Free Republic

In his classic 1932 book, Toward Soviet America, Communist Party boss William Z. Foster wrote about how “The United Soviet States of America” will come about. As a result of various capitalist crises, the national government would assume more and more control over the economy. “In finance,” he wrote, “it will mean the nationalization of the banking system and its concentration around a central State bank…” Foster is dead, but the Wall Street financial “bail-out” plan offered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in coordination with the Federal Reserve, will bring about a socialist America.

Did you know that a 10 state coalition is holding our nation's first ever carbon allowance auction at 9:00 AM EDT today? Or that the same states will be imposing a mandatory cap-and-trade program on their electric plants beginning next month? This may surprise those who assumed that June's tabling of the national Lieberman-Warner bill coupled with already runaway energy prices and growing overall economic anxiety signaled a reprieve from this stealth tax and power grab scheme -- at least for the remainder of the year. Nonetheless, the New York-based Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative launches today, striving to freeze CO2...

Coburn calls Obama, McCain; urges joint statement on bailout "...Through his spokesman, Coburn, R-Muskogee, confirmed that he called Obama, an Illinois Democrat, and McCain, an Arizona Republican. John Hart, Coburn's spokesman, said Coburn "reached out to both Senators McCain and Obama last night to urge them to lead and set aside politics in order to help solve this serious financial crisis. "His goal was not necessarily to prescribe any course of action but to urge both senators to personally engage in the very difficult legislative negotiations unfolding in Congress. Decisions about how to proceed are up to the respective campaigns...

Seoul set to crack down on illegal immigration The government will escalate its crackdown on illegal foreigners, with the goal of cutting their numbers in half by 2012, officials said yesterday. It will also overhaul the guest-worker program to better meet the need of local companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. The labor and justice ministries reported to a presidential committee an array of measures to strengthen law enforcement and enhance public order. President Lee Myung-bak called for measures to stop the inflow of illegal migrants and to better supply much-needed foreign labor to local industries. "The massive presence of...

ATLANTA - Oconee County sheriff's deputies are hard-pressed to decide whether they're dealing with a criminal when they get a call that someone is carrying a concealed weapon where they shouldn't be, Sheriff Scott Berry said Tuesday. The state's ban on firearms at public gatherings is too ambiguous, Berry told a panel of state senators conducting a wholesale review of the state's gun laws. Places of worship, sporting and political events, publicly owned buildings and places the public may gather currently are off-limits to concealed weapons carriers. But Berry said the situations his deputies encounter often straddle the line between...

All the Fed Chairman has to do is do is spend half that amount of fresh Federal Reserve Notes on U.S. Government Bonds and stop making a fool of himself by begging Congress for a favor that would just create a nightmare for him, and ergo the rest of us. What that simple inflationary monetary shock would do is immediately increase the U.S. price-level by just about 20%. The dollar would sink that much in the world's money markets and this would (1) stimulate our economy out of its current recessionary threat; (2) raise the value of real estate by...

Sharp falls in business confidence were reported across continental Europe on Wednesday as global economic storms drove the eurozone towards recession, adding pressure on the European Central Bank to consider interest rate cuts. Germany, France and Italy reported the business mood had darkened markedly this month, with Germany’s Ifo institute reporting that industry’s expectations for the next six months were the most pessimistic since early 1993. With business confidence surveys seen as a good guide to trends in activity, the deterioration provided fresh evidence that eurozone economic data for the last three months will show a second quarterly contraction –...

Scientists using data from the U.S. space agency's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers say the cause of the motion might be the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe. "The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," said lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We never expected to find anything like this."

In 50 years, NASA has earned itself an unparalleled reputation as an engineering, technological and scientific pioneer by pushing science to the limit. "Because our mission is flight in all its forms, in space and in the air, we think and work in our engineering and our science at the extremes -- and that's where the greatest discoveries are made," NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a speech last year. NASA began to conduct space missions within months of its creation on October 1, 1958. "Over the last 50 years NASA has undertaken spectacular programs in human spaceflight, robotic spaceflight,...

The news that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has shut down until spring 2009 due to a technical failure, has not come as a surprise to some scientists, who say that such a glitch in the giant machine was expected. The LHC is the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. The LHC circulated its first particle beams on 10 September 2008, but a few days later had to suspend operations due to equipment failure, when a faulty connection between two magnets triggered a shutdown which will...

"It would add to the liabilities of a government that is already living way beyond its means. It would give unprecedented power to a couple of officials who have proved highly fallible in trying to avert this alleged crisis. And it poses the risk of abuse and corruption because the government has no way to gauge the value of what it will buy. " "George Kaufman, a finance professor at Loyola University Chicago, is skeptical. "The last refuge of a scoundrel regulator," he says, "is to shout 'systemic risk.' " Usually, the alarm is false. He notes that aside from...

A YOUTUBE video has surfaced showing Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin being blessed in her hometown church by a Kenyan pastor who prayed for her protection from "witchcraft" as she prepared to seek higher office three years ago. Governor Palin is shown standing with her hands open before Bishop Thomas Muthee in the Wasilla Assembly of God church as he asked Jesus Christ to keep her safe from "every form of witchcraft", the Associated Press reported. "Come on, talk to God about this woman. We declare, save her from Satan," Pastor Muthee said as two attendants placed their hands...

Barack Obama’s Spanish-language television ad distorting the meaning of old comments by talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh is objectionable, but even this ad isn’t as horrifying as the media assault Limbaugh was subjected to five years ago this month. On September 28, 2003, Limbaugh—who had been hired by ESPN to provide a “fan’s perspective” for their Sunday NFL Countdown broadcast—discussed the Philadelphia Eagles’ anemic ’03 start with host Chris Berman and analysts Michael Irvin, Steve Young and Tom Jackson. The discussion quickly turned to Eagles’ quarterback Donovan McNabb’s perceived role in the team’s woes, and the media’s coverage thereof. Limbaugh asserted...

Premiers Thur. Sept. 25 @ 8PM ET/PT

This is absurd. This is comical. I'm watching the Drive-Bys here during the break. Do you know what the big topic on MSNBC right now is? Bush's speech tonight on the economy, nine o'clock. I'm not going to tell you what he's going to say, but I know what he's going to say. They brought in the big gun anchors at two o'clock in the afternoon to do a seven-hour pregame show on the president's nine o'clock speech. And you know what the big topic is? Executive pay. "He better make sure that he cuts executive pay." Rome is burning...

IN one of his last sermons before his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini warned of "three threats" to his vision of Islam: the US, the Jews and women. Two decades later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he has the United States and the Jews in hand - and is moving on the third "enemy." ----------snip------ His new law would restore men's Islamic right to divorce their wives without even informing them. Men would also be absolved from paying alimony. In exchange, they'd be required to pay a mahrieh (a severance payment, whose amount is set in the marriage contract) to a...

TOKYO - The Japanese government's November 30 decision to nationalize the insolvent Ashikaga banking group has surprised investors who had expected a Resona-style bailout - in which shareholders weren't forced to take a haircut for the mess. The move means that Ashikaga shareholders' capital will be wiped out, leaving them with nothing, and the government will take 100 percent of the equity in the regional lender. Since May 17 when the government decided, in bailing out Japan's fifth largest bank, not to compel shareholders to assume responsibility for the Resona debacle, some foreign hedge funds had picked up regional Japanese...

Former General Electric Co Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch said the U.S. economy faces a deep downturn in coming quarters, and he supports a proposed $700 billion government rescue package for the financial sector. "I now believe we are in for one hell of a deep downturn," Welch told the World Business Forum in New York on Wednesday, adding that the first quarter of 2009 will likely be "brutal." Until recently, Welch said, he had believed the U.S. economy could avoid recession, but he has changed his mind. "I am now caving," he said. "Get ready for real...

Before I begin this week’s festivities, I wanted to let everyone know that I got an email today that there’s going to an October Surprise. Before I get to that, there’s been a September Surprise. In case you hadn’t been around in the past few weeks, the Vanderbilt Commodores are in the Top 25. No, it’s not from the Onion, the Commodores are not only 4-0, but are 2-0 in the eternal land mine that is the SEC. The same Vanderbilt that doesn’t have an athletic department, the same Vanderbilt that people have impugned and ignored can ignore and impugn...

How Liberal Trolls Are Working To Get McCain Elected President Posted by DJ Drummond Published: September 19, 2008 - 4:11 PM Yesterday, some of my Left-leaning readers (or hecklers, to call things by proper names) remarked that my piece was nothing more than a Right-Winger making a noisy point that I supported the Republican. It's true enough that I decided to vent a little bit, just call things as I saw them, kind of like a 'sun comes up in the East' kind of thing, saying 'Obama is not what he said he'd be', but as I pointed out, not...