Free Republic

Obama buys airtime on networks for anniversary of Black Tuesday in 1929 By MARGARET TALEV McClatchy Newspapers Barack Obama is buying a half-hour slot on television networks in prime time Oct. 29, the anniversary of Black Tuesday of 1929, when panic in the stock markets set in ahead of the Great Depression. Obama, leaving a campaign stop in a diner in Georgetown, Ohio, on Thursday evening, declined to say whether he plans to address the current economic crisis in the context of the depression. He wouldn’t talk about the nature of the programming, saying, "We’re going to be talking about...

<p>Waiting to see big banks piling into the mortgage business a la Bank of America (BAC - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating)? Don't hold your breath.</p> <p>BofA surprised Wall Street last week by making a $2 billion bet on struggling Countrywide (CFC - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating). The news, announced after the close last Wednesday, gave Countrywide's sinking stock a one-day reprieve.</p>

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Capital One's shuttered GreenPoint Mortgage is the latest mortgage banking explosion to bump Wall Street's panic meter up a notch, and industry insiders say it is just another indicator that retail banks will be stung by the credit mess they helped create. "Banks are not going to want to be in the mortgage business after all this is over," says Richard Wilkes, a mortgage industry veteran who ran First Nationwide Mortgage before it became a part of Citigroup. More from FORTUNE The Bear truth Where were the cops? Subprime on the Rhine FORTUNE 500 Current Issue...

PARIS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of French transport workers, teachers and other employees staged a one-day national strike or marched through the streets on Tuesday to try to force the government to abandon a new youth job law.The Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors until the evening, commuters faced delays on trains and Paris underground rail services and airports were hit by stoppages in protest against Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's CPE First Job Contract.Villepin, 52, stood firm over the plan but the strong turnout increased pressure on him to amend or withdraw the measure and calls for his...

According to Fox, per Colin Powell.

DETROIT, March 27 (Reuters) - General Motors Corp. (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) is expected to start cutting thousands of U.S. salaried workers on Tuesday as part of a sweeping restructuring aimed at stemming losses and market share, a source close to the situation said on Monday. Tuesday's cuts will be in the engineering division, the source said. He also said reductions in sales and marketing staff would be announced in April. The job cuts will be the first of those announced last November, when the struggling automaker said it would let go of 7 percent of its 36,000 white-collar U.S....

Here we go again. Or rather there they go again. Before we could round up the usual suspects, they rounded themselves up, threw themselves into a secure cell, locked the door, and tossed the key into the moat below their prison window. They intend to stay put until George W. Bush is impeached, defeated, and drawn and tie-dyed. The group comprises an ideal mix of Democrat Dems and Democrat hacks: Ted Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Dick Durbin, Paul Krugman, John Kerry, Paul Krugman, and Joe Commissar, Harold Meyerson, and, for sheer gall, Robert Scheer, that panty hose. Have we forgotten anyone?...

An important but little-noticed Federal lawsuit is scheduled to go to court in February. Nearly six years four agents of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Narcotics Investigation(BNI) filed a civil rights complaint in the US DIstrict Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit alleged that "certain persons in the State Department and the CIA" had obstructed an investigation of the Dominican narcotics cartel, which controlledmuch of the trade in cocaine and heroin along the eastern seaboard. There is also evidence that the Dominican narcotics cartel may have indirectly financed the terrorist network that carried out the first World Trade...