Free Republic

I have 17 million reasons for wanting to increase the minimum wage. Yes, 17 million—the number of children whose lives would be a little more secure if their moms and dads earned at least $10.10 an hour. When I was in junior high, my daddy had a heart attack. He was home for a while, the medical bills piled up, and we lost our family station wagon. So my mother did what she had to do: She went to work answering the phones at Sears. The job paid only minimum wage, but it was enough to make sure we could...

When Elizabeth Warren announced her Senate candidacy in September 2011, President Obama had just signed into law the Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling but also made concessions to Republicans that would eventually lead to $1 trillion in sequestration cuts. Deficit control was a top priority for both parties, and something that Obama pledged to continue to pursue in a rare address to a joint session of Congress that month on his jobs plan. But the speech Obama gave last week to a similar joint session of Congress felt very different. His 2014 State of the Union address...

Warren Mayor Jim Fouts squirmed, acting uncomfortable, when he answered questions from WXYZ-TV's Jim Kiertzner about a video that is circulating online that appears to show Fouts walking in Chicago, holding hands with his executive assistant, Amanda Mika. The pair also appears to show the pair checking into the Drake Hotel, dining and visiting an Apple store. Fouts is 71. Mika is reportedly 25. The six-minute video, which carries a November 2012 time stamp, is posted to YouTube by someone with the screen name Warren DeepThroat, and suggests the mayor’s assistant received a pay raise at a time when health-care...

As a Tea Party troublemaker and liberal lightning rod, former Florida Congressman Col. Allen West is used to fending off attacks from Democratic critics. But he admits getting nervous when he thinks about a certain Massachusetts Democrat running the White House. “I’m more ... concerned about Elizabeth Warren than I am about Hillary Clinton,” West said in an interview on Boston Herald Radio.

Just hours before her swearing in as Rochester’s first woman mayor, Lovely Warren released a statement regarding the criminal history of her husband, Timothy Granison, when he was a teenager. Warren said her statement came in response to a question posed today by a reporter about her husband’s past. She said in 1997, when Granison was 17 years old, he was “was involved in a situation instigated by other youth that resulted in an encounter with the criminal justice system.” “Because of his age and the nature of the alleged offense, he was adjudicated a youthful offender,” Warren said. “The...

WASHINGTON — Hank Ronan knew he would get the job. He had sailed through three rounds of interviews and hit it off with the doctors at the diagnostic center in Annandale, Va., where he had applied to be a driver for $11 an hour. Shuttling patients to appointments was a world away from his 20 years as a software engineer, but it was the best that Ronan could find after being laid off in 2011. He was eager to get back to work and granted the doctor’s office permission to run a credit check. Ronan never heard back, he said...

On Piers Morgan Live Friday, Morgan asked Pastor Rick Warren whether he thought Christians’ views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage would ever “evolve” as they had for other perspectives in the Bible that “seem very anachronistic.” Warren replied no, adding, “I fear the disapproval of God more than I fear your disapproval or the disapproval of society.” Morgan invited Warren to discuss several topics, including Warren’s opinion of the new Pope, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. In a mutually respectful dialog, the two differed on many issues, most notably same-sex marriage. Warren: Tolerance, Piers, used to mean we treat each other with mutual respect, even if you...

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, on Friday defended President Barack Obama’s decision to allow health insurers to issue plans for one more year that do not meet the standards set out by the Affordable Care Act, as a transitional move. “What the president’s done is said no one for a year, no insurance company, needs to cancel its coverage because of the Affordable Care Act,” Warren said, speaking to reporters after an Associated Industries of Massachusetts breakfast at the Westin Hotel in Waltham. “They’re trying to make the transition work. They’re trying to do everything they can to...

WALTHAM - U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, on Friday defended President Barack Obama’s decision to allow health insurers to issue plans for one more year that do not meet the standards set out by the Affordable Care Act, as a transitional move. “What the president’s done is said no one for a year, no insurance company, needs to cancel its coverage because of the Affordable Care Act,” Warren said, speaking to reporters after an Associated Industries of Massachusetts breakfast at the Westin Hotel in Waltham. “They’re trying to make the transition work. They’re trying to do everything they...

In a speech to be delivered at the National Consumer Law Center's three-day Consumer Rights Litigation Conference starting today in Washington, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., talks about a myriad of issues including the battle to enact federal gun control legislation and the successes of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren, who took office a year ago in a pricey Senate race against Republican Scott Brown, reiterates her position in the speech that the system is rigged for corporations and big business. But she ads that with common sense solutions, government can be part of the solution rather than another...

The August LPS Mortgage Monitor was released this morning. It shows good news and bad news. The good news (if you are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The GSE mortgage share (blue line) has risen since 2011. mtgmktshare The bad news? The percentage of mortgages that are “out of the money” for refinancing has topped 50%. Again. %inmoney The good news? The mortgage pipeline is shrinking rapidly, particularly in judicial foreclosure states. forecpipecl The bad news? Judicial foreclosure states like New York, New Jersey and Hawaii have stubbornly high foreclosure pipeline ratios. For non-judicial foreclosure states, Massachusetts leads the nation....

She’s reportedly waiting until 2014 before she starts thinking about 2016, but Hillary Clinton, according to one national poll, is your frontrunner for the White House — by a wide margin.And Elizabeth Warren is your fastest rising star.The former secretary of state and first lady dominated last week’s new Quinnipiac University survey, which showed her gobbling up 61 percent of support and beating any Republican challenger — be it New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Kentucky U.S. Sen. Rand Paul or Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz — by anywhere from 13 to 23 points.

In a speech given on Thursday from the Senate floor, Elizabeth Warren laid into what she called the House’s “anarchy gang” and defended a vision of government as what “we as Americans have chosen to do together.” “The anarchy gang is quick to malign government,” Warren said, “but when was the last time anyone called for regulators to go easier on companies that put lead in children’s toys, or for food inspectors to stop checking whether the meat in our grocery store is crawling with deadly bacteria, or for the FDA to ignore whether morning sickness drugs will cause horrible...

Since I will be chatting about housing finance reform (re: what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), I am preparing a presentation that I will be posting next Wednesday. Chris Whalen has an interesting blog at Zero Hedge entitled: “Are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Really Profitable? Really?” His takeaway: “Given the above analysis, a strong case can still be made that FNM and Freddie Mac ought to be moved to receivership and liquidated. This process would extinguish the supposed claims by “investors” like John Paulson and move the assets of the GSEs into private hands as quickly...

On the heels of the news that Wells Fargo is cutting 2,300 workers from the mortgage production operations, we have learned from the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight that consumer mortgage relief has totaled $51 billion, averaging $80,000 per borrower. Now THAT’s a Big Twinkie! Here are the consumer relief highlights from the National Mortgage Settlement (NMS): Program to Date: March 1, 2012 – June 30, 2013 • 643,726 borrowers benefited from some type of Consumer Relief totaling $51.332 billion, which, on average, represents about $79,742 per borrower. This figure includes both completed Consumer Relief and active first lien trial...

On the heels of the news that Wells Fargo is cutting 2,300 workers from the mortgage production operations, we have learned from the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight that consumer mortgage relief has totaled $51 billion, averaging $80,000 per borrower. Now THAT’s a Big Twinkie! Here are the consumer relief highlights from the National Mortgage Settlement (NMS): Program to Date: March 1, 2012 – June 30, 2013 • 643,726 borrowers benefited from some type of Consumer Relief totaling $51.332 billion, which, on average, represents about $79,742 per borrower. This figure includes both completed Consumer Relief and active first lien trial...

Even if you're Warren Buffett--billionaire investor, founder of Berkshire Hathaway, and Democratic donor--it helps to have friends in high places. Through his holding company MidAmerican Energy, Buffett is currently atttempting to purchase NV Energy, a Nevada-based energy firm, and he's getting some big help from that state's senior U.S. senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid. Energy and Environmental Daily reports (subscriber content only) that Reid, who has been publicly supporting Buffett's acquisition of NV Energy and has criticized Nevada state regulators holding up the purchase, wrote a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requesting the agency give "close consideration" to...

US Senator Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the Consumer Financial Protect Bureau (CFPB), wants to put Glass-Steagall back into place. One of the purposes of the originial Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was to separate commercial and investment banking. “The four biggest banks are now 30% larger than they were just five years ago, and they have continued to engage in dangerous, high-risk practices that could once again put our economy at risk,” according to Senator Warren. Hmm. The enormous spike in excess reserves may be what she is thinking about. EXCRESNS But Senator Warren forgets a few things. First, the...

WASHINGTON — The escalating spying affair dogging the Obama administration now includes a bipartisan request for accountability from more than a fourth of U.S. senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. **SNIP** They said it is regrettable the information was revealed by a government whistleblower instead of the Obama administration. In a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the senators say it is time for the White House to come clean. They want him to provide straight answers to fundamental questions about the gigantic, clandestine and problematic government data collections that include huge stockpiles of information on ordinary Americans’...

She weathered Whitewater. She made it past Monica 
Lewinsky. Now Hillary Clinton is hoping to beat the rap on Benghazi and make it to the White House. The Clinton political 
machine is in full campaign mode already, preparing for 2016 and hoping voters forget by then that she had a key role in the Obama administration’s handling of the terror attack. But that’s becoming more difficult as the GOP appears to be laying the groundwork for tying Clinton to Benghazi and making sure it stays front and center in the next campaign.