Free Republic

Despite struggling with the ongoing border crisis, Texas is the number three state in terms of job growth, creating more than 20,000 jobs in August alone, with an unemployment rate of just 5.3%. So, what is Texas doing right? […] (President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard) Fisher explained that Texas is way ahead of much of the nation economically largely due to its highly diversified economy, pro-business government and lack of income tax. …

To understand why revitalizing Detroit will be difficult, consider the response to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) recent plan to make overdue customers pay their bills. The DWSD serves more than 4 million customers across the Detroit region. The suburbs mostly buy water from the DWSD wholesale, so it’s mainly city residents and businesses who get billed directly, and over half of them—about 90,000 customers—haven’t paid up. Total past-due bills add up to nearly $90 million, with the average delinquent residential customer owing $540, or more than 7 months’ worth of service, based on an average bill of...

We have just been notified that authorities may be looking for ‘loose buckets of sunshine’ in the New York area, just days after an ISIS threat upon New York and as verified by the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center (NETC) now showing TWO RADCON 5 Alerts in the greater NY City area. You can check out screenshots of the NETC’s two RADCON 5′s below as well as the 1st video, of an ISIS member making threats upon New York, warning that ISIS members are mobilizing there now. Why haven’t there been any public announcements about this yet by our mainstream media?...

Microsoft Exec: Windows 9 to be Free for Windows 8 Users Microsoft has scheduled a special invite-only event for Tuesday, September 30, 2014, where it is widely expected to introduce the next version of its popular desktop operating system (codenamed “Threshold” but popularly referred to as Windows 9)... According to Indonesian news portal Detik, existing Windows 8 users will be able to upgrade to Microsoft’s next operating system absolutely free of cost. And how exactly do they know this, you ask? Well, Microsoft Indonesia president Andreas Diantoro said so in Jakarta Thursday... ...

Apple’s OS X is vulnerable to the Shellshock bug, but it’s not that easy for attackers to take advantage of it, according to Intego, which specializes in security software for the operating system. Shellshock is the nickname for a flaw in the Bourne Again Shell, or Bash, which is a command-line shell processor widely present in Unix and Linux systems. The flaw in Bash, which has been present for two decades, could allow an attacker to take complete control of a computer. Apple, which plans to patch the flaw, said most users are fine unless they’ve tweaked advanced Unix settings....

Swiss voters on Sunday rejected a plan for a seismic shift from the country's all-private health insurance system to a state-run scheme. Referendum results showed that almost 62 percent of voters had shot down a reform pushed by left-leaning parties which say the current private system is busting the budgets of ordinary residents. The results also underlined the national divisions over the hotly-contested issue as the country's German-speaking regions voted against the plan, while their French-speaking counterparts were in favour. Switzerland's private insurance lobby hailed the vote.

Hours after the police sought to break up the protest, large crowds of demonstrators remained nearby, sometimes confronting lines of officers and chanting for them to lay down their truncheons and shields. Police officers were also injured in skirmishes with protesters. Streets of a city known as a safe enclave for commerce became a nighttime battleground.

he ban on imports of selected food products to Russia has led to a fall of purchasing prices of summer apples and vegetables in the Czech Republic, according to a poll carried out by ČTK. According to Agriculture Ministry spokesman Hynek Jordán, retail chains have made use of the situation and have cut purchasing prices of apples as well as processed products, such as apple juice, by at least 20 percent. Apples, for instance, are being sold for about one half of last year's price. “Poland started placing apples on the market for almost zero prices to get rid of...

The rationalizations for Obama’s failures are already beginning, and Tom Friedman employs the laziest of all strategies, tearing down a great man to make a small man look bigger. In his Sunday column in the New York Times, Friedman makes a number of highly dubious points. These days there is a lot of “if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan” talk by conservatives. I’ll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president. On the question of the domestic economy, there can be little doubt. Reagan inherited far higher unemployment and high inflation, and within a year or so had...

I’m a big believer that real-world examples can teach us about the benefits of good fiscal policy (think Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, and the U.S. under Reagan and Clinton) and the costs of bad fiscal policy (France, Cyprus, Greece, and the U.S. under Bush and Obama).Today, let’s look at another example of bad fiscal policy. And we’re going to pick on Slovenia since I’m on my way back from the annual Liberty Seminar at Lake Bohinj.I’m motivated because one of the other lecturers at the Seminar was that country’s former Finance Minister, Janez Šušteršic.His basic argument is that Slovenia is...

Investment & Finance End of 2014 Q3 into Q4 Thread Edition Comodities Stock Indexes    now   3 Mo. Chg.   Annualized return     now   3 Mo. Chg.   Annualized return  gold $1,220.26 -7.2% -25.9% S&P500 1,982.85 1.2% 4.7% silver $17.71 -16.2% -50.7% DJIA 17,113.15 1.7% 7.0% oil $512.66 -6.2% -22.6% NASDAQ 4,512.19 2.4% 9.8% U.S. $ $85.62 6.7% 29.8% Rus2k 1,119.33 -6.2% -22.5%  Here's what happened with the third quarter investments:  Looks like the dollar soared (so much for Fed printer devaluations), metals tanked (so much for safe havens), and while big cap. stocks have done best this past quarter the current...

Joel Kotkin writing for New Geography hits the nail smack on the head with his assessment Sick Man of Europe is Europe. Throughout the continent, public support for a united Europe fell sharply last year. Opposition to greater integration has emerged, with anti-EU parties gaining support in countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, Greece, Germany and France. The new reality is epitomized by France’s ascendant far-right political figure, Marine Le Pen, who is now leading in many polls to win the next presidential election. These attitudes suggest that the EU could be devolving from a nascent super-state to something...

Apparently, Apple’s problem (who knew the world’s most profitable company had a problem?... I mean, aside from bendable i-phones?) is that their executives are all “old white guys.” According to Yahoo Finance, the tech sector (in general) is suffering from a minority deficiency. According to Yahoo Finance, you just can’t help but notice that Apple events are essentially one long “parade of middle-aged white guys who came on stage to reveal the company’s latest and greatest.” Strong words for a website that regularly features Henry Blodget, Aaron Task, and Ben Stein. (And Henry Blodget is even barred from the securities...

An obituary in the Washington Post for Robert Poli provides a chance to look back at a decisive moment in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Poli was the head of the militant Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), which launched an illegal strike in 1981. The Post describes the significance of the action: The strike by PATCO, Reagan’s subsequent breaking of the union and the hiring of replacement workers were among the most significant job actions of their time, said Joseph A. McCartin, a professor at Georgetown University and a specialist on labor and social history. They “helped to define labor relations...

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a law curbing the power of public sector unions in his state in 2011, Democrats warned that public schools would suffer terribly. But one year after the law had taken effect--and in the midst of a recall campaign that was driven entirely by the backlash to the law--Democratic candidate Tom Barrett could not name a single school hurt by Walker's reforms. When Mary Burke, the Democrat challenging Walker in 2014, was asked last month by THE WEEKLY STANDARD if she could name any schools hurt by Walker's reforms, she replied with an anecdote about...

The kings men also viewed their power as necessary as Comey does today. They could simply enter someone’s home and search all your papers. If you wrote anything derogatory against the king, off you went to prison. This is what inspired the American Revolution and the Fourth Amendment that there had to be a reason to search not just arbitrary desire to want to know and lets see what we can find as the NSA and FBI do today. This is the very essence of LIBERTY. You cannot pretend to be the leader of the free world with people like...

President Obama, Ban Ki-moon and 300,000 others showed up in New York City this week to support the use of modern technologies and cleaner fuels. But at least four notable heads-of-state stayed home, each of whom is just as important in the battle against global warming. Missing: China, India, Russia and Canada. While it may seem hard to reconcile that some of the globe’s biggest polluters skipped the event — they still sent delegations as a show of respect — it is not necessarily a blow to the cause. That’s because of unconventional shale gas — and the wealth of...

Wow. The Washington Post either has a really weird sense of humor, or they are wildly disconnected from the political atmosphere in America. In an opinion piece (I know, it’s kinda hard to tell nowadays) writer Mark Maske speculated on a possible career option for Eric Holder, now that he has resigned from the position of Attorney General. According to Maske, Holder should lend his credibility and professionalism to the troubled NFL… And no, I don’t think this was satire. According to the WashPo:Here is one bit of unsolicited advice for the NFL: Hire Eric H. Holder Jr. and put him...

First, the late Friday rally did manage to break the large-cap index back out above the downward sloping trading channel that has dominated the month, but only barely. Moreover, stocks quickly encountered heavy resistance at around 3PM at a shorter-term and much steeper downward sloping trading channel that has formed since the market peak on September 19. In short, it was a good bounce on Friday, but U.S. large-cap stocks still have a long way to go before they are even remotely in the clear to stage the next advance to new highs. For the rest of the U.S. stock...

Here's the question of the day: Does GDP stand for Gross Domestic Product or Grossly Distorted Procedures?One of the reasons I ask is the latest push by countries to include prostitution and drugs sales in GDP calculations.