Free Republic

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough? Certainly not Vint Cerf. In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network? They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment...

After more than three decades in United States prisons — a term punctuated by a brief escape and recapture — a 62-year-old Croatian independence fighter was returned to his native country on Thursday, having served his time for a 1976 hijacking and a bombing that killed a police officer. The fighter, Zvonko Busic, led a group that planted a bomb at Grand Central Terminal that later exploded, killing a city police officer, Brian J. Murray. Mr. Busic left the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind., boarded a plane in Chicago and touched down in Zagreb about 2:20 p.m. on...

"Throughout the auditorium, there was a palpable sense amongst the delegates that we'd nominated the wrong guy" In 1976, the GOP had just nominated Gerald Ford for the Presidency. The GOP delegates enthusiastically chanted until Ronald Reagan (who had just narrowly lost the race for the Republican nomination) came to the dais and gave an impromptu speech that simply blew everybody away... [YouTube] Video/more at Reaganite Republican   Have a great weekend, FReeper patriots~

Some Milestones in Israel-Palestine1834 - 1886 - 1920 - 1922 - 1929 - 1938 - 1941 - 1948 - 1950s-1960s - 1970 1972 - 1973 - 1975 - 1976 - 1982 - 1987 - 1994 - 2000 - 2001 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2010 1834 First recorded attack on native Jews in Israel by Muslims, is the one in June 1834, Safed (the Plunder), the massacres and mass rapes went on for 33 days, (an inciter, Muhammed Damoor, a self-proclaimed prophet, ‘prophesied’ the attack for which he agitated). It was repeated in 1838. 1886 First...

Zona Cobb knows what its like to get a swine flu vaccine. The 70 year old got one when she was in her 30s back in 1976. "I got the swine flu vaccine because I had gotten the flu before and didn't want to get it again." said Cobb. She was one of more than 40 million Americans who were part of mass vaccinations in the United States. A panic started when an Army recruit at Ft. Dix New Jersey died from a swine flu virus thought to be similar to the 1918 strain which killed half a million Americans...

Leaked letter reveals concern of neurologists over 25 deaths in America A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter. The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins. It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a...

An enterprising conspiracy theorist on Monday posted a pair of U.S. government PSAs from 1976, urging citizens to quickly get a swine flu vaccine or risk becoming "very sick"-- although that pandemic never materialized. The two sensational videos attempt to show that anyone and everyone can get the bug and pass it to children, teachers, postal workers, veterinarians and acquaintances. ("Betty's mother gave it to her best friend Dottie, but Dottie had a heart condition and she died.") SNIP The agency, evidently, had a taste for scaremongering. As it turned out, its recommendation was unfounded. Not only did the 1976...

On the cold afternoon of February 5, 1976, an Army recruit told his drill instructor at Fort Dix that he felt tired and weak but not sick enough to see military medics or skip a big training hike. Within 24 hours, 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis of Ashley Falls, Mass., was dead, killed by an influenza not seen since the plague of 1918-19, which took 500,000 American lives and 20 million worldwide. Two weeks after the recruit's death, health officials disclosed to America that something called "swine flu" had killed Lewis and hospitalized four of his fellow soldiers at the Army...

After 19 years on the run, German police arrest members of RZ group, which was involved in hijacking Air France plane with dozens of Israelis on board in 1976 Two suspected members of a German left-wing terror group which took part in some of the most notorious hostage dramas of the 1970s have surrendered to authorities after 19 years on the run. Federal state prosecutors in Karlsruhe said on Sunday that the two suspected members of the "Revolutionaere Zellen" (RZ), or Revolutionary Cells, had given themselves up in December. RZ members helped Carlos the Jackal take ministers hostage at an...

REAGAN at CPAC: “Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?” “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.”

1976 was a great year for a 13 year old boy living in central Georgia. It was hot. The creek out back was cool. Girls were getting less weird and more pretty. My friends and I were within walking distance of the 7-11. “Now-Laters” and a Cherry Coke Icee were the treats of choice if we could get enough change together or beg a dollar from someone’s mom. That Bicentennial Year had both optimism looking backward and trepidation looking forward. Where were we going as a country? Fresh wounds from Vietnam, the Cold War, Watergate, Agnew’s resignation, Nixon’s resignation, inflation...

General Election Campaign In presidential trial-heat matchups between Ford and Carter, Ford trailed the eventual Democratic nominee by small margins in March, April, and early May. By late May, Carter opened up a double-digit lead and maintained it until late September. Carter's lead swelled to as much as 33 points, 62% to 29% among registered voters, after the Democratic convention that year. Ford cut into the margin after the Republican convention, reducing a 25-point (57% to 32%) early August deficit to 13 points (50% to 37%). ... In a poll conducted immediately after their first debate, Carter maintained a double-digit...

1976 / 2008 Deja Vu All Over Again 1976: Prime lending rate of 7.5%, unemployment at 7.8%. A Republican adminsitration (Ford) that was clueless about economics (price freezes, asking people to wear WIN, whip inflation now, buttons.) We were still reeling from a gas crisis that had seen gas shortages and lines at the pumps that often wrapped around a city block. On the other hand, things were looking up around the world. The Ford administration had completed several treaties with the Soviet Union and turned the bear into a cub. Islamic terrorists had come to everyone's attention at the...

...The Ford ad team told them more — how he had grown up in Middle America, played football for the University of Michigan (the name of the team was omitted in ads aired in Ohio) and served in the military in World War II. There's an assumption this year that voters know John McCain pretty well. But my sense is that there is still a lot of filling in the blanks that the McCain campaign can do. Second, they filled in the blanks on Jimmy Carter. Most voters wanted to support a Democrat, and one who had smoothed over the...

Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification -- on the order of 49 percent to 26 percent then, far more than today. The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns, Richard Nixon, had dismal favorability ratings, far lower than George W. Bush's. His name could scarcely be mentioned at the Republican...

If I could just take a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was going...

Was it a good thing for the GOP when Ronald Reagan stayed in the race against Gerald Ford in 1976 even after the Californian had fallen far behind Ford in the hunt for the nomination? Most people say yes, even though at the time many were demanding that Reagan exit stage right. As I wrote below, the GOP needs to keep the MSM focused on the issues that unite the GOP, and the best way to do that is by a series of contests throughout the spring, from Virginia to Pennsylvania and beyond. Each state that has a primary scheduled...

HISTORY - Time line [some] Important dates in radical ISLAM VS WORLD 1263 - 1328 The 'Godfather of Islamic Fundamentalism' Who is the True Godfather of Islamic Fundamentalism? His name is Ibn Taymiyyah, or Taq ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, and he lived from 1263 to 1328. His name by birth was Ahmad ibn Abdul-Halim ibn Abdas-Salaam. This individual could be considered as the real godfather of fundamentalism. Maududi borrowed extensively from Taymiyyah's writings. http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/index.php? id=1194248__________________1347 [The Bahmani sultans & genocide on Indians]The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death....

""....On 9 January 1976, three days after Epiphany, the priest of Damour Father Mansour Labaky, was carrying out a Maronite custom of blessing the houses with holy water. As he stood in front of a house on the side of the town next to the Muslim village of Harat Na’ami, a bullet whistled past his ear and hit the house. Then he heard the rattle of machine-guns. He went inside the house, and soon learned that the town was surrounded. Later he found out by whom and how many — the forces of Sa’iqa, consisting of 16,000 Palestinians and Syrians,...

<p>ONE OF THE funny things about politics is that people often have a very poor sense of which elections are important and which aren't. This fact hit me a few years ago when I was watching a "Saturday Night Live" episode from 1976. Jane Curtin was on as the host of "Weekend Update," and the joke was that SNL's feelings about the upcoming election could be summed up with a photo of Gerald Ford, defaced with horns and a mustache.</p>