Free Republic

As this is all they need to know.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy said the United States, beaten into space by Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, would put a man on the moon and return him to earth within the decade. In July 1969, President Nixon, on the deck of the carrier Hornet, welcomed home Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins of Apollo 11. What ever became of that America? What ever became of that can-do nation? What has happened to us? This October saw the vaunted Center for Disease Control and Prevention fumbling over basic questions on how to protect Americans from an Ebola epidemic in three small countries of...

"So many people – politicians, journalists, I'm afraid market analysts – sort of believe this story of an economics recovery going on around the world," Roger Nightingale, strategist at RDN Associates, told CNBC. "This economics recovery hasn't occurred. In fact, actually for the past 18 months people have been talking about it, the data is pretty flat. If anything, it's getting flatter." .... "The conventional response, among economists, is that the government must take action to boost domestic demand in the United States, with either monetary or fiscal stimulus, or by redistributing wealth," he said in a note, citing the...

<p>U.S. economic conditions in 2014 continue to languish, as millions of Americans remain jobless. Seven economic facts underscore America’s increasingly dire economic outlook.</p> <p>The latest Labor Department figures reveal that a record 91.8 million Americans are no longer in the U.S. labor force. To be included in the Labor Department's calculations for this statistic, a person must be 16 years or older, a civilian, not in an institution (such as prison), and someone who has not looked for a job in the last four weeks.</p>

On the Wednesday conference call [1] following the release of the ADP’s December National Employment Report [2] on private-sector hiring, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, the firm primarily responsible for the report’s preparation, told attendees: “It feels like the job market has kicked into a higher gear.”It’s hard to blame Zandi for wanting this to happen. After what he described as a lot of “false starts” in the past four and a half years since the recession officially ended, who doesn’t want to see some better employment news?ADP’s report showed that private firms added 238,000 jobs. Though...

Thanks to persistent unemployment and low availability of low-skill jobs, Shenandoah Family Farms’ ice cream plant in Hagerstown, Maryland has received over 1,600 applicants for a grand total of 36 jobs. Many of those applicants are former workers at the Good Humor plant that was bought by Shenandoah Family Farms. “You’d think that after 20-some-years working someplace at least somebody would think you area a good person, that you’d show up on time every day, and that would be worth something,” Luther Brooks, a 50-year-old former worker at the plant told the Washington Post. “I can’t get nothing. I’ve tried.”...

Five days after Jason Carter jumped into the Georgia governor’s race, his grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, delivered a speech urging a ban on the death penalty. Within hours, the newly minted candidate felt compelled to issue a retort: while he loves his grandfather, he told a reporter, “I believe in the death penalty for heinous crimes, and that won’t change when I’m governor.” The episode spoke to the benefit and potential burden of the Carter surname for the upstart Democratic state senator, who is waging a long-shot bid to unseat first-term Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. Practically everyone in the...

Bill de Blasio overwhelmingly was elected mayor here Tuesday, becoming the first Democrat to lead New York in 20 years and ushering in an era of activist liberal governance in the nation’s largest city. In early returns Tuesday night, de Blasio was soundly defeating Republican Joe Lhota, a protégé of former mayor Rudy Giuliani. De Blasio campaigned on a mantle of progressive change following Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, highlighting what he saw as “a tale of two cities.” The moneyed Manhattan elite have had their mayor, he argued, and now the 46 percent of New Yorkers...

They say slow and steady wins all the time, and right now it's looking like it's true with respect to the economy and stock market. You can argue the recovery has been steady, and there's no doubt it's been slow, which makes the correlating move in stocks puzzling. It reminds me of the story of The Mouse That Roared. The hard part is figuring out who the mouse is in this case. In the story the tiny (three miles by five miles) fictitious European Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on America because an American winemaker is making a knock-off...

Institutions Worthy of Our Parties: Should the U.S. Switch to a Parliamentary System? Efforts to curb legislative partisanship have weak track records, so maybe we should consider changing the other side of the equation in order to establish a government that can actually get things done. Rick Hasen has a really interesting paper up discussing partisan polarization and the possibility of changing the Constitution to deal with it. (And you should really read Jonathan Bernstein’s response, too.) Hasen starts off by asking whether we should be considering moving toward a more parliamentary style of government. It’s a fair question. We...

Bank of America said today it’s cutting 469 jobs from its mortgage servicing center in Newark as the number of homeowners delinquent on mortgage payments dwindles. Employees at the offices on the corner of Market Street and University Avenue were given the news last week. “We previously announced intentions to reduce the size of our mortgage servicing operations in line with the successful reduction of our portfolio of delinquent mortgage customers,” the bank said in an e-mailed statement last night. “Compared to peak levels in 2011, today we have fewer than half the number of customers who need the specialized...

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) is laying off 1,320 employees in upstate New York as it will exit a mortgage-servicing facility there at the end of May, according to a filing with the New York State Department of Labor. M&T Bank Corp. (MTB) is taking over Bank of America's Getzville, N.Y., mortgage-servicing facility and hiring about 600 Bank of America employees, a spokesman for the Buffalo, N.Y., bank said. He added M&T has about 400 openings in Buffalo and Bank of America employees can apply for those positions. Bank of America, the nation's second-largest bank by assets behind J.P. Morgan...

Jimmy Carter's unemployed grandson has said he helped leak damaging video footage of Mitt Romney in retaliation for the Republican's habit of maligning his grandfather on the campaign trail. .......As the story exploded, Mr Carter emailed his 87-year-old grandfather to tell him he was behind the revelation that was rocking Mr Romney's campaign. The former president replied "James: This is extraordinary. Congratulations! Papa." The younger Mr Carter was only three when his grandfather was pushed out of the White House by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election but said that he was still angered by Republicans who accused the former...

Painfully watched Obama's press conference this morning. The most uninspiring one possible from a most uninspiring individual. The conference had no purpose, no direction no call to action. America wants a president to lead, Obama can't lead. He tried to talk about econopmy, Europe, classified leads but no course of action. He should have said these are the three items we are going to work on in the next 90 days, extension of the Bush tax cuts, increasing the supply and lowering the cost of oil to natural grow the economy and the suspension of all rules and regulations on...

* Inordinate Stimulus, Undue Debt and Global Warming Foolishness Caused the Recession* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *“With few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the 3rd Century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat... No one before the 1830’s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.” ~ Jeffrey Burton Russell (The Myth of the Flat Earth)Global Warming FoolishnessIn an article entitled, “Algae for Waste Water Treatment and BioFuel Production: A Double Winner,” Dr. John Kyndt and Dr. Aecio D’Silva discuss the process known as phycoremediation, which is short for treating...

* Inordinate Stimulus, Undue Debt and Global Warming Foolishness Caused the Recession* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *It is impossible to calculate the effect of deficit-financed government spending on demand without specifying how people expect the deficit to be paid off in the future. ~ The Theory of Rational Expectations Undue Debt Obama’s three-point plan for deficit reduction can be summed up in three words, “Spend Baby Spend.” In fact, Obama will have borrowed more than $6.3 trillion during his four-year term, which is more than the first 42 and 1/4 presidents combined. And what do we have to show...

* Inordinate Stimulus, Undue Debt and Global Warming Foolishness Caused the Recession* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *“… an unprecedented degree of federal government spending and intervention vis-à-vis the $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package, the $81 billion dollar bailouts of GM and Chrysler, and the enactment of health care and financial regulatory and reform bills have done nothing to stimulate our anemic recovery and have fundamentally failed at creating private sector jobs, or generating economic growth necessary for a sustainable, healthy recovery.” ~ Douglas Schoen via: The Daily BeastInordinate StimulusAccording to Economist Raymond Richman of Ideal Taxes Association, “The...

* Inordinate Stimulus, Undue Debt and Global Warming Foolishness Caused the Recession* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *Despite Obama’s optimism, the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), the same organization which successfully predicted the last recession, and which over the last 15 years has gotten all of its recession calls right while issuing no false alarms, has recently opined that a 2012 recession is now inevitable.According to ECRI, the four basic metrics that define an economy are gross domestic product (GDP), personal income, broad sales and employment. GDP peaked in the 2nd quarter of 2010, and has since been cut in...

President Barack Obama told a Florida TV station yesterday that the United States is facing economic difficulties because it has “gotten a little soft” during the last 20 years. [ ... ] Obamaʼs “soft” comment, and its political circumstances, echo a controversial speech by then-President Jimmy Carter. In July 1979, Carter declared that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” The speech was later dubbed the “malaise speech,” even though it did not use the word.

Just a snapshot of the "Non-stop News" feature on Bberg at about 10:48 am. Obama Plans to Announce Jobs Stimulus Package With Bigger Cuts in Deficit U.S. Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Decreased in July U.S. Consumers Most Negative Since Recession U.S. Stocks Tumble on Global Growth Concerns BofA Mortgage Risk May Rise in MBIA Case Morgan Stanley Cuts Global Growth Forecast European Stocks Drop as Officials Say Fed Shouldn’t Shield Equity Market Chavez Orders $11 Billion of Gold Home U.S. Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Decreased in July U.S. Consumers Most Negative Since Recession U.S. Stocks Tumble on Global Growth Concerns