Free Republic

If he decides to make another run for the White House. Most of Kerry’s cash is left over from the 2004 campaign, $9.1 million in his presidential campaign account and almost $800,000 in his political action committee account and his Senate election account. The leftover money from his presidential campaign proved to be a sore point with many Democrats, who questioned why he didn’t spend it all to unseat President Bush. Clinton raised $5.3 million through the first three quarters of 2005 and had $13.8 million in the bank. She was expected to release her latest fundraising totals on Tuesday,...

New rules for donating that old car, tax breaks for hurricane victims and people who helped them, and bigger incentives to save for retirement are among changes Americans will see this tax-filing season. Other new wrinkles include: High gasoline prices lifted the standard mileage rate allowed for business use of vehicles. And a new definition of "qualifying child" affects tax benefits for certain filers -- the technical details of which might make your eyes glaze over. But if the fine print is too much to take, take heart: This year, the Internal Revenue Service has made it easier to procrastinate....

WASHINGTON -- The economy grew at only a 1.1 percent annual in the fourth quarter of last year, the slowest pace in three years, amid belt-tightening by consumers facing spiraling energy costs. Even with the feeble showing from October through December, the economy registered respectable overall growth of 3.5 percent for all of 2005 — a year when business expansion was undermined by devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes. The Commerce Department report, released today, offered the latest figures on gross domestic product, the best measure of the country's economic standing. The 1.1 percent growth rate in the fourth quarter marked a...

Sales of new single-family homes closed out the year on an up note, topping last year’s record sales by more than 6 percent, the Commerce Department reported today. Total new single-family home sales for 2005 reached a record 1.282 million, up 6.6 percent from the previous annual record of 1.203 million set in 2004. For December alone, new home sales hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.269 million units, up 2.9 percent from November’s pace of 1.233 million units, but down 6.6 percent from the October pace. “There is no denying that 2005 has been a tremendous year for...

General Motors produced another awful financial surprise Thursday by announcing it lost $4.9 billion during the fourth quarter and more than $8.6 billion for all of 2005. The company says the wide losses were due to the heavy cost of the company's contracts with the United Auto Workers and the need to bail out the bankrupt Delphi Corp. Richard Wagoner, GM's chairman and chief executive officer, said, "Our results were dramatically and adversely affected by charges for restructuring and matters associated with Delphi Corp.'s Chapter 11 filing," Wagoner said. It "was one of the most difficult years in GM's history,"...

New-home sales for all of 2005 climbed to an all-time high, marking the fifth year in a row of record sales. The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new single-family homes clocked in at 1.28 million units last year, representing a 6.6 percent increase over last year's 1.20 million units, the previous all-time high. Sales of new homes as well as existing homes — the biggest chunk of the housing market — have logged records five years running. In December, new-home sales rose 2.9 percent from November's pace — defying analysts' expectations for sales to go down last month....

Sales of new U.S. homes expectedly rose 2.9 percent in December as mortgage rates dipped, but home prices fell for a third month and the number of houses on the market hit a record, according to a government report on Friday. For the year, the Commerce Department said a record 1.282 million new homes were sold, up 6.6 percent from 2004, capping a five-year rally in the U.S. housing market that sent sales and construction levels to new highs. Sales of new single-family homes climbed to a 1.269 million unit annual pace in December after falling sharply the previous month....

After three years of losing money, Halliburton reported a hefty profit for 2005 and announced that all six of its divisions posted record results. "The year 2005 was the best in our 86-year history," Dave Lesar, Halliburton's chairman, said Thursday. The company posted a year-end profit of $2.4 billion, or $4.54 per share, on revenue of $21 billion. That compares with a $1 billion loss in 2004 when Halliburton finally settled scores of asbestos and silica lawsuits. For the fourth quarter, Halliburton booked a profit of $1.1 billion on revenue of $5.8 billion. Lesar attributed the fourth-quarter comeback primarily to...

On the heels of a record 2005 California wine grape harvest, an Australian wine glut, high inventories of unsold French wine and big harvests in Chile and Argentina, the nail-biting has just begun for the Golden State's growers and vintners. For U.S. wine drinkers, whose livelihoods don't depend on the profit margins of a bottle of wine, the future is plentiful, tasty and inexpensive. With beer consumption still nine times higher in the United States than wine - and even hard liquor still having an edge - U.S. wine consumption of 2.4 gallons per capita has huge potential for growth....

The year 2005 was likely the hottest year in more than a century. According to a study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) examining temperatures around the world, 2005 was either the warmest or tied for the warmest ever recorded. According to the GISS team, global warming is now 0.6°C (about 1°F) over the past 30 years, and 0.8°C (about 1.4°F) over the past 100 years. The GISS team measured temperatures using records from land-based weather stations, and ship and satellite measurements of sea-surface temperature. This image shows temperature anomalies relative to the 1951-1980 mean. Areas of...

The S&P had a measly return of 4.9 percent. Securities firms gave out a record $21.5 billion in year-end bonuses. That's fair.NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - It was, as you may have already heard, a record year for Wall Street pay. Securities firms in New York gave out $21.5 billion in end-of-year bonuses, according to the state comptroller's office. That's $125,500 per employee (although of course the money wasn't distributed anywhere near evenly). The last time things were this good for Wall Street's traders and bankers, at the end of the Internet boom in 2000, the rest of the country got...

Academia has a well-deserved reputation as a citadel of the left, but conservatives made great strides on college campuses in 2005. There are now nearly 700 active, independent conservative groups at colleges and universities in all 50 states. Students started nearly four dozen new conservative campus newspapers in 2005, bringing the total to 153. Predictably, the advancing campus conservative movement draws a strong reaction from the entrenched campus left. The reaction comes in a variety of forms, from stringent speech regulations to outright violence. But it's always outrageous -- and never has it been more outrageous than in 2005. Five...

Russia posts 6 percent GDP growth in 2005 JAN. 24 7:58 A.M. ET Russia's gross domestic product grew by 6 percent in 2005, the head of the Federal State Statistics Service said Tuesday. Vladimir Sokolin also said that inflation during that period was 10.9 percent, the lowest rate in the past seven years. Russia's economy in recent years has rebounded significantly from the economic collapse of 1998 and Sokolin said the latest figures show "the positive trend of social-economic processes continued."

NEW YORK - Last year was the warmest in a century, nosing out 1998, a federal analysis concludes. Researchers calculated that 2005 produced the highest annual average surface temperature worldwide since instrument recordings began in the late 1800s, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The result confirms a prediction the institute made in December. In a telephone interview, Hansen said the analysis estimated temperatures in the Arctic from nearby weather stations because no direct data were available. Because of that, "we couldn't say with 100 percent certainty that it's the warmest year, but I'm reasonably...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--In what can only be described as tragic, the United States likely experienced its 47 millionth legal abortion at some point in 2005, more than three decades after the Supreme Court issued its infamous 1973 Roe. v. Wade decision legalizing the killing of the unborn. The statistic is based on data since 1973 gathered by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute and on estimates by the National Right to Life Committee. In the first full year of abortion legalization nationwide (1974), Guttmacher counted 898,600 abortions. That number reached a peak of 1,608,600 in 1990, before falling to 1,293,000 in 2002....

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- The Republican National Committee said it pulled in more than $100 million in donations last year, a record for a U.S. non-presidential election cycle. RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, in a release Monday, said the party received some $101.5 million in contributions in 2005 and has about $34 million on hand. The release said more than 1 million people donated to the GOP last year. "Our fundraising success this year is a credit to the wide base of support for President Bush and the Republican Party throughout the country," Mehlman said. "This strong showing in 2005...

In many respects, 2005 was the strongest economic year the United States has experienced since 1999. The Gross Domestic Product continued its uninterrupted string of consecutive 3-percent or better quarterly increases – 10 quarters in a row, the longest streak since the mid-’80s. The nation added 2 million new non-farm payroll jobs. The average net wealth of the citizenry reached another all-time high – a total of more than $51 trillion – by the third quarter of 2005. And, as the Labor Department just reported on January 18, inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index was virtually the same...

Despite a lackluster showing in 2005 elections for the GOP, the Republican National Committee raked in better than $100 million last year and enjoys its largest cash-on-hand lead over its Democratic counterpart in more than a decade. For the year just passed, the RNC brought in nearly $102 million -- give or take a few hundred thousand -- and had $34 million in the bank. The Democratic National Committee raised $51 million in 2005 but showed $5.5 million on hand at the end of the year. That cash disparity, which has led to grumbling and fretting by some people in...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2006 – Army re-enlistments in 2005 were the highest they've been in five years, with more than 69,500 soldiers choosing to continue their service, the Secretary of the Army said here yesterday. This surplus in retention made up for recruiting shortfalls the Army has faced, Francis J. Harvey said at a Pentagon news conference. The U.S. Army is the most capable, best trained, best equipped and most experienced force the United States has fielded in more than a decade, and 2005 was a year of many significant achievements, Harvey said. Speculations that the Army is severely stretched...

NEW YORK Last year is shaping up to be a stinker for the newspaper industry. The sector turned in one of its worst performances in a decade, with newspaper index stocks down 21% during 2005 -- underperforming the S&P500 by about 24%, according to a report released today by Goldman Sachs. "It was a clean sweep, with all nine of the newspaper publishers in our coverage universe posted negative stock price performance for the year," said the report. "It's enough to make a newspaper analyst cry." The upside in 2006? Not much. The revenue environment is going to be challenging,...