Free Republic

So, what happens when the heart surgeons, dentists, litigators, and people who employ 10 or 20 other people in their mid-size businesses decide that they don’t want to pay for the excessive, pointless spending that the president finds so compelling? Instapundit speculates on people “going John Galt.” I think golf — a time-intensive sport that the hard-working have eschewed for the past decade or two because it took too long — will make a comeback.

Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher may have to fly to Costa Rica if he wants to see some of his friends. In one of his recent blogs, Dreher told of multiple people discussing potential moves to Costa Rica if things go downhill. These aren’t people who are eager to join Paulville. Rather, these are normal, middle-class conservatives who are considering moving to Costa Rica if the country goes downhill under President Obama. One of the commenters on Dreher’s blog asked if this was not unlike liberals throwing a fit in 2004 and threatening to leave if Bush won. Not...

Excerpt from article (since I am not sure what the reprint rules are ... [Rangel] slipped this horrendous tax into a popular military and veterans pension/pay bill, (without hearings or public notice) and on June 4, 2008, President Bush, not wanting to upset the veterans' lobby, signed it into law. The Rangel exit tax presumes that anyone who ends his or her U.S. citizenship and; (1) who paid more than $124,000 in net taxes for the previous five years, or (2) has a net worth of more than $2 million, is a tax traitor who did so with the intent...

BBC apologises for Gerry Anderson's anti Bush remark Radio Ulster has had to apologise for Gerry Anderson’s aside that George Bush could rot in hell on his birthday (tomorrow as it happens). Hmmm anti Americanism gone mad? Biased BBC has already got hold of it, so I imagine it’s half way round the US blogosphere already! Update: You can hear the original broadcast here. More reaction here. And you can hear the original here or here on Slugger.

I'd like to know what freepers think of the idea of moving to the Phillippines (or a similar country) to take a break from the rat race and use the low cost of living to be able to work on my own projects. This is not retirement, in other words, but it's not precisely holding a job. I want to do something with my life that I create and am in charge of instead of working for others. My best guess is that this would be a web-based business that could be run from anywhere in the world. If I...

Posted on Wed, Jun. 29, 2005 MEXICO Mexican migrants could vote from U.S. Mexican lawmakers approved absentee voting for millions of migrants living abroad. An estimated 11 million Mexicans live overseas, most in the United States. BY WILL WEISSERT Associated Press MEXICO CITY - Lawmakers overwhelming approved on Tuesday a law allowing millions of Mexicans living abroad to vote by mail in next year's presidential election -- a measure that could reshape the country's leadership race. To chants of ''Viva Mexico,'' the lower house of Congress passed an absentee voting proposal by a margin of 455 to 6 with six...

More Americans than ever before have decided that America is no longer their home. They've put down roots abroad, from Cuba (an estimated 2,000 Americans, the latest figures show) to the United Kingdom (224,000). They're in Germany (210,880), in the Philippines (105,000), in Israel (184,195). If they were a U.S. state - call it Expatria - its population, some 4 million Americans, would place it right in the middle, along with Kentucky and South Carolina. Expatriates, citizens of this floating, far-flung state, are changing the very definition of "American." "What does nationality really mean in these days, in these times...

is not so easy to know when you’re deluding yourself and when you are finally seeing the light. When I look back at my reasons for leaving the United States for France in 1972, some seem to me as outmoded—and, in retrospect, as endearing—as Beatles haircuts and Vietnam-war protests. Others stubbornly persist. In any event, my career as a serious American novelist having been short-circuited, I opted for the improbable exploit of becoming a writer in French and a professional translator, and I succeeded. I am long settled in Paris; the three youngsters I brought there, tucked under my free-flying...

our years after overseas voting became a battleground in the presidential election in Florida, millions of civilians and soldiers living abroad still face a bewildering and unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted. Election officials concede that tens of thousands of Americans overseas might not get ballots in time to cast votes. Late primaries and legal wrangling caused election offices in at least 8 of the 15 swing states to fail to mail absentee ballots by Sept. 19, a cutoff date officials say is necessary to ensure that they can be returned on time,...

Saudi interior ministry reports shooting-car bomb attack Saturday on unidentified compound in Red Sea port of Yanbu. Unconfirmed details of at least 6 Westerners killed in six-hour attacks – 2 Britons, 1 American, 1 Australian and possibly 1 Italian – one outside a hotel. British chairman of local oil company reports 17 killed when gunmen drove from industrial area to downtown firing all the way. DEBKAfile adds: Still not clear if attack targeted Yanbu’s big oil terminal, main Saudi oil export outlet to the West. If so, it would be first time Saudi oil resources were struck by terrorists exactly...

A holiday in Italy can make you wish you lived there - but the reality, says Sebastian Cresswell-Turner, is that it's a land of almost unbridled anarchy "How lucky you are to be living in Italy." "That must be heaven." "I do envy you." If you live in Rome, as I do, you get used to comments like these. But you soon realise that the idyllic vision of Italy suffers from just one drawback: it is almost complete rubbish. Rome: unbridled anarchy For the first few months after you move here, all is indeed perfect. The sun is warm, the...

Maybe some of you worldly, travelled FReepers can give your nickels' worth of free advice. I am seriously thinking of expatriation. So far I have started research on New Zealand and Philippines. I speak English only, don't have too much money (enough for plane fare and a couple of months of living), am not married and do not have kids. My goal is to find a place where the nanny laws and taxes aren't as high, and the culture is less commercial and more easy-going. HELP!

Expatriates. You see them in back-street bars of Bangkok, Manila, Guadalajara, along third-world waterfronts, in up-country Thailand, anywhere living is cheap and rules scarce. Some are old guys in their sixties and seventies with fading tattoos from other lives, lives that also fade into fewer and fewer living memories. Some are in their thirties and run little businesses, often legitimate. They are a bit rough-looking or maybe just eccentric, congenitally what they are and not concerned about what you think of them. You find them heisting a brewski in out-of-the-way spots, chaffing with the barmaids who maybe or may not...