Free Republic

Happy times are here again at the gas pump. The price of oil keeps falling, and Americans are filling their tanks for less than $2 a gallon. The government says cheaper gasoline put an extra $100 billion into drivers' wallets last year alone. That seems like it would be good for the economy. Turns out, it might not be. "Is it possible that lower oil prices could actually hurt the U.S. economy?" asks Vipin Arora, an economist with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. "I think the answer could be yes." Arora's findings are based on his own research, so this...

I have been reading some of the crap on this board after the election and some of it is shocking. I've seen plenty of vanities...but to me vanities aren’t the problem....the messages contained in many of them reflect a mindset that IMHO has no place here. I've always thought of FR as a place where Conservatives (not Republicans) dominate and idiots kind of hang around the periphery sniping with their stupid notions. But (more and more) you read some of the dumbest crap here...and then see a coterie of nitwits chiming in with their agreement. Allot of it is the...

To those of us who consider ourselves contrarians, it is the "perfect campaign," as we observe the 2004 presidential contest. Unlike the "perfect storm," it is not necessarily a disaster for anyone but the purveyors of conventional wisdom, the antithesis of contrarian insight. Just a few words about contrarianism at the outset: It is a discipline of thinking and analysis which assumes that, in most cases, when popular opinion asserts that something is true or will happen, the opposite or contrary will in fact occur. It is most often applied in stock-market investing and politics. It is not an insight...