Free Republic

For Caterpillar, the great recession was bad, for about 19 months. In May 2010, after declining sharply for just under two years, CAT posted it first positive global retail sales comps and never looked back... until December 2012 when comp sales once again turned negative and have been negative ever since. For the past 41 months! The breakdown showed that contrary to popular opinion, there has been no pick up in demand for heavy industrial machinery anywhere around the globe.

At least 10 people have been killed in a series of explosions in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, reports say. Several more were wounded in the suspected bomb attacks, targeting mainly Shia districts of the capital, police told Reuters news agency. The violence comes amid a marked rise attacks linked to growing political and sectarian tension recently. The bloodshed has raised fears of a re-emergence of the levels of sectarian violence seen in 2006 and 2007. In one of the deadliest days recently, more than 70 people were killed and many others injured in a series of bomb attacks across Iraq...

CHICAGO (CBS) – A teenage girl–an honor student who had just performed at President Obama’s inaugural–was gunned down Tuesday afternoon in the Kenwood neighborhood, just blocks from the high school she attended.

This is what the US economy has been reduced to: McDonalds reports that as part of its employment event to hire 50,000 minimum wage, part-time (mostly) workers, subsequently raised to 62,000 it received a whopping 1 million applications, or a Tim Geithner jealousy inducing 6.2% hit rate (h/t X. Kurt. OSis). Alas, the US economy is now so pathetic that the bulk of the population will settle for anything. Literally anything. And the saddest part: over 938,000 applicants were turned away. Here's hoping to Burger King needs a few million janitors in the immediate future too. And yes, aside from...

Obama Officials Tried to Convince S&P Not to Issue Credit Warning Published April 20, 2011 | FoxNews.com Even though the White House has publicly downplayed the credit warning issued Monday from a leading agency, Obama administration officials were privately trying in recent weeks to convince Standard & Poor's not to lower its outlook for U.S. debt from "stable" to "negative," Fox News has confirmed. But after a series of meetings between the Treasury Department and S&P, the ratings agency ignored the pressure and told administration officials late Friday that the U.S. government was at risk of losing its sterling credit...

Light, sweet crude for May delivery rose $1.07, or 1%, to $109.90 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It traded as high as $109.99 a barrel, according to FactSet Research. Prices had traded in the red off and on, however, as some investors judged current prices overdone. A better-than-expected data on U.S. jobless claims underpinned oil’s run, but prices also felt the pinch of a stronger dollar and falling U.S. equities. News out of the Middle East and North Africa didn’t make that many headlines. “The U.S. so far has not shown the weakness that people had been...

(edit) Seattle police are now searching for Ahmed Mohamed and Jonathan Baquiring after DNA recently linked the two men to the attack in which a 16-year-old boy was robbed, taunted with racial insults, burned with a lit cigarette and punched repeatedly. Mohamed, 22, and Baquiring, 21, each were charged Monday with first-degree robbery and malicious harassment, the state's hate-crime statute. King County Deputy Prosecutor Samantha Kanner said in charging paperwork that she is seeking to have the men held in jail on $500,000 bail once they are arrested. The victim, Shane McClellan, said he was walking home around 2 a.m....

“He said, ‘I killed the five racists that was there bothering me,’” said Will Holliday, Thornton’s uncle. “He said, ‘That’s it. The cops are going to come in so I’m going to take care of it myself.’” Holliday said Thornton had been complaining to relatives that in several years he worked at Hartford Distributors he was confronted with blatant racism. Holliday said, “He had some instances of racism at the company. They were hanging nooses in the bathroom and writing stuff like that. They were singling him out because he was the only black person there in that area.”

President-elect Obama had nearly finished his third news conference in as many days yesterday when he decided to favor his audience with one more tasty morsel of information about the just-announced members of his economic team. "I want you to know that both Paul and Austan have special turkey-cooking recipes, if anybody out here needs some advice on how to make the ideal turkey," Obama offered. Let's leave aside the question of whether credible cooking advice could come from Carter Fed Chairman Paul Volcker or University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee. Let's also look beyond the question of whether, at...

Another FreeRepublic Op-ed For the political season (#3 in a series)<p>This is a book report. Not a book report like you might construct for college course credit, a book report aimed at showing features, advantages, and benefits in reading carefully a condensation of vast research done by Jerome Corsi on one Barack Hussein Obama, Democratic Party candidate for President. And let‘s keep that fact ever in mind as the real Obama emerges through the pages of Corsi‘s book, <B>this is the Democrat choice for President.</B><p>Title of the book is <I>The Obama Nation</I> and yes, it is a play on the...