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The health care law is prompting some serious buyer's remorse in Big Labor, which worked hard on behalf of the administration to pass it: Here are some excerpts from the union's statement: ______________________________ "Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms in office. But regrettably, our concerns over certain provisions in the ACA have not been addressed,...

Let us pause, amid all the monetary turmoil, to reason out the way we talk about gold — particularly all these confounded references to its “value.” This struck us while reading a dispatch of Reuters saying that “every time the price of gold falls by $100 an ounce, as it did on Friday and it has done again today, the value of the world’s gold falls by more than $500 billion.” Reuters is hardly the only offender. ABC news notes that “for years the value of gold soared to fresh highs as its boosters fretted over the risk of hyper-inflation.”...