Free Republic

The Federal Reserve decided Wednesday to hold monetary policy steady, saying that conditions remained too weak to pull back from its bond-buying program. By a vote of 9 to 1, the Fed decided to maintain the pace of its monthly asset purchases at $85 billion-a-month.

LANCASTER, Pennsylvania (CNN) — Sarah Palin invoked Joe "the Plumber" once again on Saturday in Pennsylvania, needling Barack Obama for having a “staged photo-op” interrupted by a voter asking him “a simple, a straightforward question” about taxes. “So when he left Joe’s neighborhood in Toledo, our opponent didn’t look real happy,” Palin said of Obama. “Seems that the staged photo-op there got ruined by a real person’s question. So here’s a guy working—standing there in his neighborhood when a candidate for president shows up and he wanted more than just a handshake and a campaign button. He wanted some answers.”...

A Review of "In Praise of Hard Industries"By Robert Locke FrontPageMagazine.com | January 31, 2003 Some ideas are, notoriously, ahead of their time. This book, written by Eamonn Fingleton, is a critique of the idea that we will ever get national prosperity from the information economy and a defense of the traditional path to it by way of industrial development. It came out in 1999 at the crest of the dot-com boom, when nobody felt the sense of crisis needed to make them listen. But our economy has cooled since then and will cool further as foreigners gradually turn off...