Free Republic

President-($)elect Joe Biden on Thursday night announced his American Rescue Plan, which he said "will tackle the pandemic and get direct financial assistance and relief to Americans who need it the most." The plan comes with a big price tag ($1.9 trillion) and lofty promises, as Biden described: Direct cash payments, extended unemployment insurance, rent relief, food assistance, keeping essential frontline workers on the job, aid to small businesses. These are the key elements to the American Rescue Plan that would lift 12 million Americans out of poverty and cut child poverty in half. That's 5 million children lifted out...

What place could be sadder at Christmas than a hospice? Or so one might think. But my high-school-aged daughter discovered otherwise. She visited a hospice with her choir to sing Christmas carols. The residents were in the final months or weeks of their lives. Most were elderly, their faces gaunt, their eyes lusterless. But as my daughter's choir filed from room to room, filling the halls with strains of "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World," the patients seemed transformed. They became animated. Most struggled to sit up, raising their voices to join in and sometimes weeping as they did...

Bruce Bain doesn't attend church regularly, but nothing was going to keep him from showing up on the corner of 17th Street and Tremont Place on Friday night. "How can you have the Parade of Lights without the 'light of the world'?" he asked. "Christmas is a religious holiday." So the 56-year-old Englewood man joined hundreds of Christmas carolers from metro-area churches and sang along the Parade of Lights route. They sang on 15th Street. They sang at Court Place. And they sang at Colfax Avenue and Bannock Street. What they didn't do was raise hell. Yes, it was a...