Free Republic

In front of a ballroom full of N.C. bankers in January 2006, Wachovia chief executive Ken Thompson warned of the dangers of “toxic” home loans. A problem with so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, he told the group, was that homeowners can end up owing more at the end of the month than the beginning, which can be a “tough situation” for customers and lenders. “I have literally been amazed at the terms offered by some mortgage lenders, thankfully not at Wachovia and thankfully not so much in North Carolina,” he said. Four months later in May 2006, Thompson took a $24...

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004 1:09 p.m. EDT Billionaires Secretly Met in Aspen to Defeat Bush In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado. The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition. Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the...

If you have tried to reason with a GWF (Global Warming Fanatic), you know it's a waste of time. They believe GW with a passion that has no room for facts and data. Tell them the planet has been warming (slightly) since 1977 because it's on the up side of a solar-driven warming and cooling cycle going back hundreds of thousands of years. Tell them CO2 (carbon dioxide) - not a pollutant but a harmless gas that every oxygen-breathing animal breathes out and plants breathe in to survive - is a tiny fraction of the Earth's atmosphere, man-made CO2 a...

WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - California on Tuesday said it reached a deal with power company GWF Energy LLC to settle all its outstanding claims against the firm and pare $215 million off the cost of its 10-year electricity contract. GWF, held in part by Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (NYSE:PEG) of Newark, New Jersey, is one of about two dozen firms that signed $43 billion in long-term energy deals last year with California at the height of the state's power crisis. The state claims it was overcharged by as much as $21 billion by those firms, and is also...