Free Republic

As for my Savannah speech, about which so much has been said and in regard to which I am represented as setting forth "slavery" as the " corner-stone" of the Confederacy, it is proper for me to state that that speech was extemporaneous. The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me; and were published without further revision and with several glaring errors. The substance of what I said on slavery was, that on the points under the old Constitution out of which so much discussion, agitation, and strife between the States had arisen, no future contention...

We have seen that, irrespective of what happened in Europe, Graeco-Roman civilization was terminated very abruptly in the seventh century in its heartlands, in the Near and Middle East, and in North Africa. In these vast territories a new civilization, quite unlike that which had gone before, appeared with surprising rapidity. This new Islamic culture inherited the resources, wealth, and learning of the old one, and was, from the very beginning, at an enormous advantage over the remnant “Roman” lands which yet survived in Europe. The latter continent was still largely rural and, for the most part, “pagan” and tribal....

My notebook computer is dying and needs replacement. I like the idea of replacing it with a tablet/laptop hybrid, as I can think of a number of ways to make my life more productive if I could use both. I go out to jobsites and gather information on paper, then bring it back and enter it into the computer and produce reports. Seems to me the info could be entered into a tablet and skip a step. I also do a fair bit of work with graphics and such, but for that I normally hook up to a large monitor...

I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, the son of — at that time — McGovern Democrats. My dad was a math professor at the local college, my mom was a public-school teacher, and neither one of them had voted for a Republican in their lives — and had no intention to. Me? As soon as I started learning about politics, I turned towards conservatism — dramatically — and started hectoring my parents. (Just after she pulled the lever for Mondale in 1984, I remember telling my mother that the moment she voted I’d felt a disturbance in...

Where was Secular Humanism at Lepanto? The moral of this story, this afterword, is "Never bring a knife to a gunfight." Keep that in mind as you read. In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don't think so. We're not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We'll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D'Souza or the pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book,...

In a few hours' time, the President of the United States will apparently do to his oath of office what the Islamic State does to its captives. As I said to Hugh Hewitt the other day, even a constitution of meticulously constructed checks and balances requires a certain seemliness of its political class. This chief executive is brazen in his lawlessness, and ever more so. And he has calculated that those who object lack the stomach to do anything about it. We shall see. However, I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week - Barack...

I have a Dell notebook that's about 5 years old. Windows 7. It works fine most of the time, but every few hours it goes into a mode where the CPU goes straight to 100% usage and stays there, making it unusable. Sometimes it self corrects after 15 minutes or an hour, or sometimes I have to do a hard reboot. Then it works fine again for a while. Any suggestions?

Though his new collection of essays, “The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned” (Regnery), recounts many of the biggest political events of recent history, bestselling author Steyn says that’s not the real battleground. While everyone is focused on the 2014 midterms, the question about where our country is headed is being decided in our entertainment and our schools. Here, in an excerpt from the book, he explains how culture is king. Over the past few decades, I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar...

If somebody can post the CDC poster as a graphic, that would be great. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20140909060457/http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/pdf/ppe-poster.pdf

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A jury in Jacksonville, Fla., found Michael Dunn, a white man who fatally shot a black teenager after an argument over loud music outside a convenience store, guilty of first-degree murder Wednesday. Prosecutors said the 47-year-old Dunn shot with intent to kill when he fired 10 times into a sports utility vehicle carrying 17-year-old Jordan Davis and three of his friends in November 2012. The jury reached its verdict after more than five hours of deliberations. Dunn, who took the stand in his own defense, said he fired in self-defense. He told jurors that he saw Davis...

Some conservatives have tried to make something of the fact that President Barack Obama routinely refers to the organization that seized the Iraqi city of Mosul and declared a caliphate not as the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or ISIS, but as the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIL. In his televised address about the group on September 10, for example, he used the acronym ISIL twenty times. The ISIS vs. ISIL controversy first emerged, as far as I can tell, when FoxNews.com published “Obama’s Use of ISIL, not ISIS, Tells Another Story” on August 24,...

Barack Obama encouraged people to compare him to Abraham Lincoln. For instance, here’s the opening from a 2007 ABC News piece co-written by Jake Tapper: Standing outside the Historic Old State Capitol building where Abraham Lincoln gave a famous speech condemning slavery and calling for the United States to unite, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a 45-year-old with two years of federal legislative experience under his belt, today announced that he will claim the mantle of Lincoln and as president heal a divided nation. The piece goes on: But most of all Springfield allowed Obama to immodestly and continuously compare himself...

Why conservative skeptics are wrong about street harassment. On Thursday, most of the women on the Fox News show Outnumbered agreed with a New York Post op-ed in which Doree Lewak defended catcalling. When construction workers whistle at her, Lewak says, “my ego and I can’t fit through the door!” A few weeks ago, this video by Vocativ went viral on social media. In it, women describe getting catcalled on the street, and eventually sexually harassed, culminating in Jennifer Corey, who was Miss District of Columbia 2010, discussing one instance of her being cornered and harassed on public transportation. Outnumbered’s...

The abuse experienced by the children of Rotherham is beyond belief. Sexual abuse. Physical abuse. Psychological abuse. It is all laid out in brutal detail in the report by Alexis Jay. But one equally vicious aspect of the assaults on these children is identified in a less explicit way. And that is the manner in which the vast majority of the Rotherham victims were also racially abused.

Taking shape in parts of Iraq and Syria, the Islamist caliphate known as ISIS is already a rival in lunacy and horror to North Korea. The caliph has decreed that women from puberty up to the age of the menopause — estimated to be as many as four million — must undergo compulsory genital mutilation. I am waiting to find out what feminists have to say about this. Christianity has roots in that same territory going back to the first centuries after Jesus Christ. Raqqa in Syria is one of the cities under ISIS, and Assyrian Christians there are the...

I'm having more and more trouble keeping track of passwords on multiple sites. I would appreciate any advice someone might have on an app that would help me to do so securely and efficiently. I'm posting this because Freepers have an astonishingly wide range of knowledge and have helped me a lot in the past. Here's what I'd like: Android app that allows me to store all passwords and usernames securely, behind a single master password. Easy, preferably automatic, syncing to my PC and the cloud. Access to the stored info by phone, PC or by any computer or other...

I just purchased a purportedly unlocked AT&T Samsung Exhilarate on ebay. Works fine, but it apparently wasn't really unlocked, so I can't change APN settings and therefore can't use it to access 3G or 4G internet. AT&T simply hangs up on me automatically when I try to contact Customer Service, apparently because I'm not an active customer. You would think smart businessmen would realize someone who isn't a customer at the moment is still a potential future customer, but apparently not. Their website outlines procedures for getting a phone unlocked, but only for present or past ATT customers, which I'm...

I have a female relative in FL who has been working full-time for a day care operation since January. They have about 30 teachers and such. They provide a health care plan to full-time employees, and all but my relative have been offered access. They claim they don't have the money to put her on the plan now, and keep putting her off that they'll get her on when they can. Is this legal, and if not how can she proceed to make them do what they should?

Last week the state of Oklahoma “botched” an execution. Botched is the accepted term in the media coverage, despite the fact that Clayton Lockett was executed. He just died badly, suffering for 43 minutes until he eventually had a heart attack. Oklahoma’s governor has called for an investigation. President Obama asked Attorney General Eric Holder (who is seeking the death penalty in the Boston Marathon bombing case) to review the death penalty. Obama’s position was a perfectly defensible straddle: “The individual . . . had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes, and I’ve said in the past that there are certain...

Vladimir Putin’s slow-rolling conquest of Ukraine has restarted openly today, with calls for an “independence referendum” for the newly declared “People’s Republic of Donetsk” in the East. It’s clear that Moscow intends to conquer something like half of Ukraine – through quasi-covert means if possible, by overt invasion if necessary. Regardless, this will place the West on a course for something like the Cold War 2.0 I’ve written about. That notion is not accepted yet by many in the West, who seem not to understand Putin’s agenda. Among the doubters is President Obama, who dismissed the idea of a new...