Free Republic

The oil price crash could take thousands of good-paying jobs with it in America and around the world. More cuts are almost certainly on their way. On Monday, ConocoPhillips (COP) became the first major U.S. oil company to reveal that it is slashing spending for 2015, a decision the CEO asserted was "prudent given the current environment." Bad news already started to flow this week: Halliburton (HAL) affirmed that it plans to cut 1,000 positions due to the depressed oil market, and BP (BP) announced an unspecified number of layoffs as part of a $1 billion restructuring plan. It's true...

Seven more states signed on to a lawsuit challenging President Obama's executive action halting the deportation of as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants, bringing the total to 24 states, Texas Atty. Gen. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday. The new states to join the coalition were Arizona, Florida, Arkansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma. The original 17 states, including Alabama, Kansas and Texas, filed suit in U.S. District Court last week, arguing that Obama overstepped his powers in enacting such changes on his own. "The president's proposed executive decree violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law, circumvents the will of...

More than two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, it appears that the United States and Russia are engaging in the same sort of proxy wars that were so common during the Cold War. Everywhere that Western and Russian spheres of influence meet there is the potential for conflict, and the two aging superpowers have shown their willingness fight through their neighbors. However, this game of chess has taken on a whole new dimension that is radically different than what we saw during the Cold War. The whole point of a proxy war is to resist your enemy without actually...

Cratering crude-oil prices may be a blessing to cash-strapped American consumers, but it’s a double-edged sword when it comes to the overall economy. The problem for the overall economy is not so much the drop in oil prices as it is the velocity at which oil prices have fallen. The plunge from a peak of just over $100 per barrel in the early summer to today’s $58 — a massive 42 percent drop in just a few short months, most of which has come in the last 90 days — could make anyone’s head spin. The rapid fall in crude...

When it comes to crude oil and other hydrocarbons, the United States is bursting at the seams. The United States has very rapidly become a powerhouse as an exporter of finished petroleum products, natural gas liquids, other oils including ethanol, and even crude oil — with total gross exports of all of these combined expected to reach 5 million barrels per day (mb/d) or more by the end of this year, up a stunning 4 mb/d since 2005. Total oil exports in 2014 pushed the commodity to the top of the list of U.S. exports by category, far surpassing all...

If you watched any of the NFL on FOX Sunday, you may have caught this commercial imploring Dish customers to push the satellite carrier to keep Fox News in the lineup. FNC’s current deal with Dish expires this Saturday night at 11:59pmET. “We are simply notifying our viewers about the possibility of not being able to access FOX News on their current satellite TV provider,” says Tim Carry, EVP of Distribution for Fox News. Nearly 20,000 people called the 800 number and more than 75,000 went to the website after the ad aired during yesterday’s NFL games. The ad is...

(Reuters) - The ruble plunged more than 10 percent for the second day on Tuesday and recorded its worst fall since the Russian financial crisis in 1998 as confidence in the central bank evaporated after an ineffectual overnight rate hike. The rouble opened around 10 percent stronger against the dollar following the overnight 650-basis-point rate hike, but it reversed gains in early trade and fell to record lows, pushing losses this year against the dollar to over 50 percent. At 0637 ET, the rouble was down over 11 percent against the dollar at 73.00 after dipping past 74 rubles per...

Crony Capitalism: Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered a stemwinder speech last Friday on the need for government to rein in Wall Street influence. But it's big government that created the monster in the first place. Warren, D-Mass., was attacking a "dangerous provision" in the so-called cromnibus spending bill that, she said, stripped a part of Dodd-Frank that big banks, particularly Citigroup, don't like. Her speech had the left slobbering over itself. Michael Tomasky, writing for the Daily Beast, said Warren's "weekend heroics" made her the "most powerful Democrat in America." The Huffington Post ran a column calling it "the speech that...

In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election -- not very much, I concluded -- and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes. On anyone's list of cultural issues that have been debated over the last decade, same-sex marriage ranks just behind abortion. And unlike abortion, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed dramatically in recent years. Not long ago, it wasn't a political issue at all. The gifted writers Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch were making an intellectually serious, and interestingly conservative, case for same-sex marriage. But the...

Liberalism is… 1) ….idiots who think the police can keep us safe from criminals without ever accidentally hurting thugs who are resisting them and think the CIA can get information out of terrorists by giving them lattes, fluffing their pillows, and hugging them until they give in. 2) ….encouraging sexually deviant behavior at every turn, teaching young children about fisting and graphic gay sex, laughing at people who encourage modesty, and then demanding that college kids give formal consent before they kiss each other. 3) …a bunch of morons "occupying" a public park for months or blocking traffic who can't...

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Charlie Crist visited the White House this morning and plans to attend a holiday party there this evening.... Crist is in town with his wife Carole Crist and they were spotted by former Tampa Bay Times reporter Jennifer Liberto.

A brief rally in the rouble has ended, as an interest rate hike made in the dead of night has failed to restore investor faith in Russia's currency An overnight interest rate hike by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) led to a brief rally in the value of the rouble, but it hasn’t lasted long. Late on Monday the CBR announced that it was increasing its key rate by 6.5 percentage points to 17pc. The emergency move came as a monumental decline in oil prices and continued uncertainty over Ukraine has led the rouble to fall by more than...

Pope Francis has identified what he called “the sins of the media,” narrowing them down to three: “disinformation, slander, and defamation.” Of these, he said, “the most insidious is disinformation,” which he compared to telling half-truths.

Word For The Day, Tuesday December 16, 2014 In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". doxing -nDoxing (from dox, abbreviation of documents),[1] alternatively spelled doxxing,[2][3] is the Internet-based practice of researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual. [The term dox derives from the slang “dropping dox,” which according to writer Matt Honan was "an old-school revenge tactic that emerged from hacker culture in 1990s." ] la ubicación [oo-bee-kahs-ee-OHN] -nlocation, position La ubicación exacta de la casa es desconocida. The...

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Most everyone in the United States has at some point encountered Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. One short story, “Silver Blaze,” involves a dog that didn’t bark. Spoiler alert: Detective Sherlock Holmes solves the case by realizing a dog didn’t bark because the dog recognized the murderer.Holmes’s legwork is profoundly applicable to disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s whopper of a Rolling Stone story claiming at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the University of Virginia gang-raped — and punched in celebration — a freshman named Jackie at a party at their frat house on Sept. 28,...

How did this Alabama family handle it when they saw the people who broke into their house and stole their Christmas presents? On Sunday afternoon, Chris Wyatt and other family members were able to recognize the people who’d broken into their house on that Friday from home surveillance video. The burglars were apparently back in the neighborhood trying to ruin Christmas for a few more boys and girls. Once confronted, of course, the suspects had their own story. Chris Wyatt told WBRC TV: “They tried to say that they were lost and we corrected them where they were.” While they...

Less than two weeks after a federal court refused to temporarily block gay marriages from taking place, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede... Recent history suggests Bondi's application is headed for rejection. Her request will land on the desk of one of the court's most conservative members — Justice Clarence Thomas, who is responsible for overseeing federal courts in Florida. He could rule on her request for a stay (in which case, the full court could reverse his decision) or he could refer the matter to the entire court.

Democrats are the masters of deceptive persuasion, meaning they will take our attention off something they have really screwed up and put it on something that's not quite so bad. And chief among those masters is he who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C. For example, let's look at the bumbling idiot Jonathan Gruber, who has repeatedly said that the key for passing Obamacare was the stupidity of the American people. When Gruber was called before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to explain himself, he ducked and weaved questions, to the point that even Rep. Elijah...