Free Republic

The spending would boost programs designed to ensure children enter kindergarten prepared to learn, closing what some researchers have called the “readiness gap” that exists based on a family’s income. It would also phase in an expansion of prekindergarten, and offer money to help school districts that don’t have facilities for full-day kindergarten. “The fact that he’s making significant investments with his opening budget is really exciting,” Ted Lempert, president of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Children Now, said Tuesday. “What’s exciting is the comprehensiveness of it, because it’s saying we’re going to focus on prenatal through age 5.”

So Mr. Obama’s plan would piggyback on existing payroll direct-deposit systems, siphoning off 3 percent or so of everyone’s salaries and funneling it directly to an individual retirement account, probably a Roth for those who qualify. Employers would have to do little more than select a provider of the I.R.A.’s. There would be a standardized default investment, probably some kind of mutual fund with a mix of stocks and bonds that gets more conservative over time. The key to making this truly widespread, however, is something called auto-enrollment. That means that unless workers opt out of the plan, the money...

Mayor Bloomberg is marshaling forces for his next public-health crusade: less salt. Late last month, he quietly gathered health experts and food-industry reps at Gracie Mansion to lay out his plan to cut sodium levels in processed foods by 20 percent over the next five years. At the meeting, city health czar Thomas Frieden called high blood pressure, which is linked to excessive sodium intake, “the greatest public-health threat facing the city” and pressured the industry groups to sign on by the end of November, according to a memo written by one attendee, Scott Vinson of the National Council of...

Does the defeat of Democratic state Sen. Dina Titus in last fall's gubernatorial election mean her pet scheme -- spending millions more in tax money to dragoon all Nevada's kids into the state compulsion school system at age 5 -- is dead? Oh, please. Victorious Gov. Jim Gibbons' weak-kneed "Let's study it" may postpone the inevitable for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive -- and bankrupt us -- in our lifetimes. What will the "studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal Head Start program show:...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Every American should have health care coverage within six years, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday as he set an ambitious goal soon after jumping into the 2008 presidential race. "The time has come for universal health care in America," Obama said at a conference of Families USA, a health care advocacy group. "I am absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country," the Illinois senator said. Obama was previewing what is shaping up to be a theme of the 2008 Democratic...

"U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (L) greets Bobby Harden (R) and his daughter Olivia before speaking during an event to promote health care in New York, January 21, 2007. Clinton, in her first public appearance since joining the 2008 White House race, said on Sunday she wanted to become U.S. president because she was 'worried about the future of our country.'"

...“I’ve been struck by how hungry we are for a different kind of politics.” "...But is Obama’s brand of politics really all that different? Obama is a party-line Democrat, the 18th-most-liberal member of the Senate, according to the nonpartisan National Journal, which in 2005 gave him a higher liberal rating (82.5) than Hillary Clinton (78.5). Half the Democrats in the Senate voted for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, even Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. But not Barack Obama... "...In November 2003, he told the Chicago Sun-Times that had he been in the Senate, he would’ve voted against the famous $87.5...

In an appalling extension of the nanny state, New York is slated to become the first city to monitor diabetics' blood-sugar levels. It plans to register them like HIV or tuberculosis sufferers and nag them when their levels aren't healthy enough. Drop the cupcake; here come the sugar police. Sensible people will laugh at this, but New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, an appointee of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is dead serious about the Big Apple's sweet tooth. He's the man behind New York's onerous smoking ban; he doesn't shy from alleging "epidemics." Since Mr. Frieden recently told the New...

Canadian auto regulators are testing a system that would enforce speed limits by making it harder to push down the car's gas pedal once the speed limit is passed, according to a newspaper report....

Darryl Delatte, 57 years old and 22 months shy of retiring as a mechanic, was rescued from his flooded New Orleans home after Hurricane Katrina and dropped on an interstate. There, he watched people die -- and wondered why no help came. "Everybody kept passing you by," he says. Now, at a cavernous disaster relief center in Houston, he ponders the promises made by government officials -- of land and jobs for evacuees back home, of a rebirth of the city's essential, vibrant black community.