Free Republic

Is success being vilified in America? The successful seem to think so. A new poll from American Express Publishing and Harrison Group finds that 1 percenters no longer like to be seen as such. One-third of members of the group said they "like it when others recognize me as wealthy." Though that number (taken in the fourth quarter of 2013) may sound high, it's down from 40 percent a year earlier. And it's far below the 53 percent who agreed with the statement in 2010.

Microsoft’s cloud chief, Satya Nadella, will lead the company as its next chief executive, according to a report from Bloomberg. Microsoft’s board is “preparing to name” Nadella chief executive, Bloomberg reported Thursday afternoon. Nadella, whose official title is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, had been one of the front-runners in the race to replace current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said last August that he planned to step down within a year. But the board is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman of the company, Bloomberg reported, ousting the company’s co-founder and possibly replacing him...

Surviving the Coming Crises - Property Purchase Check List - 5 Acre Abundance on a Budget - Urban Permaculture - Absolute in Abundance - Feed Chickens without Grain - Food Forest Suburb - Reforesting with Goats - Cold Climate Permaculture - Rooftop Farm - Power of Bamboo - Perennial Abundance - Permaculture Fishponds

WASHINGTON — Hank Ronan knew he would get the job. He had sailed through three rounds of interviews and hit it off with the doctors at the diagnostic center in Annandale, Va., where he had applied to be a driver for $11 an hour. Shuttling patients to appointments was a world away from his 20 years as a software engineer, but it was the best that Ronan could find after being laid off in 2011. He was eager to get back to work and granted the doctor’s office permission to run a credit check. Ronan never heard back, he said...

IN 12th grade, my friend Ryan and I were finalists for the Silver State Scholars, a competition to identify the “Top 100” seniors in Nevada. The finalists were flown to Lake Tahoe for two days of interviews. On the plane, Ryan and I met a boy from Las Vegas. Looking to size up the competition, we asked what high school he went to. He said a name we didn’t recognize and added, “It’s a magnet school.” Ryan asked what a magnet school was, and spent the remaining hour incredulously demanding a detailed account of the young man’s educational history: his...

With business investments and a family inheritance, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and his wife have accumulated millions of dollars in assets and generated income last year well above his congressional salary, according to his most recent financial disclosure statement. Mitt Romney’s newly announced running mate reported assets in the range of $2 million to $7.7 million. The largest was the interest that his wife, Janna, holds in a trust resulting from the 2010 death of her mother, Prudence Little. Her interest in the trust falls in the range of $1 million to $5 million, Ryan reported. Ryan also...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Can you really be poor if you own a flat-screen TV ... or two? Depends on whom you ask. With income inequality at the center of the national political debate this year, it should be no surprise that conservatives and liberals are coming down on opposite sides of the tracks. Conservatives point to spending patterns, saying consumption is a better indicator of living standards than income. Using that metric, the nation's poor are living better than they have been in decades, enjoying many of the amenities that the middle class have.

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...