Free Republic

The Washington Post published a piece by a teacher which originally appeared in the Daily Kos. We have another issue to add to the never ending list of “privilege” that the left loves to whine about. Educational privilege is apparently a tragedy that has to be dealt with. The teacher complains about a couple of gifted kids, one who appears to take one government school science class and another who attends a private school on scholarship. These confident gifted kids are compared to the sad storied poor kids the teacher has to deal with every day. She complains about hunger,...

The Obama presidency has been distinguished for unprecedented levels of federal social welfare spending. In his second term, President Obama is pursuing new and expanded federal anti-poverty initiatives. There has been a sharp increase in the food-stamp and Children’s Health Insurance programs. Obama has proposed more federal funding for Head Start and pre-school education generally, job training for laid-off workers, and Medicaid. In fact, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has bloated the Medicaid rolls. He is even seeking free federally subsidized community college education. I have seen numbers ranging from 79 to 126 federal programs aimed at reducing poverty...

AIMEE PICCHI January 28, 2015 1 In 5 American Kids Rely On Food Stamps America is a global leader on a number of fronts, including having the largest economy in the world. But here is one area where the U.S., given its general affluence, would rather not distinguish itself: It has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the industrialized world. Even as the economy continues to recover from the Great Recession, 1 in 5 children are on food stamps, the U.S. Census said on Wednesday. Before the housing crash, 1 in 8 received federal food assistance. This...

In the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like they’d be OK for a while. After a gruelling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what I’d seen and how...

Evicted four months ago from their Highland Park apartment, Louis Morales and his 18-year-old stepson, Arthur Valenzuela, live half-hidden by brush along the nearby Arroyo Seco riverbed. Morales, 49, keeps a framed bible verse and a stuffed monkey in his tent. Water hauled by bike from a park heats up on the camp stove. Next door, their friend Johnny Salazar fixes bikes and shattered computer screens on the cheap for people who live in the neighborhood. A brother and sister Morales has known for years live up the river, and three couples stay down by the bridge. "Everybody here is...

Why don’t abused women just leave their partners? Why don’t poor people just spend less? Why do people in positions of power ask so many stupid questions? ‘Inequality has become a challenge to us as moral beings’Last week, I took part in a comedy night to raise money for the charity Refuge, which supports women and children who have experienced domestic violence. It was a great night: partly because it raised several thousands of pounds for the cause; partly because it was sponsored by Benefit cosmetics, and the idea of a benefit being sponsored by Benefit pleased me greatly; and...

About 3.1 million wage and salary earners in Germany had an income below the poverty threshold, according to Saturday’s edition of the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper. The paper cited an overview from Germany’s Federal Statistical Office showing the most recent available data, which covered the year 2013. It also showed the numbers of workers struggling to make ends meet jumped from about 2.5 million in 2008—an increase of 25 percent in five years. Data based on household surveys showed that those living on low wages were cutting back on food and heating, among other things, to save money. According to a...

America’s national character will have to be changed if progressives are going to implement their agenda. So, changing social norms is the progressive agenda. To understand how far this has advanced, and how difficult it will be to reverse the inculcation of dependency, consider the data Nicholas Eberstadt deploys in National Affairs quarterly: America’s welfare state transfers more than 14 percent of gross domestic product to recipients, with more than a third of Americans taking “need-based” payments. In our wealthy society, the government officially treats an unprecedented portion of the population as “needy.” Transfers of benefits to individuals through social...

Mitt Romney’s opening pitch for a third shot at the White House left many Republicans scratching their heads, in part because his plans to fight poverty and tyranny seemed to borrow the lexicon of liberals like FDR, LBJ and Woodrow Wilson. With a full house of Republican National Committee members listening aboard the USS Midway in San Diego, Mr. Romney implored his party last week “to lift people out of poverty” and “to make the world safe.” The first phrase is a favorite of liberals who gush over Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs...

In a breathless, Drudge Report-linked headline, the Washington Post reported last week that the “Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty.” A Huffington Post piece by Rebecca Klein, published 12 minutes earlier, sported a similar headline, “More Than Half Of American Schoolchildren Now Live In Poverty.” The only problem with these headlines, and the stories beneath them, is that they aren’t true—not even close. Both pieces were triggered by a report from the Southern Education Foundation. In 2013, some 19.9 percent of children in America were in families with income at the poverty line or below—in 2014, the...

To fight poverty, you’ve got to attack the behaviors that cause it. The governor (Cuomo) should remember that. If all of a sudden he’s decided to be concerned about poverty, and is riding to the rescue, his only chance of success is to be honest about both poverty’s causes and cures. Thus far, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be. To progressives, poverty is a condition imposed upon victims by oppressors. One party is disadvantaged by the evil of another. There is a fixed amount of wealth and the fact someone else has it and you don’t is because...

We need to notice and be aware of the injustices embedded in our criminal justice system.In his 1967 address to Stanford University, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of two Americas. He described them as, “two starkly different American experiences that exist side by side.” In one America, people experienced “the opportunity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all its dimensions.” In the other America, people experienced a “daily ugliness” that dashes hope and leaves only “the fatigue of despair.”(continued)

This is a breakup letter. But it's worse than that. This is a breakup letter by a junior high schooler who is trying to tell everyone in the hallway outside homeroom that the person they had liked a few days ago is just like kinda' totally awful or something. Some lib in The Inquisitr wrote:Elected in 2013, Pope Francis has since shown us a very convincing image of a bold, refreshing deviant who has adamantly defied the church’s typically iron-fisted conservatism. His stance on LGBT, women’s rights, atheism, and evolution were so mind-blowingly revolutionary that many people saw him as...

The NYT published a press release from Oxfam claiming that the richest 1% control more than half the world's wealth. I don't know if that's true, but if it is... who cares? Even if it is true, where exactly is this money being held? Investors with interests in finance, insurance and health saw the biggest windfalls, Oxfam said. Using data from Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, it said those listed as having interests in the pharmaceutical and health care industries saw their net worth jump by 47 percent. Oh, they're being held in businesses. Businesses, that, you know, employ...

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been...

We cant argue with the facts. I think its time the moderate muslim voices if there are any, start acting before its too late. Here is the list: 1. Afghanistan Extreme radical Fundamentalist Muslim terrorist groups & Osama bin Laden headed a terrorist group called Al Quada (The Source) whose headquarters were in Afghanistan. 2. Bosnia Serbian Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholic, Muslims 3. Cote d'Ivoire Muslims, Indigenous, Christians 4. Cyprus Christians & Muslims 5. East Timor Christians & Muslims 6. Indonesia, province of Ambon Christians & Muslims 7. Kashmir Hindus and Muslims 8. Kosovo Serbian Orthodox Christians, Muslims 9. Kurdistan...

Illinoispaytoplay.com (IP2P) has learned that Daniel S. Mahru, former business partner of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, made a deal with the Department of Justice (DoJ) for his silence. IP2P is the first to report that on, October 4 2012, Daniel S. Mahru will receive probation at his sentencing hearing. IP2P has also learned that this is being done to insure Mahru will not speak of crimes, of which he has knowledge, that implicate Barack Obama, Valarie Jarrett, Allison Davis, Tony Rezko and others. (Remember Tony recently saying he committed crimes for which Fitzgerald did not charge him.) IP2P is also investigating...

More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor. NORCROSS, Ga.—Every weekday around 3:15 p.m., a big, yellow school bus stops on Pelican Drive outside Norcross Extended Stay, near the intersection with Best Friend Drive. Dozens of children file out, carrying their heavy backpacks away from the Wendy’s and the AutoZone, towards the cluster of aging three-story yellow buildings where they live. Some are met by waiting parents, others trek by themselves to the shabby motel rooms, marching past broken-down cars, their tires flat, scattered around...

How big a problem is family fragmentation? "Immense," says Mitch Pearlstein, head of the Minnesota think tank Center of the American Experiment. "The biggest domestic problem facing this country." So big he went out and interviewed 40 experts of varying ideology across the nation and relayed their answers in his book "Broken Bonds: What Family Fragmentation Means for America's Future." That's the good news. The bad news is that none of the experts is confident he has an answer, and neither is Pearlstein. What is family fragmentation? The facts are easy to state. About 40 percent of babies born in...

"....Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument,.........Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The...