Free Republic

It was supposed to eradicate grumpiness from Germany. Instead, the "Du Bist Deutschland" ad campaign flopped -- and the campaign's leaders became the global blogosphere's favorite whipping boy. Du Bist Deutschland was the top Technorati search in the world last week. Zoom Du Bist Deutschland was the top Technorati search in the world last week. The idea seemed like a good one: an ad campaign to buck up the German spirit and remind the depressive citizens of Europe's largest (but struggling) economy that things really aren't all that bad. Ad agencies, newspapers and a number of celebrities donated some €30...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Free Trade stands for almost everything wrong on the planet. As the Free Trade noose tightens, more revolutionary activity will occur until the strangling grip is broken completely or until the despotism of obscenely wealthy and criminal oligarchs feeding off an increasingly destitute and dehumanized world population wins its final triumph. Free Trade is a condition in which dominant industrial power (allied to overwhelming political and military power) arranges the trade of the world to its own advantage while claiming it is participating with equals in an equal exchange of goods...

George W. Bush has just rung the death knell for his presidency. For the Supreme Court of the United States, a president under fire for cronyism has chosen the ultimate crony. For the highest court in the land, a president criticized for a lack of gravitas has chosen a woman who the president's own former speechwriter describes as "a taut, nervous, anxious personality." For one of the nine highest legal positions in the entire country, this president has ignored dozens of candidates with impeccable credentials -- top law school honors, judicial clerkships, distinguished careers in academia, lengthy experience arguing cases...

[...] It's progressive politicians who should be paying more attention. More than a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens's cockeyed optimist, Wilkins Micawber, explained to David Copperfield that the difference between happiness and misery involves the positive or negative difference between income and expenses. [...] As the government confirmed once again last week, rising costs have outpaced stagnant wages in ten of the last 12 months. [...] The Bush administration is in an ideological straitjacket. But progressive politicians have several issues they should raise, particularly long overdue increases in the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit -- kitchen table...

WASHINGTON (AP) — More teens are saying there are drugs in their schools, and those who have access to them are more likely to try them, said a Columbia University survey released today. Twenty-eight percent of middle-school-student respondents reported that drugs are used, kept or sold at their schools, a 47 percent jump since 2002, according to the 10th annual teen survey by Columbia's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. The number of high schoolers saying drugs are at their schools rose 41 percent in the last three years, to 62 percent, the survey said. Twelve- to 17-year-olds who...

Watching the Economy Crumble Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005 The United States continues its descent into the Third World, but you would never know it from news reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' July payroll jobs release. The media give a bare-bones jobs report that is misleading. The public heard that 207,000 jobs were created in July. If not a reassuring figure, at least it is not a disturbing one. On the surface, things look to be pretty much OK. It is when you look into the composition of these jobs that the concern arises. Of the...

The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the U.S. economy continues unabated. Only 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services. Fifty-six thousand jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative and waste services. Thirty-eight thousand jobs were created in education and health services, almost all of which are in health care and social assistance. Nineteen thousand jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, almost all of which are waitresses...

. . . clap the board. Generation X has become Generation Zzz — a new gang of mature, cinematic whingers. THERE is a spectre haunting Hollywood. It’s a terrifying vision of well-dressed fortysomething urbanites drifting aimlessly around city streets, staring at total strangers and ruminating on the nature of human intimacy, then returning home to sham marriages and alienated children, eating their dinner in silence and spending most of the night staring into the bathroom mirror, wondering in quasi-poetic internal monologue about the fact that we are all, on some unspeakably profound level, like, totally connected to everyone else. This...

John F. Kerry returns to the U.S. Senate. But what about his die-hard supporters - or the voters who chose Kerry but would have settled for anyone but Bush?They stray between anger and outrage, frustration and despair. What's happened to their country, they wonder? How could George W. Bush - a man they consider remarkably unreflective, an intellectual lightweight and someone they believe deliberately misled the country into war - have won? Ralph Wahlstrom, a Buffalo State College English professor, said he still has trouble accepting Bush's re-election a week and a half later. "I've never felt like this before,...

For those who have ever wondered why the sky is a lurid red in The Scream, Edvard Munch's painting of modern angst, astronomers have an answer. They blame it on a volcanic eruption half a world away. In the first detailed analysis of what inspired the painting, an article in Sky and Telescope magazine pinpointed the location in Norway where Munch and his friends were walking when the artist saw the blood-red sky he depicted in the 1893 painting. Donald Olson, a physics and astronomy professor at Texas State University, and his colleagues determined that debris thrown into the atmosphere...

<p>It was neither a simple mistake nor simply a racist act.</p> <p>It was the reality of segregation in Greater Boston that prompted a white teacher in a western suburb to assume that a black kindergartner belonged on a bus bound for Dorchester, not in an SUV bound for a four-bedroom, three-bath colonial around the corner.</p>

WALPOLE, N.H., Aug. 30 — The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the crowded field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election. Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that builds on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed...

Californian angst over affirmative action poll By Hugh Davies in Los Angeles (Filed: 06/08/2003) A prominent black conservative's attempt to create what he calls a "colour-blind" California is causing tension in the already angst-ridden "recall" election of the state governor, Gray Davis. Ward Connerly, 64, a wealthy Republican on the board of regents at the University of California, has had an anti-affirmative action initiative put on the Oct 7 ballot. Petitioners have forced the election that could remove Mr Davis, a Democrat, from office before his due term expires. Californians will now also be asked to decide if the state...