Free Republic

In 1996, Reginald Dwayne Betts — a 16-year-old honor student with braces — used a pistol to carjack a man who had been sleeping in his vehicle. Shortly thereafter, he was caught, sentenced as an adult and sent to an adult prison, where he served more than eight years, including one year in solitary at a supermax facility. "I was 5 feet, 5 inches and 120 pounds. I went to prison with grown men, and I went into what people readily acknowledge as a treacherous and a wild place," Betts tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "My judge, when he sentenced...

U.S. marshals and New Orleans SWAT team members on Monday arrested the suspect in the shooting of a Tulane University medical student who has been hailed as a good Samaritan for trying to stop an abduction. Police said the man quickly confessed to the crime. -- Police said video surveillance showed Cain dragging a woman to his SUV about 4 a.m. Friday near Magazine and St. Mary streets. Police have not said what they believe Cain intended to do to the woman. But at just that moment, police said, Gold drove up and tried to intervene in the situation. Cain...

Eleven days ago, President Obama took the opportunity at Georgetown University to defend the government’s 50-year experiment in anti-poverty welfare programs. The president claimed: It is a mistake for us to suggest that somehow every effort we make has failed and we are powerless to address poverty. That’s just not true. First of all, just in absolute terms, the poverty rate, when you take into account tax and transfer programs, has been reduced about 40 percent since 1967.

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise. President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and...

“We don’t want to be imprisoned by the past,” Obama said during a visit to Kingston, Jamaica. “When something doesn’t work for 50 years, you don’t just keep on doing it. You try something new.” – Barack Obama, April 9, 2015 In that case, is it time to revisit “The Great Society” as well?Detroit leadership, exclusively Democratic since 1962 “If Mayors Jerome Cavanagh and Roman Gribbs had cut the workforce in the 1960s and early 1970s as the population and property values dropped. If Mayor Dennis Archer hadn’t added more than 1,100 employees in the 1990s when the city...

Almost seven years ago, a troubled 11-year-old girl reported that she had been raped — twice — in her Northwest Washington neighborhood. Despite medical evidence of sexual assault, records show that no suspects were arrested and the cases were given only sporadic attention by the police . Instead, in the second case, the police had the girl, Danielle Hicks-Best, charged with filing a false report. After Danielle’s family agreed to what her parents say was a poorly understood plea, she was convicted and made a ward of the court. She spent the next few years in and out of detention...

As state legislatures throughout America struggle with requirements to balance their state budgets, let us pause to remember that one-quarter of the budget is dictated by Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose damage to state budgets lives on 42 years after his death. As president, LBJ pushed for Medicaid -- free health insurance for poor people. This was a boon to the medical industry, particularly hospitals, doctors, sellers of wheelchairs, and nursing homes. But Medicaid comes at the expense of schools, highways, prisons and others state services because it requires states to pony up some of the money in this federally mandated...

Every now and then you come across an article that folks just need to read. This one written by Michael Smith entitled, “Confessions of a Public Defender” and originally posted at American Renaissance on May 9, 2014 is one of those articles. It is a profound and deeply disturbing piece, which, as we end 2014, we all need to comprehend as we move towards the 50th anniversary of the Great Society initiatives of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Smith articulates that which ails the black community — the real discussion we should be having on race, not that of victimhood and...

Have you heard about the insurance company that provides free health coverage for the poor? Me neither. What about the hospital that provides free health care services to the poor? Of course, you say. Many of them do! Indeed, some of these hospitals even go bankrupt in the process. It is beyond the scope of this article to discern how economic values are set in a society, but rest assured that supply and demand are but one factor—especially in health care. Notably, health care is the most regulated industry in the country. With compliance comes massive additional costs, not to...

July, 1964. Fifty years ago this month. The Republican Party nominates Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for president. The resulting uproar was somewhere north of hysteria. And that was just from the GOP establishment of the day. Followed famously by a November landslide Goldwater “defeat” in which the Arizonan carried a mere five states in his race against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was the first conservative Republican to win nomination since the 1924 selection of Calvin Coolidge (the vice president who had succeeded Warren Harding after his death). From 1928 all the way through 1960, every GOP nominee from Hoover...

Sipping a hot cup of unsweetened green tea at 3am, I felt compelled to revisit Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the internet. These excerpts leaped out at me. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have...

tanding on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier. Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our...

A birthday is often a time to celebrate, but just as often a time to reflect. What’s been accomplished so far? What’s left to do? So let’s take a moment to reflect on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” as it turns 50. In May of 1964, LBJ had been president for just six months. He’d been sworn in after the tragic murder of John Kennedy the previous November. But Johnson was a man in a hurry to implement big changes. He traveled to the University of Michigan to challenge the graduates. In his 1964 speech, LBJ celebrated the...

Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier. Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our...

EW Jackson's comments last summer, similar to those of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, and Kira Davis.

WHEN I WAS young, public service television commercials were not uncommon. One of the more famous ones featured an American Indian looking at a polluted landscape. At the commercial's close, there was a tear in his eye. Less iconic was a commercial about fair housing. A superintendent is showing a substandard apartment — it needs a lot of work. If I recall, he shows the bathroom and how getting a nickel washer from the hardware store would fix the plumbing. The commercial's goal was to educate people of color that there were laws protecting them against housing discrimination. I was...

Former President Jimmy Carter championed racial equality Tuesday evening, saying "there's no difference with people in the eyes of God" during a 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Act. Carter, 89, hailed the landmark 1964 law that outlawed discrimination against minorities and women as a stepping stone, but insisted there's still more work to do. "We're pretty much dormant now. We accept self-congratulations about the wonderful 50th anniversary — which is wonderful — but we feel like Lyndon Johnson did it and we don't have to do anything anymore," said Carter, the first president to speak at the three-day...

President Obama has broken many promises. One that he has not broken is his boast that he would "fundamentally transform America." He and his fellow Democrats are on the verge of doing just that by turning us into a nation of loafers. A loafer is an idle person who lives off others. Barack Obama seemingly has no problem with such people. He might even relate to them. He does have a serious problem with his own work ethic, and finds work boring.

It was 1964 and I was a liberal confident that society could be greatly improved by large infusions of money. With all the talk currently being bruited about the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty, I am reminded that for a year, between 1964 and 1965, I was the director of the antipoverty program of Pulaski County, Ark., which included Little Rock, the adjoining city of North Little Rock and the surrounding rural area. I was then 27 years old, appropriately left-wing, and confident that society could be greatly improved with the help of large infusions of money and...

When Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his War on Poverty in 1964, I wonder if he expected we’d still be waging it 50 years later? We’ve now spent over $20 trillion on the War on Poverty, and what have we got to show for it? A welfare system that has been institutionalized into one of the country’s main industries, the creation of a new, permanent, underclass of non-contributing members of society, and the destruction of the black family: in short, a system that does more to perpetuate the existence of poverty than eliminate it. You could call it collateral damage. By...