Free Republic

Conservatives in the House and Senate achieved a small, but important victory when both chambers passed legislation this week reforming the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. The bill protects taxpayers by limiting their potential exposure should the United States suffer another significant terrorist event similar to September 11th. The only path to getting government out of the terrorism insurance business is to develop a free market solution. Hensarling’s bill is the path to that market.The President should sign the TRIA legislation immediately. The sooner TRIA is renewed, the sooner taxpayers can get off the hook.

Richard Cordray's 'Heroes' Occupy Banks and Private Homes By John Berlau on 12.5.11 @ 6:09AM Obama consumer nominee's long support of radical East Side Organizing Project. When asked about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement in October, Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren praised it to the hilt. "I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do," she told the Daily Beast. Yet when pressed in November on the OWS adherents' increasingly violent tactics, she told a Boston TV interviewer: "Everybody has to follow the law. There's no exception on that." But Warren's apparent disavowal of the tactics of OWS...

As their efforts to get the super-regulatory agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) off the ground are stifled by Senate Republicans, Democrats are continuing to seek new avenues to pressure the Republican Leadership to capitulate. The latest scheme is a hearing on “Consumer Protection and the Middle Class Wealth Building in an age of Growing Household Debt” whose purpose is the highlight the “need” for more regulation on the economy governed by the CFPB. The hearing will feature a variety of guests who will predictably call for more regulations that the unaccountable CFPB could provide. But perhaps...

In anticipation of a grilling by the Senate Judiciary Committee later this week, Google executive Eric Schmidt appeared on ABC-TV’s “This Week” to defend his company and pontificate about the economy. He should have stayed home. As if reading off talking points drafted by the Obama Administration or Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Schmidt argued for further government spending and stimulus. He called efforts to balance the budget “ludicrous” and suggested that government spending was needed to “create demand.” One can only assume that he forgot that Obama has already spent $1 trillion in stimulus and his policies...