Free Republic

The titanic political contest in 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan is well known. It was a struggle between two very different men with two very different views of America and the world. One believed in bigger government and one believed in smaller government. One believed we could work and coexist with the Soviets and one said he would "consign it to the ash heap of history." One believed in the individual and the other led a party whose platform said government was the principal creator of jobs. During the campaign, Reagan often zinged Carter by saying, "Recession is...

In the 1980 presidential campaign, the Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, said, "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." The Gipper turned out to be correct. The gale-force winds of rising inflation had knocked working-class people to the ground, with paychecks shrinking month after month. Reagan wound up winning a landslide victory, and Carter was bounced out of office. The middle class hates inflation. The New York Times recently surmised that the effects of inflation are mostly "psychological," and that people should appreciate that...

Recently, while I was working in the flower beds in the front yard, my neighbors stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. During our friendly conversation, I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be President someday. Both of her parents, Democratic Party members, were standing there so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?" She replied... "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people." Her parents beamed with pride! "Wow...what a worthy goal!"...

For several years now, polls by organisations like the Lowy Institute have been telling us that Australians aren’t particularly impressed by our democracy. This seems a startling revelation. But it shouldn’t be. With five prime ministers in five years, Australia’s democracy hasn’t exactly been stable or functional of late. Yet there’s more to Australians’ dissatisfaction with their democratic system than Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. In a 2014 Australian parliamentary lecture, Lowy polling director Alex Oliver advanced other theories said to explain Australians’ ambivalence about democratic politics. Most had to do with the state of our democracy or society. But...

You know, many of us work for a living. As such, if you have a university degree, the chances are that you migrated to a corporate job in a corporate environment. You probably received a decent salary, a nice (if bland and sterile) working environment, and considered yourself well on the way towards corporate greatness in a solid career. It’s a nice fantasy. It’s all a big lie. Most Americans waste their lives working in this environment. They get up and go to work. They deal with traffic, an uncaring boss, and suffer through the various rules that HR implements....

A List Of My Favorite Things I Learned From My Liberal Facebook Friends Social media now makes us more readily aware of our friends' and families' opinions, which can cause quite the collision in your friendships. However, it's important to remember that having friends with a difference of opinion around can provide for an opportunity to learn a little something from one another. Proving just that, let me present you with a list of things I learned from my friends on the left. political-dissonance Gender is an arbitrary societal construct, but Hillary must be elected because we need a female...

Editor’s note: An AoM reader recently wrote me a letter recommending I look up this old essay, which originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine in March 1933. I did so, and was delighted by what I found. In the piece, Robert Littell takes on a classic genre: the listing of those skills every man should know. Naturally the fun of such lists is the passionate discussion that results from men adding their two cents as to what belongs and what doesn’t, and what should have been included instead, and I’m sure Littell’s list will have you both nodding and shaking your...

Marine veteran banned from his daughter's school after objecting to Islam lesson and now looks set to miss her graduation A Marine veteran who was barred from his daughter's school after objecting to a lesson about Islam wants the ban overturned in time to attend her graduation. John Wood and his wife Melissa have filed a civil rights complaint against La Plata High School in Maryland, claiming the district forced their 16-year-old daughter to take classes that promote Islam over Christianity and Judaism. The lawsuit also says Wood was barred from the school after complaining about the curriculum. Wood now...

The Miami Dolphins have fired general manager Jeff Ireland... Ireland was elevated to the GM position in January of 2008, given full power over football operations and personnel once Bill Parcells agreed to step aside in September of 2010, then was rewarded with a multi-year contract extension the following January. Under Ireland, the Dolphins went a combined 46-50 with a wild card loss to the Baltimore Ravens following the 2008 season.

Many are talking about teaching the GOP a lesson. As a fellow Freeper suggested - teach the Dems a lesson instead! 'Penalties' is the red hot topic. We the people can impose penalties on the violators of the Constitution by voting them out! So teach them a lesson by dishing out the most severe penalties - vote them out!

The irony here, of course, is that the history lesson of democracy gets delivered by a former refugee from the former Soviet Union, but the history lesson doesn’t just end with the USA. One young man tried to pass an “Occupy Wall Street Journal” to two men observing the protests, and ended up gaining an education in history, politics, economics, and statecraft. Give the young Occupier credit, as Joe Schoffstall says — he was at least willing to listen. I’m not sure he was actually convinced, but he at least knew better than to keep arguing:

(And you wonder why Britain is in trouble ....) After just one day of classes at her summer school of choice, Emily Birkenshaw had already learned a crucial lesson: how to "go floppy" when facing arrest. "You're heavier then, so you can't be carried," she said, with the genuine delight of a new recruit. The 24-year-old been practising by linking arms with her classmates and singing loudly at a pretend policeman. "It just felt really empowering," she said. "If that happened [in real life] – and I hope it wouldn't – I'd know how to do it without getting hurt."...

The other day it was announced that a well known, mega-company discovered a new way to destroy antibiotic resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. Using nanoparticle technology – which is 50,000 times smaller than a hair’s width – the company’s researchers were able to target an electrical charge on the bacteria’s surface, bursting the membrane open to bring about its demise. According to the Wall Street Journal, “if successful, [the discovery] would offer a fresh strategy against a worrisome public-health problem of possibly deadly bacteria evolving to become impervious to antibiotics.” Nearly 19,000 people in the U.S. each year die from...

In 1976, a Chicago newspaper columnist wrote that Jerry Brown would get "the moonbeam vote."The writer was Mike Royko, who then started referring to the then-38-year-old Brown as "Gov. Moonbeam." Royko was suggesting that Brown was attracting California's New Age crowd. Brown was a strong supporter of space exploration and many of the earliest statewide green initiatives. Yet he also gained a reputation as a fiscal conservative, refusing many perks that came with the governorship.Royko eventually retracted his statement, and in 1991 in the Chicago Tribune, he called the moniker "null, void and deceased."

Rome -- Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave a lesson on Islam and copies of the Quran to a few hundred young Italian women Sunday as he arrived in Rome for his fourth visit in a year. It was the second time the Libyan leader - who travels with female bodyguards and fancies himself a self-styled feminist - had staged such an event for Italian women, who were recruited by a modeling agency and paid an undisclosed sum to attend.

Thanks to the wonders of globalization, I’m writing this in a fairly decrepit salon de thé off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins are emblazoned with “Gracias por su visita.” Through a blizzard of flies, I can just about make out the plasma TV up in the corner on which Jimmy Carter, dubbed into Arabic, is denouncing Israel. Al Jazeera doesn’t so much cover the Zionist Entity as feast on it, hour after hour, without...

There is no way to spin this. With his stunning victory tonight in Massachusetts, Scott Brown accomplished the unthinkable: He now sits in Ted Kennedy's old seat. The White House will blame the crappy candidate. The crappy candidate will blame the DSCC. Congressional Democrats will blame obstructionist Republicans. And some idiots will still blame Bush. But nobody on the left will admit the truth: Americans loathe their agenda.

"President Obama, I support the Americans' outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing." -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24 WASHINGTON -- When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom. Just how low we've sunk was demonstrated by the Obama administration's satisfaction when Russia's president said of Iran, after meeting President Obama at the U.N., that "sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable." You see? The Obama magic. Engagement works. Russia is on board. Except that, as The Washington Post inconveniently pointed out, President Dmitry Medvedev said...

(IsraelNN.com) A recent children's television program broadcast from Gaza teaches Muslim Arab children several different vocabulary words for "slaughtering" the Jews in the Land of Israel. The theme is hardly new for the Hamas-run station. Al-Aqsa TV broadcasts a children's program called "Tomorrow's Pioneers" featuring a live child actor and an adult actor dressed in an animal costume. The current "animal" co-host is Nassur the Bear, introduced earlier this year, who follows in the footsteps of Nahoul the Bee, Assoud the Rabbit, and Farfour, who was a Mickey Mouse lookalike. Themes promoted by all the characters include Islamic triumphalism, anti-Semitism,...

Derivative markets . . .an understandable explanation: Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers, most of whom are unemployed alcoholics, to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now pay later" marketing strategy and as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar and soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment...