Free Republic

The far left has attempted to portray their elderly hero, Frances Fox Piven, as a lonely shut-in who spends her time knitting mittens and eating Werther’s Originals in her New York apartment. But the truth is that age has not dampened Piven’s appetite for radical socialist political activities.Piven, an academic who is still on the board of ACORN-partner Project Vote, has announced that she will be co-hosting a 1960s-style “teach-in� April 5th, and she’s bringing in some heavy hitters.The national event, which will be simulcast, will also feature fellow socialist professor Cornel West and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.  SEIU is...

But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture...

Groundhog Day: The 60s Melissa Barnhart, April 2, 2010 In his book, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Regan to George W. Bush, Bernard von Bothmer, a professor of American history at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University of California, “examines the ways in which four presidents [Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush] used their own selective versions of the 1960s for political gain in the years from 1980 to 2004. It focuses on their conscious manipulation of five topics: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Vietnam...

The majority of Baby Boomers and those of the post sixties generation are joyfully celebrating the 40-year anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival which took place in 1969. Since then, the event has been glorified, glamorized, sensationalized and etched into the very fabric of our American consciousness and youth culture. This festival was the defining point against “the Establishment” and America’s core Judean/ Christian values. This festival was the brown acid of the radical Left’s agenda, whose goons in the reprobate (godless) music industry have steadily pushed the boundaries of morality over the past 40 years. In the wake of...

Ah, the ‘60s, the hippie-drenched era recently dredged up as part of the Woodstock 40th anniversary news coverage. What a shame that so much of what the public knows of the turbulent decade is either an exaggeration or outright falsehood. Enter The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties by Jonathan Leaf. The author debunks much of the conventional wisdom regarding the decade, from the culture at play to the Vietnam War. It’s easy to blame psychedelics abuse for the mass hypnosis regarding such an important chapter in American history. But Leaf calmly shares some cold, hard facts concerning the era....

I came across a beautiful version of Unchained Melody earlier today, and it started me down memory lane.

A memorial service is planned for May 16 for Steve Hamilton, a prominent Bay Area anti-war activist and member of the Oakland 7 who was acquitted in a notorious conspiracy trial.

Ayers Under Fire by: Bethany Stotts, February 24, 2009 The Support Bill Ayers petition has now garnered signatures from thousands of academics and other citizens in support for former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, but Ayer’s reputation in academia may not be so rosy after his time in this year’s election spotlight. “It seems that the character assassination and slander of Bill Ayers and other people who have known Obama is not about to let up,” the petition states. It sports 4,291 signatures as of this writing. “While an important concern is the dishonesty of this campaign and the slanderous...

Why did the 60's Generation get it so wrong in so many areas of life?

In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen ''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner,...

In my last post I referenced the Days of Rage - put on by the Weathermen AKA Weather Underground in Chicago, October, 1969. I was in Chicago a few days later with my 2 little kids to get visas to travel to Korea for a year with the US Army. This was not fun & games like Woodstock. It was scarey as hell. This is Barak Obama's buddy Ayer's group. His lovely wife Bernadine Dohrn was also a part of it. They were rich, white kids playing revolutionaries. Whether Barak was 8 or not back then, does not take away...

Per popular demand, after the very successful "Who Is Your Favorite Drummer?" thread, here we have a new posting to determine who is your favorite guitarist of all time.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too. The Pentagon Papers (the 7,000-page, top-secret US government report into the Vietnam War) are proof of this: right after the Tet Offensive, the business world turned against the war, because they thought it was too costly, even though there were proposals within the government - and we know this now...

The lowest form of solidarity, I remember reading somewhere, is generational. What do you have to do, after all, to qualify as a “baby boomer”? Membership in that vast sodality means that you were in your late teens or early twenties during the sixties: an underwhelming achievement that required no more than being able to say “present.” As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard. If there didn’t happen to be French argot for this, I would still want to answer to the name “sixty-eighter.” For me, this date-stamped association...

Viewing The 1960s From My 60s By Burt Prelutsky Even though I'm embarrassed to have been a Democrat for so many years, I'm proud that even in my 20's, I thought the 60's was the worst decade in America's history. Because I was born in 1940, I was at UCLA for some of those years and had a bird's eye view of my fellow college students. It was not a pretty sight. What makes that time the source of so much nostalgia for so many people of my age -- the incessant folk songs, the tie-dyed shirts and blouses, the...

O ne of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man." No offense to...

Kobler’s Key to the CouncilBOOK REVIEW: Kobler, John F., C.P.  Vatican II, Theophany and the Phenomenon of Man: The Council's Pastoral Servant Leader Theology for the Third Millennium.  (American University Studies, Series 7, vol. 100)  New York: Peter Lang, 1991.  0820414921, 9780820414928  $51.95 by Paul Zarowny, Ph.D. Whatever its multiple shortcomings, my book on the Council is the only published attempt to provide a synthesis, at least in a seminal way, of the religious ontology shaping the sense of the Council.[1]     Passionist priest Fr. John F. Kobler’s Vatican II, Theophany and the Phenomenon of Man (1991) is a follow-up to...

Blame the '60s for America's perpetual adolescence? Nah, blame the '20s. In the 1990s, most people who played video games were teenagers. Now the average gamester age is nearly 30. Cultural products aimed at tots and preteens capture the attention of adults. "SpongeBob SquarePants," intended for the 6-to-11 age group, draws almost 19 million viewers from the 18-to-49 crowd. Some famous museums, uncomfortable with their adult role as guardians of historical memory, have gone adolescent, staging exhibits on motorcycles, hip-hop and "Star Wars" movies. Many college courses, even on major campuses, make rainy-day activities at summer camp seem profound. Such...

Liberals love to boast that they are not "religious," which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. – Ann CoulterThis day, America and the world are in a dire cultural, political and spiritual crisis. The very existence of civilization as we know it seems to hang in the balance. Will America be what intellectual Bill Bennett calls "the [world's] last best hope," or will America (and the West) go the way of Holland, which in January of this year erected a monument in Amsterdam? The monument was not to Rembrandt, not to Grotius, not to...

This is great ~~ nostalgia and lots of smiles, but the 60's were sure times of change and disruption. Take Me Back to the Sixties

Denny Doherty, Canadian member of the Mamas and Papas folk group, dies at 66 CASSANDRA SZKLARSKI Published Friday January 19th, 2007 TORONTO (CP) - Halifax-born Denny Doherty was remembered Friday as the "angelic voice" that carried the '60s folk-pop group the Mamas and the Papas through such memorable hits as "California Dreamin'Â " and "Monday, Monday." Doherty died early Friday at his home in suburban Mississauga after suffering an aneurysm in his abdomen, said his sister Frances Arnold. He was 66. "Everybody used to think that John Phillips, who wrote the songs, was also the main voice of the group,...

"...Although Nexis overflows with references to protesters gobbing on Vietnam vets, and Bob Greene's 1989 book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam counts 63 examples of protester spitting, Jerry Lembcke argues that the story is bunk in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" ... Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed--the actual person who was spat on turned out to...

They have such whimsical names as heavenly blue, crimson rambler and pearly gates, and delicate blooms that crawl quickly up trellises. But when morning glory seeds aren't planted -- when they are instead ingested -- whimsical thoughts can crawl through altered minds with kaleidoscope-like visions. Kristy Peterkin, whose family owns Ayers Variety and Hardware, says the owners caught two teenage boys stealing "13 or 14 packs of these seeds." And teenagers know this. Once popular in the hippie era of the 1960s, morning glory seeds as a hallucinogen seem to have sprouted once again. Local gardening shops have noticed their...

I found this URL a few weeks ago. It has 50s, 60s and 70s rock 'n roll - The Allman Brothers, Joan Baez, The Band, Big Brother, Elvin Bishop, Mike Bloomfield Booker T. & the MG's, Butterfield Blues Band The Byrds, Joe Cocker, Wayne Cochran, Elvis Costello CSN&Y, King Curtis, Miles Davis, Derek & The Dominos, Doobie Brothers, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Electric Light Orchestra, Everly Brothers, The Grateful Dead, H.P. Lovecraft, Emmylou Harris, George Harrison Jimi Hendrix, Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Al Kooper, John Lennon, Little Feat Loggins and Messina, Mahavishnu Orch., Taj Mahal Steve Miller,...

SAN FRANCISCO--In 1970, 20-year-old student Bill Sagan had his first real brush with rock and roll history at an early Led Zeppelin concert at Chicago's fabled Aragon Ballroom. Now the entrepreneur owns one of rock's biggest treasure troves of recorded shows by Zeppelin and other history-making bands, and he's beginning to share it freely online. Since 2002, Sagan has owned the full archives of legendary promoter Bill Graham, whose concerts featuring performers such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and others helped define the late 1960s and early '70s. Late last week, Sagan began putting excerpts from...

WASHINGTON - Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89. McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael. Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race. The former college professor, who ran for president five times...

There are many moments in life when you realize that you and your generation are officially moving beyond the fringe of popular culture, or at least to a place where big advertisers no longer feel the intense need to reach you. If you live with a teenager, there's a blazing neon line between advertisers' interest in them (intense) and you (not so much). Teens are relentlessly courted to buy the latest fashions, music and other trendy stuff, while the aging parents are just as relentlessly ignored, except for news about the latest arthritis treatments. That you will bankroll the teens'...

Infinity launched the Jack format in New York City and Chicago today. WCBS-FM in New York City made the switch at 5 p.m. ET, kicking off the new programming with "Fight For Your Right (To Party)" by the Beastie Boys. In Chicago, WJMK-FM launched Jack at 4 p.m. CT. The WCBS-FM Oldies format will continue to exist as an online radio station (www.wcbsfm.com). WJMK-FM will also transfer its Oldies format online at www.WJMK.com. "New York deserves a radio station that is equally as eclectic as its listener's personalities and attitudes," said WCBS-FM VP/GM Chad Brown. "Jack-FM promises to be unlike...

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle....

Greg Hassall and Charles Purcell do battle over the fab four. FOR OK, Ob-la-di Ob-la-da is the most annoying song ever written. And you won't find Revolution No 9 on too many iPods. But how many bands' dud tracks can you count on one hand? The Beatles deserve their place in the pop pantheon. They revolutionised the way pop music was written, recorded and talked about. They were funny, charismatic, hungry to learn and unafraid of controversy. They matured spectacularly over seven tumultuous years, then quit on a high note with the peerless Abbey Road. They were a genuine band,...

I'm currently reading David Horowitz's "Radical Son", at the urging of my father, a fellow FReeper. Very good, though sometimes tedious, reading. This is a guy who was smack in the middle of most of the 60s war protest, peacenik anti-government revolutionary stuff. Interesting that it shows, among other things, that McCarthy probably wasn't quite paranoid enough when it came to communists in the U.S.A. Anyone else read/reading this book? Comments?

More than a win for conservatism, Bush's victory marks the end, finally, of the '60s.THE SIXTIES ended on September 11, 2001, but they were interred on the morning of November 3, 2004, when a senator from Massachusetts played the reverse role of another senator from Massachusetts 44 years earlier.In November of 1960, John F. Kennedy had received a call from Richard Nixon, conceding the election, an act of statesmanship that still redounds to Nixon's credit. Nixon's chances of successfully waging a recount of Illinois and Texas votes were higher than Kerry's of contesting Ohio's votes from Tuesday, but both would...

The Other Sixties by Bruce BawerTwo decades, the 1950s (1950–59) and “The Sixties” (ca. 1965–74), continue to be the touchstones by which American liberals and conservatives define themselves. To those on the right, the 1950s were the last good time, an era of sanity and maturity, order and discipline, of adults behaving like adults and children knowing their place. To those on the left, the 1950s were a time of fatuous complacency, mindless materialism, and stultifying conformism—not to mention racism, sexism, and other ugly prejudices. By contrast, “The Sixties,” for conservatives, were an explosion of puerile irresponsibility and fashionable rebellion,...

Blowing in the Wind September 30, 2004 By David Asman As a creature of the '60s, I spent my early teens listening to and appreciating Bob Dylan (search). At first, his rebellious nature caught my interest. But what appealed to me more was that his sharp edge cut not just through the hypocrisies of middle-class culture, but also through the phoniness of the '60s counter-culture. He did not suffer fools lightly, no matter what their affiliation, as you can see from the brilliant film biography of him called "Don’t Look Back." He smacked down softheaded hippies as eagerly as he...

Hiya, Mr. Dunnaghy Has everyone in America ever agreed about anything? Yes, and his name was Frank Fontaine. by Larry Miller 08/17/2004 12:00:00 AM IN THE WEEKS, months, indeed years of exhausting campaigning, speechifying, and punditizing leading up to a presidential election--exhausting, that is, from the voters' point of view--and in a particular contest in our nation's history when the rhetoric has been especially, er, tart--I was wondering the other day whether we Americans have ever agreed on anything, large or small, and my answer was: No; I don't think so. And things were no less divided in the past;...

Getting Back in Tune with Swinging '60s BY DAVE BARRY July 25, 2004 When word got around the music community that the original Federal Duck was getting back together after 35 years, the reaction from serious rock fans was unanimous: Why? I should explain that the Federal Duck was the band I belonged to when I was a student at Haverford College back in the '60s. We were originally called The Stomp Jackson Quintet, and then The Guides (don't ask) but we came up with our new and final name one night when we were lying on the bank of...

Tony Blair today launched an extraordinary attack on the decline of the traditional family and the rise of "different lifestyles". In a speech which risked a backlash from single parents' groups and Labour MPs, the Prime Minister said the culture of the "Swinging Sixties" was partly to blame for crime and social breakdown. "A society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to others," said Mr Blair. "All of this was then multiplied in effect by the economic and social changes...

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni keeps '60s spirit intact for a new generationBy Tyrone BeasonSeattle Times staff reporter Nikki Giovanni may be a 60-year-old cancer survivor with a respectable teaching job at Virginia Tech University, but her opinions; and hair; are as edgy as ever. A cornerstone of the Black Arts literary movement in the 1960s and early '70s who sported an Afro when Afros were social statements, Giovanni still looks hip with her new, don't-mess-with-me platinum locks. And Monday, when the poet and activist pulled up the left sleeve of her sweater in an auditorium filled with 500...

Some of the lessons Father Kevin Martin learned in seminary have faded with time, but he remembers when the future Episcopal priests were taken to see Catherine Deneuve play a Paris prostitute in the soft-porn “Belle de Jour.” The late 1960s were heady times at Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School, he said. The sexual revolution inspired people in clerical collars to do things that, today, would turn a sexual-harassment attorney into a pillar of salt. “It was the spirit of the day,” said Martin, who leads a renewal group called Vital Church Ministries near Dallas. “We were supposed to be...

<p>The conservative commentator James Hirsen, a columnist for Newsmax.com and a regular on Fox News and "The Sean Hannity Show," once played keyboards for the touring Temptations. At the time he was the only white face in the group.</p> <p>His hiring, he says, was "no affirmative action decision. I really had to be funky, or I lost the gig."</p>

I can't seem to find anything on the net in the way of the history of welfare. I've come across some reform issues with Clinton and Congress but nothing more. I'm looking for who came up with the idea, what President implemented it, why it was started and so on....if any of you are history buffs or were around during the times please post your thoughts. Thanks!

Zal Yanovsky, guitarist and co-founder of the Lovin' Spoonful, died of a heart attack at his home near Kingston, Ontario, on Friday. He was fifty-eight years old. Yanovsky was a largely self-taught musician whose artful guitar work and effervescent presence helped make the Lovin' Spoonful one of the most musically distinctive and commercially successful American bands of the 1960s. Yanovsky's mischievous, grinning visage was as memorable as the quartet's impressive run of sunny, infectious folk-rock hits, including "Do You Believe in Magic?," "Summer in the City," "Daydream," "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice," "Rain on the Roof" and "Nashville...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 23 Credit: NASA, Lunar Orbiter 4 Explanation: Like a target ring bull's-eye, the Mare Orientale is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. Located on the Moon's extreme western edge, this impact basin is unfortunately difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. It is over 3 billion years old, about 600 miles across and was formed by the impact of an asteroid sized object....

The 60s just won’t go away. Many Boomers have idealized the period beyond recognition. To them, it was a period of making love, not war, of telling it like it is, of truth and beauty, of honesty and openness. The dirty little secret of it all, known by those of us who lived through it, is that the 60s had more than its fair share of pedestrian hypocrites. "All you need is love," advised John Lennon at roughly the same time he abandoned his own son. His holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as the Beatles found out, was interested in more...

THE "sexual revolution" of the 1960s took place because of a shortage of men rather than the implementation of liberal social policies, according to a book by a leading American conservative. James Q Wilson, a former Harvard professor, claims that the "Swinging Sixties" did not represent a radical break with the past but can be explained by the ratio of men to women. "Whatever the Sixties did, it is hard to find much evidence that they created the divorce revolution," he says in The Marriage Problem. Wilson, who visited Britain last year for a seminar on the family at the...