Free Republic

The vision embedded in the Founding documents of the United States was of a free and equal people. At the time of the nation’s founding, this was not so much a fantasy but—with the obvious and inhumane exception of slavery—empirical reality. Class distinctions were extant, but they were not necessarily pronounced. The same was true of inequality in wealth and status. Northeastern financial families like the Schuylers had an edge over the yeoman farmers of Shenandoah Valley, of course, but it was nothing compared to the rigid class divisions in continental Europe. The same seemed true for the nation for...

Here's the story. Not long after 9/11, the World Trade Center Business Recovery Grant program was established to help small businesses recover and rebuild. The program disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars through a New York state development corporation in the years following the attacks... ...the New York Daily News ran an investigative piece about how the program had awarded grants to companies and subsidiaries that hardly seemed like "small businesses." Among them were Dell, Morgan Stanley, and, yes, Donald Trump... ...as Trump said immediately following 9/11, none of his properties were directly damaged by the attack on the World...

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign Tuesday rolled out a plan to increase building energy efficiency standards as a way to cut emissions and save on energy costs. The plan, her campaign said Tuesday, looks to improve building codes, provide more information about buildings' energy usage and expand appliance energy labeling as ways to reduce energy consumption. The proposal would save households and businesses $70 billion, or $600 per household, annually if implemented, Clinton's campaign said, and reduce taxpayer spending on energy in federal buildings by $8 billion. Its goal is a one-third reduction in energy waste within ten years. The far-reaching...

Chamber of Commerce operatives may be behind the effort to shift support from Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to billionaire Donald Trump.  One needs to look no further than establishment mouthpiece John Feehery to find evidence.The smoking gun appeared in the New York Times: Trump won’t do long-lasting damage to the G.O.P. coalition,” said John Feehery, a Capitol Hill aide turned lobbyist. “Cruz will." In 2010, Think Progress exposed Feehery for being a paid shill for the Chamber of Commerce. The Hill nor any of television outlets Feehery appears on disclosed the fact that Feehery’s public relations firm, The Feehery Group, counts the U.S. Chamber...

... The ad goes on to say that Trump bulldozed the home of an elderly widow in Atlantic City to build a limousine parking lot at his casino. "Trump won't change the system. He's what's wrong with it," it says in the end. Cruz tweeted his ad Friday morning saying "It's time we change the system and break the #WashingtonCartel -- together!" ...

Cruz tries for a respectable showing in Iowa with Trump and the governor against him There are few things that energy-policy experts of all political stripes can agree on - but one of them is that mandates and subsidies to promote the use of corn ethanol (a policy first implemented by Jimmy Carter) are wasteful boondoggles that harm our environment and food supply while imposing billions of dollars of hidden costs on consumers. However, most energy-policy experts are not running for president in the Iowa caucuses. Ted Cruz, however, is running in the Iowa caucuses, and this week he found...

As General Electric gears up to move its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston, the people and communities being left behind are dreading the pain to come. John Engel, a real estate agent and town councilor in nearby New Canaan, told public radio's "Marketplace" that the departure of 800 GE executives, most of whom will likely list their homes for sale, will send the local housing market staggering. Once the region loses millions of dollars in disposable income, it will ineluctably lose much of the business those dollars sustained. There will be fewer patrons to fill local restaurants, for example,...

"Donald Trump can typically do no wrong - until he attacks Ted Cruz."HOUSTON, Texas — Today, at a rally held in Myrtle Beach, SC, New York billionaire Donald Trump attempted to attack Ted Cruz using a New York Times hit piece and was booed by the crowd. Watch the video here:Donald Trump Booed for Attacking Ted Cruz (Video)NBC News: Donald Trump Booed By Conservative Crowd After Attacks on Ted Cruz Among conservatives, Donald Trump can typically do no wrong - until he attacks Ted Cruz.On Saturday, Trump drew boos from a grassroots conservative crowd during remarks at the South Carolina...

In a State of American Business address, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue said Thursday that the Obama administration is on a "regulatory tear" that will continue until President Barack Obama leaves the White House. [...] ... "How do we know? They've been telling us every day since the first of the year. It has unleashed a runaway EPA that has been stretching the law, and in some cases, breaking it in order to consume control over the local economic development across America," he said. ...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing its weight behind President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement between the United States and 11 other nations. -snip- The Chamber is the third business group to offer support for the deal this week, joining the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable.

I take a more benign view than most conservatives of some of the dreadful budget compromises of the recent omnibus, because spending packages are always going to contain a lot of give and take. Better to look at the long game, to judge if any small victories or compromises may make possible better outcomes down the road. Such small details are as unsatisfying as cold peas, and often don't pan out, or get lost in the shuffle. But I think expecting Paul Ryan to turn around Congress in three months was more than a but unrealistic.Much worse in my mind...

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval approved a $335 million incentive package to attract upstart electric carmaker Faraday Future's billion-dollar factory to a hard-hit Las Vegas suburb, even though the company has yet to unveil a concept car or bring a product to market. The move came shortly after the Legislature voted overwhelmingly to support the deal Saturday, after a four-day special session in Carson City. Lawmakers learned last week that Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting was backing the secretive California-based company, which employs some former Tesla Motors executives, and that Faraday plans to bring 4,500 direct jobs to Nevada. ...

More Americans favor than oppose a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are living in the United States illegally, a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows. While most Republicans oppose such a path to citizenship, it doesn't seem to be a dealbreaker issue for them. ...

Tesla has no more business being in business than Yugo. Which isn’t anymore. So why is Tesla? Because political correctness, crony capitalism – and a hallucinatory desire to believe in a mirage; to refuse to admit that what you think you see in the distance isn’t actually there; that your mind isn’t playing tricks on you. But then, the Yugo was just a bad car. The Tesla is a bad electric car – and the electric part effaces the bad part. Electric cars can do no wrong – to an extent that is quite literally unbelievable. Unless you’ve seen it...

The chemical giants DuPont and Dow Chemical Co. agreed to merge in an all-stock deal valuing the combined company at $130 billion, with plans to eventually split into three. The deal, which is likely to face intense regulatory scrutiny, allows the new company — to be called DowDuPont -- to rejig assets based on the diverging fortunes of their businesses that make agriculture chemicals and plastics. Dow and DuPont have been struggling to cope with falling demand for farm chemicals because of falling crop prices and a strong dollar, even as their plastics businesses have thrived thanks to low natural-gas...

A billionaire who is backing former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has launched a personal campaign against fellow billionaire Donald Trump, calling him an insecure, narcissistic bully who needs to be stopped. Mike Fernandez, a Cuban-born major Republican donor from Miami who built his fortune in the health care industry, has bought full-page newspaper ads blasting Trump and planned to run a pro-Latino television ad during Wednesday's GOP debate coverage designed to counter Trump's anti-immigration message. He is also launching a website this week to be called "Stop The Bullyionaire." [...] Fernandez likened the attraction to Trump to the rise of...

The U.S. House on Thursday passed a five-year transportation bill that also revive(s) the charter of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which had been allowed to expire in the face of conservative opposition. the House of Representatives voted 359 to 65. All 65 "no" votes came from Republicans, including lawmakers opposed to the EXIM bank measure. "It proves to the American people that we can get things done," said House Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican.

Nearly a dozen big Republican donors backing different presidential candidates are coming together to help fund an advertising campaign attacking front-runner Donald Trump, who faced sharp criticism from rivals this week for his inflammatory comments about Muslims. Matt David, spokesman for the group planning the attack, a Super PAC called New Day for America, which is supporting Ohio Governor John Kasich's presidential bid, said 10 new donors had pledged money in the two days since Politico reported Thursday evening the group's plans to attack Trump in New Hampshire....

(watch video at link) ISIS has taken responsibility for the horrifying attacks in Paris that have left more than 150 dead and hundreds wounded. French President Francois Hollande is calling for the closure of his country's borders. President Barack Obama didn't condemn Islamic radicals for the attacks, but he did call them "an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians" and "an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share." Friday's deadly attacks thwarted Al Gore's long-planned Paris webcast and star-studded concert to promote climate change awareness. "Out of solidarity with the French people and the City...

With many analysts predicting that the upcoming United Nations Climate Summit in Paris will fail to produce an ambitious, binding global agreement, President Obama is hoping to come to the rescue. He does not want a repeat of the 2009 UN confab in Copenhagen, where he was roundly dissed by his green supporters for "failing to seal the deal." The president has loads of friends on Wall Street. As the grand sugar daddy handing out corporate welfare, Obama has taken the White House pay-to-play game to new stratospheric levels, as even many of his media allies and erstwhile supporters...