Free Republic

Although he appeared well and spoke in a clear voice, he also made a rare acknowledgement of the strains of the job. "Please pray for me because this work is not easy," he told thousands of faithful gathered in St Mark's Square. He started the day by flying by helicopter into a women's prison where the Vatican has set up an exhibition that is part of the Venice Biennale -- a prestigious international art show that has never been visited by a pope before.

Far-right Republicans in Congress are forming an “America First Caucus” that would promote nativist policies, according to materials outlining the group’s goals first obtained by Punchbowl News. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) are reportedly behind it, with Reps. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) signed on as early members. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who faces federal and House Ethics Committee investigations over allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, tweeted that he was joining Greene in the caucus. “We will end wars, stop illegal immigration & promote trade that is fair to American...

Most Americans don’t believe people are rich because they work harder than other people or poor because they don’t work hard enough, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center.In the results of a poll released Monday, some 65% of U.S. adults said people are rich because they had more advantages in life than others, while only 33% said it’s because they work harder than others.When it comes to the question of why people are poor, some 71% of respondents attributed it to having to face more obstacles in life. Only 26 percent of respondents in the...

Thinning Cotton, Growing up on the Mississippi Delta When I was a boy, my father worried that I was unlikely to go far in life until I overcame my stubborn nature, and whenever he tried to convince me of that, I stubbornly persisted the he was confusing stubbornness with persistence. One day, after putting up with my hard-headedness as long as he intended to, he said, “Junior, since you work with Jaybird every day, I’ll ask him about all this persistence you profess to have.” Early the next morning, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took his work crew...

If you didn’t know, MSNBC’s wacky weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry recently chastised a guest on her show for using the term “hard worker.” On using the “offensive” term, she whined: I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker.’ Because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like. As he’s been known to do in the past, CNN’s host of Somebody’s Gotta Do It , Mike Rowe, took to his website to set the hyper-sensitive Harris-Perry straight...

“My take Lenny, for what it’s worth, is that there is no longer a limit to what people can be offended by,” Rowe responded. “This business of conflating hard work with forced labor not only minimizes the importance of a decent work ethic, it diminishes the unspeakable horror of slavery,”

America has lost a national treasure: B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89. Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love. “I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said...

We often hear about the glory days of immigration when America threw open her arms to the huddled masses, but one thing you don’t hear about is how those people had to make it on their own without a government safety net. There was plenty of private charity, which was highly encouraged, but health care, a minimum-wage job, college entrance, housing, legal representation, and education certainly weren’t promised—not like today.

We are often told that individuals are “stuck” in fast food jobs, as if there is no hope for advancement or development. But these aren’t dead end jobs for people willing to learn, grow, and work really, really hard. At Domino’s Pizza, over 90 percent of franchise owners started out as hourly employees, and the chain’s 5,000 locations are largely owned and operated by franchisees. Rob Cookston is one such owner who worked his way up. Cookston started delivering pizzas out of his cherry red Volkswagen Beetle 25 years ago. But, eyeing the store owner’s yellow Ferrari, Cookston knew that...

"The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?" -- Thomas Sowell "Long ago, I realized that success leaves clues, and that people who produce outstanding results do specific things to create those results." -- Tony Robbins Not only does success leave clues, failure leaves clues as well. That's how the...

The annual ritual known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee came and went last week with kids spelling words that, I suspect, many with graduate degrees couldn't spell. The winner was Arvind Mahankali, a 13-year-old eighth-grader from Bayside Hills, N.Y. Mahankali is the first boy to win the title since 2008. There is a lesson to be learned from the success of these young people, including the ones who came close to winning but didn't. It is the value of persistence. Mahankali won this year by spelling the German word "knaidel." He lost the bee three times before and was...

A teen's luck appears to have changed after a chance encounter with an Indiana restaurant owner during a 10-mile trek through ice and snow for a minimum wage job interview. It all started on Friday, when Art Bouvier, the proprietor of Papa Roux, a Cajun restaurant in Indianapolis, was laying rock salt outside the establishment after an ice storm earlier that morning. He said he was approached by a teen who asked him how far it was to 10th and Sherman. Mr Bouvier told WLFI-TV: 'And I'm thinking we're at 10th and Post. I said, "Buddy that's probably six, seven...

On Nov. 29, 1766, Benjamin Franklin wrote for the London Chronicle: "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. -- I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they...

WASHINGTON — With a Nobel Peace Prize in hand, President Barack Obama returned to the grind of governing, refocusing on his top domestic priority as the Senate moves toward a pivotal moment on legislation to remake the nation's health care system. Obama arrived Friday from Norway after becoming the first chief executive to collect the storied award so early in his tenure. He blitzed through his Nobel itinerary, then met privately with U.S. embassy staff at his hotel in Oslo before returning to a huge agenda hanging in the balance, including health care and another European trip next week for...

....Looking back today, through the smoking ruins of a political and financial culture which thought it had abolished the business cycle, I can see that we were co-opted into a form of social order which was dying. Job, saving, marriage, sucking up to potential lender: we were made to prove that we could be trusted in order to gain the privileges that trust brings. In a word, we were made respectable. As hard times return, could respectability return, too? Should it? Ever since the Romantic movement began more than 200 years ago, no concept has taken harder knocks from great...

Freddie Thompson hit full height in the 10th grade, some 6 feet, 5 3/4 inches. His buddies called him "Stick." He was a nice-looking kid, played football and basketball, chased girls, horsed around in class, rarely cracked a book. "Basically, just a carefree, underachieving kid," he says today. "Pretty good kid. Never gotten in trouble or anything like that. But didn't care much about my studies." Years ago, he put it a different way in an interview with The Washington Post: "I was interested in two things -- and sports was one of them." He must have had something going...

Jack Welch gives advice on how the new graduate can succeed in American companies. It seems to be good advice to succeed in any company -- anywhere. His number one piece of advice: OVERDELIVER - This is very un-American -- and very un-student-like. In school, students learn to meet certain objectives -- answer certain questions within certain time parameters. In the workforce -- it's not that way anymore. To get an A+ in business, Welch says, a person -- 22 years old or 62 years old -- needs to: 1. Expand the organization's expectations of what you can do --...

The Committee of 100 survey that I have mentioned here in the past asked the question of American opinion leaders - Americans were asked - What are the most admirable traits of the Chinese and their culture? Here are numbers four through one. 4. Commitment to Education - 13%. The Chinese are indeed diligent students. The only people I know who study harder than the Chinese are their children. Oh!, they are Chinese, too, I suppose. 3. One in six - the History - 16%. China has a looong history, and everything that was discovered, created, or found was done...

The gift had to be right, something she would never forget. After all, Adaline Davis had reared her grandson like he was her own, making him everything that he had become. He even called her "Ma." So on her birthday two years ago, Vernon Davis did what only a college freshman would do. He had her name tattooed to the inside of his left arm. Then he raced home with his surprise.