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A senior official with the International Monetary Fund expressed concern over the Democratic Republic of Congo's levels of debt to China, in a report released Wednesday after a 18-day visit here.

Energy: In a stunning defeat, congressional Democrats were forced to allow the quarter-century-old offshore drilling ban to expire. But the fight has only begun, with the struggle now shifting to state legislatures.Funny how the Democrat-controlled Congress can't get the things it wants enacted, can't even get a single appropriations bill passed, yet minority Republicans this week succeeded in ending a supposedly sacrosanct ban on oil and gas offshore drilling that dates back to the early 1980s. It was an unexpectedly powerful knockdown of Democrats and their enviro-extremist allies, but they are not yet counted out. GOP Sen. Jim DeMint of...

By Herb Denenberg, 09/24/2008 If Gov. Sarah Palin had ever looked at her first grade teacher cross-eyed, that would be a front-page story in the newspapers of the dishonest, fraudulent and biased mainstream media. Papers like that include The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. However, if you're running on the Democratic side of the ticket, you can have a long record suggesting you're stupid, arrogant and dishonest and that will be ignored by the mainstream media. Take the case of Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for vice president. Most people remember his famous plagiarism...

With extraordinary stakes on the line, President Bush has invited both presidential candidates and the leaders of the House and Senate to the White House on Thursday in hopes of securing a bill to rescue the economy. Bush took the unusual step Wednesday night of calling Democratic Sen. Barack Obama directly to invite him to the meeting, White House press secretary Dana Perino said. An Obama spokesman said the senator would attend. The White House has also invited Republican Sen. John McCain. Perino said the goal of the session is to make progress -- fast -- on a bipartisan solution...

I won't pretend to understand what is going on right now. My question is, how will all of this affect me and the average American? I've heard words like "depression" and "complete meltdown" mentioned and it scares me.

The only thing I worry about with ads like this, is that it will force Obama to drop Biden from the ticket before Sarah gets to slap him around too. It's great when all you have to do is show a video of your opponent to make your point.

<p>I'm sure many Freepers have enjoyed reading posts by Common Tator. He's been a fixture on sites like FreeRepublic for years and always offers thoughtful and accurate insight on news and politics.</p> <p>Common Tator has survived bouts with cancer in the past and beat huge odds before. But now he faces his largest challenge yet.</p>

According to CNN (ugh), it just crossed the AP Wire that President Bush has formally invited McCain, Obama, and Congressional Leaders to the White House for an emergency meeting. McCain, as we know, is on his way to Washington. It remains to be seen whether, in the middle of this gigantic crisis, Obamaface will get out of his hot tub and put his wine and cheese aside long enough to respond to an invitation from the president of the United States?

Looking for input on this. Should my fellow FReepers from the great state of IL call the Messiah's Senate Office and demand he get his skinny a** back to DC and do his job? I think we could at least run interference with his offices and tie up their phone lines for a while, if nothing else. We'd also confuse his people and possibly cause him to flip flop and go back to DC. "I'm from IL, and I'm not paying Senator Obama so he can run for President two years and then vote 'present' with $700 billion on the...

People anthropomorphize animals all the time. Amusingly, usually. And most of us are guilty (although I have a workmate who never indulges in this behavior. She did call me the other day, though, to have me instruct her in the pronunciation of the word, so that she might not sound like a fool while she ridicules those of her acquaintance who imagine their dogs to be smiling at them.) I myself frequently imagine Horus to be gazing at me in loving adoration, while he more probably is projecting the little dotted butcher’s lines onto the contours of my flesh and...

This is a purely unscientific observation based on many years of following local and national races in the "red T" of the Pennsylvania mid-state. Through several decades of election cycles it has seemed that any candidate who can flood the area with yard signs--especially those displayed on private property, as opposed to major intersections in public right of ways--has gone on to prevail in the election. The candidate who strikes first wins big. In my battleground district of a battleground County in the battleground State of Pennsylvania, I am delighted to observe a SURGE in McCain and McCain-Palin signs. Even...

ABC News has learned that President Bush called Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., this evening and invited him to participate in a meeting about the Wall Street bailout bill tomorrow afternoon in Washington, DC, with other congressional leaders, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Obama accepted the president's invitation, a source tells ABC News. The invitation comes at an interesting time. The President has not been in the middle of negotiations with Congress, leaving that task to his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. McCain earlier today announced he was suspending his campaign -- and his participation in the first presidential debate Friday night...

With all the news focused on the economy and the President’s speech tonight, you may have missed the big news from Iraq: The country that was once “on the brink of civil war”, The country that defeatist Democrats like Harry Reid wrote off as “lost”, The country that Senator Joe Biden wanted to divide into three ethnic-based regions (video from September 8, 2008—Biden brags: “My plan to partition Iraq is working.”) That same country UNITED PEACEFULLY today to overwhelmingly pass a Provincial Election Law that will allow new elections to take place between now and January 31, 2009. The law...

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Warren Buffett, one of the world's best known and wealthiest investors, is betting $5 billion that the U.S. financial system is not about to collapse. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKA) said Tuesday it will invest at least $5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS).... In addition to buying $5 billion in preferred stock, Berkshire also got warrants to buy another $5 billion in Goldman's common stock. Goldman also said late Tuesday it would raise another $2.5 billion in its own public stock offering.

Ahmadinejad speaks out 37:55 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks with CNN's Larry King about nuclear arms, the Iraq war and much more.

Naked Man Walking His Dog Tasered By PoliceFla. Man Said Allah Told Him To Do It POSTED: 7:15 am MDT September 17, 2008 TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A 40-year-old Florida man walking his dog in the nude was Tasered by police when he refused to follow an officer's commands. David McCranie of the Tallahassee Police Department said an officer on patrol spotted the man last Friday night. The man was asked what he was doing and told the officer, "Allah told me to watch a Bruce Willis movie and walk the dog," McCranie said. “He was obviously having some sort of...

As you probably have heard the Punk in response to McCain requesting a delay in the debates said something to this effect: As President you need to be able to perform more than on task at a time, we both have big planes to get us to Mississippi. How nice would it be if someone in the McCain camp responded to Obongo that the day he has launched off a Aircraft carrier or dodged SAMS, he might then be able to make that comment. This punk makes me sick.

US dollar set to be major casualty of Hank Paulson's bailout “This may prove to be the dollar’s epochal moment – the moment historians look back at as its major turning point.” By Edmund Conway Last Updated: 10:47PM BST 22 Sep 2008 Comments 108 | Comment on this article The dollar could be at a major turning point Photo: AP Whether or not tomorrow’s accounts of today’s turmoil prove David Owen of Dresdner Kleinwort right; whether or not this is the beginning of the end of the dollar’s pre-eminence in the world’s central banks and foreign exchanges, the economic landscape...

A decision by Toronto's city council to ban an exhibit comparing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with those of Adolf Hitler has drawn fire from Canadian Jewish groups. The traveling four-part exhibit, of which the Ahmadinejad presentation makes up one part, has been banned by an ad-hoc committee within the council for being too controversial and inflammatory. "The exhibit talks about the Holocaust cartoon contest and [Holocaust denial] conferences [Ahmadinejad] has held and his statements against the Jewish people," explained Avi Benlolo, president of the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. "If this...

The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering for one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Völkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.) And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to...