Free Republic

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is sharing his regrets about his "fiscal-cliff" strategy, less than a month after the House bitterly swallowed a last-minute deal hatched in the Senate. In a private speech to the Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner said that he should have taken a different course after the November election by immediately demanding that the Senate produce a bill to avert the worst parts of a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that were due to hit on Jan. 1. Instead, Boehner delivered a formal speech at the Capitol on the day after President Obama won a...

(Reuters) - Ending a self-imposed silence about the November election, 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said on Wednesday that he and presidential running mate Mitt Romney lost not because of ideas, but due to ineffective communication.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. ... There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically...

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Deficit Is Basically Solved Walter HickeyJan. 10, 2013, 4:00 PMMany people think that fixing the deficit is a painful process that involves deep cuts to crucial programs. Some think the process is too hard, and it's not worth trying yet. That's not correct, according to a chart from from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Richard Kogan showing just how far the United States has come in the past two years. We've talked before about how the painless and most effective solution to the deficit is additional growth in GDP. As the recovery progresses and GDP...

If financial aid to Israel were slowly decreased over time, it would increase the Jewish state’s sovereignty because they wouldn’t need to get permission from the U.S. every time they need to defend themselves against aggressive neighbors, Sen. Rand Paul said on Monday. Paul said that while he knows the idea of decreasing any kind of foreign aid is a “minority opinion” in Washington, it will be a lot harder for America to help others “if we are out of money,” reported Fox News. …

This time I should’ve been the one listening. But listening can be tough sometimes when you’re an analyst and a commentator, and people around the country – listeners, readers, media, candidates, causes, businesses, etc. – come to you to find out why things are happening and what may happen next. Analysis and commentary is one of the few things in life I’m really good at. My car expertise begins and ends with changing a tire. Any toy that comes with the phrase “some assembly required” my kids immediately take to my wife. And when that much-anticipated Zombie apocalypse finally happens...

SILVER SPRING, Md., Jan. 2 (UPI) -- A Maryland 6-year-old was suspended from school for forming the shape of a gun with his hands and saying "pow," a lawyer for his family said. Robin Ficker said a boy, a student at Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, was given a one-day suspension from school with a conference planned for when students returned from winter break for the pretend shooting a week after 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., The (Springfield, Va.) Washington Examiner reported Wednesday. "What they're doing is...

Washington — Consumers saved nearly $1.5 billion in 2011 as a result of rules in President Obama´s healthcare law that limit what insurance companies can spend on expenses unrelated to medical care, including profit, a new analysis shows. Much of those savings — an estimated $1.1 billion — came in rebates to consumers required because insurers had exceeded the required limits. The study by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund also suggests that the Affordable Care Act forced insurers to become more efficient by limiting their administrative expenses, a key goal of the 2010 law. In some cases, insurers passed savings...

... Obama is having Mitt Romney over for lunch on Thursday and their meeting is already generating a lot of buzz. Here are five theories about the White House’s motives.... 1. Obama is extending a common courtesy... 2. Obama will offer Romney a Cabinet job... 3. Obama will enlist Romney in the fiscal cliff debate... 4. Obama wants Romney’s advice on business issues... 5. Obama wants closure on the 2012 presidential election, or something else?....

This week financial news organization CNBC gave some mainstream attention to the largest money laundering and racketeering lawsuit in United States History, in which “Banksters” and their U.S. racketeering partners are being accused of laundering of 43 trillion dollars worth of ill gotten gains.The lawsuit is said to involve officials located in the highest offices of government and the financial sector.Since this information was surprisingly revealed by the mainstream news organization there has been a very suspicious and deadly fallout at the CNBC headquarters.Within hours the original page for the article was taken down, and CNBC senior vice president Kevin...

- The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com - The Grover Plan: More Cowbell!Posted By Mickey Kaus On 5:58 AM 11/13/2012 @ 5:58 AM In DC Exclusives,KausFiles | No Comments We’ll dilute our way out of it! Republicans did poorly among Hispanics last week. How to address that problem? The answer, they’re told by Washington savants, is to back an immigration reform that … increases the number of Hispanics! It’s a plan so crazy it just might be crazy.Joshua Culling, who works for Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, elaborates on the plan elsewhere on this site. It turns out the idea–let’s...

Ted Turner Thinks It’s Good That US Soldiers Are Killing Themselves + UN ought to be global police

GLENDALE, Calif. (KABC) -- Proposition 37 is a measure to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food. There are two sides to this contentious issue.

In A Sudden Twist, A New Group Of Economists Are Blaming Bernanke For The Great Recession Ambrose Evans-Pritchard The Daily Telegraph (UK)September 24, 2012, 4:51 AMMonetarists from across the world can mostly agree on one thing. The US Federal Reserve caused the Great Recession. Fed chair Ben Bernanke kept policy far too tight after the US economy buckled in early to mid 2008. He allowed a collapse in the money supply to run unchecked, causing avoidable disasters at Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, and AIG later that year. Call it the "Bernanke Depression" if you want, a term gaining traction in elite...

Casino magnate Steve Wynn was recently interviewed by Jon Ralston, host of "Face to Face with Jon Ralston," on Nevada's NBC affiliates. For much of the interview, he was highly critical of President Obama and his policies. This is not a new position. Wynn has gone after Obama in his company's earnings conference calls. What was new was his aggressive criticism of the Federal Reserve's current easy monetary policy, comparing quantitative easing to a Ponzi scheme: "The demand for American bonds wasn't as great as what it used to be. So what we did is what Bernie Madoff went to...

.....Other bloggers have made lists of the substantial number of media figures married to Administration appointees and Democratic Party figures....The incestuous relationship between the media and the Democrats is of such longstanding that you could say the Capitol is like Deliverance with better clothes and haircuts....................... The bigger news of the week....is that the Administration's recounting of what happened in Benghazi has been proven to be a pack of lies, the intelligence community is refusing to take the fall for the Administration's disregard for the lives of its own representatives abroad, and the media is continuing to do its best...

We already noted the absolutely stunning surge in reported Household Survey jobs which "added" 873,000 jobs, or the most since 2003 and the second most in the past decade, which was just a little bit off the Household Survey used in the monthly NFP jobs changes, which came at 114,000, or about 8 times less. But what was the reason for this epic jump in Household survey jobs? Simple, and those who have read our series on America's transition to a part-time worker society know the answer. The reason is that the number of part-time people employed for economic reasons...

Ok, so I stole this from a poster named Jake and modified it a little: Democrat civility: “If you believe things contrary to what I do, I’ll call you a racist or stupid, just letting you know.” Democrat compromise: “Here’s my deal for you. I’ll tell you what I want, and you will give it to me, or I’ll throw a hissy fit and call you more names” Democrat racial tolerance: “Romney is out of touch because black people don’t understand savings accounts.” Democrat free speech: “The US strongly denounces this despicable video. They had no right to say things...

The thing about the set of leaked videos from a Romney fundraiser that nobody is talking about is this part: The video was taken at a $50,000 per plate fundraiser in Florida. You may not have noticed, but despite the blur there are a lot of plates in front of a lot of people. This is what people are still not grasping about Romney: He's about to open up the money floodgates in a way that Obama can't match. Romney was wildly successful during the primaries — not as a result of his charm and personality — but because he...

LOS ANGELES – "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" Groucho Marx sang in a 1932 picture filmed on the Paramount lot here. Today's Southern Californians seem to agree. Once know for its sunny, freewheeling disposition, this region has long been as regulated as anywhere. Lately, however, cities, school districts and even libraries have been outlawing chunks of what used to pass for birthright at a startling clip. Bonfires on the beach? Sorry, Gidget: Newport Beach is waiting for permission from the California Coastal Commission to remove its long-cherished fire pits, which it banned this summer as health hazards. Newport's fleet...