Free Republic

AKRON, Ohio — The Republican Party once chose a presidential nominee who was successful in business but had never held political office. Who went from being a Democrat to a Republican, but was a maverick in his new party. He would often speak off the cuff, was not much of a churchgoer, had what one historian called “a magnetic personality” and was not always faithful as a husband. He was definitely a dark horse when he began his campaign against veteran candidates but won the GOP nomination in defiance of the political establishment, with what one observer called “a tendency...

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 THE NEWS OF THE WEEK IN REVIEW16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE24 25 26 27 28

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

Links to both Parts (text of both parts is in this thread): Part 1: http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=227 Part 2: http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=228 _________________________ Digesting the meaning of the 2nd District Primary Results, who gained, and who lost: Winners: Every single resident of The 2nd District. No matter who wins on August 2, we will be represented by someone who lives with us, works with us, has integrity, and will effectively represent us (yes, even a Democrat can do that). Winners (again): Every single resident of The 2nd District. A McEwen victory would have forced BizzyBlog to fully research and verify a great deal of...

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

Calling the 2012 Republican presidential primary the most volatile for the GOP in generations isn't political hyperbole - it's empirical fact. Since the start 2011, seven different candidates or potential contenders could claim to be the Republican race's front-runner, according to polling from Gallup. The list includes Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. In at least one Gallup poll, each claimed at least a share of the lead in the GOP race. (snip) Polling data supplied by Gallup dating back to 1930 shows that no other race since that time has...

By the end of the 1930s the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt had lost a great deal of its luster. While the New Deal undeniably brought tangible benefits to millions of Americans, it had not delivered on its promise of economic recovery. Ten years after the Great Crash of 1929, nearly one worker in five was unemployed, despite the administration having racked up a series of budget deficits that were unprecedented in peacetime. Moreover, the president himself was caught in a dilemma — there was no up-and-coming Democrat whom he believed to be a worthy successor to the Oval Office....