Free Republic

Dog Tired Dogs cage-free setting offers owner new beginning Glendale — Downsized and downtrodden, Susan Taylor was in life's doghouse. Decades ago, she had been in the prosperous business of supplying ingredients to Milwaukee's brewers. As that business began to taper off in the 80s and 90s, Taylor was one of many shown the door when her employer was snapped up by a larger company. Suddenly outside an industry for which she had cultivated a particular skill set, Taylor went on a 15-year "journey to find out what to do with my life" — a long and difficult journey that...

Management consulting firm Grant Thornton recently released a ranking of countries by how well they encourage "dynamic growth" for businesses. We caught up with Stephen Chipman, CEO of Grant Thornton U.S., who says that "dynamism can be largely defined by a business' ability to act with speed, agility and flexibility. It’s about an organization's knack to move relatively fast in a productive manner, to grow, to take action without significant barriers — internal or external — getting in the way." It's not all about the economy. A variety of factors went into the model, including the availability of private credit,...

Today is Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, and who better to make the case for traditional values at the Republican National Convention than Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy, a man who lives them in his business and personal life and who has paid a heavy price for publicly saying so? Mr. Cathy learned the hard way what President Obama meant when he said that this election is a choice between two different visions for the country -- and by saying publicly he supports the biblical definition of the family, Cathy put himself at odds with President Obama and his Democratic Party allies on...

Does anybody remember, back in the depths of the recession of 1981-82, how President Ronald Reagan kept his chin up and exhorted American businesses to work hard and produce an economic recovery?Reagan had a program of tax cuts, limited domestic spending, deregulation and a strong defense aimed at overturning Soviet communism. He argued in speech after speech that his domestic plan would produce higher economic growth and lower unemployment, and that prosperity would generate the resources to fund a strong national security.Cynics proliferated. But Reagan stayed with it, praising free enterprise and entrepreneurs. And eventually, sunny skies replaced gloomy clouds....

ROANOKE, Va.— A Roanoke business woman's gun and where she keeps it has helped her launch another, new business. Eliane Coleman Niemann has owned The Health Shelf, a full service herbal wellness center, for 18 years. She got quite a scare one day in 2009 and thought she was going to be robbed. Nothing happened, but an idea was born. It's called the Apron Gun Holster. "I didn't want my customers to come into a health store and be talking to me about their health, and I'm doing reflexology on their feet and then seeing a pistol on my side,"...

Rock star Bruce Dickinson has vowed to create 1,000 jobs at a “centre of excellence” for British aviation. The Iron Maiden frontman, a fully qualified pilot, yesterday bought 132,000sq ft of old RAF hangars in South Wales. He aims to use the site at St Athan, Vale of Glamorgan, to service Boeing 737s, train pilots on simulators and, one day, build airships. His firm, CARDIFF AVIATION, hopes to take on the first 50 to 60 staff this July. Hundreds more would follow as contracts come in.

In the 13 years since he suffered a string of political setbacks and quit the third most powerful job in Washington, Newt Gingrich has been busily laying the foundation for a comeback to an even grander perch. On any given day, the former Speaker of the House can be found on a chartered jet headed to Iowa to train future GOP candidates through his American Solutions group, or in Phoenix discussing ways to lower health-care costs with drug makers through his for-profit Center for Health Transformation. He might also be in Philadelphia, narrating a film produced by Gingrich Productions, or...

The woman accused of keeping four handicapped adults chained in a Philadelphia basement and stealing their Social Security checks may have done the same thing to victims in Florida, Virginia and Texas, Philadelphia police said today. *snip* (hate to butcher article but have to in this case..I apologize) She was charged with beating the man with a hammer, tying him up in a closet with only three meals over the course of two months, and beating him with broomsticks, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. When he died, his body was stuffed into a plastic bag and dumped it in an...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQscE3Xed64

There’s no more poignant symbol of American childhood than the lemonade stand, evocative of long, lazy summer days and pie-in-the-sky entrepreneurial dreams. It inevitably was a subject for a Norman Rockwell print, with a brassy kid confidently hawking cups for 5 cents each. If Rockwell were to update the image today, he might have to include an officer of the law nosing around the stand to ensure its compliance with all relevant ordinances. In various localities around the country this summer, cops have raided and shut down lemonade stands. The incidents get — and deserve — national attention as telling...

WASHINGTON – A high-tech entrepreneur unveiled plans Tuesday to launch the world's most powerful rocket since man went to the moon. Space Exploration Technology has already sent the first private rocket and capsule into Earth's orbit as a commercial venture. It is now planning a rocket that could lift twice as much cargo into orbit as the soon-to-be-retired space shuttle. The first launch is slotted for 2013 from California with follow-up launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Space X's new rocket called Falcon Heavy is big enough to send cargo or even people out of Earth's orbit to the moon,...

Hello everyone - I'm starting my own business. I won't pimp it here as that would be in bad taste, among other things. What I am looking for are sources for cost-effective health insurance. I'm otherwise healthy, active, and don't anticipate any issues but one never knows. There are so many enterprising Freepers that it would be a waste not to tap this place as a reliable resource for something like this. Any helpful info would be greatly appreciated.

We will never ever develop a country of unleashed entrepreneurs until Americans are unleashed from employer sponsored health care. Not only that but our US industry will never again be competitive with international business until the direct costs of per employee health care are removed from the costs of doing business. How that happens is debatable, but the outcome either pro/con is not debatable. Some may not agree. Employees are tethered to employers and employers are tethered to employees. Health care encourages the best employees and those with an entrepreneurial bent to stay shackled to employers and it encourages US...

School bans on cell phones are dialing dollars for one savvy entrepreneur. Vernon Alcoser has cornered the mobile market at two Bronx schools, where students pay $1 a day to keep their cell phones in the trucks he parks nearby. "It's better than trying to sneak your phone in," said Tatyana James, a freshman at Herbert H. Lehman High School who pays Alcoser's company, Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage, to baby-sit her BlackBerry during class. As far as Alcoser knows, his phone storage trucks are the city's first. Parked across from Lehman on E. Tremont Ave. and DeWitt Clinton High...

This is why America is the greatest nation in the world. And why Obama will never be able to stop people from creating ideas and moving forward with them. From Weird Tech News Hub: 1. Million Dollar Homepage - 1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel 2. PickyDomains - Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? 3. Doggles - Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? 4. LaserMonks - An eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your toner cartridges. 5. AntennaBalls - You...

There’s a common question brought up in the entrepreneurial community that goes something like this: “Should I go to college?” or “Should I drop out of college?” It’s even the subject of a good analysis by Vivek Wadhwa over at Techcrunch. . I’ve seen the question pop up often enough, it’s certainly an important one, and a question that I have a lot of personal experience with (I went to college, started a company, “stopped/dropped out”, and eventually went back to finish my undergraduate degree). By no means am I 100% right on this subject, but hopefully this serves as...

If we truly want to create jobs, it is not enough to simply berate business to create them. We must address the dynamics that keep businesses from offering jobs and that keep people from accepting jobs. We can use policy to create jobs - we just have to care enough about the jobless to make creating jobs a political priority.

“Republics they say are ungrateful. . . . The people that create or build to make victory possible . . . are war profiteers to be subjected to suspicion, to be investigated, to be harassed.” Thus spoke Andrew Higgins, the inventor of the Higgins boats that were so essential to the U. S. D-Day landings in WWII. Eisenhower called Higgins “the man who won the war for us.” But when the war was won, Higgins was socked with an IRS investigation and then was largely forgotten. I grew up in Nebraska, where Higgins was born and raised, but I never...

At one point toward the end of his article, Professor Blinder downplays conservative concerns over the disincentive to work that unemployment insurance creates: “As the unemployment rate rises, the disincentives that worry conservatives become less important because there are fewer jobs to find…” In this line, we see a true conflict of visions about the way the world works. Professor Blinder sees some fixed number of jobs out there and too many people fighting for them. He thinks that businesses don’t hire more because there is not enough demand for their products. Yet this is an impoverished view of the...

After getting frustrated out of the lemons his problems gave him, David Miller made his own corporate lemonade. Due to the frustration of always having to call technical support to solve his own frequent hardware problems, he started taking the initiative to educate himself.