Free Republic

I know that President Obama is cool, and everybody just loves him personally. But, does it ever seem as if he's going out of his way to poke his finger in your eye? Not that you'd mind, of course. Well, it turns out you're most probably right. Rule for Radicals #10 (no, I'm not joking) is "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." The dark lord of discord, Saul Alinsky, explains: [quote] It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential...

Couple of Blog posts might be of interest to Fellow Freepers. The Week in Politics-Obama takes on the Catholics; Obama by the Numbers True Crime-Josh Powell Must Be In Hell; Missing Toddlers , Barefoot Bandit….More Book-"The Devil Himself" by Eric Dezenhall-When the Bad Guys Become the Good Guys; Guest Writer Michelle Obeys the Gubmint

Mob Wives reality star Karen Gravano is releasing her memoirs Mob Daughter on Valentine's Day, and the families of victims murdered by her father ex-Gambino underboss Sammy the Bull are apoplectic as reported by John Marzulli for the Daily News: "My brother was killed by Sammy, then he was killed again when he wrote his book and now he's being killed a third time in her book," said Roseanne Massa, whose brother Michael DeBatt was shot dead in 1987 on Salvatore Gravano's orders. "Having our family members killed over and over again is not a way to hold to our...

When Mark Skousen started Freedom Fest in 2002 he didn't think he was giving birth to a movement. Now, it's a decade later and thousands of people around the world are aware of Freedom Fest and routinely attend its events. I caught up with Mark at the Global Financial Summit in the Bahamas last week. As a freedom loving person, Mark was anxious to create a place where fellow freedom lovers could gather and start fighting the ever increases governmental encroachments. Far from being a US phenomena, governments across the globe have had an ongoing undeclared war on individual freedom...

Professor Abul Ahrar Ramizpoor was 9 years old when troops from the U.S.S.R. intervened in Afghanistan in 1979. He remembers standing with his family, feeding their small library of books one-by-one into a fire. They had heard stories of the Soviet communists murdering “intellectual” Afghan citizens and Ramizpoor’s father wanted to keep his family safe. Ramizpoor and most of his family survived the 10-year Soviet occupation of his home country. Today he is married with two young children and works as a United Nations human rights officer. He has also started Afghanistan’s first free-market think tank promoting classical liberal values....

Dr. Yaron Brook has led the Ayn Rand Institute for the past 11 years. He believes the most important debate of out time is not economic but philosophic: you are not your brother's keeper. Rather, your primary purpose is to the live the best life that you possibly can. This means being your own master and living on YOUR terms. You will be the most successful when you are the freest to pursue your goals and dreams. Unfortunately, this important debate is all but ignored during most political campaigns. Until we address this threshold issue, not much human progress will...

Tom Clancy's latest thriller, "Locked On" is, as always, a really good read. Many FReepers, like myself, have been fans ever since "The Hunt for Red October." There is one thing however, that is suprisingly different in his newest novel.

If you paid any attention to the rumblings in the technology industry this week, you would know that Apple released a piece of software that will supposedly revolutionize the educational industry. iBooks Author is the culmination of many years of internal developments at Apple. Modernizing education was, of course, the passion of Apple's late legendary leader, Steve Jobs, and was the project he most wanted to see come to light. Let me be clear, what Apple released Thursday, Jan. 19., is revolutionary. It will change many aspects of education within the United States and potentially worldwide. However, it will not...

Just a couple of recent Blog posts of mine that might be of interest to Freepers. Some book reviews, some politics, some Delaware news. Book ReviewBringing Adam Home-Time for Adam Walsh to Receive Some Justice Delaware NewsThe Race for the 6th Senatorial District-the Controversy, Christine O'Donnell Betrays True CrimeGod Bless Eve Carson-She Wanted Her Killers to Pray With Her. More True Crime Political NewsWhat's New, What's Old, What the Jug-Eared Dictator Does Now Book Review"Turn Right at Machu Pichu" by Mark Adams-Who Knew Exploring Could Be funny?

Jack Abramoff's political confession, "Capitol Punishment," promises to provide a respite from daily reports of government corruption, civil liberties violations, abuses of power, constitution shredding, mad power grabs, cover-up, phoniness and lies emanating from the current White House. He sounds like a one-of-a-kind guy: "a power-lifting, football playing, Orthodox Jewish, right wing Republican opera buff. You know the type." It's good to know that his ordeal didn't rob him of his sense of humor. Abramoff was exhibit A-Z in the museum of corrupt Washington types: homo-lobbyist. What makes that laughable is the suggestion that any one person sits at the...

Dear fellow South Carolina evangelicals and pastors: You may find this hard to believe, but in 1947-48 I was the pastor of the Oolenoy Baptist church in Pumpkintown, S.C, thirty five miles out in the country from Greenville. It was there that I was ordained to the Gospel ministry and have been in the Lord’s work for over 64 happy years. The reason I am writing you is because as a South Carolinian, you are in a strategic position to help America at this historic time in our nation’s history. During the last three years our nation has been led...

MEMRI - The Middle East Media Research Institute - has for years been an invaluable source for revealing the double talk and outright flood of lies coming from the Arab world about Israel in particular and Jews in general. MEMRI can be found at www.memri.org. I accidentally entered .com vs. .org and found a spoof site, www.memri.com. It carries Arab propaganda against Israel, Jews, and for good measure Christians. Its main organ seems to be Jerusalem World News, which carries stories about evil Jews and Christians working to harm Islam. As noted above, one current story is about Israeli Jews...

It’s an anniversary of sorts. It was four years ago this week, the day after the New Hampshire primary when I first began to become an invisible man. It all started when I fell down dead on the living room floor. Apparently, a lifetimes of cigarettes, brownies and Italian sausage has consequences. At midnight, without any warning other than mild heartburn, I collapsed and heard my wife call 911. She alternated between assuring me that I was fine and telling the 911 operator that if they didn’t get there soon, I would be gone. Within minutes there was the loud...

John Grisham has been an international, best selling author for nearly 20 years. His specialty, legal thrillers like The Firm, The Rainmaker, The Litigators and many others; Grisham has also written a couple of children's legal thrillers as well. He's sold over 250 million books, ranking him among the most successful authors on the planet. I've enjoyed his earlier works; but recently, I've found that his work was starting to feel like it was written from a standard outline. However, his latest work, The Litigators, seems to have broken this formulaic mold. The story centers on David Zinc, a Harvard...

Whether he wins the Iowa Caucuses or not, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has apparently hit a raw nerve in higher education. “Let’s look at colleges and universities,” he said in Mason City, Iowa. “They’ve become indoctrination centers for the left.” “Should we be subsidizing that?” Evidently, merely calling for shutting off the federal spondulix is tantamount to repression. “Santorum shows his great commitment to the First Amendment by declaring that the federal government should punish institutions for their ideology,” John Wilson writes on the academe blog. “If colleges aren’t supporting Republican ideas, Santorum tells us, the government should de-fund...

This list is my opinion of the best nonfiction books on the subject of economics, policy or law that came out in the year 2011 (with one exception). Though it is probably too late to pick these books up in time for Christmas, readers are encouraged to look into the after-holiday sales and check out some of the best work from the past year. “Keeping the Republic: Saving America by Trusting Americans” – Gov. Mitch Daniels Daniels is the current governor of Indiana. He was also the speaker at a recent Mackinac Center event, where he gave a taste of...

Richard F. Miniter has an intriguing article in AmericanThinker.com. Richard believes the advent of the Kindle and the Nook will lead education back to its original methods, namely autodidacticism. In his article, A World Without Schoolteachers, Richard describes personal experiences and references a large body of evidence supporting the fact that home-schooled children routinely out perform their public school rivals in standardized testing as well as national spelling and geography bees. However, home-schooling isn't for everyone. If a parent is not available due to work demands, then who will supervise the student? We don't want to end up with the...

Well, the statistics are in and NFL football star Tim Tebow has yet one more sterling accomplishment--but this one is not about football. It's about his book, "Through My Eyes," about his Christian life story. With staggeringly high sales, Tim Tebow has become the #1 best-selling religious author in America for 2011. Tim explains how his dad told him early in life that becoming a star gives a person a platform for good or evil. He also taught Tim that success opens the door to all sorts of temptations. So Tim purposed in his heart to become a good role...

Apparently we'll be referring to Richard Nixon -- the nation's only President to resign in disgrace -- as "Tricky Dick" for another reason. In the newly released biography Nixon's Darkest Secrets veteran Washington reporter Don Fulsom alleges the 37th President who served from 1969 to 1972 "may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon" as reported by Tom Leonard for the Daily Mail: Bebe Rebozo was a short, swarthy, good-looking Cuban-American businessman with a history of failed relationships with women and close...

Every year now for a number of years my wife and I watch the entire six disc extended version of the Lord of the Rings during the gloomy Northwest winter around the Thanksgiving-to New-Years time. It helps us through the winter gloom, but since Obama's election it also helps us maintain hope and courage. I grew up on Tolkien before he was well known, and it probably shaped me in ways I can scarcely appreciate. My wife on the other hand, from the Third World, had no inkling of Tolkien until this movie cycle came out. We are both very...

A young quarterback who dropped to his knee after humiliating the Chicago Bears in an unbelievable overtime win is doing more to exemplify his faith in God to our young people than a president’s dismissive Sunday golf games. The example of Tim Tebow’s mother refusing to abort him when her doctors told her to do so is in stunning contrast to Barack Obama’s actions in the Illinois State Senate when he voted against the Baby Born Alive bill. Remember when he said soon upon entering the White House that America is no longer a Christian nation? Just go to tebowing.com...

In this time of worry about the future of our nation let us pause to remember the gift God gave us on the first Christmas morning. Here is the story of Christ’s birth as told to us by St. Luke @2: 1-20) 1 In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. 2 This was the first enrollment, when Quirin’i-us was governor of Syria. 3 And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. 4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to...

Does anyone know about notorious laywer Roy Cohn getting hit with an obscenity charge in 1957 in New Jersey? The only reference I can find to it is here with reference to an FBI document: Cohn was a personal friend of Hoover during the 1950s and 1960s, and the two shared extensive correspondence directed to each other on a first-name basis including a September 1957 exchange on an article published by the Director entitled "Let's Wipe Out the Schoolyard Sex Racket." Ironically, only months earlier an apparent obscenity indictment against Cohn had been dismissed according to an FBI memo dated...

Interview with James Delingpole, from the Uncommon Knowledge series at the Hoover Institute. 48 minutes. Variety of topics covered include the Euro, Climategate, the UK riots, etc.

  A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan  I got to the hospital after visiting hours, but the nurse led me to the room anyway. "There hasn't been anyone," she confided. I pursed my lips in grim acknowledgment. "That's why I'm here." Inside the room the patient looked like purple death. It was a critical-care room, bright and white and cheerfully clinical. The bed was surrounded by apparatus, with lines and leads and probes and IV tubes running to him. The only unbruised part of him that I could see were his eyes, and his eyes were more deeply wounded than anything. I'll...

A noted left-wing author who teaches at a bastion of so-called progressive education recently delivered a surprising defense of Western civilization—and an attack on prevailing academic attitudes towards it. Unfortunately, Christopher Hitchens said, confidence in the superiority of the West has been eroded in recent decades. Hitchens teaches at the New School in New York City. Hitchens criticized those Americans (on both the Left and the Right) who responded to the September 11 attacks by asking what America had done to deserve them—a question belonging to a mindset he called “moral suicide.” Such relativism, Hitchens said, is the result of...

  How to slay dragons  And now I am a man-killer. We live with the consequences of our choices, and we cannot fail to live with all the consequences of all our choices. Sic semper nobis, sic etiam mihi. Thus always to us, thus even to me. Your money? Or your life? Your mind – the means of your life? Or your life – the end of your mind's devising? Lie or die? Can any such choice be made? And if it can't – what then? What if you choose neither? What then? I got mugged, that's what happened. Or almost...

The authors who are read most widely are those who are no longer around. Former Accuracy in Academia executive director Dan Flynn pays homage to a quartet of them in his latest book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. America may never again see the likes of Will and Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, Milton Friedman and Eric Hoffer. For one thing, all ascended to intellectual heights from modest means, if not actual penury. Moreover, although their political viewpoints spanned the ideological spectrum, all shared a love of country, namely the one in which they lived and worked. For example, Will and Ariel Durant,...

This year, 2011, has marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Check out this article: Happy 400th Birthday To The King James Bible -- The Most Influential Book In The English Language The headline of this article is no hyperbola. From a literature standpoint - this translation is one of the greatest piece of literature in the English language. (reference: Why the King James Bible Endures) From a scholarly standpoint - the bar was set very high in making this translation. (reference: An enduring legacy) From a cultural standpoint - no other book has influenced so much of...

Who would believe that Newt Gingrich holds support amongst Conservatives? His written and orally described stances on issues Conservatives know to be fraudulent would put him in the same boat as Romney. We've all heard the problems with him as a Conservative, his couch talk with Pelosi on Global Warming for the Al Gore website, his affirmative push for mandates in health care, his failures as Speaker, his pro-Fairness Doctrine bill, his immigration stance, and so much more. He is apparently effectively deflecting Conservative criticism better than Romney. Why is that? Though Gingrich has so many negatives, and actually, more...

If, like the hero of Rafael Sabatini’s wonderful adventure novel Scaramouche, you were “born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad,” you no doubt guffawed as I did at the CBS News show 60 Minutes‘ reaction to the failure of the mis-named super-committee. Those twelve stout-hearted congressional heroes were assigned the task of cutting 1.2 trillion dollars out of a 44 trillion dollar deficit over the course of ten years — so minuscule a drop in so vast a bucket that it wouldn’t even have gone plink when it hit the bottom. And they...

Apparently you can serve two masters. In Montreal, QB Canada Marvin Elkind was a small-time Jewish hood working for the Italian Mafia who later became a police informant, and the 77-year-old's double life is the subject of the new book The Weasel by Adrian Humphreys as reported by Rene Bruemmer for The Gazette. Elkind got his underworld start at the age of 18 as the driver for Jimmy Hoffa whom he chauffeured for four years, and he claims to know where the infamous Teamsters boss is buried as reported by Joe O'Connor for the National Post: "' have it on...

… this story of Louis Zemperini was a tale that grabs the reader by both the heart and the guts and keeps a clenched fist on both throughout the read.

WHAT would Batman make of the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Well, the man who brought him back to life in the critically acclaimed series The Dark Knight Returns thinks the anti-capitalist movement is "a pack of louts, thieves and rapists". In an open letter on his blog, comic book legend Frank Miller accuses the protesters of harming America with their "political garbage" and tells them to wake up to the country's real enemy - al-Qaeda. Miller, who is best known for his gritty Batman books, Sin City and 300, writes: 'Occupy' is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at...

If there was a point of no return for Sarah Palin — when the former Alaska governor irreversibly undermined herself as a potential presidential canedidate — it may have come in the aftermath of the attack on Gabrielle Giffords, when Palin taped a video calling it a "blood libel" to criticize her for having targeted the Arizona congresswoman's district with a crosshairs symbol online. In their new book, Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, make it clear that they objected to Palin's imagery themselves, and that Giffords raised concerns about it at the time: "She was troubled that her district...

Introducing Mark Levin’s new book be released on January 17, 2012! Pre-order your copy today from major online booksellers!

Listening to an interview of Peter Schwiezer talking to Steve Bannon (Director of Palin's Undefeated movie)...There's a whole chapter in Peter's new book exposing Warren Buffet. Supposedly he is involved in insider trading. This chapter of Schweizer's book shows how his company got the sweetheart deal to invest in Goldman Sachs in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. One member of Congress even bought Berkshire stock the day before the deal was even announced....It was a racket!

In this interview Rickards discusses his extraordinary new book Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis. He also lets King World News listeners know what to expect regarding gold manipulation, the ongoing currency wars and much more. The KWN audio interview with Jim Rickards is available now...

My gradual approach to an understanding of our currently trashed Constitution has been an interesting self-educational journey over the past year or so, and has led me to James Madison's "Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787" (with an introduction by Adrienne Koch). I am currently about a tenth of the way into it, and find it fascinating. The process of the convention and Madison's way of recording it is interesting enough in its own right, but to see the Founders' concerns being so clearly hashed out, and to understand how that fits with the final product...

...This farm was strewn with rusted car parts, overturned boxes of trash, empty soda bottles, crushed cans and downed trees, and through this WALL-E wasteland wandered dozens of chickens, cats, dogs, and three bloated broad-breasted white turkeys. The bearded proprietor ambled through the debris and grabbed up a fat, hiccuping bird that he placed in a laundry bin in the back of our car. "You gonna ... ?" he made a throat slashing motion and grinned. I gave him cash. The turkey may well have ingested STP, Mountain Dew, and crystal meth, but I remain confident that she was never...

The War Against the Poor: Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality by Frances Fox Piven. Tom Dispatch: We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now. The Occupy Wall Street movement has already...

There are moments in a person’s life that shake you to your foundation, that cause you to rethink everything you think you know, moments that hit like a two by four upside your head. Just such moment arrived for me late on a Friday afternoon. A friend of mine, let’s call him Adam, since that’s his name, has self-published a book, Formerly Filthy Rich, My Scandalous Life with a Billionaire Cougar. . . . Now his book is at the very least R-rated, and it’s an account of his six year marriage to Nu Skin co-founder Sandie Tillotson. Nu Skin,...

I am putting together a photo album. One consisting of my own photographs taken by the DSLR camera I own. I've already created one album, paying ~ $42 for a book of 26 pages (13 sheets) of my color photographs. Expensive, but worth it. (The service, which I selected after thorough online investigation, was Adoramapix. I am not associated with them, and seeing the results I do recommend them, but if you know of a service that is less costly and as good, please do let us know.) The theme and title of my second photo album is to be...

Dear Freepers, Do you an older teen with Homeschooling success, I'm in need of an affordable high school program for my 15 yo son. He's troubled and anxious at attending a predominately Black High School due to threats and fights.

I met Utah’s Governor Jon Huntsman and his wife Mary Kaye at an event in Las Vegas. My wife Sandie Tillotson had arranged for us to sit in the VIP section with them. Huntsman was a good friend of NuSkin, and helped open the lucrative Chinese market when he was a Trade Representative ... for the Bush Administration. MLM companies had tried to get into China for years, but NuSkin was the first, and Sandie said it was because of Hunstman. Of course it went both ways, and NuSkin was a good friend to Hunstman, and Sandie said she sent...

Publishers for US First Lady Michelle Obama’s upcoming cookbook have released an early preview of the book’s cover art and revealed more details about its spring release. American Grown: How the White House Kitchen Garden Inspires Families, Schools, and Communities, published by Crown Publishers, is Obama’s first cookbook and will be issued in both print and digital editions. The print edition will include photos of the White House garden and Obama throughout the seasons, and include more details about how the First Lady was inspired by her daughters Sasha and Malia to change her family’s eating habits and plant an...

The Occupy Wall Street history will be published by OR Books, a company that rose to fame after publishing "Going Rouge," a collection of negative essays about Sarah Palin that was released on the same day as her memoir, "Going Rogue."As offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street protests continue to spring up around the country, the publishing company OR Books has announced that it will release a history of the movement titled “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America.”OR Books said the book will be written by Writers for the 99%, a collection of writers...

Ya think?? NEW YORK – A new book released today documents how President Obama and progressive Democrats are deliberately overloading the U.S. financial system, using socialist designs to remake the economy. "Red Army: The Radical Network that must be defeated to save America" by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott unearths the radical origins of Obama's major economic legislation and policies, including the 2009 "stimulus" and health-care law. The book, with nearly 1,500 endnotes, documents how these radicals aim to remake the American financial system with massive government control. "Red Army" contains a number of other major scoops while exposing...

In a recent Times column entitled “Occupy the Classroom,” Nicholas Kristof went to bat for the idea of “early childhood education.” He quotes the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, as she forcefully states what we already know: there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students; and those gaps widen in later years. Question is, what does our Education Establishment intend to do about these gaps? Nicholas Kristof is sure that we should do something. And that something, apparently, is to do more and more of what we are already doing but force it on younger and...

A wide selection of Free preparedness books on a great number of subjects: Preparedness General. - All Hazard Preparedness Workbook - ARC - Emergency Preparedness Checklist - ARC - Family Disaster Plan - ARC - Preparing for Emergencies - ARC - Supply Kit - Becoming Self-Sufficient for 6 Months - Bug-out List - Civil Preparedness Guide (FEMA) - Diabetes Disaster Guidelines - Disaster Handbook - Disaster Supply Kit - Emergency Plan - Emergency Survival Preparation - Family Disaster Plan - Family Emergency Handbook - Family Emergency Plan Template - FEMA Are You Ready - FEMA Checklist - In Home Shelter...