Free Republic

President Obama admitted he cried at a recent senior staff send-off dinner — and is now claiming that he’d be able to get re-elected if he had run for president again. “I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama said in a “The Axe Files” podcast interview by former aide David Axelrod. “I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – More than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness last year, and 11 million had a serious illness, U.S. government researchers reported on Thursday. Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest level of mental illness at 30 percent, while those aged 50 and older had the lowest, with 13.7 percent, said the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA. The rate, slightly higher than last year's 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes...

WASHINGTON -- To bemused conservatives, it looks like yet another example of analytic overkill by the intelligentsia -- a jobs program for the (mostly liberal) academic boys (and girls) in the social sciences, whose quantitative tools have been brought to bear to prove the obvious. A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than liberals -- in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves ``very happy,'' only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared to 47 percent of conservative Republicans. This finding is niftily...

NEW YORK - Consumer confidence soared in November as declining gasoline prices contributed to a stronger-than-expected reading that could bode well for the holiday shopping season. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose to 98.9 this month from 85.2 in October. Analysts had expected a reading of 90. The better-than-expected results reversed a two-month decline. "A decline of more than 40 cents in gasoline prices this month and the improving job outlook have combined to help restore consumers' confidence," Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said in a statement. "While the index...