Free Republic

A 20-year-old Chicago man is being celebrated as a hero after he leaped into action to save the life of a man who fell on the subway's potentially deadly third electrified rail. Anthony Perry, 20, was honored in a ceremony on Wednesday by a local community leader who awarded him a new car for his heroism. Perry told WGN TV about the moment he saved the man's life: 'I don’t think I was thinking about what could happen to me at the moment. It was more of what do I have to do to make the situation peaceful. I felt...

Justin Lecea — a self-described “Bernie Democrat” running to unseat Texas Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro — is defending a tweet in which he wished former President Barack Obama would get cancer. Over the weekend, Lecea retweeted an Obama tweet reminding people about the deadline for enrollment in Obamacare, and added his uncharitable message. “I just want you to think about all the people who have and will die because Obamacare is pointless and your entire presidency was a waste,” he wrote, and added “If god was just you would get the most malignant cancer imaginable.”

Hanging onto your wallet is not an option. The feds will find your back pocket. And then there are the other thugs who prey on passengers. Nobody will get home unscathed When you venture beneath the city streets, go through or leap over the turnstile (not recommended . . . a consequence may be a fine, or a broken leg), stroll down the platform to the favored spot where your preferred car will stop, three things can happen. Two are bad. You have a chance to get on the train and reach your destination safely . . . so far...

What do Presidents Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. all have in common? None of them cut Social Security to reduce the deficit – but President Obama's new budget proposal will do just that. His plan would especially slash benefits for future retirees, and the cuts just keep getting worse year over year. President Obama included these cuts, known as the chained CPI, in his "grand bargain." He released his budget today, and he needs to hear that these cuts are completely unacceptable.

There is a brand of Republican who looks at President Obama’s vulnerability on the economy and says, “Go for it!” They argue that the overriding issue of the campaign should be jobs — and that everything else should be a distant second. There is another kind of Republican who sees the election of 2012 as a tipping point for the nation — a do-or-die moment when we will either pull back from the precipice of debt and national decline or fall off the edge. This second brand of Republican is hoping that a candidate will emerge who can lay before...

Election '12: Mitt Romney reportedly intends to use the "third rail of politics" — touch Social Security and you die — to kill Rick Perry. But the winning strategy next year may be something novel for politicians: the truth. For unexplained reasons, Mitt Romney's people in New Hampshire told former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen about their grand strategy to defeat Texas Gov. Rick Perry — and the plan couldn't be more out of sync with the anger currently raging at the Republican grassroots. "Romney strategists are quick to note that in his book, 'Fed Up!,' Perry writes that...

If there is one thing that Democrats, Republicans, and the media all agree on, it’s that Republicans are running a grave risk by trying to reform Medicare. Remember, they will point out, that Republicans tried to reform Medicare in 1996 under Newt Gingrich and suffered terribly at the polls as a result. And furthermore, they’ll remind you, voters punished Republicans when George W. Bush tried to reform another entitlement program, Social Security. This message is reinforced by polls finding that Republican proposals are unpopular, and by the angry and raucous reaction to the plan at congressional town halls. It’s a...

Entitlements: While a massive health care entitlement is fashioned in secret, another one, Social Security, is running deficits decades earlier than expected. We've been kicking the can down the road. We're out of road. As Bernie Madoff found out, any Ponzi scheme depends on a continuous inflow of new cash and new customers or the ever-expanding pyramid will totter and collapse. Social Security, dependent as it was on new workers paying the expanding benefits of retirees, is about to, much sooner than expected. As Ed Morrissey over at HotAir.com reminds us, Peter Orszag, now director of the Office of Management...

Entitlements: Social Security's chief actuary reports that the social safety net will run a deficit for 2010, nine years earlier than predicted. Put down that big gavel, Madam Speaker, we're about to hit the iceberg. No sooner had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, carrying the gavel used when Medicare was enacted, taken a victory lap around the Capitol Building after passage of the health care bill than did the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration report that his part of the social safety net had a big hole in it and would run a deficit for all of 2010. Stephen...

Unlimited Liability: While the Democratic leadership is trying to force a health care entitlement on a country that doesn't want it, the mother of all entitlements is in the red. Get used to it. It's only going to get worse. While it doesn't have the voltage it once did, Social Security is still the third rail of politics. Politicians are afraid to touch it out of fear of damaging their careers. Their decades of cowardice have led us to 2010, the year that Social Security begins its descent into the financial abyss. This year it will pay out $29...

Fred Thompson's presidential campaign has been unorthodox since Day 1, and his decision to grab the "third rail" of American politics with both hands is a clear indication that he really is a different kind of candidate. Since agreeing to run, after a mild draft effort by conservatives looking to fill the void in the race for a candidate who shared their views and values, Thompson has pursued what can only be considered a nontraditional path. He has eschewed the traditional 24/7 campaign run by his competitors and expected by the Washington-based mainstream news media, which has labeled him poorly...

The phrase has long since entered the political lexicon, but it was former House Speaker and Massachusetts Representative Tip O'Neill who first christened Social Security the "third rail of American politics." The reasoning behind his snide dubbing is twofold: the high political mortality rate of those who suggest change to the program, and avoidance of the issue by even Washington's most forthcoming public officials. During the Oct. 9 GOP debate, presidential candidate Fred Thompson threw conventional wisdom to the wind and grabbed the rail. Hard. Thompson called Social Security's current trajectory "unsustainable" and proposed reducing the benefits of recipients to...

Washington (AHN) - Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson proposed Friday to reduce promised retirement benefits and to create a system of voluntary personal retirement accounts that can also help to finance the Social Security program. Under the proposal, retirement benefits for workers who are now 58 and older will not be affected. Employees who are now younger will get smaller monthly Social Security pensions because their benefits will be calculated based on the yearly increase in prices. Meanwhile, the personal retirement accounts will be funded with workers' contributions to be matched by funds from the Social Security trust fund. Workers...

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson waded into the politically potent issue of Social Security on Friday and proposed overhauling the retirement system by creating 401(k)-style personal accounts. Tampering with Social Security is fraught with political peril and President George W. Bush's attempts to change it during his second term fizzled as lawmakers balked at his drive to create private investment accounts subject to the whims of the stock market. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, is seeking to show he is willing to take on tough issues if elected in November 2008, telling a news conference in Washington he is...

This past Wednesday, when I attended Students for Saving Social Security’s event on Social Security reform with roughly 300 other young people, I was overcome by an unusual Washington, D.C. emotion—hope. Having only lived in our nation’s capital for about a year, I have not yet succumbed to the total disillusionment and cynicism of many people, but it has certainly affected my optimistic tendencies. But in contradiction to my sometimes-attitude that nothing in this city ever gets done, let alone gets done right, I found myself believing something could be changed. Social Security was considered for decades to be the...

...The third rail has been losing its juice for years. Bush came out in favor of individual accounts during his race in 2000. And, in the 2002 congressional elections, in every race where Social Security was a major issue, candidates favoring reform won. In fact, those results are simply a reflection of the strong and continued public support for reforming Social Security. A recent poll for the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 56 percent favor letting workers invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market, compared to only 36 percent opposed. Another survey by Rasmussen Reports...

Getting into the last month of campaigning before November 2nd roles around, neither Bush or Kerry has elaborated upon a plan to secure America's gloomy future. I am not talking about the War in Iraq, Peace in the Middle East, or global terrorism, I am talking about Social Security, the third rail of politics. Currently, there are only 2.7 workers financing every retirees' retirement. This is not a new problem- its been looming around ever since LBJ screwed things up for America in his "Great Society." With every paycheck I recieve, I cannot help but notice the many taxes that...

Politics aside, immigration, legal and otherwise,is a fact of California life that is having tremendous impact. About a third of the immigrants to the United States come to California and they and the babies born to immigrant mothers account for virtually all of the state's net population growth,About six million people each decade. Without immigration, in other words, California's population growth would be zero.For the rest of the article buy the paper cause it ain't online!

Now that Gray Davis has stepped in it, maybe it's time to find out how our esteemed Democrat United States Senators are going to vote in the future on government payments for "slavery reparations". Let's get them on record BEFORE the election this fall. A simple "yes" or "no" will do, kids - Tom can save the soft-shoe for the voters at home in South Dakota. Tommy and the rest of his Senate Commies might want to know that any of my tax dollars that go to pay "reparations" will be considered "stolen by an illegal government". I believe that...