Free Republic

In the 2008 Pixar movie WALL.E, humans so clogged up the earth with garbage they had to move to spaceships. Motorized chairs ferried the obese blobs portraying people of the future, who sipped liquids from massive cups and sat mesmerized by video screens. It was both funny and scary in its assessment of America’s throw-away, fast-food culture where convenience is everything and self-control and direction outsourced to technology. At the time of the movie it was part of an emerging chorus of voices decrying Americans’ growing girth. Five years later it is almost impossible to go a day without seeing...

A good doctor will not simply make a diagnosis based on measurements. The symptoms and complaints expressed by the patient are at least as important in making a determination as the data provided by diagnostic tools. When the data says one thing and the symptoms continuously say another, it makes sense to question the reliability of the instruments. This would be particularly true if the instruments are furnished by a party with a stake in a favorable diagnosis, say an insurance company on the hook for treatment costs. The same holds true for the U.S. economy. Although our government-supplied data...

Chris Hayes is a leading light in MSNBC's brain trust. The network casts him as a serious intellectual bringing serious solutions to America's problems. Which makes his simplistic and manifestly mistaken proposal that much more maddening. Making a peek-a-boo video-clip appearance on today's Melissa Harris-Perry's show, which focused on finding solutions to poverty in America, Hayes was seen holding up a hand-written sign with his solution, reading "Giving people money: It's actually that easy." View the video here.

Acting state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley lowered her head and slowly shook it side to side when summing up the financial condition of her once powerful party. "We're broke, broke, broke," Worley told the party's Executive Board in a special called meeting Frida. How broke is broke? Worley didn't sugar coat the answer. "This is my 18th day as chair and thirty minutes after I took over on April 22nd the landlord of the building where our party headquarters are came in and said he wanted us out, that the rent was overdue and was always overdue," said Worley....

I’ve written many times about how investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other successful people migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states. Well, the same thing happens internationally, as France’s greedy politicians are now learning. It’s a lot harder for Americans to escape our tax system, though, in part because of reprehensible exit taxes that are disturbingly reminiscent of some of the awful policies of past totalitarian regimes. But it still happens, and that’s a very damning indictment of Obamanomics and a worrying referendum on the future of the United States. Here are some blurbs from a recent Fortune article.Americans...

The Mini-Golf Tax. The “Iron Man” Tax. The Burning Man Tax. I’m pretty sure most Nevadans enjoy one or more of those activities, which means if Democrats in the Legislature pass their new Nevada Entertainment and Admissions Tax, every Nevadan will curse them when they try to enjoy themselves on the weekend after a long workweek. Wow, this is stupid. So, instead of imposing a corporate tax on Wal-Mart like nearly every other state in the country, you’re going to tax me when I go to the movie theater? So I’ll pay $11.88 instead of $11? I love carrying 12...

New York’s metropolitan tri-state private sector employment gains in April were a far cry from the jobs juggernaut in other areas of the country, according to a jobs report released Friday. The combined tally for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut was 3,370 last month, compared with a whopping 23,390 private- sector job gains in Texas alone, 9,570 in Florida and 4,110 in Utah, according to the inaugural monthly ADP Regional Employment Report. New York’s 1,490 job gains and Connecticut’s 1,230 were not exactly fighting for bragging rights. But they still overtook New Jersey, which produced a mere 650 private-sector...

Many part-timers are facing a double whammy from President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. The law requires large employers offering health insurance to include part-time employees working 30 hours a week or more. But rather than provide health care to more workers, a growing number of employers are cutting back employee hours instead. The result: Not only will these workers earn less money, but they'll also miss out on health insurance at work. Consider the city of Long Beach, Calif. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials...

It should be obvious, to anyone reading this, that Spain is in an economic depression as well as bankrupt. It is equally obviously that eurozone imbalances and a flawed treaty are to blame. Finding mainstream organizations willing to admit Spain is bankrupt is another matter. Yet today, Jeremey Warner writing for The Telegraph says just that. Warner says Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can I'd not noticed this until someone drew my attention to it, but the latest IMF Fiscal Monitor, published last month, comes about as close to declaring Spain insolvent as you...

--SNIP-- What does it mean that hopelessly bankrupt nations like Spain can borrow money at less than 5 percent interest? What does it mean that 60 percent of home purchases in many U.S. metro markets are being made in cash, and that hedge funds and institutional investors are the largest buyers? What does it mean that the Dow and S&P 500 are hitting record highs while 47 million Americans are on food stamps? What does it mean that the official unemployment rate is going down while the number of people not working is going up? What does it mean that...

RyanM wrote: “Not since the poilus surrendered to Hitler in 45 days has an opponent backed up so much talk with so little fight."Give me a break. The French took a million casualties during the 1940 campaign. They lost not from a lack of will to fight, but to incompetent commanders who saddled themselves with an obsolete doctrine. - GOP Fairy Tale: We Came, We Saw, We Surrendered Dear Comrade Private Ryan, Eh, the French lost 50,000-85,000 killed and about 120,000 wounded in the Battle of France, not even nearly close to the million you claim. A million and a half Frenchman surrendered, however,...

The yen slid to a 4-1/2-year low against the dollar on Friday, triggering a sell-off in oil and gold as well as safe-haven U.S. and German debt, after recent signs of strength in the U.S. labor market added to bullish sentiment on the dollar. Wall Street surged at day's end, pushing both the Dow and the S&P 500 to record closing highs. Data on bond holdings in Japan showed the Japanese were buying more foreign assets, and the yen's collapse reverberated throughout financial markets. Conflicting signals about how investors view the economic outlook added to the yen's wide impact. The...

It's been a rough end to what started out as a record-breaking season for openly gay characters on the small screen. After a 2012-13 season that featured a record number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters on TV, this past week's wave of cancellations may drastically alter those statistics. Gone are shows that featured prominent gay story lines including NBC's The New Normal and CBS' Partners. Both were semi-autobiographical series about the lives of its nearly all openly gay creators -- Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler on the former, David Kohan (who's not) and Max Mutchnik for the latter...

Advances in cancer treatment are saving lives and cutting health-care costs. But because many health-insurance plans haven’t caught up with the times, nearly half of all cancer patients are forced to choose between the treatment that could save their lives — or one that’s paid for. John Rykert had been battling advanced basal-cell carcinoma for two decades by cutting out the tumors as they appeared. In 2009, after 20 surgeries lasting 10 hours each, Rykert’s doctor said that the cancer had spread so far that the only option left would be to carve out half his face. But then Rykert...

Israeli police say protesters are marching in Tel Aviv over proposed tax hikes and benefit cuts. … Protesters are angry over the proposed decrees by Israel’s new finance minister Yair Lapid who started his job several weeks ago. Lapid ran in January’s election on a ticket vowing to help the middle class. The proposed budget hits that demographic deep in their pockets with raised taxes and slashed benefits. …

I’ve written many times about how investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners and other successful people migrate from high-tax states to low-tax states. Well, the same thing happens internationally, as France’s greedy politicians are now learning. It’s a lot harder for Americans to escape our tax system, though, in part because of reprehensible exit taxes that are disturbingly reminiscent of some of the awful policies of past totalitarian regimes. But it still happens, and that’s a very damning indictment of Obamanomics and a worrying referendum on the future of the United States. Here are some blurbs from a recent Fortune article....

Over the past five years, technology has improved the productivity of the typical oil or gas rig on America’s shale fields between 200 and 300 percent.

ANNAPOLIS -- Republican Sen. Richard Colburn of Dorchester voted against Maryland’s recently passed gas tax increase, but now hopes some of the new money will go to replacing the Dover Bridge in his district. The new taxes, initially expected to raise prices at the pump by 4 cents a gallon this July, might help to expand funding for the rehabilitation and replacement of Maryland’s deteriorating bridges. As of April, 87 of the 2,572 Maryland State Highway Administration maintained bridges were structurally deficient, which doesn’t mean they are unsafe, but that they have areas that need to be repaired or replaced,...

Shortly after Barack Obama won reelection in November, New Jersey governor Chris Christie pointed out that Republicans’ cloudy political prospects had a bright silver lining. “One of the reasons you have 30 Republican governors in America, and why we’re the only organization to add Republican strength,” Christie said, “is because people see us getting things done.” Christie’s stance countered most of the elite postelection commentary, which gleefully pronounced the Republican Party’s political irrelevance. But the governor was right. Since Obama first took office in 2008, Republicans have picked up a net nine governorships, bringing their total to 30 states,...

According to BotObjects' product copy, this previously unknown hardware and software company has a revolutionary product on its hands in its new ProDesk3D 3D printer. Among other highlights, which my colleague Michelle Starr wrote about earlier this week for CNET Australia, the ability to print objects in a full range of colors from common PLA plastic would instantly put the ProDesk3D at the top of the consumer-grade printer market. Follow along the reader comments on the various posts covering BotObjects announcement though, and you'll find a common refrain of skepticism. "So we have computer-generated images of the printer. No images...