Free Republic

After World War I the third rate minds who brought us the conflict to begin with came up with another stupid idea: They decided to divide up former German, Austrian and Turkish empires into separate countries, like Czechoslovakia, and create makeshifts, like the Danzig Corridor. Germany lost territory to Poland to create a land corridor to Danzig that gave Poland access to the sea.Never mind that it cleaved a country in two. It was these territorial wedges-- wedges that diced up ethnicity-- that Hitler used to gain legitimacy in the eyes of Germans. By cutting up countries in defiance of...

I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot,” Abigail Borah, a youth delegate to the 2011 Durban climate negotiations, yelled from the conference floor. “I am scared for my future,” she cried, silencing Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator. “We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.” Now the Obama administration is signaling that there will be not be a new climate treaty. According to a report in Wednesday’s New York Times, the path to a treaty has come to an end, 14 months before the...

During his entire first term and beyond, President Obama and his sycophantic defenders blamed “the bad economy” on George W. Bush, as if his policies alone were the cause of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But Bush has been out of office now for nearly six years, and for certain has had zero influence on the country’s economy during that period.In short, then, Obama now owns the economy and has for quite some time. So kind of shape is it in? Not good. According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), a report that...

BEIJING -- The top leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) decided on Friday to cut salaries for executives of state-own enterprises (SOEs). During a meeting presided over by Chinese President and CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee approved plans to reform the system that determines centrally administered SOE executives' salaries and the size of their expense accounts and other privileges. In a statement released after the meeting, the Political Bureau said excessive salaries will be cut to reasonable levels. It urged SOEs to improve their corporate ethics, saying that income gaps...

Consumer spending fell in July for the first time in six months, as Americans cut back on purchases of new cars and other retail goods, the government reported Friday. The drop in spending was a bit of a surprise: economists polled by MarketWatch had predicted a seasonally adjusted 0.1% increase. The growth in incomes, meanwhile, slowed to 0.2% pace in July from 0.5% in each of the prior two months. It was the smallest gain since December and also below Wall Street expectations.

Twenty-three years ago, Pepe Fanjul went to the Dominican Republic on business and stayed for love. “I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a house in the Caribbean, a very airy, outdoor atmosphere — not busy — with ocean views from every window and lots of grass and greens, since my wife is an expert gardener. We didn’t want a marble palace; nothing formal like our New York apartment or even my ranch, just something that fit the area, a Caribbean feel — Bali Caribbean, if you will.” . . . Today, while the family shows up for...

COLUMBIA, S.C. - The Republican Party must control Congress in order to solve national problems like immigration, Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, said Wednesday during a fundraiser for the South Carolina Republican Party. Despite recently being indicted on two felony counts of abuse of power, Perry visited the Palmetto State - the first Southern state to hold a primary during presidential elections - right after spending a few days in New Hampshire, which holds the second nominating contest in the country. In addition to the fundraiser, Perry had time to watch Texas A&M, his alma mater, take on the University of...

Maxine Waters — the fiery liberal from Los Angeles known for calling House Republican leadership “demons” and threatening to nationalize oil companies — has gone from the scourge of Big Business to a sympathetic ally for corporate America. It’s no accident. Waters is executing this transformation by seizing on the growing divide between conservative Republicans and Big Business and leveraging her position as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, where in the coming weeks she will play a role in the battles over extending a terrorism insurance program and the Export-Import Bank. A large part of her...

Aug. 27 will officially go down as a red letter day in the history of reserve currencies and dollar hegemony in how oil and gas are purchased throughout the world. In a new announcement from the Russian business media source, Kommersant, Gazprom has conducted the first sale of oil in a currency other than the dollar, and will henceforth open their purchase window to accept both Roubles and Yuan for the exchange of oil and gas products. Beginning today with an 80000 ton oil shipment from their Arctic fields, Gazprom Neft agreed to new terms on the sale and transfer...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s assets rose in value by at least 8 percent during 2013, raising their total to between $5.3 million and $14.1 million, according to her latest financial disclosure released Thursday. Yellen’s biggest asset is a trust fund she set up in 1992 with her husband, George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The value of the trust fund is estimated at between $1 million and $5 million. Yellen’s assets have likely been driven up in value by a rebounding economy and a rising stock market. In 2012, her disclosure form estimated her assets at between $4 million...

As Russia scrambles to refinance maturing debt, stabilize the ruble, and battles to halt the collapse of investment in new plant and equipment, Russia will draw down its official reserves and rainy-day funds, capital flight will accelerate, perhaps to unsustainable levels, and economic growth will collapse, perhaps as much as during the financial crisis of 2009. The longer the sanctions stay in place, the worse the consequences. . . . Vladimir Putin has maintained his hold on power via an implicit bargain that he will produce rising standards of living and ensure that pensions and wages are paid on time....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Remember the exit polling data in the 2012 presidential election. The first wave, and there was a question, that when I saw the results of the exit poll, I said this election is over and Romney's been beat and there's no hope. It was that well over 60 percent of people that voted blame Bush for the economy. Okay. This morning on the Fox Business Network, Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo, Sandra Smith was filling in as hostette. She spoke with Fox Business Network overseas editor Ashley Webster, a male, about a new poll on American attitudes...

The U.S. intelligence community has observed a “significant increase” in chatter among terrorist organizations as the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks nears. “We’ve noticed a significant increase in chatter among Islamic terrorist organizations overseas both on the Internet and phone lines,” a U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Blaze. While the intelligence community can not pinpoint whether or not an attack is planned, the official said that agencies “did see this kind of increase in chatter before the September 11 attacks.” Deciphering chatter is more difficult than in previous years because of...

In his rush to flame-broil Burger King as an unpatriotic fast-food joint looking to skip out on paying its taxes to Uncle Sam, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews sought to enlist the famously pro-free market, pro-capitalism Wall Street Journal. The only problem is his claim is 100 percent Grade A baloney. "The Wall Street Journal lead editorial today came out against it.... The lead editorial today, surprisingly, attacked this tax scheme," Matthews insisted to guest David Corn of the leftist Mother Jones magazine. In point of fact, the Journal editorial board slammed not corporate "inversion" schemes but the current U.S. tax code, which...

Californians already pay the nation's second highest gas tax at 68 cents a gallon -- and now it will go up again in January to pay for a first-in-the-nation climate change law. ... Estimates of the cost of the tax vary. The California Air Resources Board, the Golden State's premier anti-pollution agency, predicts the new tax will raise gasoline prices from 20 cents to $1.30 per gallon. A prominent state senator who helped author the bill estimated the cost at 40 cents a gallon. Environmental activists downplay the cost, but hail the impact. "We're going to now tackle probably 40...

Unlike most American presidents, Barack Obama took his inaugural oath of office twice, the latter affirmation serving as a private belt-and-braces remedy to a verbal mistake, the former as the usual public spectacle. Four years later, he repeated the trick, promising fealty first during an exclusive White House ceremony, and then, a day later, before the nation at large. Thus did our 44th president bring to a remarkable four the number of times that he had solemnly sworn to faithfully execute the Office, and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United...

AUSTIN — Nearly three years after more than 600 Texas school districts sued the state challenging the school finance system, a Travis County judge has ruled in their favor. In an almost 400-page opinion released Thursday, state District Judge John Dietz said that the state’s school finance system is unconstitutional not only because of inadequate funding and flaws in the way it distributes money to districts, but also because it imposes a de facto state property tax. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, which had argued that the system was flawed but nonetheless constitutional, said Thursday that the state “will...

Europe hasn't recovered, because it hasn't let itself. Too much fiscal austerity and too little monetary stimulus have, instead, put it more than halfway to a lost decade that's already worse than the 1930s. It's a greater depression.

Extortion: Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder's record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America. Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation's largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

Full body shiver… I really loath the sentence I’m about to type. In fact, I hate it so much, I’ve retyped it almost a dozen times; and there is no better way of articulating the disturbing truth: Paul Krugman was right.Okay. I’ve showered. Also, I have slept on this thought. And yet, it’s still haunting me. The Left’s most adored “economist”, who has managed to turn being wrong into a career option, actually stumbled across a small kernel of truth in an otherwise typically inarticulate column. The King-of-Keynes managed to write a completely, and unavoidably, coherent thought last week. I...