Free Republic

Some of the artists of the 60s are revising their hits with new lyrics to accommodate aging baby boomers who can remember doing the "Limbo" as if it were yesterdayThey include: Bobby Darin --- Splish, Splash, I Was Havin' A Flash Herman's Hermits --- Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Walker Ringo Starr --- I Get By With A Little Help From Depends The Bee Gees --- How Can You Mend A Broken Hip? Roberta Flack--- The First Time Ever I Forgot Your FaceJohnny Nash --- I Can't See Clearly Now Paul Simon--- Fifty Ways To Lose Your Liver The...

If you think state and federal government COVID-19 policies are too restrictive, you haven’t been to a college campus lately. Schools across the country have imposed extreme, micromanaging rules on 19-22 year olds—a demographic more likely to die from the seasonal flu and pneumonia than COVID.Paying top dollar at already overpriced institutions for vastly inferior remote learning, university students remain unnecessarily isolated and barred from using the services and facilities they and their families are paying for. Many schools, like Southern Methodist University, forbid students from having guests in their dorm rooms. Others have even installed security cameras in the...

Kwanzaa has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s.Spanning from Dec. 26 to the first of January is Kwanzaa, the invented African American holiday celebrated solely by white liberals and clueless public school teachers. Overblown by leftist claiming the holiday has immense cultural significance, a survey by the National Retail Foundation discovered only 1.6 percent of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa. The “holiday” was created in 1966 by Ron Karenga, who renamed himself Maulana. Karenga, the founder of the United Slaves, a violent rival organization to the Black Panthers, created the holiday for black Americans...

"Behold, two of the spookiest TV and MOVIE cars ever built! Dennis Gage gets a close up look at the insane Drag-U-La coffin car dragster. It's a casket on wheels! Plus, we pile into the Munster Koach and FREAK OUT the neighborhood! In the Munsters episode titled Hot Rod Herman, Herman Munster loses the Koach in a drag race so Grandpa Munster builds the Drag-U-La to win back the Koach. "The Munsters" was a hit TV show in the 1960's."

The 1960s were intended as a rebellion against the materialism, mindless conformity, soullessness, and general inhumanity and immorality of commercial and bureaucratic (“corporate and militaristic”) America. The answer, it was thought, could be found in freeing ourselves from a society gone wrong by rejection of social forms, pursuit of intense experience, and “doing your own thing”—making individual choice the supreme standard. The solution made the problem worse. The ’60s turned society much more than before into a mass of contending wills with no higher standard to order them. Rebels and activists debunked what was left of traditional culture without offering...

If you could go back to 1950, would you do it? There would be no Internet, no cellphones and you would only be able to watch television in black and white. But even though they lacked many of our modern conveniences, people genuinely seemed to be much happier back then. Families actually ate dinner together, neighbors knew and cared about one another, and being an “American” truly meant something. Today, we like to think that we are so much more “advanced” than they were back then, but the truth is that our society is in the process of falling apart...

Leaving the White House grounds recently, I knew I would encounter protestors. You could hear them throughout the evening, trying to disrupt. Most of the protestors were to the east and north of the White House, so staff directed us to exit out the west gate. A security guard offered to accompany me and my husband south to Constitution Avenue to meet our Uber driver, and we went safely home. We heard numerous stories the next morning of guests who had been threatened and endangered. One friend with whom we had walked out of that west gate actually decked a...

Here's a part: Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of...

ROUND 7 - THE FINAL - OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, March 1 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. The FINAL! Just 2 songs! Pick your favorite! No reply, no vote. Please be clear what your intentions are! Cuteness is fun, but often misunderstood. Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end (hopefully) the following Monday.

ROUND 6 OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 23 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. The FINAL 4! Even easier! Just 2 pairs of songs! Vote for your favorite of each pair shown. No reply, no vote. No more refusals - there're only 2 pairs, after all. Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end (hopefully) the following Monday.

ROUND 5 OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 16 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. The Great 8! It's getting easier! Just 4 pairs of songs! Vote for your favorite of each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs, but please be clear about that.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end (hopefully) the following Monday.

ROUND 4 OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 9 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. SWEET 16! 16 songs, 8 pairs, 8 winners! Vote for your favorite in each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs but please be clear - and please don't overdo it! No onesies.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end the following Monday. Format: Billboard rank/seed - year - title - act

ROUND 3 OF THE '60S TOURNAMENT OF CHART-TOPPERS COMMENCES! Votes due: Sunday, Feb 2 @ 6:00 pm Eastern. (SUPER BOWL SUNDAY!) 32 songs, 16 pairs, 16 winners! Vote for your favorite in each pair shown. No reply, no vote. (You may abstain from any pairs but please don't overdo it! No onesies, please.) Any ties will be broken with a run-off which will end the following Monday. Format: Billboard rank/seed - year - song title - act

ROUND 2 of the greatest hits of the '60s begins! Due date: Sunday, Jan 26 @6:00 pm (Eastern) This Round takes the top 6 songs of each year of the '60s per BILLBOARD, and pairs them in play-off brackets, along with the best 4 #7s as voted in Round 1 (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3807574/posts)

OK, FREEPERS, LET'S START THIS CONTEST FOR THE GREATEST SONG OF THE '60S. The baseline for the contest is the top 7 hits of each year of the '60s, as compiled by BILLBOARD. This is NOT based on personal preferences, biases, prejudices, or counter-culture fringe-element reactivity. Round 1 is listing candidate songs in order of preference. (The remaining rounds are handled as play-off brackets, starting with 32 pairs of songs to compare.) ROUND 1 We begin by using the #7 songs of each year and paring them from 10 songs to 4 (to set up play-off brackets for the rest...

Who wants to participate in a music play-off bracket-type poll for best songs of the '70s? 2 and 5 years ago I ran "tournaments" to pick the best songs of the '70s and '80s, based on Billboard rankings, so only the best of the best were included! You can view how this played out here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3249477/posts http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3635562/posts I want to do that for the '60s, and some posters expressed interest in the '60s back then.

The American electorate is more divided than at any point in recent memory...A consideration of America’s recent past is essential to understanding why polarization defines the character of our contemporary moment and how such division has reached its fever pitch. Lucky for us, the academic study of the culture wars has found its most comprehensive text to date in Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America. For Hartman, the beginnings of our politically fraught moment can be found not in the debates over the implementation of the New Deal or the battles over temperance as other historians have...

Hundreds of Indian Ocean islanders who were forcibly deported from their homeland by Britain 40 years ago won a battle yesterday which could see them set sail for an emotional return within days. The court of appeal in London found the British government guilty of "abuse of power" for attempting to prevent the Chagos Islanders from reclaiming land leased from under their feet by Britain to the US in the 1960s. Three judges upheld a ruling in the islanders' favour last year, ordered the government to pay their legal costs and withheld support for an appeal to the House of...

The 1953 wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy was so perfect it is still being talked about more than 65 years later. As recently as 2017, gossip website The List was still calling it “the most beautiful wedding ever.” It was a fairy tale worthy of the legendary couple who would preside over Camelot. But for Ann Lowe, who designed the bridal gown, it was a nightmare. First, the wedding dress was destroyed 10 days before the ceremony. Then the 24-year-old bride, who did not really like the gown in the first place, snubbed her. Asked who...

After Obama served two terms as president; after Oprah became one of the richest people Earth has ever known; after America became history’s most diverse nation where the descendants of black slaves, as a group, are more successful than any that ever existed, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are talking about race as if we’re still living in the ‘60s.  And they do it not to solve real moral and socioeconomic problems in poor black communities – but to get political power.It’s infuriating.Cory and Kamala are mixing anecdotal scraps from America’s bad old days with “microaggressions” from today’s classroom racism,...