Free Republic

One year after the near collapse of the global financial system, this much is clear: The financial world as we knew it is over, and something new is rising from its ashes. ... the easy-money system that financed the boom era from the 1980s until a year ago is smashed. Once-ravenous U.S. consumers are saving money and paying down debt. Banks are building reserves and hoarding cash. And governments are fashioning a new global financial order. Congress and the Obama administration have lost faith in self-regulated markets. Together, they're writing the most sweeping new regulations over finance since the Great...

Trying not to be a pessimist but it does seem that we are witnessing the demise of the greatest country known to man.

Warren E. Buffett has two cardinal rules of investing. Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1. Well, a lot of old rules got trashed when the financial crisis struck — even for the Oracle of Omaha. At 79, Mr. Buffett is coming off the worst year of his long, storied career. On paper, he personally lost an estimated $25 billion in the financial panic of 2008, enough to cost him his title as the world’s richest man. (His friend and sometime bridge partner, Bill Gates, now holds that honor, according to Forbes.) And...

Olbermann: "Do I really want to be like Glenn Beck?"

Want to know just how unstable MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is? Within the course of 48 hours, he asked Daily Kos readers to send him everything they could dig up about Fox News host Glenn Beck, and then called off the dogs. That's right. The host of "Countdown," apparently worried about his image, posted a follow-up blog Tuesday telling his minions to stand down but remain ready to attack if he needs them in the future: Story Continues Below Ad ↓ An update on this: to clarify something I obviously didn't previously, I'm not talking about letting up on criticism of...

Mass fraud and ballot-box stuffing in the recent elections has thrown international commitment to Afghanistan into peril, says guest columnist Ahmed Rashid. Claims of mass fraud and ballot-box stuffing during the 20 August presidential elections has plunged Afghanistan into a deep political and constitutional crisis for which neither the Afghan leadership nor the Americans or the UN have any easy answer. The rigging was assured months ago when President Hamid Karzai began to ally himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers and top officials in the provinces who were terrified of losing their jobs and their lucrative sinecures, if President Karzai...

Here is video of incoherent Keith Olbermann tonight attacking Glenn Beck for his efforts that brought about the resignation of Van Jones. Olbermann called the laundry list of radical statements by Van Jones a "tempest in a teapot." Olbermann says the White House needs to stand up to Beck "next time." In the final four minutes, Olbermann goes on one of his rants about how he has been mistreated by Fox News opposition research, and in general, insults Glenn Beck. But he pulled back from announcing an email where people can send dirt on Glenn Beck, now saying he is...

BOSTON – Facing impending layoffs at his manufacturing plant, Alan Willoughby left to seek financial security selling automobiles at a used-car lot. Then the economy hit the skids, and he struggled to make ends meet. Finally, he turned to the one field he knew would provide him a steady income: funeral sciences. At the age of 50, Willoughby is returning to college, joining a surge in student interest at the nation's schools that provide an education in the business and science of death, a field that historically garners greater interest as the job market worsens. "It just got to the...

The Obama administration wants to maintain the secrecy of terrorist watch-list information it routinely shares with federal, state and local agencies, a move that rights groups say would make it difficult for people who have been improperly included on such lists to challenge the government. Intelligence officials in the administration are pressing for legislation that would exempt "terrorist identity information" from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Such information--which includes names, aliases, fingerprints and other biometric identifiers--is widely shared with law enforcement agencies and intelligence "fusion centers," which combine state and federal counterterrorism resources. Still, some officials say public...

The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed—in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt. For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project...

I once had the displeasure when I was a much younger man of taking car of a merchandise return from Army Archerd's wife. How he lived with her I don't know. She was the most rude and arrogant person I ever met in my life. I am sure that now that Army Archerd has moved on he will certainly rest in peace away from her.

...Let's just consider this one thing for the time being. Hugo Chavez. Over the past several days I've been reading about his star turn at the Venice Film Festival. Since when did it become so chic to celebrate dictators? WTF is up with that?! Whats up is that Oliver Stone has made a film, a documentary, about Chavez which as IBDeditorials says, "emphasizes that the public has it all wrong about the clowning Chavez being a threat to the West. It's merely an image problem he has, brought on by unjust demonization from George W. Bush." Can we just lock...

Israel stands out in the poll as the only public among the 25 surveyed where the current U.S. rating is lower than in past surveys. and Again, Israel stands alone as the only country where Obama does not engender more confidence than did President Bush.

LOS ANGELES – Army Archerd, whose breezy column for the entertainment trade publication Daily Variety kept tabs on various Hollywood doings for more than a half-century, has died. He was 87. Archerd's spokeswoman said he died Tuesday at UCLA Medical Center of mesothelioma, a cancer of the lungs strongly tied to asbestos exposure. Over the years, Archerd won praise from the Hollywood establishment for always checking the accuracy of his news tips before printing them. He had an extensive phone directory of much-guarded private numbers that he would use to call movie stars and studio bosses directly to ferret out...

Obama says 'it's time to act' on healthcare Los Angeles Times ^ | 9/7/09 | Peter Nicholas Posted on Monday, September 07, 2009 8:33:12 PM by Nachum In a speech to the AFL-CIO, the president accuses critics and special interests of using scare tactics and spreading 'lies' in healthcare debate. Reporting from Cincinnati - In a combative Labor Day speech, President Obama said that the healthcare debate had gone on too long and accused opponents of spreading "lies" meant to persuade Americans that his proposed overhaul would cruelly deny care to the elderly. The president, speaking at an AFL-CIO picnic,...

The little blood-sucker that can save lives PAT HAGAN 08th September 2009 Thousands of people who have had, or are at risk of, a heart attack could be saved by a new drug made from a chemical produced by blood-sucking ticks. The drug, called Variegin, contains a man-made version of an anti-clotting chemical found in ticks from Africa and Central America. Once the tiny insects have latched on to their human or animal prey, they release the chemical to stop blood from clotting and allow them to feed for longer. Scientists have replicated an anti-clotting chemical produced by ticks which...

At the end of fiscal 2008, which came on September 30 of last year, the American national debt stood at $9.6 trillion. That sum is, perhaps, quite beyond the imagining of most people. It is, after all, 250 million times the average per capita income. Even the total fortunes of the entire Forbes 400 list add up to less than 15 percent of it. To use a journalistic measure that dates back to the late 18th century—when the British national debt had become a major political issue in that country—if you laid 9.6 trillion silver dollars end to end, they...

A congressman from the Indiana 9th district named Baron Hill had a major league arrogant temper tantrum on camera last Saturday which has become a big hit in the blogosphere with over 100,000 viewers on YouTube. So one would figure that the local Bloomington newspaper, the Herald Times, would cover it, right? Wrong. Amazingly the most interesting thing that has happened in Bloomington in at least a year has been studiously avoided by that newspaper. Here is the scene as described by the American Thinker:It is not just the career safe seat members of Congress and the Senate who are...

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued an alarming report on swine flu last week. A typical front-page article about it began, "Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths." But the council's "plausible scenario" involving those alarming figures is based on three main assumptions, all of which must be valid or the house of cards comes tumbling down. Yet all three fly in the face of science....

ABC's World News on Tuesday night bemoaned the impact of conservatives and citizen journalists in derailing President Barack Obama's agenda. Pivoting from the reaction to Obama's address to students, anchor Charles Gibson observed “today's speech was really the latest target of some conservative groups taking on the President” and “their tactics are having an impact.” Reporter Dan Harris asserted “the conservative echo chamber is not new, but,” he fretted, “this White House is operating in a vastly accelerated media environment where you no longer need to be in the presence of reporters to make news, as we saw with the...