Free Republic

Former White House officials on Wednesday rushed to defend President Obama against scathing criticism from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In his new memoir, Gates wrote the president did not believe in his own strategy in Afghanistan, and that for him, it was “all about getting out.” Former White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley said Gates shouldn’t have released his memoir while the war in Afghanistan is still being fought. “It’s one thing as historians look back on an administration, but in the middle of it, when you’re pursuing a war at the same time, and one that...

<p>The silver 2001 BMW 535i roared through Adams Morgan, occasionally screeching over the sidewalks as my accountant wrenched both hands from the wheel for another toke at the weed-pipe. "Gadzooks, man!" I shouted. "Can you keep it together for another fifteen miles, or at least outside the District limits?" We were halfway through our 35 mile journey from Bethesda to Falls Church, with enough dangerous narcotics to stun a grizzly bear in the trunk: We'd started with nine ounces of weed, six rocks of crack, a sugar jar full of blow, 36 vicodin tablets, a cage filled with live Bolivian arrow toads, and two jars of ketamine. Plus two quarts of Beefeater gin, a case of Schlitz malt liquor, and a four ounce ball of Afghan hash: Surely enough to get this pair of degenerate drug addicts to Fall's Church. After that what man could say?</p>

“Author Claims Norman Rockwell Was Closeted Homosexual,” William Bigelow writes at Big Government: American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, a new biography of the great American artist and iconic figure Norman Rockwell, accuses him of being a closeted homosexual, basing the spurious claim on the fact that Rockwell would stop young boys on the street or at recess and ask if they would pose for his illustrations. The author, Deborah Solomon, ignores the fact that Rockwell, who was married three times and had three children with his second wife, who died unexpectedly in 1959, stated in his...

<p>It seems that for liberals in the media, Phil Robertson has become a modern-day Emmanuel Goldstein, the number one enemy of the people in George Orwell's classic "1984." On Saturday, "humor columnist" Bill Mann used a racial slur against Robertson in an article at USA Today, calling him a "cracker" in an article about things one would not want under the Christmas tree. Mann followed that up with a tweet attacking Sarah Palin and the Duck Dynasty cast on Sunday.</p>

Many of us will gather our families around the TV this Christmas Eve to watch Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The story behind the movie is well known, so I won’t bore you with reiterations of such. Capra based It’s A Wonderful Life on the short Christmas story, The Greatest Gift, by Philip Van Doren Stern. His adaption on the big screen of the ultimately undeniable importance and fragility of each and every one of our lives has become a gift to us in and of itself. But Capra’s real gift to us was his philosophy as a filmmaker....

Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we...

worked for Major General John Borling when he was a Colonel in the basement of the Pentagon. I’ve been in touch with him and received permission to share one of the poems from his book. In addition to the poems being well developed and written, what is unique is the fact that originally they were NOT written. That’s right. All of these poems were developed in his and his fellow POW’s minds over several years while sitting in small solitary cells in the Hanoi Hilton. John was there almost 7 years. The poems were memorized and communicated between each other...

American feminists may be in for a surprise. A growing number of manly men in the country are taking back the masculinity that Betty Friedan and her ilk took from them during the beginning of the feminist movement in America.

There are signs building that the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers is getting ready to confirm what AT contributor Jack Cashill demonstrated years ago: he was the actual author of Barack Obama's first purported autobiography, Dreams from My Father. If he does so, this could be political dynamite for a president who has already demonstrated to the American people that he is willing to lie when it suits his political interests, as in, "You can keep your health insurance. Period." R. Emmett Tyrrell of The American Spectator offers the indicators that Ayers is getting ready to spill the beans:

Tuesday, December 03, 2013 Illinois high school requires parents to self-identify as liberal or conservative An assignment sent home from an Oak Forest, IL high school government class is raising eyebrows among parents who are shocked by the questionnaire they and their children are required to fill out. The questionnaire (below) has the parents identify their positions on a number of highly-charged issues, and then places them on a "political spectrum." The survey is part of Oak Forest High School's Common Core curriculum, which according to the school district's website is to ..."provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students...

Dates are slowly being released for the next leg of Gov. Sarah Palin’s “Good Tidings and Great Joy” book tour. At time of writing we have: December 4th: Liberty University December 6th: Billy Graham Library December 7th: Books-A-Million, Monroe, LA (see article below) From Sarah Palin’s Facebook page: Honored to be participating in the final Convocation of 2013 this Wednesday at Liberty University. Look forward to discussing “Good Tidings and Great Joy” and how together we can protect the heart of Christmas. More information here: https://www.liberty.edu/online/liberty-news/?mid=107216 P.S. This is a photo of the Heath antler pile that I wrote about...

"Nanotechnology-driven manufacturing will change our world in fundamental ways—but we shouldn’t get too worked up about it." In 1959, Richard Feynman delivered a lecture with the provocative title “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Speaking at a meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech, the Nobel-laureate-to-be speculated about the possibility of manipulating matter at the atomic level via exquisitely small machines. Would it be possible, Feynman asked, for such machinery to configure atoms themselves, producing atomically precise outputs? Might we one day have billions of submicroscopic factories working in parallel to produce anything and everything we need? It...

"After tomorrow those godd-n Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's not a threat. That's a promise." – LBJ to his mistress Madeleine Brown on the eve of JFK assassination Did LBJ have JFK killed? This question has endured ever since that fateful day of 50 years ago – Nov. 22, 1963. Former Nixon White House adviser and self-proclaimed "GOP hit man" Roger Stone makes this central argument in his new book, "The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ." Stone's very interesting narrative isn't another "conspiracy theory" book to add to the already voluminous number of fantastical JFK...

Clive Staples Lewis November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963

It’s amazing how God will send you the message you need when you need it.

Why is the national pride of that era gone? Could it possibly have anything to do with . . .

Fudan University in Shanghai is to study China's historical figures such as Confucius and the early emperors through modern DNA technology, Beijing Times reports. The studies follow the latest findings published on Monday on Cao Cao, a warlord who lived nearly 2,000 years ago in final years of the Eastern Han Dynasty. It debunked rumors that Cao's father Cao Song was fostered by comparing the DNA of Cao's living descendents and that found in the teeth of Cao's grandfather. Han Sheng from Fudan University, who led the Cao Cao research, says it is a breakthrough in the fields of both...

Okay, my last novel, "Castigo Cay," is in the Kindle store on a free run today through Wednesday. It's a departure from the characters and situations in the Enemies Trilogy, but it's still a look forward at a crumbling, semi-dystopian America. The main character is Dan Kilmer, a thirty-something former Marine scout/sniper who is trying to live as a free man in a world that is anything but free. This is the last novel I have written. Over the past six weeks I've put all of my titles on Kindle free runs. I have nothing left in the inventory, and...

With the current emergence of electronic devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, people are using more online resources and reading more e-books. At the 32nd International Istanbul Book Fair, publishers, online database providers and writers are focusing their attention on how the digital era has changed how people read and write. Siqi takes us there for more. Although the number of e-book readers is gradually increasing, the e-book publishing industry in Turkey is still rather small. Nihan Tanriyakul works for Dogan Group, the publisher with the largest circulation in Turkey last year. "Digital book sales are not big deals...

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter is slated to speak at the University of Southern California this Sunday, an event that has prompted talk of a protest and a firestorm of online controversy on Facebook, where many USC students called the best-selling author and political pundit an anti-Muslim xenophobic demagogue. “I’m gonna be really surprised if this women makes it out of USC alive lol,” wrote one student on the event’s evite on Facebook. “Based upon her ignorance and the amount of hate she’s brought, I expect a riot this Sunday. Not advocating such a thing of course but if it were...