Free Republic

Tapping pension funds and encouraging online crowd funding are at the heart of plans unveiled by the European Commission to kickstart business investment. Speaking on Thursday (27 March), financial services commissioner Michel Barnier said the Commission’s blueprint on “long-term financing” published the same day was needed to further encourage alternatives to traditional bank lending which remains stagnant more than five years since the start of the financial crisis. “Our financial system must regain and increase its ability to finance the real economy,” he said, adding that “we need to diversify financing sources in Europe and improve access to finance for...

I can barely put 2 pieces of code together but I’ll bet I could have made a website which enrolled at least one person at this point. Well I could have hired someone anyway. Oregon couldn’t even do that. (From Breitbart.com) Rep. Jason Conger, the other Republican on the panel, says officials in charge including executive director Rocky King, who left his job in December, should have known better than to try to pull off a project of this scope without hiring an IT contractor to run it. “I think it reflects a certain amount of arrogance that it...

President Barack Obama is getting some help from the country's tech giants in his effort to show Americans how climate change will affect their communities. The Obama administration thinks that local data, which may have a real-world effect on Americans' lives, will provide a convincing argument for steps to prevent climate change. The risk rising sea levels have on individual communities will be the focus of a new website, climate.data.gov, which uses government data to put environmental changes in context. The White House also called on tech companies to develop tools for Americans to better get a grasp on how...

Historians will one day look back at the presidency of Barack Obama and highlight the administration’s dangerous willingness to short-circuit the Constitution when convenient. From refusing to enforce immigration laws and disregarding rules governing presidential appointments to the outright takeover of our health care system, President Obama has repeatedly painted outside the lines to reward his friends, punish his enemies or to achieve his legislative and political objectives. There can be little debate that Hollywood and the recording industry have been some of the president’s strongest allies. They invested millions in his reelection campaign and are often credited with helping...

Regular readers may have noticed that I generally say that advocates of big government are “statists.” I could call them “liberals,” but I don’t like that using that term since the early advocates of economic and personal liberty were “classical liberals” such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Jean-Baptiste Say. And proponents of these ideas are still called “liberals” in Europe and Australia. I could call them “socialists,” but I don’t think that’s technically accurate since the theory is based on government ownership of the means of production. This is why I’ve been in the strange position of defending Obama...

There is a common saying on Capitol Hill that those who do not come to the table will become the lunch. This refers to those who fail to hire sufficiently well connected lobbyists or make large campaign contributions. Even those who do come to the table may get carved up. When President Obama called the parties making money from medicine into the White House to discuss what would become of Obamacare, most of the special interests tried to make a deal. With the Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, they knew that defiance would likely backfire. The major insurance...

President Obama next week will champion his health care law on WebMD, which bills itself as the “leading source of health information for consumers and health care professionals.” The White House says Obama will answer questions about health care and the Affordable Care Act from WebMD users during a conversation with the site's health care reform expert, Lisa Zamosky. The interview will air March 14 and WebMD users can pose questions atWebMD.com/AskObama.

Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway posted a record profit in 2013, jumping 31 percent over the previous year, the company said in its annual report, released on Saturday. Profit for the full year rose to $19.5 billion from $14.8 billion in 2012. Net income rose to $4.99 billion in the fourth quarter, or $3,035 per Class A share, from $4.55 billion, or $2,757 per share, a year earlier.

Top Illinois politicians say a multimillion-dollar institute bound for Chicago will be the nation’s flagship research site for digital manufacturing. Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday publicly heralded Chicago’s selection by the Defense Department as the site of one of two manufacturing institutes. …

President Obama is dividing America into two nations—one rich, the other increasingly poor, and both more likely to elect Democrats. Americans growing richer support his policies, and those growing poorer are increasingly dependent on Democratic politicians for government handouts. In this century, the economy has not performed well, and a jobs shortage has driven down the income of most Americans. Obama’s “recovery” has managed only 2.4 percent growth, but George W. Bush’s expansion scored about the same rate and then collapsed altogether. Since 2001, when Bush took office, the U.S. economy has created only 4.7 million jobs—about 30,000 a month...

The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death,” but the same can’t be said of Washington, DC. The bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, contractors, insiders, cronyists, and influence peddlers have rigged the system so that they get rich by diverting money from people in the productive sector of the economy. How bad is the disconnect between Washington and real America? Well, according to Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index, people in every state have a negative outlook. But there is one outpost of giddy prosperity, and that’s the District of Columbia, where residents have a 20-point gap compared to the most optimistic...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The U.S. government has picked a Google subsidiary to run and renovate a federal airfield that is frequently used for the personal flights of the Internet company's billionaire executives. The decision announced Monday clears the way for Google's Planetary Ventures LLC to take over management of the 1,000-acre Moffett Federal Airfield, a former U.S. Navy based 4 miles from Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The airfield, which was built in the 1930s, has been managed by NASA's Ames Research Center for the past 23 years. Financial terms of the new arrangement still must be worked out...

Once thought of as a possibly more conservative alternative to establishment Republican Speaker John Boehner, establishment Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA-7) long ago proved he is fully invested in Boehner’s lobbyist-driven legislative agenda. The Murray-Ryan budget and Amnesty for illegal aliens are just the latest in a long list of betrayals conservatives have suffered at the hands of Eric Cantor. From breaking the spending caps in the sequester, to voting for the Wall Street bailout through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), when faced with a choice between business -as -usual and fighting for limited- government constitutional conservative...

Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language television network, is airing half-hour specials about healthy living and educating viewers about how to sign up for coverage under President Obama's health law. And tax preparers at thousands of Jackson Hewitt and H&R Block offices are talking to their customers about how to enroll in the new insurance plans sold through the law's online marketplaces. As the law becomes embedded in American life, the Republican drive to dismantle Obamacare will almost certainly become more complicated.

Dave Brat is challenging Rep. Eric Cantor in a Republican primary — and giving the House majority leader a verbal thrashing on immigration. Dave Brat is challenging Rep. Eric Cantor in a Republican primary — and giving the House majority leader a verbal thrashing on immigration. “Cantor is following the agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce — pursuing policies that are good for big business, but come at the exclusion of the American people,” said Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College. Brat’s upstart bid against the second highest-ranking House Republican may seem quixotic. But it’s...

When CVS Caremark Corp. Chief Executive and President Larry Merlo announced that his drugstore chain would stop selling tobacco products , one of the first to respond was the president of the United States. The speed of the president’s statement indicates that CVS’s decision was likely coordinated with the White House. Every day, countless business decisions are made without any comment from the White House. Something unusual was going on. This is troubling. It gives the appearance of preference for those who curry favor with the powerful, and it squeezes out smaller entrants who can supply innovative products and services...

PARIS -- An environmentalist lies down alongside his fellow organic cucumber aficionados to block the construction of an oil pipeline and wakes up a member of a proxy army serving the billionaires who are fighting against America's economic and national security interests to line their own pockets. How did that happen? This phenomenon is on display in the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline project, the cornerstone of Canada-U.S. energy independence, set to run from Alberta, Canada, into Nebraska, then ultimately to the Gulf Coast of Texas where it can be exported. None of this pleases environmental activists, whose actions...

Americans for a Conservative Direction, an affiliate of the Silicon Valley-backed FWD.us advocacy group, on Friday launched a remarkable $750,000 ad campaign heaping praise on the House GOP for its new plan for immigration reform. President Barack Obama signaled Friday in a Google Hangout interview that he was open to the GOP terms, meaning reform is looking more likely than it did a week ago. The 10-day buy includes national broadcast TV and cable TV, plus talk radio. The ad, produced by FP1 Strategies, ends with type on the screen saying: “HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO FIX IMMIGRATION – STRENGTHEN OUR...

Immigration is the zombie of political issues--even when it is dead, it is still alive. The combination of the Democratic Party, business interests, and a GOP operative class yearning for its promise of improved standing with Hispanic voters means that you can never really count it out. That said, it is hard to imagine Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) moving forward after yesterday's closed-door showdown. According to estimates from those who were in the room--both in favor of moving forward and against--the dozens of GOP lawmakers who spoke were at least 80-20 against bringing a bill to the floor this year....

The State Department is presenting a global webcast on February 4, titled "From the Street to Mainstream: The Evolution of Rap/Hip Hop Music." The host of the webcast, rapper and State Department Music Ambassador Toni Blackman, will be joined by Pras Michel, [snip] Some of Michel's more inflammatory comments in the past raise questions about the appropriateness of his appearance with the U.S.'s music ambassador on a government-sponsored webcast representing America to the world.