Free Republic

When President Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession. It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state. Not only has Mr. Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America. In March, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, led by former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, calculated the total value of the federal government's "unfunded liabilities" as they stood at the end of fiscal 2008. These liabilities include the publicly held portion of the national debt plus the amount the government must...

When it comes to outsourcing city work, Mayor Ray Nagin says an outright ban on hiring business people who have been convicted of public corruption might be taking things a bit too far. Asked by WWL-TV whether he would support legislation disqualifying felons from getting future city contracts, Nagin said Thursday that it "depends upon the conviction." "I don't want child molesters and rapists and those kind of people, but if somebody has made a mistake and has a white-collar crime and they've paid their time and they're back in the business, then I don't really see a problem with...

Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas...

Yet again the Thursday network evening newscasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover the (Climate Gate Scandal) However, ABC World News did manage to devote a two minute story to the release of singer Susan Boyle’s first album. On Thursday afternoon, ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper (reported the controversy on his blog:) “President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John Holdren, faced a barrage of questions yesterday from Republican Members of Congress about a series of hacked emails at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit that climate change skeptics have seized upon as evidence that the whole...

LOS BANOS, Philippines (AFP) – Asian rice farmers typically do not fly around the world on holidays or own big-engine cars but scientists say they have an important role to play in helping cut the world's output of greenhouse gases. While much of the globe's focus in the climate change fight is on the burning of fossil fuels and the logging of rainforests, water-logged rice paddies are also a major source of global warming-causing methane. > About 10 percent of the methane comes from rice farming, while other sources include the flatulence of cows and decomposing landfill garbage dumps. Wassmann...

Americans honor the courageous informant, the gutsy citizen who stands against the savagery of the profit-mongering conglomerate. Well, sometimes. It appears, believe it or not, that there are those who aren't religiously tethered to this sacred obligation. For now, due to revelations of the Climategate scandal, in which hacked e-mails revealed discussions among top climate scientists about the manipulation of evidence, Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain, has temporarily stepped down from his position. Michael Mann — architect of the famous "hockey stick" graph — is now under investigation by Pennsylvania State...

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- AmTrust Bank, which opened with one office on Valentine's Day 120 years ago and grew to one of the nation's 100 largest banks, was seized by federal regulators Friday and bought by New York Community Bank of Westbury, N.Y. AmTrust is the first Northeast Ohio bank to fail since TransOhio Federal Savings Bank of Cleveland was seized 17 years ago. AmTrust, the latest calamity in the nation's 2-year-old banking crisis, became the 128th bank to fail this year, and the second in Ohio. Six banks in all failed Friday, bringing the year's total to 130. With assets...

"So how can you ensure you're not harmed in future by slick rhetoric? First, by forcing yourself to admit, when the first signs of fraud appear, that you have been duped. Don't let your pride stand in the way. Get out. This way, you avoid staying on to the grim end with future Nortels. Second, whenever you see a talking head pushing a stock or a fashionable disaster on TV, ask yourself: “Who pays him?” Everyone in the market is talking up his book, yet once a mania starts, everyone has the same book, and so they all push the...

Barrick Gold to work on mine despite court ruling Fri Dec 4, 6:18 pm ET TORONTO – Global mining giant Barrick Gold Corp. will continue work on a massive gold mine project in Nevada even though a U.S. court of appeals ordered more environmental analysis on the mining project, a company spokesman said Friday. Vincent Borg said work will continue on its new $500 million Cortez Hills mine a day after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit granted an injunction to force Barrick Gold to postpone digging a 2,000-foot deep open pit at...

New York Times Staffers Freaking As Bill Keller Raises The Axe Keith Kelly|Dec. 4, 2009, 11:10 PM | 61 | With just days to go until a Monday deadline, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller yesterday confirmed that he was unlikely to get 100 newsroom volunteers to accept buyouts -- meaning he'll wield the layoff ax for the second time in two years. Sources said the newsroom was in a state of high anxiety this week because of chatter that just 50 unionized editorial workers from the Newspaper Guild are expected to step forward for voluntary buyouts by the...

Drop in Unemployment Could Have Little Impact on Default Numbers: Analysts 12/04/2009BY: CARRIE BAY he unemployment rate dropped in November, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday, as companies shed the fewest number of jobs since the recession kicked in two years ago. Government statistics show that last month, the jobless rate edged down to 10.0 percent, falling from the 26-year-high 10.2 percent hit in October. Only 11,000 jobs were lost in November, the Labor Department said. Economists had forecast a loss of as much as 130,000, consistent with the average of 135,000 job cuts seen in the prior three months....

CMBS Delinquencies Soar, Led by Hotel Defaults: Trepp 12/04/2009BY: CARRIE BAY The secondary market for commercial real estate is just beginning to show new life, with the first successful sale of a commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) package in over a year and several new issues in the wings spurred by the strong investor interest on that initial offering. But the positives of renewed activity are tempered by more bad news on the performance of those commercial bond deals made before the freeze. According to a new report from commercial research provider Trepp, delinquent loans in commercial mortgage securities jumped 85...

A cigarette tax-funded program that pays for breast cancer screenings for low-income women will stop accepting new patients Jan. 1, public health officials said this week. Officials said the decision came as a result of “unprecedented fiscal challenges” to the program which they hope to reopen by summertime.If “Every Woman Counts” reopens July 2 as planned, its scope will be scaled back significantly. Although women ages 50 and older will still be eligible, women ages 40-49 will no longer be screened. State officials acknowledged that women ages 40 to 49 who had been served by the program will no longer...

The New York Times on Friday said it probably will have to lay off newsroom employees, because it doesn't expect to get enough people to volunteer for buyouts. The paper in October announced plans to shed 100 jobs from its 1,250-person newsroom and said it hoped to achieve the reductions entirely through buyouts. Employees were told they had until Dec. 7 to decide whether to take the offer and that the paper would resort to layoffs if too few people volunteered. "We will not know until [Monday] how many Guild and excluded employees have opted to take buyouts, but it...

In January 2008, the United States economy employed 138.1 million people and the unemployment rate stood at 4.9%. But the powers in Washington thought deficit spending could boost a slowing economy, so Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) passed and President George Bush signed a $168 billion economic stimulus bill made up of temporary tax cuts and increased mortgage grantees for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By January 2009 that economic stimulus worked so well that the U.S. economy had lost 3.5 million jobs and the unemployment rate stood at 7.6%. Again the powers in Washington thought deficit spending was the answer,...

New! Scientists who know that there is no significant man-made global warming have recorded videos to be displayed for the delegates to the International Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Four of those videos were shot and edited by the team I (John Coleman) worked with. Here they are for you to see: Video: John Coleman John coleman is the founder of the Weather Channel, the original weatherman on Good Morning America and now the lead meteorologist here at KUSI-TV. Video: Joseph D'Aleo Joseph D'Aleo is a certified consulting meteorologist, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, first director of meteorology at...

Democrats have done a good job portraying Repub licans as health-care-reform obstructionists. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) gave the party line, for example, when he told Talk Radio News service, "There is no Republican health-care plan out there." In fact, the GOP has offered several health-reform bills. And on Nov. 3, the party's leaders in the House unveiled a comprehensive reform plan, introduced as a substitute amendment by Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- which Democrats defeated 258 to 176 on Nov 7. The bill, says Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), represents Republicans uniting behind "eight or 10" core principles. One...

The boss of the world’s largest shipping conglomerate has advocated the use of nuclear power on-board merchant ships. Outlining the container alliance CKYH’s decision to push ahead with super slow steaming, COSCO ceo and president Capt Wei Jiafu said that the move was in part a green one. He then went on to say that he was in favor of using nuclear power on-board merchant ships as a further green initiative. ‘As they are already on-board submarines, why not cargo ships?’ he mused. Later he spoke to Seatrade Asia Online and revealed COSCO is in talks with the national...

SHANGHAI, China - Prime Minister Stephen Harper is telling Chinese leaders they should not expect silence on human rights as the tradeoff for expanded economic ties. The Canadian leader delivered his first and only major speech of his four-day visit Friday night in Shanghai, China's glittering commercial centre that proclaims the country's emergence as an economic power in towers of neon. And he made it clear he believes the two countries have much to gain from a stronger economic partnership, especially in the energy sector. Canada is an emerging energy superpower, the world's seventh biggest oil producer, third largest natural...

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the...

Three-quarters of Ontarians oppose the looming 13 per cent harmonized sales tax, suggests a new Toronto Star-Angus Reid Public Opinion survey. In troubling news for Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberals, 70 per cent of the 1,162 people polled said their opinion of the government has worsened due to the HST. The numbers were released on the first day of public hearings into the tax at Queen's Park, where various interest groups converged, and about 300 First Nations peoples held an anti-tax rally on the front lawn and later blocked evening rush-hour traffic on University Ave. and College St.

Plan to give billions of pounds to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change could fuel conflicts as rivals fight over the cash. Many of the nations expected to be hardest hit by climate change are vulnerable because they are badly governed and war torn. But new funds, set to be agreed as part of an international deal on climate change at Copenhagen, could make the situation worse. The Chatham House Report Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility warns that billions of pounds could foment violence as rivals fight over the spoils. The think tank calls for all money...

People who doubt that human activity contributes to global warming are “flat-earthers” and “anti-science” The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment. Mr Brown has insisted that the science on climate change is settled World leaders meet in Copenhagen next week seeking a global deal on cutting carbon emissions. But the debate has been clouded by a row over accusations that British scientists manipulated data on global temperatures. The United Nations yesterday announced an investigation into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research...

. . . You've probably read about “Climategate” – how thousands of hacked e-mails from climate scientists revealed that they colluded to fudge their conclusions about global warming, told each other to destroy incriminating e-mails and perhaps even dumped raw data to mask the fraud. Why did it work? Because the falsified conclusions appealed to people's good nature, and because the conspirators co-opted above-average rhetoricians to deliver their message. Now why am I going on about this? For two reasons: First, because global warming is an investment theme that a few brokers are pushing; so, if you are a theme...

Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available, but global warming advocates reassure us that this shouldn’t really concern us because some other data sources reportedly show the same thing. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the University of East Anglia. . . .

President Barack Obama will extend his push to revive the U.S. economy next week with a speech outlining job creation ideas, from encouraging home insulation programs to diverting funds meant to rescue failing banks, officials said on Friday. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent, political pressure is building on Obama to do more to boost the economy after months of debate on overhauling the U.S. healthcare system and a months-long review of Afghan war strategy. The White House has not given specifics of Obama's strategy but U.S. officials said his proposals included incentives to homeowners to make their homes more...

Given the downturn's depth, some optimists think jobs will return quickly. They got some ammunition on Thursday, when new weekly claims for jobless benefits fell to a 14-month low. Payroll cuts, meanwhile, have steadily gotten less bad and could end soon. But fast-snapback hopes are countered by a mountain of data suggesting the recovery from this recession will be just as jobless as the prior two. The percentage of jobless workers on permanent layoff, with no hope of getting called back to work, is at a record 55.1%. A record 9.3 million are working part time because there's nothing else...

Things are getting hot and heavy in Copenhagen ahead of the city's massive climate change conference. The city's mayor warned hotels against patronizing Danish prostitutes during the upcoming U.N. summit — but the Copenhagen hookers are reportedly striking back by offering free sex to anyone who ignores the warnings. Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to 160 Copenhagen hotels, urging guests and delegates to refrain from buying sex, Spiegel Online reported. The city's prostitutes have retaliated by offering free sex to anyone who brings one of the cards to an assignation. The response is being organized by the Sex Workers Interest...

More than the majority of eligible Macon police voters opted to form a bargaining union with Teamster Law Enforcement League. The final ballot was counted around 8 p.m. on Friday. Teamsters Law Enforcement League Representative Jim Romar says 162 voted in favor of a union and two voted against forming a union. Romar says 220 Macon police, those who who rank as sergeants and below, were eligible to vote. The polling booth was located at the Electrical Workers Union Hall in Macon on both Thursday and Friday. Romar said they agreed to count all the ballots after the poll closed...

In recent months, there has been a good deal of discussion of change in the United States. Sadly, over the last two centuries, the direction in which this country has been changing seems to be away from liberty and towards more control. The present changes are hardly unprecedented and certainly not unforeseen. In this essay I will examine two authors, Hilaire Belloc and F.A. Hayek, who present a useful analysis of our present situation. In 1912, Hilaire Belloc published The Servile State, in which the Englishman prophesied that the world was moving to a reestablishment of slavery. This book made...

Bill reported earlier about a Global Warming/Hitler video which was released (10/3/2009) before the climategate scandal broke out: More Global Warming Fraud HumorA new improved video has been released to incorporate the climategate scandal. Version 2, is much better, imho.Hitler was behind global warming-climategateAlso, FoxNews reports:Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate Scandal Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate ScandalABC didn’t cover it. CBS didn’t either. And NBC apparently wouldn’t go near it.The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they’ve even been scooped by the fake news...

Denmark's Speaker of Parliament in Copenhagen said: "The problem is that lots of people go around saying that the climate change we see is a result of human activity. That is a very dangerous claim".

The Democratic think tank has released a "fact sheet" explaining how the party's health-care legislation is totally consistent with Catholic teaching as long as you ignore that whole abortion thing. The fact sheet purports to show that the bills reflect the criteria that the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference laid out in a May statement. You'd never guess it from the "fact sheet," but the bishops have repeatedly affirmed that Catholic teaching considers abortion and euthanasia particularly grave injustices and warned against treating them as items on a checklist. That's why the bishops' first and most specific comment in their statement...

When politicians say there is no Plan B, it usually means that they have given up on Plan A and are unsure what to do next. The UN climate summit in Copenhagen has been portrayed as the last chance to save the planet by those keen to bounce the world into agreeing a treaty on cutting greenhouse gases. Copenhagen is, of course, merely the last chance until the next chance. The key players are already preparing for another summit next November, when the real deal may be signed. To give it its formal title, Copenhagen is the 15th Conference of...

California Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken an odd position in regards to the latest developments in climate science. The publication of hundreds of e-mails between some of the world's leading climate researchers is proving to be an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made global warming.In the emails, scientists appear to be encouraging each other to keep their stories straight about global warming while discussing strategies to discredit opposing views and deal with data points that inconveniently fail to support the correct conclusion: that human activity have caused a permanent increase in the world's temperatures.You might think that the embarrassment accompanying...

Glenn Beck argues for a federal Value Added Tax. O'Reilly wants a federal sales tax.

YAHOO! and Microsoft have finalised the details of their planned internet search and advertising partnership. The companies hope to implement the deal next year with the approval of anti-trust regulators. "Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010," the companies said in a joint statement. "Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value and more innovation."...

DECEMBER 4 No Way, No How, to the Public Option KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL 'About two months ago my wife and I were out with another couple, and they said 'So, how's it going?'—and I knew what they meant. I said, 'I'm doing my own independent thing, but for the first time in five years, I feel out of the crossfire . . .' And my wife said, 'Knowing you, before long you'll mess up.'" Joe Lieberman laughs a big, hearty laugh, then adds: "And then came the public option!" The senator from Connecticut doesn't look sorry. Sitting in his office...

Wealth: Chile is expected to win entry to OECD's club of developed countries by Dec. 15 — a great affirmation for a once-poor nation that pulled itself up by trusting markets. One thing that stands out here is free trade. At a summit of Latin American countries last week in Portugal, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet suddenly became the center of attention — and rightly so. She announced that her country was expected to win membership in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, an exclusive club of the richest and most economically credible nations. Chile is the first country in...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- More than a dozen parking spaces at a Metropolitan government facility have misspelled words, and no one noticed until Channel 4 pointed it out Friday. Related: Watch This Story The word "owned" is misspelled 16 times in spaces outside the County Clerk's office off French Landing Drive at MetroCenter. It's a parking lot, and most people usually don't pay attention to what's on the ground until something is misspelled. Words on the first three parking spots are spelled correctly, but spot No. 4 is misspelled. It should read "Metro Owned Vehicle Parking Only;" however, someone switched up...

This is the fourth of five parts of a Monday series excerpting Thomas Sowell's latest book, "The Housing Boom and Bust."IBD Exclusive Series: Thomas Sowell on The Politics of the Housing BoomFederal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was the best-known public figure to issue warnings on the housing boom. His warnings, like those of the secretary of the treasury and the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., were delivered directly to Congress, while testifying there. Greenspan over the years moved from expressions of mild concern to a more dire view of the situation. In 2005, Greenspan testified: "Although a bubbling...

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more. Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out state governments and convert unused TARP bucks into…a government union slush fund.

New York, NY (AHN) - Retail continues to lag behind other sectors of the American economy, with government and private reports indicating mixed results for November. Department stores added 8,000 jobs over the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, while jobs in the shopping center industry fell by 14,000, a trade industry group said Thursday. The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) said a survey of 32 retail chain stores found that November sales dipped 0.3 percent from November 2008. Sales had been up the previous two months. Department stores had the most disappointing results, dropping 4.5 percent from a...

Senate Republicans discussed the impact the almost half trillion dollar Medicare cuts contained in the Democrats' health care bill will have on the quality of care currently enjoyed by about 40 million American seniors using the program, particularly the 11 million using Medicare Advantage.

In an indictment handed down Nov. 20 ....accused 15 individuals of being involved in the trafficking of cocaine and other narcotics in the Chicago area. .... aimed at dismantling the drug trafficking network of La Familia Michoacana (LFM), a mid-sized and relatively new drug cartel based in Michoacan state in southwestern Mexico. The U.S. investigation of LFM has revealed many details about the operation of the group in the United States and answered some important questions about the nature of Mexican drug trafficking and distribution north of the border. .....leaders are known to distribute documents to the group’s members that...

LOCKPORT, Ill. — Wildlife officials discovered a single Asian carp Thursday in a canal leading to Lake Michigan, the nearest the destructive species has come to the Great Lakes, Illinois environmental officials said. Environmentalists fear that if the silver or bighead species of giant Asian carp reach the lakes they could starve out native fish species and devastate a $7 billion-a-year fishing industry. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials found the 22-inch immature specimen among tens of thousands of dead fish identified in a fish kill operation in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, about 40 miles from Lake Michigan,...

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Even as he heralded the first unemployment drop in months, President Barack Obama began putting the finishing touches Friday on a fresh job creation proposal he's planning to send to Congress next week."I still consider one job lost one job too many," Obama told a community college crowd in Allentown. "Good trends don't pay the rent."The president plans to outline his list of ideas for a new jobs bill in a speech from Washington on Tuesday. Among the plans he's likely to endorse is an expansion of a program that gives people cash incentives to fix up...

Two Georgia bank failures brought the U.S. bank failure tally to 126, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Regulators closed the First Security National Bank of Norcross, Ga., and Atlanta's Buckhead Community Bank. State Bank and Trust Co. of Macon, Ga. will assume the deposits of both banks. As of Sept. 30, First Security had total assets of about $128 million and total deposits of about $123 million, and as of Nov. 6 Buckhead had total assets of about $874 million and total deposits of about $838 million. The failures also raise the number of bank failures in Georgia...

A senior Chinese official criticized foreign banks for selling derivatives with “fraudulent characteristics” that led to heavy losses for state-owned airlines and other companies. “Some international investment banks are the biggest villains,” said Li Wei, deputy chairman of the agency that oversees China’s biggest state companies, in a commentary in this week’s edition of the Study Times, a newspaper published by the school of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The comments were the Chinese government’s most pointed public criticism yet of foreign institutions. Li’s agency said in September it would support companies that want to challenge the contracts in court....

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2009 – More than 3,000 military families will have a few extra presents under the tree this year thanks to the generous efforts of Operation Homefront and The Wal-Mart Foundation. A military spouse receives assistance from volunteers during the Operation Homefront and Wal-Mart Foundation toy event for military families in the National Guard Armory gymnasium in Fayetteville, N.C., Dec. 4, 2009. Courtesy photo by Shane Dunlap  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Operation Homefront, a troop-support organization, invited spouses of deployed servicemembers to shop for free today in six make-shift toy stores stocked with toys and books...