Free Republic

Susan Vincent reached into the cage and pulled out a small yellow bird, saying, “This is Kiwi. He loved us, but he was lonely.” It is a lovely spring day in Spanish Harlem on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Vincent, a former children’s clothing designer turned award-winning high-school science teacher, is explaining some facts about the facts of life. “We had to get Kiwi a mate. It was a perfect way for the girls to learn something about nature, about birds, about”—she smiles, holding little Kiwi up—“about the birds and the bees.” It was, as they say in...

As you may have heard, Donald Rumsfeld has been offered a one- year appointment as the Special Distinguished Visiting Something at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank affiliated with Stanford University in a way not clear to me or, apparently, anyone else. The online petition opposing his appointment has been signed by more than 2,600 "members of the Stanford community," another fuzzy designation. The reaction of the Hoover Institution to the online petition has been a hearty laugh and another round for the table. It has never cared about the opinions of the Stanford community in the past, and...

Stanford University faculty members are protesting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's appointment as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Renowned professor emeritus of psychology Philip Zimbardo, who has publicly blamed Rumsfeld and other Bush Administration officials for the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is among a protest petition's "instigators," as he put it. "We think he has distinguished himself for all the wrong things than what the university should stand for and what America should stand for," Zimbardo said Monday, adding that about 118 people had signed the petition by Sunday, but the number should increase...

Hoover Institution fellow, Peter Robinson, speaks with Fred Thompson about his candidacy for President of the United States. Robinson delves into the key issues facing America today, the politics of running for president, and the source of Thompson's conservative views.

INTRODUCTION BY RODNEY ATKINSON: We reproduce here a letter written by the distinguished Serb author and academic William Dorich to the Director of the Hoover Institution in California, complaining about the publication of pro Albanian and virulently anti Serb propaganda in their "Policy Review". Dorich is right in seeing this and other examples at eg Stanford University as proof of a re-writing of European history in US academic life which is favourable to those sundry fascist powers whom the USA helped to defeat in 1945. The Hoover has had a high reputation for political economic and foreign policy research, based...

$10 million spent annually by district for classroom subs... Driven by parental concerns about teacher absenteeism, the Chicago Public Schools for the first time will start scrutinizing schools with high numbers of teachers taking sick days. On any given school day in Chicago, an average of 1,500 teachers, about 6 percent of the teaching staff, call in sick or take a personal day, according to a Tribune analysis of teacher payroll records. The absentee rate is highest on Fridays, when an average of 1,800 teachers don't show... For each of the last six school years, Chicago teachers missed an average...

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security. Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat. "Not much competition here," he quipped. Friedman is considered perhaps the most influential economist... It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral. Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a...

"...The reviewer's error only shows how successful the public education cartel has been in misleading the public [about how awful big city public education has become]..."

...Life expectancy at birth has increased for all socioeconomic groups, with black men making the most dramatic gains, to 68.2 years in 2000 from 60 in 1970.... Partly because of rising female employment, the median income of white households rose 19% between 1980 and 2000 and that of black families 39% from a lower base.... Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg cites a decline in starvation. "In 1970, 35% of the people in developing countries were starving. In 1996, the figure was 18% and the United Nations expects that figure will have fallen to 12% by 2010." Professor Lomborg a few years...

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN EDUCATION by Milton Friedman The general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable. The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward collectivism offers an opportunity to reexamine the existing activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of the activities that are and those that are not justified. This paper attempts such a re-examination for...

How to Cure Health Care By Milton Friedman Archived Issue - Winter 2001 Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advance in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the fraction of national income spent on medical care; and third, rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care, on the part of both consumers of medical care and physicians and other suppliers of medical care. Rapid technological advance...

<p>Edward Teller, the man who played a key role in U.S. defense and energy policies for more than half a century and was dubbed the "Father of the H-bomb" for his enthusiastic pursuit of the powerful weapon, died Tuesday, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory confirmed. He was 95.</p>

CONSERVATIVE thinktanks exert a considerable influence over the Bush administration and the US media, with their right-wing agenda considerably at odds with the more moderate view of the State Department, analysts say. Bodies such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute have been influential since the days of the Reagan administration, and are now prominent again under President George W Bush. "They certainly influence the people or reinforce the ideas of the people who influence the President," according to political scientist Stephen Wayne of Georgetown University. "It is not only an influence, it's a reinforcement, really, of the directions...