Free Republic

Academic research consistently finds the same pattern. Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives. [I]n an analysis looking at ninety countries from 1981 through 2014, the social psychologists Olga Stavrova and Maike Luhmann found “the positive association between conservative ideology and happiness only rarely reversed. Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries and never in the United States.”It is empirically unclear why this pattern is so ubiquitous, not just in the contemporary United States but also historically (virtually as far back as the...

Mayor Ray Nagin, ridiculed nationally and derided some locally following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, has been re-elected to office in a fairly tight race against Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu. Nagin took over 80 percent of the African-American vote and just over 20 percent of the white vote in defeating Landrieu. The totals are in contrast to four years ago when Nagin got 84 percent of the white vote in his race against Richard Pennington. Nagin received national attention as the mayor of a devastated city, especially with calls for the federal government to "get off their ass" and help...