Free Republic

In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep. The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow. Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed. And then a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and...

Even before a single bag of tea has been dumped as a form of protest over government economic policies, the gang at MSNBC is in full-attack mode over the notion these protests merit any recognition. On MSNBC's April 10 "Countdown," fill-in host David Shuster imitated his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow's juvenile and overdone description of the tea party protest to disparage the upcoming nationwide event. "Now to the so-called ‘teabagging parties' you may have heard about," Shuster said. "They have been fluffed repeatedly by Fox News. Citizen protests over the government's collection of taxpayer money, specifically that the wealthiest taxpayers...

<p>This week's harebrained proposal to rocket stocks back up to their late-'90s peaks: Cut or eliminate the taxes on corporate dividends.</p> <p>Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman urged abolishing the tax in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. Writing in the New York Observer on the same day, Nicholas von Hoffman said investors' moods would improve if stocks paid 5 percent dividends and that all that's needed to convince companies to start paying them is a "slight change in ... income-tax law?eliminating the tax on dividends to people with gross incomes of, say, $300,000 or less." And if Congress stopped its "double taxation" of dividends, James Glassman, the co-author of Dow 36,000, argued in the American Enterprise, "shareholder dividends would recover, and small investors would regain a powerful tool for separating real successes in business from the impostors."</p>