Free Republic

While most Americans have never heard of it, the Interior Department’s five-year plan for offshore energy development is essential to maintaining our basic standard of living and keeping the prices for thousands of everyday goods and services low. At a time of record inflation and sky-high energy costs, it is critical that the Biden Administration show its energy and environmental leadership by moving forward with this offshore energy plan. Since 1953, the U.S. Interior Secretary has been required by law to prepare a five-year plan to set a schedule for oil and gas leases in U.S. offshore waters. It is...

Deutsche Skatbank, a division of VR-Bank Altenburger Land, which was founded in 1859, is not the biggest bank in Germany, but it’s the first bank to confirm what German savers have been dreading for a while: the wrath of Draghi. Retail and business customers with over €500,000 on deposit as of November 1 will earn a “negative interest rate” of 0.25%. In less euphemistic terms, they have to pay 0.25% per annum to the bank for the privilege of handing the bank their hard-earned money or their business cash. Inflation has had a similar effect in the zero-interest-rate environment that...

Desperate times call for zero rates from Fed Gerard Baker: American view It did not take long for a brief moment of hope on the US economic front to turn to ashes yesterday. The weekend marked the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, with last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. Even a recession, it seems, cannot diminish the frenzy of the American consumer and Black Friday, as it is known, demonstrated, with frightening new ferocity, that the most dangerous place on earth is between an American and a bargain. A Wal-Mart employee at...

The crime should be easy to solve: A blinged-out rap star is shot in his royal blue $250,000 Lamborghini on a busy Washington street during Howard University's homecoming weekend. A half-dozen people witness the attack, including several members of the star's entourage, following him in a bubblegum-pink Range Rover. The celebrity himself apparently gets a good look at the gunman. But the police say their investigation is stalled for one maddening reason. The victim -- platinum-selling New York rapper Cameron "Cam'ron" Giles, who was shot in both arms -- doesn't seem to be cooperating. Nearly four weeks have passed, and...