Free Republic

Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that after President Obama won re-election, he tried to find out ways of pushing his second term agenda without the Republican-led Congress. “Guys, I don’t want politics to be a limit of what you recommend to me,” Obama told senior aides David Plouffe, Lew, Dan Pfeiffer and Pete Rouse a couple of weeks after his reelection, according to a White House aide with direct knowledge of the meeting. “Let’s come up with an agenda, then let’s figure it out from there as best we can,” he said, prodding them to adopt a more muscular approach to...

Items in the U.S. cost half what they do in Brazil, due to taxes, inflation and the real. Above, a Macy's crowd. Ana Ligia Paladino traveled 5,000 miles from her home in southernmost Brazil last month to jostle for Black Friday bargains at Macy's in New York City. Waiting in line by 5 a.m., she soon notched her first buys in a planned 10-day shopping spree. "It was a bagunça!" she recalled, using a Brazilian expression that means both mess and mayhem to describe the scene. Brazilian shoppers are taking the U.S. by storm this holiday season, a welcome boost...

PHILADELPHIA - A North Philadelphia shop owner said he had no words to describe his emotions upon returning from India, where he had attended his mother’s funeral, to discover his store had been looted and vandalized. Bhupinder Cheema had operated a small convenience store near Germantown Avenue and West Cumberland Street, and had invested thousands of dollars into the business. Over the course of trip to Indian, which lasted several weeks, word spread through the neighborhood that the store had been left unattended.

"Twenty years after the state began to address the problems faced by colonias — a byword for poor communities that lack basic infrastructure — bad water and sewage issues continue to plague them. Roads are rutted, and some toilets are known to flush into backyards, even if a homeowner is lucky to have a septic tank instead of an outhouse. Quality drinking water can be iffy. Even as colonias along the border have received assistance from state and federal officials, colonias here — near Corpus Christi — and in other parts of the state have historically been left out by...

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has stopped using fake health and safety meetings at job workshops to snag illegal immigrants. Marcy Forman, director of the Homeland Security Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) divison, said in a letter to the United Food and Commercial Workers union, that it had stopped using sting operations for rounding up undocumented immigrants. ICE arrested 49 illegal immigrant workers at North Carolina's Seymour Johnson Air Force Base last summer by luring them with a flier to what was advertised as a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting. Those arrested were contract workers and largely...

Life & Death in South L.A. A hospital in chaos. LOS ANGELES — When a local story here in southern California tickles the antennae of the exalted ones at the New York Times, you can be sure things have come to a pretty pass. And indeed they have at Martin Luther King Jr./Charles R. Drew Medical Center, in the Willowbrook area of South Los Angeles. The Times reported on Sunday that the hospital has descended into a state of chaos, marked by infighting, racial tension, accusations of corruption, and many, many millions of dollars in malpractice payouts. "King/Drew consistently ranks...