Free Republic

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains. That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.” Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools...

In an op-ed yesterday, David Brooks — The New York Times’ alleged conservative columnist — claims Republicans’ downward trajectory is due to their devotion to rugged individualism and their neglect of community. ... It seems The New York Times’ conservative lapdog has found his ideal Republican — Barack Hussein Obama.

Putting her in the policy shop is like Lyndon Johnson making Jane Fonda a senior adviser on Vietnam.

Soros told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes that he developed his character as Nazi collaborator in Hungry. He took that learning and became convicted Insider trader, a guy who made 10 billion dollar off the British people through currency speculation, terrorist supporter and Israel hater. After the last election George Soros, met with a group of Mega-rich liberals to ensure that they get to control the country after the 2008 Elections. What they ended up doing is giving $100 Million dollars to key liberal organizations in major battle ground states(see Obama's Liberal Shock Troops ). Here's the scary part--it worked....

She believes al-Qaida was an "obscure group" turned into a massive threat due to U.S. policies. She's referred to former President Bush as "our torturer in chief" and a "psychotic who need(s) treatment" while comparing Bush's arguments for waging a war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's use of political propaganda. She's worked on behalf of George Soros' philanthropic foundation. Meet Rosa Brooks, the Obama administration's new adviser to Michelle Fluornoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, a position described as one of the most influential in the Pentagon. "I prefer to think of (my new position) as my personal government...

"David Brooks's Op-Ed column in The New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." Source David Brooks, a self-described "moderate conservative," illustrates the intellectual schizophrenia that conflicts that breed of thinkers. Six months ago, on September 30, 2008, in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Revolt of the Nihilists," Mr. Brooks, mad at the 228 House members who voted down the first version of the bailout bill, wrote: "And...

With the rise to enduring power of president Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, a new type of Republican emerged in reaction to FDR's attractive and overawing power - the-me-too Republican. Until the election of president Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies, but claimed they would administer them better. Of course this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics.

As the seventh anniversary of the jihadist murder of nearly 3,000 American civilians passed last week, it is useful to recall an article that the Hyde Park Herald published on September 19, 2001 – written by a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. Even all these years later, it is revealing of the mindset of the man who would be leader of the free world. Obama starts out well enough, saying: “We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of...

Last night, Barack Obama’s exit music at the close of his historic Democratic convention acceptance speech was “Only in America,” a song by country’s foremost multiplatinum duo.

My first thought on the running mate question is that to balance his ticket, Barack Obama should pick a really old white general. Therefore, he should pick Dwight Eisenhower. John McCain, on the other hand, needs to pick someone younger than himself. Therefore, he also should pick Dwight Eisenhower. ...If John McCain is elected, he’ll face a political culture threatening to split at the seams. In defeat, Democrats will be enraged at everything and everybody. The Republican Party will still be exhausted and divided. McCain will find it hard to staff the administration since so many Republican advisers were exhausted...

You cannot have it both ways! Every year in America, this “both ways” mentality gets worse and worse. Somewhere along the line Americans started thinking that we could have all of our rights and freedoms and have expedient justice and results at the same time. Well, I have to tell you: YOU CANNOT. There is a blend of the two that must be championed if we are going to continue being a successful country. The mortgage crisis of late is one of the great disasters caused by this “have it both ways” mentality. The government was constantly pressured by citizens...

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...

Tax Cuts Can't Be GOP's Policy Centerpiece David Brooks, New York Times In 1974, a group of economists and journalists got together in a bar and launched supply-side economics. It was a superb political and economic package. It addressed a big problem: stagflation. It had a clear policy focus: marginal tax rates. It celebrated a certain sort of personality: the risk-taking entrepreneur. It made it clear that the new, growth-oriented Republican Party would be different from the old, green-eyeshade one. Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy....

David Brooks is a national treasure. He is perhaps our most gifted spotter of trends, and his pop-sociology seems moved by a genuine curiosity, and so is often blissfully immune from the draw of familiar categories and conventional wisdom. He has taught us more about the life of the contemporary middle class than anyone, and most weeks he is the only reason to read the New York Times. But as a spotter of trends, Brooks is also a generalizer, and tends to advance a simple, coherent, well packaged aphorism as an explanation for large events and ideas. It is the...

You better put down your drinks, and make sure there's nothing in your mouths, for the New York Times's David Brooks made a comment on Friday's News Hour that is guaranteed to evoke uncontrollable fits of laughter from those on the right side of the aisle. After introducing regular guests Brooks and Mark Shields, host Jim Lehrer asked their opinions concerning the just-released Osama bin Laden video.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson is turning up the rhetoric in a fight with Lansing over a proposal to reclassify 200 felonies as misdemeanors. If it happens, he says, "everybody should go out and buy a gun. I recommend an Uzi."

REVIEW OF: Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Arthur C. Brooks (Basic Books, 250 pp., $26.00) It’s tempting to say that Arthur Brooks, in his definitive new book on American charitable giving, has shown that there is nothing oxymoronic about the term “compassionate conservative.” That, at least, is the conclusion that critics have drawn from Brooks’s demonstration that conservatives, despite the myth that they lack compassion, give significantly more to charity than liberals do. But in fact Brooks has shown something even more significant: that “compassionate conservative” is not only overly defensive,...

If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame. There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious. The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy, which the Baker-Hamilton commission terrifyingly described. The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly. Joe Biden, who has the most intellectually serious framework for dealing with Iraq, was busy...

<p>I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.</p>

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate "forgiveness" of loans to Third World countries, a "living wage" for the poor and a "safety net" for all. But these are all government policies -- not individual acts of compassion -- and the actual empirical consequences of such policies are of remarkably little interest to those who advocate them. ...snip... A new book, titled "Who Really Cares" by Arthur C. Brooks examines the actual behavior of liberals and conservatives when it comes...