Free Republic

...President Donald Trump has recommended a cut of some 30% to the State Department’s budget, which includes the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development and most of America’s investments in global health. Congress is unlikely to go along with such large cuts, but our best guess is that, by the time the dust settles, key foreign-aid programs will be scaled back. Even modest cuts would represent the reversal of a long-term trend of increasing U.S. support for foreign aid, and a similar mood of retrenchment has taken hold elsewhere. In the U.K., the world’s second-largest aid donor, there...

Sunday, Feb 7, 2016 08:01 PM +0900 It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system Sanders has ended the coronation and fired up the grass roots. Now Clinton's electability argument is crumbling too Bill Curry It would be hard to overstate what Bernie Sanders has already achieved in his campaign for president, or the obstacles he’s had to surmount in order to achieve it. Not only has he turned a planned Hillary Clinton coronation into an exercise in grass-roots democracy, he’s reset the terms of the debate. We are edging closer to the...

Modern feminism erupted upon Western culture in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which smeared suburban households as “comfortable concentration camps.” Friedan was a communist who knew little of housework. Her husband even furnished a maid. Yet she charged that tending the hearth repressed homemakers who would find greater contentment in roles historically filled by men. Were feminists true to their purported ideals — penetrating previously masculine domains and liberating women from reliance on men — they would adore Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. As the world actually turns, conservative women find feminists their shrillest critics. But their achievements,...