Free Republic

The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times column, “Welcome to the Recovery.” As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echoes from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David...

Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, supported the Bush tax cuts originally but with warnings that he said were ignored. It was not enough, it seems, for Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman and a self-described lifelong Republican libertarian, to call for stringent government regulation of giant banks, as he did a few months ago. Now Mr. Greenspan is wading into the most fierce economic policy debate in Washington — what to do with the tax cuts adopted, in large part because of his implicit backing, under President George W. Bush — with a position not only contrary to...

Al Gore Stirs Controversy, This Time In MexicoPress Barred from US Politician’s Speech for Mexico State Governor Enrique Peña Nieto By Fernando León and Erin Rosa Special to The Narco News Bulletin August 6, 2010 TOLUCA, MEXICO; AUGUST 4, 2010: If Al Gore thought a trip South of the Border would alleviate his recent divorce and masseuse tabloid scandals up north, he found only more controversy in Mexico. On Wednesday, the former US vice president visited Toluca, capital of the state of Mexico, as invited guest of Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, a 2012 presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party...

Original title: Dem Rep Sheila Jackson Lee Tells NAACP: “All Those Who Wore Sheets a Long Time Ago Lifted Them Off to Wear Tea Party Clothing” (Applause!) Those who used to wear sheets are now being able to walk down the aisle and speak as a patriot because you will not speak loudly about the lack of integrity of this movement. Don’t let anybody tell you that those who spit on us as we were walking to vote on a health care bill for all of America or those who said Congresswoman Jackson-Lee’s braids were too tight in her hair...

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- The man accused of leading police on a wild chase on the Massachusetts Turnpike made several strange comments Tuesday during a rant in court. With bandages on his head and arm, 29-year-old Alejandro Serra of Framingham pronounced to the court, “I am Pope Alexander. This is my real name. It's ‘cause I am Pope Alexander.”

Radio host Alex Jones, who believes that 9/11 was a U.S. government plot and "inside job" conspiracy, is featured in Chris Matthews' Wednesday documentary on MSNBC as a leader of the "New Right" and the Tea Party movement. But Jones has absolutely nothing to do with the conservative or Tea Party movements. In the advance promotional advertisements for the program, Jones is shown saying that the U.S. has entered the phase of "deep tyranny." The promos make Jones appear to be the undisputed leader of the "New Right" and the Tea Party movement. But in fact, a video shows Jones...

Newly minted Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle is a kook. That's what Sen. Harry Reid's people are telling reporters. ABC, CNN, and other outlets seem to agree, noting that Mrs. Angle wants to shutter the federal Department of Education, get the U.S. out of the U.N., phase out Social Security, and eliminate the IRS. We haven't yet heard her explanations of these positions -- many of which can be justified in the proper context. It's certainly possible that she is a little eccentric (that prison massage program doesn't pass the smell test). But this much is certain: It is not...

Things are not always as they appear.

"Some UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft, and this is the biggest story of the millennium." These words are not the rantings of a deranged individual looking for attention or a comfortable straitjacket. Stanton Friedman is a maverick of sorts. Employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for companies like General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse and Aerojet General Nucleonics, he worked on highly classified programs involving nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets. In 1958, UFOs caught his attention, and Friedman has since lectured about this subject at more than 700 colleges and professional groups in all 50 states and...

(This is from the middle, but go to the link and read it all.) Get those "sudden stop" plans in place - NOW. If you're in a big city you're in big trouble. Find friends or relatives that aren't and see what you can do about a place to go where you have a reasonable shot at avoiding the worst of this. Look, all-out civil unrest (or worse) is a low-probability event but if you get trapped in a big city and the worst comes that city will go feral within hours and become a free-fire zone. What's worse, many...

Behind the scenes the insider Republican establishment is now in an uproar as the odds are high that Rand Paul wins the Republican nomination for senator from Kentucky. This would be a major embarrassment to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and raises a big question about 2012: Why is Sarah Palin getting so much attention, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) so little, from the national media and pundit classes? Certain pundits appear strangely infatuated with Palin, but it seems to me that if Ron Paul runs for president in 2012, he could win a plurality of delegates in a multi-candidate field....

How Rand Paul became the Tea Party's ObamaHis father's libertarian army and Rush Limbaugh's "Dittoheads" aren't natural allies. But Rand Paul has united them.Friday, May 14, 2010 08:01 ETOn the afternoon of Dec. 16, 2009, the 236th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Rand Paul left the office of his small ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green and drove 30 miles to Russellville, Ky. In an election year without the Tea Party movement, Rand Paul's campaign to become Kentucky's next U.S. senator would be just as quixotic as the bid his father, Ron Paul, made for the Republican presidential nomination in...

Those who adore modern, unlimited government have a problem. A few problems, actually, but biggest is their obvious inability to say “no” to government growth. Today’s politicians and pundits seem completely incapable of prioritizing anything. After all, in their minds, every need represents a right to government support or a mandate for government action. If a constituency likes a program (and what constituency objects to money being thrown at them?), what can they say against it? But these folks have a second problem, a practical one. They have opponents. The bulk of the American populace, in a sense. But, in...

There is a proposal for the United Nations to accept “ecocide” as a fifth “crime against peace”, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court, is the brainchild of British Planetary Rights Lawyer Polly Higgins. You can watch her video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZiN6DWMsP4. You know that anyone who happens to call themselves a ‘Planetary Rights Lawyer’ is already a sausage short of a hotdog. But Polly’s Law won’t stop at mere ecocide. Oh, no, no. Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and...

It's not uncommon for traffic to be a bit congested on the corner of College Avenue and Dickson Street in Fayetteville, AR, especially in the afternoon. On Monday, however, traffic came to a complete stand still. The reason? It all happened around 3:30 Monday afternoon when Abel Tomlinson, who ran for Congress in 2008 against John Boozman, drove his car into the middle of the Dickson/College intersection and left it there blocking traffic from all sides. Before anyone could react, Tomlinson was sitting atop a tree in front of Washington County Court House - causing a scene and of course...

Now this is a race that I would like to see. Keith Olbermann handed his a** by Scott Brown.. the rhetoric should be rich. He’s such a pompous loud-mouth

Pop quiz—What does more to galvanize radical anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world: (a) Israeli settlements on the West Bank; or (b) a Lady Gaga music video? If your answer is (b) it means you probably have a grasp of the historical roots of modern jihadism. If, however, you answered (a), then congratulations: You are perfectly in synch with the new Beltway conventional wisdom, now jointly defined by Pat Buchanan and his strange bedfellows within the Obama administration.

If the never-ending string of snowstorms has you believing global warming is a hoax, Al Gore says think again. The former Vice President turned planet protector insists all that white stuff is just another sign of creeping climate change. Warmer temperatures increase the amount of water that gets drawn from the oceans into the air, causing more rain and the current deluge of snow, Gore explains in the New York Times.

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change By AL GORE It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil....

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6M7o3ruNdU