Free Republic

The Census Bureau last week released its latest estimate of the U.S. poverty rate... The 2005 poverty rate of 12.6 percent...was substantially higher than the 11.1 percent level back in 1973... The results seem to suggest a prolonged failure of national policies to address poverty. However, the problem here lies less with actual living conditions than with the flawed and misleading poverty measure .... Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone and television sets than non-poor households in 1970; much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical home of 1980, almost as likely to have...

CONCORD, N.H. - In his lifetime, President Franklin Pierce was written off as a failure. AP Photo   And through the years, scholars have dismissed Pierce, who served from 1853 to 1857, as a weak, ineffectual leader who was wrong on the overriding issue of his time: slavery. But a small group of Pierce enthusiasts in his home state believes the nation's 14th president deserves a second look. "He had the terrible task of being president just before the Civil War," said Florence "Chips" Holden, a member of the Pierce Brigade, founded in the 1960s to save Pierce's Concord home...