Free Republic

How We Can Clean Up A Lot of the Economic Problems Remember Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and other companies had artificially put assets on the books? They'd say something was worth $10M when they bought it, but eventually it decreased in value, and they never updated the value in the books. That was part of the fraud. Under current laws at that time, they were all convicted and put in jail for fraud. Then we got all mad and made all these new laws that are coming out the wazoo called sarbanes oxley. It's a huge, massive law but the...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this afternoon outlawed text-messaging while driving. He signed legislation banning drivers from sending, writing or reading messages on electronic devices starting in January.

Train Victim's Cell Kept Calling Loved Ones After He Died September 17, 2008 SIMI VALLEY -- One local family whose loved one died in the Metrolink collision is still questioning something that happened that night. They got several phone calls from 49-year-old Chuck Peck after the crash. But they now know he died on impact. Peck's fiancee, Andrea Katz, told KTLA that the first call was to his son in Utah. "...and he said my dad just called me and I said, what did he say? Is he okay? Where is he? He didn't say anything, the phone rang and...

40 Days for Life 'Being Human' spotlights 40 Days for Life just prior to kickoff!Just days before simultaneous campaigns launch in more than 170 cities in the United States and Canada, the 40 Days for Life effort was the focus of a world premiere documentary on the EWTN global network. Here's a brief excerpt: "This episode of BeingHuman focuses on the stories and successes that prayer, fasting, and peaceful vigil have accomplished through 40 Days for Life campaigns that have now spread across the country and around the globe," said national campaign director David Bereit. "This show offers a great...

Riddles, Mysteries, and Enigmas (I) In 1959, Jaroslav Pelikan, then a Lutheran professor of church history at Yale Divinity School, published The Riddle of Roman Catholicism. Writing on the eve of the Second Vatican Council and in the early phase of the Cold War, Pelikan sought to address the vast ignorance about Roman Catholicism on the part of most American Protestants. At the time, American Protestants, both mainline and sideline, were nervously uncertain on the verge of an election of a Roman Catholic President. How, they wondered, could one swear allegiance to the Constitution of the United States while meeting...

What this scandal needs is a great coined name... here it is... "The Fannie Mae Four" Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines As a bonus... I also coined the term "The Vanity Post" for the source line for vanity posts. Enjoy. :)

For Democratic leaders, it's a striking defeat as they agree to allow expanded offshore drilling in waters they once called sacrosanct, giving Republicans a rare victory on energy policy six weeks before the election. In a matter of months, Republicans turned offshore oil drilling from a non-issue — even one feared as a political liability by many Republicans in Congress — into political gold as anger over high gasoline prices made voters receptive to calls for more domestic energy production. After vowing to protect a quarter-century ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Democrats on Wednesday moved through...

Can anyone remember...there are 2 files in Win98 that "remember" the drivers database. It was a trick in years past, that if you corrupted your drivers, you could "force" a rescan of the database by deleting these two. I though they ended in .idx and lived in the system folder, but I am hitting a dead wall and can't remember them.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad weighed in on the US presidential election today, noting that only one of the candidates supports restoring diplomatic contact with Iran. In response to a question from an American student about whether he supports Democratic nominee Barack Obama or Republican John McCain, Ahmadinejad did not explicitly name Obama but said: “The American government 28 years ago decided on its own to cut its ties with Iran . . .We do prefer to have relations, whereas one of the candidates in this election would prefer that.”

Congress took on the $700 billion bailout on Tuesday with what Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, called “the most palpable sense of national crisis since we gathered here in this building immediately following the 9/11 attacks.” That’s not exactly how it looked to those trying to follow the testimony of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Crisis connotes rolled-up sleeves, pots of coffee and the casting aside of protocol, ceremony and partisan grandstanding. Instead, what viewers saw was Washington as usual: senators pontificating while behind them aides whispered and...

This one came across the desk this morning. It’s a portion of letter going out today from John Allison, President & CEO of BB&T, to every member of the US Congress.Key Points on “Rescue” Plan From A Healthy Bank’s Perspective Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the primary cause of the mortgage crisis. These government supported enterprises distorted normal market risk mechanisms. While individual private financial institutions have made serious mistakes, the problems in the financial system have been caused by government policies including, affordable housing (now sub-prime), combined with the market disruptions caused by the Federal Reserve holding interest...

Barack Obama is one of a hundred US Senators. He’s drawing a salary, paid for by you and me, to be a US Senator. Right now, the US Senate is debating whether or not to dump over 700 billion of our dollars into a financial bailout plan. Obama’s campaign counterpart, John McCain is already heading back to Washington and has suspended his Presidential Campaign to work on the problem even though the Harry Reid, who apparently forgot that US Senators don’t give commands, ordered him to stay away. So what’s Barack Obama, community organizer par excellence, planning to do? Nothing....

When it comes to fiscal conservatism, George W. Bush failed us. He has angered fiscal conservatives in both parties. I don't spend much time defending Bush's fiscal record because there's really very little worth defending.   But Bush's failure wasn't because he cut taxes. Bush failed because he failed to cut spending.   P.J. O'Rourke defined fiscal conservatism as follows: "To a true fiscal conservative, tax cuts don't matter much, and neither does the national debt. That is because the real problem is spending. Even the best and most necessary public spending comes with a harrowing price: the percentage of...

(CNN) — McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

PHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ― The discovery of several hot dogs in packages outside Citizens Bank Park brought the bomb squad out and forced the temporary evacuation of the stadium Wednesday evening. According to police, Pattison Street between Darien and 11th Streets was shutdown as officials investigated the discovery of several suspicious packages near a ticket office. Fans inside the stadium were evacuated, but players remained on the field during the incident. Bomb squad members further investigated the packages and determined they were simply several hot dogs in foil wrappers. Sadly, the wieners were detonated as a precaution. The stadium was...

NAJAF, Iraq –The Iraqi Air Force and Army took another step toward taking care of their citizens when they delivered a planeload of humanitarian goods to displaced residents in the Najaf Province. The shipment came from private charitable organizations in the United States, but was coordinated and delivered by Iraqi Security Forces.The shipment of supplies was loaded onto a C-130 cargo plane owned, piloted and crewed by IqAF, at New Al Muthana Air Base in Baghdad. The hour-long flight took the material to Najaf in the Southwest area of Iraq. From there it was taken to a forward operating base...

Since I kept forgetting to take my memory pills--or couldn't remember how many I took-- I stopped taking them one week ago tonight (yeah, I remember the night, sounds like a problem doesn't it?). And they weren't so much memory pills as they were sanity pills, but as with most things of this nature, eventually I started to feel weirder on the piills than I did before them, so I quit. Then along comes Fred who reminds me how much I miss them...

West Virginia Man Charged with Assaulting an Officer Wednesday, September 24, 2008 During fingerprinting, Cruz then allegedly moved closer to one of the officers and passed gas, the station reported. In the complaint, the investigating officer wrote that police noticed a "very strong" odor. The alleged stunt led Cruz to be charged with another offense — battery on an officer — in addition to DUI and obstruction, WSAZ reported.

In Washington these days, an 11-figure expenditure barely attracts notice. With Congress preoccupied with the massive, $700 billion bailout plan for the financial industry, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have finally secured Part One of their own federal rescue plan. A bill set to be passed by Congress and signed by President Bush as early as this weekend—separate from the controversial Wall Street bailout plan—includes $25 billion in loans for the beleaguered Detroit automakers and several of their suppliers. "It seemed like a lot when we first started pushing this," says Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, one of the...

SCRANTON, Pa. — Until recently, Matthew Figured, a Sunday school teacher at the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church here, could not decide which candidate to vote for in the presidential election. He had watched progressive Catholics work with the Democratic Party over the last four years to remind the faithful of the party’s support for Catholic teaching on the Iraq war, immigration, health care and even reducing abortion rates. But then his local bishop plunged into the fray, barring Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, from receiving communion in the area because of his support...