Free Republic

Dan Butler and David Broockman of Yale had a very bright idea. They mailed a series of letters to legislators in which a fictional constituent asked for help in registering to vote. Some of the letters were signed with putatively black names (like DeShawn Jackson) and some were signed with putatively white names (like Jake Mueller). The letters from the putatively black constituents received fewer responses from white legislators and received more responses from minority legislators. The really interesting finding concerns the partisan nature of the responses. There wasn’t one. Whites from both parties exhibited similar levels of discrimination against...

The March 7 Newsweek (NewsBeast) features an article titled "David Brooks Wants to Be Friends," but there's more bridge-burning than friend-making in this interview with James Atlas. Of course, he came up in Washington through conservative opinion journalism from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and The Weekly Standard, but "something has changed." Conservatives are now more uncivil. Well, either that -- or his paychecks are now signed by PBS, NPR, and The New York Times: But Brooks insists that something has changed in the past decade. Political discourse had grown coarse, he laments. Gone is the...

If only this were a coalition of the left and the right working out differences. But alas, it’s just a coalition of mostly liberal politicians who used to label themselves by a political party and now would rather fly stealth. Sigh. If you are not familiar with “No Lables”, no worries, it’s brand new and they certainly deserve a Hat Tip for brevity. Here’s their declaration: We are not labels – we are people. We care deeply about our country. We are frustrated and concerned about the tone of politics. We are passionate about addressing America’s challenges. We are Democrats,...

DAVID BROOKS, NYT: Yes. Well, I shouldn’t have confessed this. He said this to me off the record about a year ago. But it hasn’t… JIM LEHRER: Off the record? So, then you can’t talk about it. DAVID BROOKS: Yes, because Peter Baker is a better than I am, because I couldn’t get him to go on the record with that thing. JIM LEHRER: He said this to you a year ago? DAVID BROOKS: It was obvious. I mean, you are trying to build a stimulus package. And when they were trying to build it, believe me, they would have...

(snip) Whitman is representative of an emerging Republican type — what you might call the austerity caucus. Flamboyant performers like Sarah Palin get all the attention, but the governing soul of the party is to be found in statehouses where a loose confederation of uber-wonks have become militant budget balancers. Just as welfare reformers of the 1990s presaged compassionate conservatism, so the austerity brigades presage the national party's next chapter. Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, is the spiritual leader. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey...

Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened. Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America's essential nature. These forces would replace America's traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy. These forces are more powerful than ever in this age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the...

If a RINO is a Republican In Name Only, let's coin a new acronym for David Brooks: RINYTO: Republican In New York Times Only. For only in the Gray Lady's bailiwick could Brooks be considered much of a Republican. Take his current column in the Times. Brooks warns Republicans on the verge of regaining power that it would be nothing short of a "tragedy" if they were to oppose . . . more government and higher taxes.

The Democrats could be heading toward a defeat of historic proportions in November, but it is possible to imagine a scenario in which things might have turned out differently:

Columnist David Brooks has a reputation for being every liberal's favorite conservative. It's a debatable moniker, but it does seem to fit so far as the White House is concerned. The Obama administration has courted centrist to left-leaning pundits since coming to Washington. White House officials regularly make advisers and experts available to liberal columnists on deadline. They've also held several off-the-record lunches with the president during major policy rollouts. Brooks is one conservative among the White House favorites. (SNIP!) Brooks' favorite soundtrack these days also seems entirely apt for the even-tempered columnist: "Sense and Sensibility."

Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently, the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by spending $125 million on everything from TV ads to community organizers. Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn’t set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health-care bill, and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme. They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of progress...

The New York Times token resident conservative, occupying the Larry Craig distinguished columnist chair, recently wrote a fascinating article (Two Theories of Change) on the differences between the French Revolution and the American revolution, based upon the differences between their respective philosophical bases. As usual, it is concise, contains a wealth of material, and draws from a wide variety of sources. Also, as usual, it is completely wrong: this piece virtually cries out for a Fisking. Let's start with the first two paragraphs, to get off on the wrong foot(*)."When I was in college I took a course in the...

David Brooks seemed to be having a coherency challenged moment during his latest scheduled conversation with fellow New York Times columnist, Gail Collins. First Brooks excused what Connecticut senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal falsely claimed about being a Vietnam combat veteran as an "accident": As for Blumenthal, my guess is he survives his little brush with mendacity. The Connecticut Democrat accidentally said he was a combat veteran, when in fact he never served in Vietnam. Could happen to anyone! A moment later, Brooks reversed course and admitted that Blumenthal lied but, eh, no big deal: The claim is dishonorable, but everybody...

This probably confirms that the Utah GOP did the right thing eliminating Senator Bob Bennett, because RINO so called conservative David Brooks thinks it's a 'damn outrage'...(Video)

Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America. They’ve done very well here. Only about 6.7 percent of Swedish-Americans live in poverty. Also a century ago, many Swedes decided to remain in Sweden. They’ve done well there, too. When two economists calculated Swedish poverty rates according to the American standard, they found that 6.7 percent of the Swedes in Sweden were living in poverty. In other words, you had two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same. (snip) This is not to say that policy choices are meaningless....

David Brooks is on a search to find out how it was that we elected such a “moderate” president and wound up with the worst of big government liberalism and a polarized electorate. He seems stumped as he explores these questions in what can only be described as evasive phrasing: "The country had just elected a man who vowed to move past the old polarities, who valued discussion and who clearly had some sympathy with both the Burkean and Hamiltonian impulses. He staffed his administration with brilliant pragmatists whose views overlapped with mine, who differed only in that they have...

Hey Dave, the only biggers Gamblers are the people who voted for Obama on Election Day. Brooks: The White House has said we're all in, they're betting their whole Presidency on getting this thing passed...It's very easy to see how this thing goes down...What strikes me at the end of the day is that we've elected another riverboat gambler, President Obama is risking his Presidency on a 50/50 chance, would you risk your house on a 50/50 chance? I wouldn't"

Today Matt Patterson takes on The New York Times’ David Brooks for his infatuation with Obama and the “limits of [Brooks’] understanding.” The jumping off point for his piece at Big Government is Brooks’ “continued fascination” with Obama’s perfectly creased pants. So let us jump off Obama’s lap and begin this discussion with a bit of history. You are likely not aware that trousers with creases were once sneered at. They announced to everyone that your pants were “store bought” — creased from sitting on a store shelf, a sign they were factory-made and of inferior quality. Those weren’t “creases”...

A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don't portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development – and they're not even talking about uber-oldsters jumping out of airplanes. One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls "generativity" – providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don't. As Vaillant writes in his book Aging Well, "Biology flows downhill." We are naturally...

There is a specter haunting America: the specter of a saner, updated version of Ross Perot. He is lurking out there, ready to ride the free-floating anger and distrust of Washington. He is out there now in one of his homes or private jets, getting madder by the day. He is large of ego, full of money and cranky in mien. When he enters the arena, he’ll say that Washingtonians, all of them, are a bunch of failures. Over the past five years, Washington has tried to reform Social Security, immigration, health care and energy policy. All of these efforts...

t didn't take long for the critics to come out in force -- and on YouTube -- against the Obama administration's just-leaked plan to propose a three-year freeze in discretionary, "non-security" spending as part of the upcoming budget. Some Democrats scoffed at the idea, calling it the wrong approach during a time of deep economic recession. Republicans depicted it as a political gambit destined to be shot down by a non-compliant Congress. One particularly tough attack, however, was delivered in Obama's own words -- in the form of a video compilation showing the president scoffing at just such a proposal...