Free Republic

About 40% of registered voters citywide told a Los Angeles Times poll that in the last two years they had “seriously thought about moving out of Los Angeles.” As The Times previously reported, the most commonly cited reason, by a large margin, was the cost of housing, cited by 46% of those who said they had thought about going.

Is Obama grabbing yet another look at a woman bending over?

The Barack Obama administration is pressing states to spend more of their transportation stimulus money in poor and distressed areas. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote to state governors Thursday encouraging them to allocate money they are getting from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to “economically distressed areas.” Fifty-two percent of ARRA money is earmarked for such areas. LaHood is encouraging states to fast-track stimulus money to those areas and to try to go above and beyond that threshold. The stimulus has been slow to jump-start the national and local economies. ARRA money will fund expansions of...

T. Boone Pickens, like any good businessman, can read changing economic conditions. While he spent the 1980s as a “corporate raider” and oilman, in this age of Barack Obama and Henry Waxman, he has shifted his focus to lobbyists, feel-good green messages, and technology that depends on government subsidies. The result: Taxpayers will now be subsidizing T. Boone Pickens, a billionaire—and Republicans and Democrats in Congress tell you it’s for your own good. This week, three senators proposed special tax credits that will subsidize Pickens’ latest business venture, which he calls “the Pickens Plan.” Like his previous undertakings, Pickens has...

Are the latest cyber-attacks directed against South Korea and the United States — presumably from North Korea — a major threat, or not? The Wall Street Journal touted them as “among the broadest and longest-lasting assaults perpetrated on government and commercial Web sites in both countries.” The New York Times was more dismissive:

BAGHDAD -- Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki struck a conciliatory tone ahead of his trip to Washington, talking about his gratitude for U.S. sacrifices in Iraq, and offering to negotiate a settlement between Iraq's federal government and the country's Kurdish enclave as tensions heighten between the two. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal as he prepared for a visit to the U.S. on July 21, Mr. Maliki said he planned to thank America for its shared sacrifice with the Iraqi people in the tumultuous post-Saddam Hussein years since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. "We have [achieved] a combined victory...

The past two weeks has seen the administration and Congress float ideas on how to pay for the $1.5 trillion bill for Obamacare. Some of it surrounds empty promises of savings, much of it involves tax hikes . Some of these tax hikes even conform to Obama’s promise of not taxing people making under $250,000. They are designed to take money out of the hands of people who drive the economy. Proposed tax hikes in this category include: 1) capping the value of itemized deductions including gifts to charities; 2) a 3% surtax on households earning more than $250,000; and...

Cecelia Carmona has sent six children and a grandson to parts of the United States on two-year LDS missions -- all as undocumented immigrants. A year ago, the Salt Lake City single mom from Mexico completed her own 18-month mission in New York City. -SNIP- The church did not take a position on recent immigration legislation, which outraged Jaime and other LDS immigrants eager for their faith to defend them. "The church could make more pressure on lawmakers," he says. It's a balancing act for LDS authorities, given that many of the main opponents of undocumented immigrants also happen...

The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign policy neophyte and "reset" man, the arms reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage. Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst. Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia "Joint Understanding," is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into...

My name is Brandyn Keating, and I'm the new Virginia State Director for Organizing for America. I'm excited to announce that we're on the ground in Virginia. I'm thrilled to be part of this movement standing with President Obama to make the change we fought for in 2008 a reality in 2009 and beyond. Right now, that means working to fix our deeply broken health care system that has denied many Americans the care they need for far too long. Organizing for America is fighting to make sure Congress passes real health care reform that gives every American access to...

Archaeologists from Geneva University have discovered what they claim is Africa's oldest ceramic, dated at around 9,400BC, in eastern Mali."It's a tiny, ornate fragment that was made with great skill and the use of fire," said ethno-archaeologist Anne Mayor in Bamako, the Malian capital.

Dems vs. Dems on National Security Puts Speaker Pelosi's CIA Fiasco Back in the Spotlight Key Democrat Criticizes Democrats: "I Just Think There's a Real Problem with Politicizing Our Intelligence Community" Washington, Jul 10 - House Democrats pulled the FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization bill from floor consideration this week, continuing to fight amongst themselves and play politics with our intelligence professionals and U.S. national security. A Wall Street Journal editorial this morning described it this way: “As political spectacles go, one would be hard pressed to find anything as ridiculous as the Washington Romper Room now starring Congressional Democrats and...

Unemployment has reached a 10-year high in Europe. The official jobless rate in the 16-nation euro currency zone rose to 9.5 percent in May, from April’s 9.3 percent. The European Union (EU) statistics office Eurostat revealed that 273,000 people lost their jobs in May. The Eurostat figures are based on the EU Labour Force Survey and recorded the eurozone unemployment total in May at 15.13 million people. According to Eurostat, 3.4 million people in the eurozone were made unemployed in the year from May 2008, when the number of jobless stood at 7.4 percent. Across the wider, 27-nation European Union,...

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. -------------------------------------------- That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test, the grades were averaged and...

Calls to investigate the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are growing after media outlets revealed that immigrants with inadequate certifications may be working on American airplanes. In many cases, according to reports, mechanics who don’t even speak English are replacing qualified American workers. "We just have to bring them before Congress and ask them what they're doing,” said Texas Rep. Ted Poe of Houston. “I will ask Congressman Oberstar of the Aviation Committee to hold hearings with the FAA regarding this whole situation." WFAA-TV in Dallas and Fort Worth exposed the problems with an investigation in early July. “Reporters found that...

L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned the United States Friday that if it did not reach agreement with Russia on plans for missile defense systems, Moscow would deploy rockets in an enclave near Poland. In sharp contrast to his positive words during President Barack Obama's visit to Moscow earlier this week when the two reached broad agreement on nuclear arms cuts, Medvedev used a news conference at the G8 summit to return to Russia's earlier tough rhetoric on arms control. Medvedev also appeared to change his tone on the missile defense shield itself. During Obama's visit he...

CANTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. (July 9) - An Amtrak passenger train carrying about 170 people struck a car that had skirted a gate at a road crossing near Detroit on Thursday, killing all five people in the sedan, authorities said. The crossing has a gate and flashing lights that apparently were working when the car approached, said Sgt. Mark Gajeski, a police spokesman. Based on witness accounts, "it looks like they probably did go around the arm. They went around the gate," Gajeski said.

If New Yorkers fantasize that doing business here in Los Angeles would be less of a headache, forget about it. This city is fast becoming a job-killing machine. It's no accident the unemployment rate is a frightening 11.4% and climbing. I never could have imagined that, after living here for more than three decades, I would be filing a lawsuit against my beloved Los Angeles and making plans for my company, Creators Syndicate, to move elsewhere.

News Asia-Pacific Uighur group 'regrets' photo error An official of the World Uighur Congress has admitted that their exiled leader used an incorrect photograph to illustrate riots in China's western Xinjiang region, during an interview with Al Jazeera. Alim Seytoff of the Uighur American Associaition said he and other Uighur leaders regretted the error. Rebiya Kadeer, a former Uighur businesswoman who was jailed in China for several years and now lives in exile in the US, used the photograph during an interview earlier this week. She said the photograph showed Chinese forces lined up on the streets of Urumqi, the...