The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

College Students Should be Angry

Today's college students have a right to be angry. Many pay exorbitant prices — that burdens them with deep debt — for a degree of questionable worth with decreasing prospects of a good career and positive return on investment. That anger should be channeled toward liberal con artists who routinely sell them a pack of lies, starting with their colleges and universities.

From Investor's Business Daily, Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies:

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.

"Until 2011," she noted, "students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

"Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the 'empire,' UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a course each in gender, race, ethnicity, disability or sexuality studies, imperial, transnational or post-colonial studies, and critical theory." [snip]

UCLA is far from alone, "but the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the English Department there was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature uncorrupted by ideological overlay," Mac Donald noted.

IBD argues that "for parents who assume a degree from a famous college with a long-established reputation gives the wisdom of the ages to their kids, a closer look might reveal they're paying a lot of money for ideology, not edification."

Sadly it's the college students—not their parents—who pay the greatest price for higher ed's con job, and they are likely to be the last ones to discover how very badly they have been short-changed.

Hook-up Culture Hurts Boys Too

"An entire generation of parents has spent years panicking about the effects of hookup culture on girls. But what about boys?" asks Ryan Sager @ Time magazine. "That’s the question Rosalind Wiseman takes on in this week’s issue of TIME."

For her new book, Masterminds and Wingmen, she delves into the world of boys. As the mother of two boys, she was eager to make sure that their side of the story was not left out. During two years of research, she interviewed hundreds of boys across the country — individually, in groups, over the course of extended e-mail correspondences — and their stories are really quite striking.

As Wiseman writes, we assume that boys are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of hookup culture — and thus we tend to ignore its effects on them. But those effects, it turns out, can be rather rough.

Boys and young men are much more complicated than our popular culture acknowledges. Here, then, are nine surprising things Wiseman discovered about boys, drawn both from her book and from her piece in this week’s magazine.

Rosalind Wiseman's full article, What Boys Want, is behind Time's paywall, but Sager's preview article, 9 Reasons 'Hookup Culture' Hurts Boys Too, is online, and the reasons he lists may surprise the ladies.

OCare: Progressives Pick Winners & Losers

"Unlike drug addicts, alcoholics, or the obese — all of whom represent higher-than-average medical costs — smokers are the only such group with a pre-existing condition that ObamaCare penalizes," reports William La Jeunesse at Fox News.

It allows insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than non-smokers for an identical policy, depending on the state and any subsidies the person might qualify for. [snip]

A study by nonpartisan Institute for Health Policy Solutions found some smokers could pay as much as 33 percent of their income in health care premiums, well in excess of what ObamaCare considers "affordable" health care.

The study presented three scenarios:

1. The premium for a young, non-smoker earning roughly the minimum wage will cost $708. The same policy for a smoker would cost $3,308, or up to 400 percent more.
2. Before subsidies, a non-smoker who is 59 or older would also pay $708 for a "silver" or mid-level policy. However, a smoker of the same age would pay $5,908.
3. In a worst-case scenario, an older couple who smokes could be "literally impoverished" by ObamaCare premiums, said the report. That couple could pay an $11,352 health care premium, or one-half their annual income of $23,000. By comparison, a non-smoking person over 59 years old would pay 90 percent less, or just $952 after federal subsidies.

It seems that Progressives have an insatiable appetite for controlling other peoples' lives and choices, whether it's the amount of salt they eat or the size of the soft drinks they buy. Remember that Progressives were the primary drivers of the Prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900s, too. 

"Redistribution is a loaded word"

In a Sunday New York Times article, reporter John Harwood quotes William Daley (then Obama's chief of staff) saying that "redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people's minds. It's a word that, in the political world, you just don't use." Headlined "White House Memo: Don't Dare Call The Health Care Law 'Redistribution'," the article continues:

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. [snip]

Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.

The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.

And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.

Study: Plan B Pill Useless for Women over 176 Pounds

"In a major blow to birth control proponents, the European equivalent of Plan B - known as the 'morning after pill' - now includes a warning that the contraceptive is not effective for women over 165 pounds and does not work at all for women over 176 pounds," writes Nicole Bailey. "The implications are staggering: according to the Centers for Disease Control, the average weight of an American woman over 20 is 166.2 pounds."

Feminist outlet Jezebel pointed out that the saga began with a 2011 study:

...a 2011 study out of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland that found that "the risk of pregnancy was more than threefold greater for obese women compared with women with normal body mass index, whichever EC [Emergency Contraception] was taken." They also found that the risk of pregnancy was particularly high if that emergency contraception was made of levonorgestrel, the hormone found in many of the major over-the-counter morning after pills sold in the United States, like Plan B One-Step. The study recommended that overweight women use IUDs.

HRA Pharma, the European manufacturer of a drug essentially identical to America's Plan B, has followed up on the findings of that study and concluded that it is time to warn women that "the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds," reports Mother Jones.

Feds Profit Mightily from Student Loans

The Left once railed against "big banks" for the profits they made on student loans. Now look who's raking in all those profits. Reports education reporter David Jess of the Detroit Free Press:

The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.

The $41.3-billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but still enough to pay for one year of tuition at the University of Michigan for 2,955,426 Michigan residents.

It’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.

It's an even rosier picture for the greedy federal government over the next decade:

This summer, Congress passed a law tying interest rates on loans to the market. The law set rates for all the loans at different levels, but based them all on the 10-year U.S. Treasury rate and allowed rates to change each year.

For Stafford loans, both the subsidized and unsubsidized, the interest rate is the Treasury rate plus 2.05%, with a cap of 8.25%. Graduate student loan rates are the Treasury rate plus 3.6%, with a cap of 9.5%, and the parent loans are the Treasury rate, plus 4.6%, with a cap of 10.5%.

While offering immediate relief to students, those rates are expected to rise in coming years and give the federal government $175 billion in profits from student loans over the next decade.

That’s got students who are paying steamed.

“Instead of making a profit on student loans, why doesn't the government try to help out the millions of students who are struggling financially and at the very least, lower the interest rates?” Wilk said “I don’t understand how the government expects this generation to support themselves after graduation, starting out with a mound of debt and in a lot of areas, no job.”

Gillespie: Youth Revolting Against Obama

"Millennials may be young," writes libertarian Nick Gillespie, "but they're not stupid."

Citing the latest Quinnipiac poll showing 54% of 18- to 29-year-olds now disapprove of the job President Obama doing (compared to 36% who approve), Gillespie argues (with strong uncensored language) that the love affair between Obama/Democrats and youth actually began waning immediately after Obama took office in 2008.

In 2008, Obama won 66 percent of votes cast by 18-29 year olds. In 2012, he racked up just 60 percent. More tellingly, the participation rate among younger voters dropped precipitously between those elections, with Obama pulling 2.4 million fewer votes from 18-29 year olds in 2012. The second time around, he just wasn’t putting young asses in the voting booth anymore.

Obamacare may be the "cherry on top of a shit sundae," says Gillespie, but there are lots of other fault lines including Obama's stimulus fail, foreign war and nearly-war policies, increased deportation of illegals, drone strikes, privacy invasion and a government with way too much power over their lives.

Yet the biggest reason for the soured relationship is likely to be personal economics:

As bad as Obama’s time in office has been for older Americans, nobody has taken it on the chin quite as bad as kids under 30, who are more likely to be unemployed, broke, and facing decades of sub-par wages if and when they do finally get a job.

Health Care is a Woman's Issue

It's been said that women make the majority of family health care decisions, so it's not surprising that women would be the most upset with the president's false promises about Obamacare and the disaster his law has become for them in terms of policy cancellations, higher premiums and deductibles, poorer coverage and fewer doctor choices.

Indeed women are upset with the president, according to the CBS News poll released Nov 20, 2013.

The President's overall job approval rating has declined among many demographic groups since last month, including independents (a 12-point drop), men (down 9 points), and women (a 10-point drop). More women now disapprove than approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing as president.

Only 39% of women now approve of Mr. Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove.  In October, the numbers among women were 49% approve, 46% disapprove.

OCare - Middle Class Revolt

Liberals designed Obamacare to hook the middle class on a new wealth redistribution drug, and they believed a majority of voters would quickly become addicted. It's not working. HotAir.com quotes a National Journal poll showing "a majority expects to see the middle class get hammered by ObamaCare."

The survey also produced adverse judgments on what the law will mean for other groups. Just 39 percent said the law will benefit the middle class, while 53 percent said it would harm it. That was also down significantly since September 2012, but essentially unchanged since last July when respondents split 36 percent positive to 49 percent negative.

Blaming 'White Soccer Moms'

From Investor's Business Daily editorial, Duncan Blames Common Core Fight on 'White Soccer Moms':

Perhaps nothing personifies the arrogant nanny state paternalism of the Obama administration more than this statement by Duncan on Friday: "It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary."

Secretary Duncan made his comments about the Common Care State Standards (CCSS) before a group of school superintendents in Richmond, Va., to a meeting of the Council of Chief State Schools Officers organization (CCSSO). This is one of the two organizations that own the public license to the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was devised by a group of the nation's governors and backed by the Obama administration in 2009 with the goal of setting a uniform standard for grades K-12 nationwide. Some 45 states, in many cases enticed by federal grants, have signed on. It has since morphed into what many consider an attempt to nationalize education and control what future generations think and know. [snip]

As Valerie Strauss points out in the Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet," New York was the first large state to implement the standards and give students new standardized tests supposedly aligned with the Core. Test scores plummeted by 30% this year. [snip]

Free minds are the last thing Common Core advocates have on their minds. Common Core contains statements in its lessons such as "The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all" and "The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation."

In the middle school, Common Core calls upon students to read only the First Amendment. Can't have 14-year-old minds learning about the other amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights, such as, say, the Second Amendment or the 10th — those defending the right to bear arms and limits on federal power.

Public education as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon. This nation was built on the foundation of the proverbial little red schoolhouse and local control.

Now we are to be in thrall to ideologically driven teachers unions and education statists who seemingly share V.I. Lenin's terrifying belief: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

Census Bureau 'Faked' Unemployment Data

"In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington," reports John Crudele at the New York Post in an article worth reading in its entirety.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

Is there any government agency that Americans can trust these days?

---

UPDATE: Instapundit reminds us that Obama moved the Census Bureau control to the White House in first term.

O and Ocare Sinking Like Rocks

Arguing that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare," Jonah Goldberg describes the "Obamacare Schadenfreudarama" as "one of the most enjoyable political moments in my lifetime."

Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life. ... In every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality.

Polls show the downward spiral for Obama and Obamacare. Last week it was the Quinnipiac poll. Obama's approval rating fell to 39%, and disapproval of Obamacare has risen to 55%. The shocker: 54% of young voters disapprove of Obama, and 51% of them disapprove of OCare.

This week it's the ABCNews/WashingtonPost poll. Obama's approval rating is down to 42%, and 57% disapprove of Obamacare. While hiding today's actual poll numbers, here's how the news story describes young adult voters:

At the same time, there’s also one core support group in which Obama is hurting – young adults, a group he won by an historic margin in 2008, and strongly again in 2012. The president’s overall approval rating has lost 23 points among adults age 18 to 29 since January, his steepest loss in any group. Their view that the country’s headed in the wrong direction has gained 20 points since May. And in just the past month, opposition to the health care law has jumped by 16 points among under-30s, with strong opposition up by 21 points.

Rhetoric has yielded to reality now that young healthy adults are getting hit by a law specifically designed to force them to "share their wealth" with older and less healthy folks. As Fox News reports, even college students are either seeing soaring premium cost increases in their previously cheap college health plans, or finding them cancelled entirely.

All of which explains this trend line produced by Gallup polling:



The pity is that it took so long for so many Americans to figure out what conservatives knew all along.

---

UPDATE: More bad news for the president. Politico reports this additional tidbit from the ABC/WashPo poll:

As more bad poll numbers continue to pour in for President Barack Obama, a new survey finds that if the 2012 election matchup were held this month, Mitt Romney would hold the edge with the voters.

Romney topped Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters in the Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Among all Americans, the 2012 rivals would be tied, at 47 percent.

[see also President Romney? Yes, If The Election Were Held Today ]

Government's Assault on Privacy

From McClatchy news today:

U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.

Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. [snip]

It turned out, however, that many people on the list worked outside the federal government and lived across the country. Among the people whose personal details were collected were nurses, firefighters, police officers and private attorneys, McClatchy learned. Also included: a psychologist, a cancer researcher and employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University. [snip]

The unprecedented creation of such a list and decision to disseminate it widely demonstrate the ease with which the federal government can collect and share Americans’ personal information, even when there’s no clear reason for doing so.

The President's Lawlessness

President Obama announced today that "he will allow" insurance companies to "renew for one year any health plans that do not meet Obamacare's coverage standards." The announcement prompted this reaction from Timothy Sandefur:

Amazing. The Obama Administration has decided to temporarily "fix" the mess they've made—by simply withholding enforcement of the law they championed. That is to say, by allowing people to break the law. Again. I mean, that's what happened with the Employer Mandate, also: it wasn't "delayed," as the news stories put it. What happened was that the Administration simply instructed administrative agencies not to enforce the law's requirements.

As Christina and I observe in an article coming in the next issue of Regulation, this sort of behavior indicates a profound failing with Obamacare: one that runs much deeper than the policy problems that have been the focus of recent debates. From its unconstitutional origin, to the rewrite that the Roberts Court put on the law, to the unconstitutional delegation of lawmaking power to unelected, independent bureaucrats, to the halting and unpredictable manner in which it is being enforced or not--depending on political pressure—Obamacare has been a sustained assault on the concept of the rule of law itself.

OCare Millennial Ads: Desperate and Insulting

Just how stupid does the Obama Administration think Millennials are?  Really stupid, if the new Obamacare ads are an indicator. Here's one of the OCare ads rolled out this week. It's supposed to motivate Millennials to sign up for OCare insurance to get the "free" birth control:


Arizona State University student Annica Benning @ College Fix calls the ads "insulting on many levels," including belittling the progress women have made over the years toward equality and independence.

In order to get the "free" birth control, of course, MILs must sign up for Obamacare insurance. In Colorado, where the ads were released, the Obamacare insurance premium costs an average $192.35 per month for adults age 27 (see Heritage Foundation state-by-state estimates).

So Colorado Susie’s cheap $9 per month birth control pills just went up to $192.35 per month.

For a laugh, we edited OCare's ad to bring a little honesty to it:

Who is responsible for this marketing wonder?  Per Michelle Malkin,

The “Got Insurance?” campaign is the lame brainchild of two “progressive” outfits with dubious nonprofit status: ProgressNow and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. Their previous claim to fame: a “Thanks, Obamacare” social-media movement to propagandize praise and gratitude for the federal mandate.

If the Democrats aren't careful, they'll wrestle the "Stupid Party" label from the GOP!

Pollster Kellyanne Conway on Cuccinelli, Christie & Women

Conservatives should take 3 key lessons from November's gubernatorial races, pollster (and Institute board member) Kellyanne Conway told NRO's Kathryn Lopez in an interview.

1. Obamacare is poison.  Despite no money, Virginia candidate Ken Cuccinelli closed a double-digit negative gap against Obamacare advocate Terry McAuliffe to a mere -2.5% on Election Day. Given another week [or, we could add, RINO donor support], Cuccinelli would likely have won.
2. The "War on Women" has run its course. NJ candidate Chris Christie's opponent, Barbara Buono, used the same "abortion, anyone, anytime, anywhere" playbook as McAuliffe in Virginia and lost to Christie by 34 points.
3. Don't play your opponent's game. Both sides [in the Virginia race] went negative early and stayed negative. Women prefer positive solutions to negative slights.

Conway has one piece of advice looking forward to 2016: 

What must be resisted is allowing a bunch of donors and consultants to proclaim “who can win” and “who can’t win” three years before the election. It is silly, unprovable, designed to pad the pockets of consultants and dissuade conservative candidates, and is never followed by the Left. They nominate non-household names (Carter, Clinton, Obama) and Republicans nominate people known best for having lost previously (Dole, Romney, McCain).

Obamacare, Common Core, and economic growth will be among the important questions to GOP primary voters. The ability to connect with and convince working-class voters and others who remain elusive to the GOP will also matter.

Read the full interview.

McCarthy: Obama's Massive Fraud

"If he were a CBO in the private sector" the headline of Andrew McCarthy's article continues, "he'd be prosecuted for felony fraud for his repeated claim, If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep it. Period.

Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.

Obama's claims put him in the company of Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff and Goldman Sachs for making statements he has known to be misleading and false since 2010.

Barack Obama is guilty of fraud — serial fraud — that is orders of magnitude more serious than frauds the Justice Department routinely prosecutes, and that courts punish harshly. The victims will be out billions of dollars, quite apart from other anxiety and disruption that will befall them.

The president will not be prosecuted, of course, but that is immaterial. As discussed here before, the remedy for profound presidential corruption is political, not legal. It is impeachment and removal. “High crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment — need not be indictable offenses under the criminal code. “They relate chiefly,” Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 65, “to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” They involve scandalous breaches of the public trust by officials in whom solemn fiduciary duties are reposed — like a president who looks Americans in the eye and declares, repeatedly, that they can keep their health insurance plans ... even as he studiously orchestrates the regulatory termination of those plans; even as he shifts blame to the insurance companies for his malfeasance ...

It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will ever be impeached. It is certain that he will never again be trusted. Republicans and sensible Democrats take heed: The nation may not have the stomach to remove a charlatan, but the nation knows he is a charlatan. The American people will not think twice about taking out their frustration and mounting anger on those who collaborate in his schemes.

Hemingway: Marriage Culture, or Government Culture?

"The more we move away from a marriage culture, the more we move to a government culture," tweeted Mollie Hemingway following the Virginia election in which candidate Ken Cuccinelli won the 'married women' vote but lost the 'single women' vote. She explains more fully in Pick One: Marriage Culture or Government Culture, which is worth reading in its entirety.

The University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project came out with a fascinating report (“When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America by Brad Wilcox“) showing that marriage in America is becoming something of an elite institution, reserved for older individuals. Wealthy white people are getting married and having strong marriages. Other folks less so. Far less so. Delayed marriage has both costs and benefits. It’s worked out well for elite women and helped them have more career advancement. But the failure to marry has had some serious destabilizing effects on non-elite women.

One of those effects on non-elite singles is economic instability. According to the report, "[c]ompared to those continuously married, those who never marry have a reduction in wealth of 75 percent, and those who divorced and didn't remarry have a reduction of 73 percent."  Hemingway concludes:

It’s pretty simple, really. It may be popular to pretend that women and men are identical, but women and the children they love are the most vulnerable to the downsides of a culture where marriage is delayed or forgotten. We bear far more economic risk and suffer through the deleterious effects of instability. Women in strong marriages tend to have their basic needs cared for by their own family unit and the civil society closest to them. Women who are not in strong marriages tend to rely on the government. Voting patterns reflect how women’s incentives change with changes in their marital status.

We should never forget Julia, President Obama’s central character in the “War on Women” campaign. She lived “her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work,” as David Harsanyi wrote. And she never married.

No, we are not a democracy

If this short video can explain the difference between a republic and a democracy (and various other forms of government) so easily and effectively, why do our public schools teach it so poorly?