Free Republic

SAN DIEGO — At Mitt Romney’s proposed California beach house, the cars will have their own separate elevator. There’s also a planned outdoor shower and a 3,600-square foot basement — a room with more floor space than the existing home’s entire living quarters. Those are just some of the amenities planned for the massive renovation of the Romneys’ home in the tony La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, according to plans on file with the city. A project this ambitious comes with another feature you don’t always find with the typical fixer-upper: its own lobbyist, hired by Romney to push...

The rich really are different from the rest of us, scientists have found — they are more apt to commit unethical acts because they are more motivated by greed. People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in...

General Electric Antares Group living BIG at Beaver Creek Resort with private ski instructors at $745 USD a day for EACH PRIVATE INSTRUCTOR! (Not what the teachers make, that's what the ski school gets to rent a private instructor for ONE DAY.) They are getting private race coaching and rented the NASTAR Race Course for most of today. Private racing for GE HONCHOS! After he passed on this information I went to NASTAR.com and found the race, complete with names. I wasn't sure everyone on the list was connected with GE Antares because there are a bunch of Colorado addresses....

Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax return on Monday. His total income for the year was listed as $21.6 million, more than one-half of which came from capital gains. How does that stack up against your income? Enter your annual income below to find out how long it would have taken Mitt Romney to earn the same amount of money.

Here’s the worst thing you probably haven’t heard about President Barack Obama’s health care plan, which he and his allies are about to force through the Congress despite enormous opposition from the American people: it makes everything onetime vice presidential nominee John Edwards once said about the class divide of “two Americas” come true. The dirty little secret of this plan-which wouldn’t be a secret if opponents of this legislative package weren’t distracted by a dozen other wrongheaded policies in it-is that it will bring a major and irreversible upheaval to America’s labor markets. In a time of economic tension,...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Social Networking Class War: MySpace Vs. Facebook Claire Cain Miller 07.23.07, 6:00 AM ET A flurry of recent articles have observed that young people are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves, setting off speculation that MySpace is becoming the latest victim of fickle teens following the hot new thing. Not so, says University of California, Berkeley, researcher Danah Boyd. Not all teens are leaving MySpace, she wrote in a recent essay--instead, they're splitting up along class lines. Boyd confirms what teens in any high school across the country already know: Affluent kids from educated, well-to-do families have been fleeing MySpace...

John Kerry's insult actually offered a little insight. His "advice" to students at Pasadena City College in California would have been conventional wisdom on almost any "elite" campus, particularly in the Ivy League, where just about anyone is eager to tell you that only chumps go to Iraq -- or anywhere within the sound of the guns. When President Nixon ended the draft of an earlier generation the principled protests against the Vietnam War vanished overnight. Most of the Ivy League schools continue to bar the ROTC from campus. Harvard booted ROTC in 1969 and banished it again in 1993,...

Good news is bad news for those who need bad news.According to data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau, college-educated black men earn less than their white counterparts, providing evidence of America's continued discrimination against blacks. College-educated black women, however, earn more than their white counterparts, providing further evidence of America's continued discrimination against blacks. If there seems to be a conflict in logic between these two conclusions, then that's probably because you are a racist. Or perhaps you just lack the razor-sharp deductive reasoning of the folks at the Associated Press, who implied such conclusions in a...

My mother is a teacher and has started working on her Masters Degree. One of her courses is on Family Therapy and she has to plot out her extended family as part of the course work. "Family Themes" was one of things she needed to write down so she asked me for ideas about some of our family themes. I started to look through her textbook to get a better idea of exactly what they wanted. Here is just some of what I found: The Expanded Family Life Cycle Individual, Family, and Social Perspectives Third Edition Edited by Betty Carter...

Fifty years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, the debate about race and academic performance has in many places gone terribly off the mark. The remarkable achievement of the Supreme Court ruling, which declared the legal segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional, was the foundation set for equality of opportunity. Today, the focus has shifted from equality of opportunity to equality of academic result and -- even further from the point -- to issues only indirectly related to schooling. Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, for example, perceives freely chosen residential patterns in America as a basis...

<p>WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate, Inc.) -- In his uncompromising condemnation of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, President Bush has no more reliable and important supporter than his erstwhile political foe Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.</p> <p>John McCain, an authentic American hero who knows firsthand the pain of combat, has said: "War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers."</p>

Doctors Shrugged by Russell Madden Forty-five years ago, an immigrant from Russia (who might well have been denied admittance to this country had she faced today's oppressive restrictions) published a novel that described men of intellect withdrawing from the world. Rather than submit to increasingly onerous and stultifying laws and regulations, these business people, artists, and scientists refused to work under such chains. Better, they decided, to deny others the benefits of their skills, their knowledge, and their experience than to labor as little more than beasts of burden for unforgiving and demanding masters. The fictional scenario that Ayn Rand...