Free Republic

I attended the first gun show of the season in Yuma.  I paid $60 to rent a table and give away free .22 ammunition.  I have more than I will likely shoot in my lifetime, purchased when the prices were much lower.I could sell it, but the Bible says that generosity is a virtue.  I am curious about human nature. and the lingering lack of .22 on store shelves prompted me to give away some bulk Remington golden bullets.   I used the event to promote the blog where I do most of my writing, Gun Watch. I gave away...

The Treasury Department has unveiled new regulations aimed at reeling in tax-dodging U.S. corporations trying to take advantage of friendly international tax codes. Snip "U.S. companies are currently taking advantage of an environment that allows them to move their tax residence overseas in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States without making significant changes in the nature of their overall business operations," Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told reporters Thursday as he announced his department's new corporate inversion guidelines. Snip Those on the right generally want to avoid sweeping tax increases for American corporations, while proposals brought forward by...

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: 'Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial.' - 'When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period.' Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer: 'Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. We are being led down a false path. To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?' Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore: 'We...

The world is running out of storage facilities for surging supplies of oil and may soon exhaust tanker space offshore, raising the chances of a violent plunge in crude prices over coming weeks, experts have warned. Goldman Sachs told clients that the increasing glut of oil on the global market has combined with mild weather from a freak El Nino this winter. The twin-effect could send prices plummeting to $20 a barrel, the so-called ‘cash cost’ that forces drillers to abandon production. “Risks of a sharp leg lower remain elevated,” it said. Oil has fallen from $110 a barrel early...

It's always the things you don't expect that get you. After banking scandals, currency issues, and a Greek/Portugese/Spanish debt crisis just about every six months, the economic and political partnership that is the European Union seems much more likely to fall apart for an entirely different reason after all. That reason is ISIS. This is a political nightmare for the statist bureaucrats who have been working for decades to reduce true representative democracy all for the goal of a unified and monolithic economic entity without worrying about being hindered by annoying little things like the will of the people. Before...

Yahoo has hired Business Insider's Hunter Walker as national correspondent, the company announced Friday. Walker will cover the 2016 presidential race for Yahoo News, with a special focus on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

A group of more than three dozen senators are pressing President Obama to tell the truth in talks with foreign leaders on any deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and explain that the ultimate say is with Congress and not the administration. Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma led a group of 37 senators in sending a letter to the president Thursday night, saying that any global agreement with "binding" timetables and emission targets, as well as financial obligations costing taxpayers, "must be brought before Congress for approval."

Last month the Obama administration's Labor Department issued Interpretive Bulletin 2015-01, which tells pension funds what factors to use when choosing investments, including climate change. Only a few tax lawyers noticed, but with U.S. pensions at $9 trillion, this is a gross power grab that will hurt the retirees it claims to protect. This government is essentially saying: Don't you dare invest in anything that causes or is hurt by climate change, or you'll be sued for failing your fiduciary responsibilities. Energy, utilities and industrials are 20% of the market. How can pension funds now own any of them? Pushing...

Last week, a bipartisan pair of senators, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), introduced a pro-American H-1B reform bill aimed at ending the chronic abuses of the long-compromised guest-worker program. The timing could not have been better. Not only has the New York Times just begun a new series of reports on H-1B abuse, but also just released is Michelle Malkin's latest tour de force Sold Out which skewers the program and looks to be one of the more important books this presidential cycle. Even traders on Wall Street think the Grassley-Durbin bill's serious. H-1B outsourcer Tata Consulting declined...

New rules will cost businesses between $49,000 and $77,000 to comply Obamacare regulations requiring that restaurants post calorie information on menus will make it harder and costlier for breweries making craft beer to comply with the new rules, Watchdog.org reported. Regulations taking effect next year will require that restaurant chains with more than 20 locations nationwide such as Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s post calorie information on all of their menus. For items such as craft beer, which are not made in house, calorie information from the brewery must be shipped to the restaurant. “Brewers are facing the prospect of...

On November 5, the White House released the text of the 5,544 page Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that President Obama had just finished negotiating under the FastTrack authority that Congress gave him. That trade pact can no longer be amended. The up-or-down votes in the House and Senate will take place as early as January 2016. So what’s in the TPP? Here’s a quick summary: A legislative body superior to CongressA vehicle to pass Obama’s climate change treatyIncreased legal immigrationReduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticalsQuotas on U.S. agricultural exportsIncreased currency manipulationReduced U.S. power That’s the summary. Here are the details....

Chinese authorities just uncovered a massive "underground bank" in the country's eastern Zhejiang province, according to a report in the People's Daily, the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper. The scale of the operation reported is astonishing. The report suggests 410 billion yuan ($64 billion) in foreign-exchange transactions were made by the unnamed illegal organisation - 370 people have reportedly been arrested.

The most quoted jobs metric in the world is misleading Many of the truly unemployed are considered self-employed About 3 billion people who want a great job don't have one What the whole world wants is a good job. That was the breakthrough finding from Gallup's first global survey 10 years ago, and it continues to be true. However, there is a problem with how the world defines and measures what a good job is... [snip] How Global Agencies Define Work Here is the heart of the problem... [snip] Global_employment Let's consider a real job or a good job --...

The TV is on in the background, and you’re replying to a quick email on your phone nearby. You don’t know it, but the devices are communicating. During a commercial, the TV emits an inaudible tone and your phone, which was listening for it, picks it up. Somewhere far away, a server makes a note: Both devices probably belong to you. This information about which devices belong to whom is immensely valuable to advertisers hoping to target ads specifically to you. In a simpler time, targeted marketing was easy. Most people had a computer at work and maybe another at...

The dire economic situation of millennials was front and center on Capitol Hill Wednesday, and a committee chairman said the executive and legislative branches were worsening it. The political failure to tackle the national debt and unfunded liabilities of entitlement programs are going to set back the generation born between 1980 and 2000 even further, Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., said at the Joint Economic Committee hearing. One member of that generation is a member of Congress now: Republican Elise Stefanik of New York, elected at age 30 last year, who testified about her generation's perspective at the hearing. Rep. Stefanik...

"The world is floating in oil. The numbers we are facing now are dreadful," said David Hufton from PVM Group The world is running out of storage facilities for surging supplies of oil and may soon exhaust tanker space offshore, raising the chances of a violent plunge in crude prices over coming weeks, experts have warned. Goldman Sachs told clients that the increasing glut of oil on the global market has combined with mild weather from a freak El Nino this winter. The twin-effect could send prices plummeting to $20 a barrel, the so-called 'cash cost' that forces drillers to...

UnitedHealth Group's threatened exit next year from Obamacare raises a dark question that could determine the future of President Obama's healthcare law: Will other insurers follow suit? It would be a sharp ding to Obama's signature healthcare law should the nation's largest insurer decide to stop selling plans through the law's online marketplaces. United said Thursday it is considering pulling out after the current enrollment season ends in January, citing major losses from the Obamacare plans. "We cannot sustain these losses," CEO Stephen Hemsley said on a conference call. "We can't really subsidize a marketplace that doesn't appear at the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's national flag carrier will begin its first direct flights from Baghdad to Washington next year, Iraqi Airways' Director General Osama Sadr told reporters on Wednesday. "The preparation has been done after several meetings were held with the administrative bodies of the airports that Iraq is planning to travel to," Sadr said, announcing that flights also would be starting to Belarus and Tunisia. Sadr said the airline is trying to connect Iraq to most countries around the world, and the airline is busy negotiating with airports where it wants to land. Baqr Jabr Zubaidi, from Iraq's Ministry...

The University of Michigan has added a three-year diversity requirement to its Ross School of Business undergraduate curriculum that, among other things, will teach their students how race, gender and sexual orientation “connect to larger systems of power, privilege and oppression.” The classes, which include “Identity 101” and “Entering into, Engaging with and Exiting Communities across Difference”, are mandatory for graduation and emphasize “identity, diversity and experience,” said Lynn Wooten, associate dean for undergraduate programs. ... The three-year program takes place over the sophomore, junior and senior years, focusing on “identity, diversity, and organizations,” in each respective year. The program...

The very short version: United HealthCare is the biggest health care insurance provider in the country (something like 70 million people, apparently). It is huge, it is influential, it is weighty. And UHC took a $425 million dollar haircut last year in the Obamacare exchanges, so now it’s thinking of stopping selling on the exchange by the end of next year. Note that UHC did not say that they would, merely that they might. They did this at a shareholders’ meeting, too; which suggests that a large part of that might have been due to UHC’s awareness that people were...