Free Republic

.......... [S]upport for Obama has more to do with European distaste for Middle America, characterised by “angry” Tea Party activists, guns, racism, climate-change denial and creationism. (We all like a laugh at creationists, but the main difference between the sort of unscientific beliefs espoused by religious Republicans and the secular bunkum believed by the Democrats is that you can get fired for questioning the latter’s PC doctrines.) It’s this arrogance and snobbery that drives European thinking about the US. A case in point is the Guardian’s unwittingly comic 2004 Operation Clark County, where they got various yellow-teethed Brits to condescendingly...

A number of nations — such as Hong Kong, Israel, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Germany and Taiwan — do require paid vacation time. There's a growing movement of people advocating "simplified lifestyles" to try to get the United States more in line with the rest of the world. "We're sacrificing on the altar of productivity and gross domestic product all sorts of values: health, where we're not doing well in this area, longevity, physical fitness and obesity — all sorts of factors that rank the United States in last place among industrialized countries," said John de Graaf, the Seattle-based...