Free Republic

The HBO documentary Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 picked up the Oscar for Best Short-Subject Documentary at Sunday night’s 87th annual Academy Awards. The 40-minute film follows staffers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 24-hour call center as they speak with veterans experiencing emotional crises.

5 years into the euro zone crisis the ECB announces a €1.1 trillion quantitative easing programme to boost economy. Bolder than expected. Draghi Commits ECB to Trillion-Euro Asset-Purchase Plan to Fight Deflation Mario Draghi led the European Central Bank into a new era, committing to a quantitative easing program worth at least 1.1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) to counter the threat of a deflationary spiral. The ECB president shrugged off determined opposition led by German officials with a pledge to buy 60 billion euros every month through September next year in a once-and-for-all push to put more cash into circulation...

Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown... The next financial collapse, already on our radar screen, will not come from hedge funds or home mortgages. It will come from junk bonds, especially energy-related and emerging-market corporate debt. The Financial Times recently estimated that the total amount of energy-related corporate debt issued from 2009-2014 for exploration and development is over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements recently estimated that the total amount of emerging-market dollar-denominated corporate debt is over $9 trillion. Energy-sector...

When it comes to student debt, it's not fair to blame students for being in over their heads. In the first of its reports (April 2014), the BCEP concluded that not only is the price tag for governmental student loan relief programs much higher than originally thought, but their existence presents an irresistible temptation for students to “engage in more risky behavior because they don’t have to bear the full cost of their actions.” As such, the center urges policymakers to eliminate the forgiveness portions of the various relief programs to “reduce the potential for over-borrowing by requiring borrowers to...

The constitutional issues involving President Barack Obama's executive orders on amnesty far transcend the issue of illegal immigration. The president’s action strikes at the very heart of our separation of powers. The Constitution reserves to Congress alone the power to enact and alter law, and charges the president with the responsibility to faithfully execute those laws. If the president can seize legislative power in this manner and then boast to an audience that he himself has changed the law, then the separation of powers becomes meaningless, and our constitutional Republic will have crossed a very bright line that separates a...

The Mexican Revolution, which began on November 20, 1910, and continued for a decade, is recognized as the first major political, social, and cultural revolution of the 20th century. The United States, Mexico’s northern neighbor, was significantly affected by the human dislocation that resulted: if someone did not want to fight, the only alternative was to leave the country—and over 890,000 Mexicans did just that by legally emigrating during the second decade of the 20th century….

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 03, 2014 The German magazine Stimme des Glaubens reported years ago that Pope John Paul II had commented on the Third Secret of Fatima during a conference in Fulda, Germany in 1980. In this report, Pope John Paul II said, "...it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this: if there is a message in which it is written that the oceans will flood whole areas of the earth, and that from one moment to the next millions of people will perish, truly the publication of such a message is no longer something to be so much...

The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election. The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one. From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour. Strategists and experts say the result has been bad news for Democrats, who have had a tougher time underscoring their preferred campaign...

Nigeria has been declared officially free of Ebola after six weeks with no new cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. WHO representative Rui Gama Vaz, speaking in the capital Abuja, said it was a "spectacular success story". Nigeria won praise for its swift response after a Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July. The outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries. The WHO officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday. Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in...

News about the spread of the Ebola virus has been an increasing focus for market participants in recent days. Despite rising media coverage, Ebola seems to have had little discernible effect on consumer sentiment to date. However, as Goldman Sachs notes, the "fear factor" associated with Ebola appears more significant than in past instances of pandemic concern. While expert opinion sees the likelihood of a significant outbreak of Ebola in the US as very low, it is likely any negative macroeconomic consequences are most likely to be transmitted through fear or risk-aversion channels.

In an open letter to Saudi ministers posted via Twitter, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud expressed his “astonishment” at comments made by Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, who reportedly played down the impact of oil prices falling below $100 a barrel. Prices have since fallen below $88 a barrel, or a quarter since June. Prince Alwaleed, noting the kingdom’s 2014 budget was 90 per cent dependent on oil revenues, said belittling the impact of lower prices was a “catastrophe that cannot go unmentioned”.

The signs of the times as read by the Roger Cohen of New York Times at least in his piece The Great Unraveling throw shadows upon a doubtful scene. He surveys our age and writes, “it was a time of beheadings. … a time of aggression. … a time of breakup. … a time of weakness…. a time of hatred. … a time of fever. … a time of disorientation.” And yet they had come to that pass sleep-walking, unmindful “until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had...

With international crises boiling on three continents, it is easy to think that things could not possibly get any worse. But, of course, they can, and that proposition is being tested presently in Pakistan where anti-government protests area growing more aggressive.300 were injured in overnight battles with government forces on Saturday night into Sunday morning. Demonstrations by Pakistanis loyal to opposition politician Imran Khan and cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri that began two weeks ago became more violent this weekend as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. The protest movement has been camped outside of Pakistan’s parliament...

Via Facebook: No Drama Obama’s Summer Casual Agenda for America (or What He Didn’t Do On My Summer Vacation)There is absolutely nothing important going on in the world right now.There are no security threats, no worldwide turmoil affecting America’s interests, no civil war in Syria, South Sudan, or Libya. No war on our ally, Israel. No Ebola epidemic devastating West Africa and spreading. No race riots tearing apart a whole community in Missouri. No Russian aggression in Ukraine. No deranged North Korean dictator testing more missiles. No Chinese jets getting up close and personal with our American military. No brave American...

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...

Tyler Durden 08/26/2014 After spending time in Argentina, BofA's Marcos Buscaglia is concerned... The perception of many locals is that the risks of an economic/currency crisis before year-end have increased significantly. This compares to a view they had before of a muddle-through till the 2015 presidential elections. Policy decision-making is ever more concentrated, and the administration has radicalized, but the severe economic downturn will change political incentives in 2015, in BofA's view. With the official peso rate at record lows once again, the black-market Dolar-Blue tumbled to over 14/USD - a record low indicating dramatic devaluation ahead (which of course,...

There’s something darkly coincidental in the fact that the latest weapon to be deployed against the survival instinct of both Israel and the United States is an alleged “heartlessness” when it comes to children. The people of Israel are castigated in news media, social media and the “international community” (read: the scoundrel United Nations, of whose budget U.S. taxpayers pay 22 percent) as lacking in “humanity” itself. Why? Because as the IDF fights to end Gaza’s endless rocket barrages against Israel, many children under the age of 18 number among the civilian dead. This London Telegraph headline is not...

The leader of the Kurds in Iraq has pleaded for arms shipments to fend off onslaught from extremist Islamic State (IS) militia, who are accused of burying women and children alive. United States officials have warned IS is a direct threat to the US, and other western nations, and is more powerful now than Al Qaeda was when it struck the US on September 11, 2001. The US forces have continued airstrikes against IS targets in northern Iraq as political friends and foes criticise president Barack Obama's decision to limit American action in the country.

Dead bodies of illegal immigrants are turning up in south Texas as Central Americans pour across the U.S.-Mexico border, and a veterinarian who ranches cattle 70 miles from ground zero has the photos to prove it. Dr. Mike 'Doc' Vickers of Brooks County, Texas showed some of the grisly images to MailOnline, all of them far too grotesque to publish unedited. One picture shows a corpse propped up against a tree near his ranch in Brooks County, his eyes missing and dried blood cascading down his shirtless body. 'This guy, obviously, had to lay down up against that tree, and...

Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst (R) reported that the vast majority of illegal immigrants coming over the southern border are not unaccompanied minors in an appearance on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.” “Our effort in Texas is not focused on the unaccompanied children...we are focused on-the unaccompanied children represent some 12%-20%. We're focused on that 80, the 85% of which a quarter according to the border patrol, have a criminal record” he said ...