Free Republic

Time's cover story denouncing the Bush era (plus a year of Clinton and a year of Obama) as "The Decade from Hell" is overwrought. But Time's guru Andy Serwer tries to claim it's not: Calling the 2000s "the worst" may seem an overwrought label in a decade in which we fought no major wars, in historical terms. It is a sadly appropriate term for the families of the thousands of 9/11 victims and soldiers and others killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the lack of a large-scale armed conflict makes these past 10 years stand out that much more. This...

Ten years ago today, California's march toward its present fiscal chaos began. On June 16, 1999, the board of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) – its investment portfolio bulging after several years of large gains – voted to ask Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature to broadly increase benefits for more than 800,000 government employees and retirees. There was some skepticism. An aide to Davis, who was then cultivating an image as a pragmatic, can-do centrist, said the governor worried about the prudence of such a broad benefit boost. Assemblyman Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, questioned how CalPERS could...

MOST EVERYONE in Sacramento agrees that there is no easy way to balance a state budget that is at least $14.5 billion in the red. They also understand that they cannot ignore the fiscal dilemma. Here's the situation: California's budget deficit for the next 18 months is at minimum $14.5 billion. Revenues are short even though Californians are paying the highest percentage of their incomes in state and local taxes than ever before. The state's and nation's economy is slowing down, further threatening revenues. Even with a slower economy, there is no good reason why California is in such a...

Three fatal shootings since Saturday have pushed San Francisco's murder total for the year to the highest level in more than a decade. In the latest killing, a 24-year-old man died after being shot in the city's Hunters Point neighborhood Monday afternoon. That murder follows the fatal shooting Saturday morning of two men who were gunned down in the city's Mission neighborhood. For the year, the homicide total in San Francisco now stands at 97 - the city's most killings in more than a decade. The last time the city had more than 97 homicides in one year was in...

City hit by biggest crisis for a decade By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor Last Updated: 12:55am BST 11/08/2007 Britain's golden economic era is facing its final days with financial markets suffering their worst crisis in a decade, analysts warned last night. Traders negotiate in Sao Paulo, Brazil On one of the worst days in recent stock market history almost £56 billion was wiped off the value of London's leading firms amid worldwide panic. Experts predicted that the turbulence could have knock-on effects for all British households, depressing the housing market, potentially pushing unemployment higher and plunging pension funds into deficit....

My web site JunkScience.com celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 1, 2006. To mark the event, this column spotlights 10 big junk science stories of the last 10 years. In no particular order, they are: 1. The most toxic manmade chemical? That’s what some called dioxin, a by-product of natural and industrial combustion processes and the “contaminant of concern” in the Vietnam-era defoliant known as Agent Orange. Billions of dollars have been spent studying and regulating dioxin, but debunking the scare only cost a few thousand dollars. Keying off Ben & Jerry’s claim on its ice cream packages that “there...

The end of this week - Friday, July 1 --marks the midpoint of the middle year in our still-unnamed decade. The first years of every decade naturally bleed over from the last, but by now we should have a clearer sense of who we are, the distinguishing characteristics of the first decade of the 21st century.The most obvious point is that this decade and century began not on January 1, 2000, but on September 11, 2001. The attacks have defined our times, abruptly beginning the shift in perspective and reality that distinguish this decade from the last. Terrorism was a...

In the sixties, many of us were pulled to the left because we thought it was the ideology of liberty. Duped by a false caricature of the conformist fifties as a neo-Puritan, repressed enemy of the individual, we were attracted by the spontaneous, exuberant celebration of individual freedom we thought characterized that decade. Those of us with intellectual pretensions further asserted that the sixties sensibility was squarely in the American tradition of autonomous individualism. Surely, as the movie Easy Rider suggested, the hippy was the new mountain man, the new Huck Finn, the new frontiersman — and so, more quintessentially...

Japanese police questioned three siblings today after it was discovered they had been living with the decomposed corpse of their father for nearly a decade. Police found the body of Kyujiro Kanaoka lying on a futon bed at the family’s home in Itami, western Japan, said a police spokesman. Kanaoka’s three elderly children, all in their 70s or older, told police they thought their father was still alive but that one of them recently had consulted a relative about the possibility that he might be dead, the spokesman said. Police were investigating the cause of Kanaoka’s death. Judging from the...

WASHINGTON – Within a decade, the government will be footing the bill for nearly half the nation's medical costs, its share propelled higher by the new Medicare drug program, administration economists estimated Wednesday. At the same time, total health spending – both private and government – will take an ever-larger portion of America's economic output, said the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The rise in federal payments raises "some really, really big issues" about a government budget in which other programs already are being squeezed out, said Urban Institute tax analyst Eugene Steuerle. The projections were...

Mbeki hails decade of progress Mbeki was upbeat but short on specifics President Thabo Mbeki has hailed great advances made in South Africa since the end of apartheid 10 years ago. In his annual state of the nation address he said the government had delivered on basic needs like housing, electricity and water. However, he admitted there remained challenges to overcome. The issues of Aids and Zimbabwe were almost completely absent from his speech. The country is gearing up for the third fully democratic general elections. Drive In his address to MPs, President Mbeki quoted a line from former President...

<p>California's population grew very rapidly in the years after World War II, driven by an industrial expansion that attracted millions of opportunity-seeking émigrés from other states and an explosion of births.</p> <p>Between 1940 and 1960, the state's population boomed by an astonishing 128 percent, from 6.9 million to 15.7 million, forcing California's politicians to respond with an unprecedented expansion of highways, schools, parks, water systems and other components of what we now call infrastructure. It was, in a sense, a golden age when the state's socioeconomic reality meshed with its dominant political values. But, as it happened, the end of the postwar baby boom in the mid-1960s more or less coincided with the peak of California's industrial expansion, and a sharp drop in both births and domestic migration ensued.</p>