Free Republic

President Bush explains big bailout as high-stakes debate heats up. NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- President Bush used a prime-time TV address on Wednesday night to press his case for a $700 billion bailout of the nation's shaky financial system. The aim of Bush's proposal is to restore confidence to the credit markets, which are at risk of freezing. Should that happen, experts say, the U.S. economy could seize up - threatening easy lending to businesses and consumers, a loss of jobs and a severe economic downturn. "We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis," Bush said. Banks have...

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said President Bush called Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama tonight around 7:30 pm. Bush and GOP presidential hopeful nominee Sen. John McCain also spoke this afternoon, and their staffs conferred afterwards, Fratto said. The president has invited the bicameral and bipartisan leadership, and the two senators running for president, to the White House tomorrow, "to work on driving to a bipartisan and timely soultion." Obama has agreed to attend the meeting. "A few moments ago, President Bush called Senator Obama and asked him to attend a meeting in Washington tomorrow, which he agreed to...

An Alaska Democratic state lawmaker has written a letter to a state trooper official calling for an investigation into possible witness tampering related to the state's ethics probe of Gov. Sarah Palin by people working for or close to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. In a letter Wednesday to Alaska state trooper director Audie Holloway, Democratic Rep. Les Gara accused the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain of intimidating witnesses and/or pressuring people close to Palin, McCain’s vice presidential running mate, not to comply with subpoenas seeking testimony about whether Palin improperly fired her public safety commissioner. "Starting after...

CLEARWATER, Florida (Reuters) - John McCain and Barack Obama issued a joint statement on Wednesday urging lawmakers to cooperate and reach a U.S. economic bailout agreement to avoid "economic catastrophe". In a three-paragraph statement issued by McCain, the Republican candidate for president and his Democratic rival Obama, the two said it was time for both parties to come together for the sake of the American people. "This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country," it said. "We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is...

Johnson County deputies have acquired a new crimefighting tool: a device that quickly tells them —right during a traffic stop — whether someone is lying about who they are. The sheriff’s department is among the first agencies in Kansas and the metropolitan area to test a portable machine that identifies fingerprints in the field, deputies said. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation recently gave five units to the department for testing, said sheriff’s spokesman Tom Erickson.

As I am doing my research on the issue of Islam I sometimes come across articles speaking about interfaith dialogue. Interfaith sounds well and good but the question is what are the actual results of these meetings? Most recently there was a world wide interfaith conference sponsored by the Christian oppressing Saudis. As for Jewish people, they are not even allowed in Saudi Arabia. Just weeks later those same Saudis had over a dozen Christians deported from Saudi Arabia. The horrifying crime of these Christians was worshipping in their homes. Now on September 25Th there will be an interfaith dinner...

I'll be leaving mid afternoon from Philly to join the public display of affection for our troops at Walter Reed. Not only that, it keeps the bastards from Veterans For peace and Code Pink from psychologically torturing the patients with things like holding "Maimed For A Lie" signs up to the ambulance bus windows when the arrive from the combat zone. I can go down the New Jersey side (I-295) if that's where people are located, and stop in Maryland at places like Elkton (Exit 109) and Bel Air (Exit 77) off I-95.

When it comes to smooching, Kirk Cameron only has lips for his wife. The former star of the TV sitcom "Growing Pains" refused to kiss the actress who played his wife in his new movie "Fireproof," he told the "Today" show on Monday.

Former Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson was dumped from Obama's vice presidential search team, but he's still playing a behind-the-scenes role on the campaign. Former Senator Tom Daschle, a top Obama backer, emailed a select list this afternoon that he and Johnson would be leading a briefing intended largely for Clinton's campaign brain trust next month. "Jim Johnson and I have scheduled another informal breakfast discussion and update on the campaign early next month," he wrote to a list including Senator John Kerry, James Carville, and Richard Holbrooke, as well as Clinton's former top campaign aides, including Howard Wolfson, Geoff...

WASHINGTON – Pressing urgently for a massive financial bailout, President Bush says the nation faces a "long and painful recession" if Congress fails to act. He says "our entire economy is in danger."

military application electromagnetic drive in space

It is now consensus that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the heart of the systemic meltdown we are seeing in the mortgage market. They are costing taxpayers billions through their own bailouts and through the role they played in fueling an artificial mortgage boom.But eight years ago, when I testified before Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's "special privileges create a serious hazard to the market, to taxpayers (and) to the economy," my criticism of these sacred financial entities was met with ridicule. At the hearing on June 21, 2000, before the House Financial Services Committee, I...

It turns out the lineage of the official Obamunist salute goes back further than the astro-hippies on Star Trek. Here's the Obamaniac "Sign of Progress": …and here's a photo from the history books… The German Propaganda Archive provides this caption: The hands of the Führer organize his speech. This picture captures Hitler's hands as he speaks of the unity of the National Socialist and socialist ideas. I thought the idea of the salute was to make a zero, summing up the emptiness of the Obamania phenomenon. But maybe it represents the circle that race-obsessed, socialist progressives go round and round...

By taking the colossal wreckage of the credit bubble onto its own books in a $700bn (£382bn) taxpayer sink, Washington has forestalled a run on the world banking system, and may hopefully have saved the viable core of modern capitalism. Hank Paulson's "Super Sink" is the "game changer" we have all been waiting for in this interminable crisis. It puts a floor under the toxic debt that is bleeding the banking system to death, and ends the downward spiral of CDOs, CLOs, HELOCs, and such instruments of leveraged excess that lie at root of the credit terror. No doubt the...

BOSTON—A federal bankruptcy judge who resigned after his drunken driving arrest has a new job. Robert Somma has been hired by the Boston law firm of Posternak Blankstein & Lund as a senior counsel in the firm's bankruptcy department. Somma rear-ended a pickup truck at a red light in Manchester, N.H. on Feb. 6 while wearing a cocktail dress and high heels. He resigned from the bench a few days after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge of drunken driving and paying a fine.

The free market has nothing to do with the current crisis Forget AIG for a moment. Forget Freddie and Fannie, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Imagine a company much bigger. Imagine a company that at the end of this year will have spent $400 billion more than it has taken in. Worse, imagine that the company's accounting is so bad, the $400 billion doesn't even begin to cover the whole of this company's liabilities. In fact, the company deliberately chooses to use what's known as "cash accounting" rather than the more accurate accrual accounting. Cash accounting looks at...

America's Energy: Joe Biden wants to develop clean coal technology — for the Chinese. As for the U.S., he wants the Saudi Arabia of coal to be the Bangladesh of energy.Biden has joked that the difference between him and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is that she's "good-looking." One of the real differences is that Palin wants to develop America's abundant domestic energy resources — all of them. She cut through red tape to get a pipeline built to supply the lower 48 states with natural gas from Alaska's North Slope. Biden, Obama and other Democrats want to go through the...

The ruins of a lost Jewish city that vanished 700 years ago have been found, it has been claimed. The city, Itil, was the capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear, leaving little trace of its culture. Archeologists hope the discovery of Itil will reveal how the Khazars actually lived It was mentioned in medieval travellers' accounts but Soviet dictator Josef Stalin banned any research into the city and the Khazars, fearing it would prove Russia was descended from a Jewish state. The city made...

As Congress and the Administration work to prevent the crisis in the financial sector from spilling over into the larger economy, the vultures are swarming. In an Associated Press article yesterday, the following quote is made by Barney Frank, ultra-liberal Democrat of Massachusetts: “The private sector got us into this mess…The government has to get us out of it. We do want to do it carefully.” This is obscene. This “mess”, as Congressman Frank so eloquently put it, is the fault of government pure and simple. And, it is the personal fault of Barney Frank. For him to now hide...

The Pentagon will receive a record $488B budget; automakers get $25B in loans; offshore drilling ban lifted. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House passed a $630 billion-plus spending bill Wednesday that wraps together a record Pentagon budget with aid for automakers and natural disaster victims, and increased health care for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.