Free Republic

The phone lines are jammed. The American people have risen up in response to a rallying cry from Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), overloading the phone lines on Capitol Hill to pressure their members of Congress to fight against President Obama’s planned executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. ~snip~ “This shows the American people are going to resist,” a Sessions aide told Breitbart News. “The crescendo will grow. They are only beginning to be heard. They will get louder in the coming days.” The calls are coming in response to Sen. Sessions, who last week asked...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she knows how difficult it is "to be the leader of a relatively small country." Come again? I know I’m relatively young, but I think I would have remembered President or Prime Minister or Queen Hillary. Clinton made the comments on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" while discussing the conflict between Israel and Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. “I’ve known Bibi a long time and I have a very good relationship with him, in part because we can yell at each other – and we do,” Clinton said. “And...

Argentina on Tuesday will meet the U.S. mediator in its battle with 'holdout' debt investors suing the country for last-minute talks to avert its second default this century. Mediator Daniel Pollack said in a statement on Monday he received a telephone call from the Argentine government advising him a delegation of technical, financial and legal representatives will meet him at 11 a.m. EDT (11.00 a.m. EDT) on Tuesday in his office. "I again urged direct, face-to-face conversations with the Bondholders, but that will not happen tomorrow," Pollack said, referring to the holdout creditors. Argentine dollar-denominated bonds fell more than 3...

Michelle Obama wants the federal government to tell us what kind of food to eat. I actually wouldn’t object if she merely used a bully pulpit to encourage healthier eating. But the busy-body crowd in Washington has a hard time distinguishing between giving advice and engaging in coercion. So we now have legislation that gives Washington the power to interfere with food in local schools. But not everybody is rolling over, particularly when federal rules are coercing states into banning bake sales. The National Journal reports on growing resistance to this absurd example of nanny statism from Washington. Here are...

A federal judge handed a landmark victory to Kane County and the state of Utah on Wednesday in a years-long dispute with the federal government over whether some rural routes should remain in use as roads, or if they should be closed to the public. In two decisions, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups found he had jurisdiction to hear Kane County's claim, gave parameters for "reasonable" right-of-way widths on some routes and determined that 12 of 15 routes in dispute were roads and therefore accessible by the public. The distinction hinged on an 1866 law through which Congress sought to...

Britain’s Farnborough Air Show wrapped up last week after seven ear-splitting days. To impress the excited kids and jaded dealers in attendance, the U.S. sent an F-8, an F-15, and a pair of F-16s. But the much anticipated F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter was a no-show. After a runway fire grounded the fleet earlier this month, the Department of Defense suspended negotiations to purchase the next batch of the planes. The troubled fighter is only the latest in a growing number of cases where the DOD has bought poorly designed and massively overpriced equipment for the nation’s armed forces....

There is good and there is evil. Good is the healthy state, functioning optimally according to its design. Evil can be defined as a conscious state of disorder, a parasite that thrives on conquering the good. Humans are creatures of a magnificent design. They start out innocent enough, generally attracted to good. But all people seem to be subject to the attentions of evil, sometimes as a victim and sometimes as a participant. The vast majority of humans are kind and interesting, regardless of their culture, religion, race, or party affiliation. And right about the age of six, they are...

As the Obama administration weans the U.S. off dirty fuels blamed for global warming, energy companies have been sending more of America's unwanted energy leftovers to other parts of the world where they could create even more pollution. This fossil fuel trade threatens to undermine President Barack Obama's strategy for reducing the gases blamed for climate change and reveals a little-discussed side effect of countries acting alone on a global problem. The contribution of this exported pollution to global warming is not something the administration wants to measure, or even talk about.

The Washington Times and the Washington Redskins announced a unique partnership that will make the newspaper a content and marketing partner of the team. Under the partnership, the Redskins and the Times will collaborate on unique content offerings throughout the year designed to provide Redskins fans with compelling, timely and unique coverage. The offerings will include a weekly “Redskins Weekend Game Guide,” which will wrap the front page of the Times’ print edition each Friday during the NFL season and a new free digital magazine called “The Redskins Report,” which will showcase exclusive content about the Redskins. Both features are...

Illegal immigrants are a minor annoyance; America’s shift towards European fertility is a catastrophe from which we may never recover. The demographic crisis isn’t at our borders but at home. It’s easy to blow off steam about illegals on the border, and tough to address the fundamentals. I’ve tried to do so in the past, for example here, but the real problems and prospective solutions don’t make easy sound-bites.Just to make things clear: I want super-tough, restrictive immigration laws. I’d prefer a Canadian-style system that favors highly-educated immigrants with capital to invest. But I don’t think the best immigration...

A leading air transport industry body has called for a top-level meeting with the Venezuelan president to discuss ways to restore over $4 billion of airlines' money that is trapped in the country due to its currency controls. President Nicolas Maduro's government requires airlines to sell tickets in the bolivar currency but has been slow to allow them to repatriate the earnings. IATA said on Monday that international capacity on routes to Venezuela is down 36 percent year-on-year, or down 49 percent from 2013 peaks. "Confidence in the market is falling sharply," Tyler said. "Venezuela risks becoming disconnected from the...

The high-rise at 500 N. Lake Shore Drive is the second-most expensive in the city, with rents for a one-bedroom apartment approaching $3,000 a month, well beyond the reach of most Chicago residents. But that's not too much for the Chicago Housing Authority, which has used federal tax dollars to pick up most of the tab for four lucky residents in the year-old building, with its sweeping views of Lake Michigan, a concierge and a dog-grooming center. The tenants moved in over the past two years as part of a push by the CHA to expand its housing voucher program...

Who is Shaun Donovan? Recently confirmed by the Senate to head the White House’s budget office, Donovan at first appears to be a typical bureaucrat. He has held the position of Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) since 2009, and has now been promoted to one of the highest offices in the U.S. bureaucracy. However, a look at Donovan’s tenure at HUD and his lack of knowledge about America’s fiscal circumstances shows that the Senate should have opposed his nomination. Instead, a majority of Republicans and every voting Democrat ignored Donovan’s ignorance about the federal budget...

The “Iron Maiden." She was the staunch and sturdy leader of Great Britain who once held up F. A. Hayek’s masterwork “Road to Serfdom” and declared “This is what we believe in.” Hayek’s work is a road map for what could go wrong when individual freedoms are lost and central planning becomes the answer for every ill. When truth is bent to meet the moment and government decision making is the proposed cure all, “serfdom” is the destination. Margaret, in believing Hayek’s cautionary, also declared that Socialism cannot sustain itself. Socialism can not last because eventually “you run out of...

The global warming fear mongers are at it again. Twice recently they’ve been caught in the act-- not only are they lying, they're so desperate that they're starting to look ridiculous. “Three years of observations show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year,” reports the UK’s University of Leeds, “twice as much as when it was last surveyed. A team of scientists from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, led by researchers at the University of Leeds, have produced the first complete assessment of Antarctic ice sheet elevation change.” Like...

UNKNOWN QUESTIONER:“Um, you mentioned the Health Insurance Exchanges for the States. And it’s my understanding that if the States don’t provide them, that the Federal Government will provide them.”M.I.T. economics Prof. Jonathan Gruber:“Yeah, so these Health Insurance Exchanges —once you go on MA-HealthConnect.org and CRS [is] in Massachusetts—will be these new shopping places. And they’ll be the place that people go to get their subsidies for health insurance. “In the law it says [that] if States don’t provide them, the federal backstop will. The Federal Government has been sort-of slow in putting in this backstop, I think partially, because they...

President Barack Obama, who in his political dotage is enthusiastically getting in touch with his inner Otto von Bismarck to such an extent that we half expect him to start sporting a walrus mustache and a pickelhaube, on Saturday treated the ailing republic to another lecture on the theme of “economic patriotism,” by which he means an arrangement under which companies adopt tax strategies that maximize the amount of money they send to President Obama and his colleagues to dispose of as they see fit. He demanded that companies “embrace an economic patriotism,” presumably one defined by Barack Obama, rather...

SIX YEARS AGO, Jeanne Shaheen was quick to attack then-Sen. John Sununu on the cost of gasoline. This was a time when New Hampshire consumers were paying around $4 a gallon. In television ads and on the stump, Shaheen argued that the senator deserved blame for not doing more to bring prices down. Her supporters even held protests at his offices to highlight her position. One of her supporters went so far as to dress up as a gas pump to follow Sen. Sununu around at events claiming he wasn’t doing enough to “help the middle-class” deal with fuel prices....

Here's the question, not of the day, but of the month: Who's Winning the War in Ukraine? That may sound like a simple question, but it isn't. That question leads to a second question "In whose eyes?" It also depends on the definition of "war". And it also depends on the definition of "win". And finally it depends on which media source you believe. Military Aspect From a military aspect, I have seen reports from both sides. The Western media portrays Ukraine on the march with the rebels surrounded, and losing ground. Is that accurate reporting? I will let you...

This week, in the aftermath of the Q1 -2.9% GDP disaster, the biggest "non-recessionary" drop in 67 years which was blamed on harsh weather (because there have never been harsh winters in the past 67 years), we get the first glimpse of what Q2 GDP was in the US economy. It is expected to print just shy of 3%. However, one person disagrees: Gary Shilling believes that not only will Q2 GDP be closer to 1% than to 3%, there is a fairly good chance it could be negative, which of course would mean that the US economy has officially...

British lawyers are getting ready to hit Russian President Vladimir Putin with a multi-million pound class action suit for his alleged role in the Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine this month, an English daily reported. According to British daily The Sunday Telegraph, senior Russian military commanders and politicians closely-linked to Putin will likely be also included in the suit, set to take place in American courts. “There has been talk of civil suits against Malaysia Airlines, but those immediately responsible are not only the separatists who are alleged to have fired the rocket at Flight MH17,...

The state of Arizona executed double murderer Joseph Wood this week. The convicted killer was injected with a combination of lethal drugs that eventually caused his death; however, it took too long according to some observers. After being administered the drugs, Wood lingered for almost two hours before dying. Witnesses included reporter Troy Hayden who said the execution was “botched” and that Wood’s last words were similar to “a fish on shore gulping for air.” While Hayden complained that the execution was “very disturbing to watch,” U.S. Senator John McCain noted that it was “terrible” and amounted to “torture.” During...

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry after perusing these stories that will be added to our “great moments in government” collection. For instance, did you realize that American taxpayers were saddled with the responsibility to micro-manage agriculture in Afghanistan? You’re probably surprised the answer is yes. But I bet you’re not surprised that the money was flushed down a toilet. Here are some excerpts from a report on how $34 million was wasted. American agricultural experts who consider soybeans a superfood…have invested tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to try to change the way Afghans eat. The...

Here are Professor Peter Morici's forecasts for upcoming economic data. Forecast Prior Observation Consensus Week of July 28 July 28 Pending Home Sale Index - June 103.3 103.9 104.2 Dallas Fed Manufacturing Index 13.0 11.4 12.0 July 29 S&P Case/Shiller Index - May Twenty City Y/Y 9.9 10.8 9.9 Consumer Confidence - July 85.5 85.2 85.5 July 30 ADP Employment Report - July 236K 281 235 GDP - Q2 (a) 2.7% -1.0 3.1 GDP Implicit Price Deflator 1.8 1.3 2.0 July 31 Initial Unemployment Claims 300K 284 305 Employment Cost Index - Q2 0.5% 0.3 0.5 Employment Cost Index -...

Just for once, wouldn't it be great if President Obama actually defended American business, instead of attacking it? Just once?Wouldn't it be great if Obama acknowledged that U.S. firms are overburdened by the highest corporate tax rate among developed countries, and as a result are becoming less and less competitive? Wouldn't it be great if he said he wants to fix this tax imbalance in order to grow the economy faster and give U.S. businesses a leg up on the global scene? Couldn't he just say that? He could say it like this: "Look, I don't want to drive businesses...

While this past week may have been pretty much nothing in the way of general asset growth (metals flat off --stocks flat in market under pressure), it's been a great week for geek number thingees, in fact we updated the link list to include Business Insider's Chart page (hat tip to Wyatt's Torch) and we've been into the income shifts that have turned the Great Recession into the gift that keeps giving.  Chgogal gave us the headsup to the  NYTimes piece "The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less" and Wash. Post Chart study Median household incomes have collapsed since...

he NSA made me slather my face in make-up. Or, it didn’t make me, exactly. But last spring, I found myself wandering around D.C., wearing dazzle camouflage for the first time. It was a sunny Saturday, the capital swamp neither frigid nor muggy-oppressive—perfect for walking. It took me 45 minutes to get all the makeup on, to get the pencil right and the hair dangled just so. I spent the day hanging out with some friends around Adams Morgan, a neighborhood seemingly developed by former hippies who had gone into non-profit C-suites or opened boutique restaurant-bars. I told my friends...

General Motors said Thursday that its second-quarter earnings fell 85 percent, as recall costs chopped $1.5 billion from the bottom line.

Swift Boat Captn wrote: And things were so great before Obama took over. Let's go back to the Chimp's economy that he started by turning surpluses into deficits then finished by losing 800,000 jobs per month and Wall Street on the brink of extinction. - This Won’t End End Well: Obama Giveth X and Taketh Away 7.6 Percent More Dear Comrade Kerry, In February 2007, when the terrible, evil George W. Bush was president, there were 2,427,000 more jobs than there are today. In February 2007, when the terrible, evil George W. Bush was president, there were 5,167,000 fewer unemployed....

Ask Jason Fraser how many jobs he applied for after graduating from a St. Petersburg law school last year and this is what he says: “Maybe 10 or 20 when it was some place I wanted to work. Maybe 50 when I started getting desperate.’’ After searching as far afield as Ocala and Miami, Fraser finally landed a public defender’s post in Pasco County in June. But his months of job-hunting raises another question, one that nags at many in the legal profession: Does Florida have too many lawyers? Since 2000, the number of licensed attorneys has swollen from 60,900...

When companies are heading for the door as fast as they decently can, you have to ask yourself why? President Obama's approach is a rather different one; let's just lock the door and stop them from leaving.On both sides of the US political divide, America's apparent corporate exodus via so-called "inversion takeovers" is a source of growing concern. However, their response to the problem could hardly be more different. Broadly, Republicans want to deal with the issue by lowering corporate tax rates; but Democrats want to stop the outflow by changing the rules. As things stand, these allow companies to...

Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals. ear Reader (including the many new anti-Semitic and just plain bat-guano crazy people who’ve wandered into my life in recent days), Last night I said on Twitter: Forgetting may not be the right word. Though if this was the Soviet Union, teams of fat-fingered bureaucrats would be airbrushing his likeness from all official records. In case you’re not up to speed, let’s recap. It’s really a wonderful, feel-good story for the whole family. In the Halbig decision this week, the court ruled that according...

Nevada Power has amended its general rate increase request in a filing Friday with the state Public Utilities Commission, raising the revenue requirement to $37.8 million from the $20.8 million sought originally May 2. The effect of the new request, which totals about 81 percent, would be to impose an overall increase of 1.64 percent instead of the 0.9 percent request in the original filing.

<p>DENVER (AP) — Officials at some Denver homeless shelters say the legalization of marijuana has contributed to an increase in the number of younger people living on the city’s streets.</p> <p>One organization dealing with the increase is Urban Peak, which provides food, shelter and other services to homeless people aged 15 to 24 in Denver and Colorado Springs.</p>

African visitors to U.S. conference to be taught about subsidies, assistancePresident Obama has begun touting his upcoming “U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit” as an opportunity for African nations “to become partners with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children.” The event, according to the White House, will “build’ on the president’s trip to Africa in the summer of 2013 in which U.S. taxpayers paid $60 to $100 million for the Obama family’s lavish comforts and entertainment. While the summit’s official theme is “Investing in the Next Generation,” a close inspection reveals that U.S. taxpayers again ultimately...

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Iraq’s largest oil refinery for domestic use has been overtaken by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadi terrorist group aiming to establish an Islamic caliphate in these two nations. As Iraq’s most lucrative resource is now siphoned off by a radical organization, the global oil market risks destabilization while financially empowering ISIS. Economic stability facilitates greater religious freedom – establishing an ISIS controlled government as detrimental to Iraq’s advances toward a stable and secular democratic state. The Christian population has been a primary target of this fundamentalist movement,...

Sweet Cakes by Melissa, a Christian-owned bakery, closed its doors earlier this year after its owners Aaron and Melissa Klein were found guilty of violating gay people's rights by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.The Kleins refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple in 2013, which resulted in the complaint against them.However, the bakery, now called "Sweet Cakes," continues to exist as an online business.According to The Advocate, the bakery recently posted a picture on its Facebook page of some goods that it recently made for the Restored Hope Network, an ex-gay organization, and added...

I’ve had some fun over the years by pointing out that Paul Krugman has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. So I shouldn’t be surprised that he wants to catch me making an error. But I’m not sure his “gotcha” moment is very persuasive. Here’s some of what he wrote for today’s New York Times. Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare. …Needless to...

iv> If you are like me, you grow frustrated when billionaires come out and tell the public how to live their lives. I am especially suspect of billionaires who are buying up robot companies, while trying to convince the public that we should work half as hard. In other words, when the dudes from Google try to pitch this sort of thing, I find it total nonsense, and a cover for the fact that one day, we may not have a choice to work half as much, or not at all since their robots will work a lot harder for...

Bloomberg is reporting on the increase in coal company bankruptcies in recent years, due to the switch by power companies to natural gas and fracking, which has flooded the market with cheap gas. Driving this conversion is the prospect of new, draconian rules to be issued by the EPA on emissions from coal plants. Exports are failing to save U.S. miners. Slowing Chinese growth and rising competition from overseas, including increased Australian output, have sent the price of metallurgical coal, used in steelmaking, to a six-year low. Central Appalachian thermal coal, used in power plants to produce electricity, fell on...

Now front page news soon to be in the corporate obituary column. First the board has to go. Why? It does not know the grocery business let alone Market Basket's. It does not know its employees or its customers. Lets step over that bump in the road for now. They hired co-CEO's. That never works again pointing to the lace of management structure needed to run a 71 store chain. Let's step over that hurdle also. One of the co-CEO's is from Albertson which was torn apart by a strike 10 years or so ago on the West Coast. never...

The International Monetary Fund has urged Ukraine's fragile government to honor its bailout obligations, a sign the fund is concerned a breakdown in the country's coalition could jeopardize its emergency financing package. Ukraine's ruling coalition broke up on Thursday, with Prime Minister Arseniy Yansunyuk submitting his resignation, jeopardizing passage of a supplementary budget that may be needed for the IMF's executive board to approve the next tranche of financing in late August. The fund said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde discussed the implications of the political developments with President Petro Poroshenko and Mr. Yatsenyuk by telephone on Friday. (SNIP) The...

Over 4,000 Americans have signed a petition to boycott Chase bank over a company survey that probed employees about their sexual orientation and personal beliefs. The National Organization for Marriage’s campaign, “Void Chase,” urges customers across the globe to take their banking business elsewhere until JPMorgan Chase apologizes and promises “never again to invade the privacy of your employees in this way.” The effort is the result of what critics call an invasive survey that asked whether Chase employees identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, or as an “LGBT ally.”

Beneath all of the bogus economic data, the US economy is tanking again. One of the biggest games played by the bean counters in Washington in the US is the overstatement of GDP growth by understating inflation. Consider this simple example. Let’s say that the US GDP grew by 10% last year. Now let’s say that inflation also grew by 10%. In this scenario, real inflation adjusted GDP growth was ZERO. However, announcing ZERO GDP growth is a major problem politically. So what do the Feds do? They claim that inflation was just 8%, and BOOM you’ve got 2% GDP...

Power stations that burn biomass are worse for the environment than those that burn coal, new analysis suggests. According to David MacKay, the government’s chief scientific advisor on energy, burning wood imported from North America in British power stations produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal.As previously reported on Breitbart London, American scientists wrote a letter to the British government in May to protest the policy of subsidising power firms to import wooden pellets from the U.S. They said that this was anything but carbon neutral as the forests from which the pellets are taken act as a “carbon sink”, taking carbon dioxide...

Corporate Deserters President Obama was beating the drums on Thursday in Los Angeles regarding corporate tax deserters, companies that move headquarters or tax shields to another country in order to escape high US tax rates. The LA Times provides the details in President Obama Hits 'Corporate Deserters' in Populist L.A. Speech. Tearing into companies he dubbed “corporate deserters,” President Obama on Thursday launched an election-year push to make it harder for U.S. companies to avoid paying taxes. Under a bright sun at a trade and technical college in Los Angeles, Obama issued a damning assessment of a “small but growing”...

Glitzy billboards in the Middle East and postage stamps in the U.S. Advertisements for lingerie and sales on modest skirts. Lavish buffets and cellphone apps. Ramadan, Islam's holiest month, is a boon for retailers in the Middle East, South Asia and beyond. And while some Muslims welcome it as a positive sign, others see it as commercialization of a sacred time of year.

Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too. The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower....

A New England supermarket chain embroiled in a labor dispute provides a boon for its competitors—or does it? One week after a company-wide employee dispute slammed the breaks on food deliveries, the shelves are looking pretty barren inside most of New England’s 70 or so Market Basket stores. Rather than shuffle past picket lines to contend with empty meat cases and dwindling produce bins, many of the region’s customers have been taking their business elsewhere. Exactly how many customers have been going elsewhere is a question that’s begging to be answered, though of some of the area’s competing grocers are...

I received a note the other day from a social Democrat, who wrote: “When Obama came to power the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 7,900, today it is over 17,000. When he came to power, the Federal Budget deficit was 11% of gross domestic product (GDP), today it is 2.8%. When he came to power, the economy was in a free fall and losing 8 million jobs, today it is growing and all the lost jobs have been recovered. We are poised today to become the greatest energy producer in the world and North America will produce more oil and...