Free Republic

This week, Paul Krugman of The New York Times posited a theory: Red states cause depression and suicide. In a column titled "America's Red State Death Trip," Krugman wrote: "In 1990, today's red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts." On this basis, Krugman blasts Attorney General William Barr, who suggested earlier this...

Rosa Brooks serves as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy. In May 2010 she also became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy. She is running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues. She is on leave from her job as a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is known as a columnist (most recently with the LA Times) and at the Pentagon her portfolio has included both human rights issues and global engagement and strategic communication. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, is...

Social policy often does more harm than good, says one of the last of the original neocons.The Obama administration is entering a field not cultivated on a major scale since the 1960s: social policy. Unlike safety-net entitlements, such as health insurance and cash welfare, social policy—or social engineering, to use the more critical term—uses government action to try to change and improve people and their neighborhoods. For instance, the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods are supposed to replicate, in 21 cities, what the Harlem Children’s Zone has done in Manhattan—to “create plans to provide cradle-to-career services that improve the educational achievement...

Long but fascinating article on how economies, birthrates, social policies and taxes are all affecting each other, and prosperity, freedom and having lots of babies go hand in had. Short version: Help the US economy by having more babies!

In 1992, Barack Obama led Project Vote, a masive voter registration drive in Chicago...

Kerry's Lies Don't Matter by Bob Redman (27 Oct. 2004) Kerry's lies don't matter to the 45 and more millions of people who are going to vote for him on Tuesday. Nor that he lobbied to get a purple heart for a scratch, bugged out early from Vietnam, committed treason afterward, left one heiress and children to marry another heiress, took campaign money from Vietnamese, Chinese, and Iranians, and will stoop to any lie in a debate or on the stump. His supporters know or sense all of this already. In short, these people identify with him. There will, however,...

In President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address, we are going to hear a lot about something called an "ownership society." The idea is that American workers aspire to be owners — owners of stock for their retirement, owners of homes, owners of businesses, owners of good health insurance and owners of the skills they need to navigate multiple changes of jobs and careers. It sounds just great. Take a closer look, however, and you will recognize the trademarked Bush combination of inspiring themes coupled with a complete absence of useful tools. In other words, "bait and switch."

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland, noted for fried breakfasts of epic proportions, is chewing over the possibility of a special tax on fatty foods to tackle rising obesity levels. Faced with an epidemic of expanding waistlines as the Irish enjoy unprecedented prosperity, Health Minister Micheal Martin confirmed he was "very tentatively" examining slapping a levy on high-fat comestibles. A proliferation of restaurants and fast-food joints during the country's celebrated "Celtic Tiger" boom of the late 1990s and an increasingly sedentary national lifestyle are among factors blamed for a rise of nearly 70 percent in the number of those overweight or obese...

Joseph LoconteRenewing the Social FabricPhiladelphia Society,April 14, 2002           In a way no one anticipated, George W. Bush has shifted the national conversation about renewing America’s social fabric. Not since Dwight D. Eisenhower has a president used the bully pulpit as aggressively to tout the importance of faith to republican government. “Without God, there could be no American form of government,” Ike bluntly put it, “nor an American way of life.”[1] President Bush seems no less persuaded that religion is required to keep the democratic machine up and running. His faith-based initiative assumes that religion’s ability to spark personal and...