Free Republic

"[W]e are born to be happy, to be abundantly supplied with every good thing, to have fun in living, to consciously unite with the Divine Power that is around us and within us, and to grow and expand forever. " -- Ernest Holmes

Praise the Lord. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who finds great delight in his commands. Psalm 112:1 Have you ever been in the presence of someone truly great? The greatness I'm talking about is not someone who’s powerful or influential or famous or rich. I'm talking about someone who you admire so much that you hang on his/her every word. You write down what he/she says. Sometimes you understand everything she/he says and there are times what he/she says is a complete mystery to you. You inquire more about the person. You ask others what they know...

I was driving near the border of Nevada about a week ago, when I saw a sign, Martin Luther King Jr. Highway. My mind instantly raced back 40 years. I remember being moved as I watched this mesmerizing orator on television as he spoke outside the Lincoln Memorial. Even Walter Cronkite said about him, ''I only met Martin Luther King on a few occasions but I was always struck by the obvious force, the power of his character.'' King's life and death is the stuff of legend now. But it's what he couldn't do that causes me to wonder today....

Heroism: To leap in front of a 370-ton locomotive to save a stranger in a dank New York subway pit takes a kind of courage we'd all like to think we have but don't. Wesley Autrey showed it Tuesday and elevated us all. The new year has begun on a high note from Harlem after Autrey, 50, a construction worker on his way to work with his two little daughters, headed into Manhattan's 137th Street-City College station. Before he got through the turnstile, Autrey spotted a young man thrashing about in a seizure and called for help. But he didn't...

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - July 19, 2006 - A University of Illinois researcher had discovered a fourth copy of a rare letter Abraham Lincoln had written by to the nation's governors in 1861. The letter John Lupton found Tuesday in the Lehigh County Historical Society's holdings was one Lincoln wrote as part of an unsuccessful ratification process for a constitutional amendment Congress adopted during the term of his predecessor, President James Buchanan, that would have made slavery the law of the land. The president remembered for abolishing slavery had been willing to push the amendment as "kind of a carrot...

WASHINGTON, April 11, 2006 – Three years after his brigade seized control of Baghdad's international airport from Iraqi forces' control, Army Col. William Grimsley said he believes that country is taking the critical first steps toward reclaiming its past greatness. Grimsley, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Combat Brigade Team during the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, said history - not current events - will tell the true story of Iraq's metamorphosis. And that story will show how Iraq ultimately emerged from almost 40 years of a regime that ignored the people's needs and undermined its potential, Grimsley,...

Lessons from Lincoln By Joseph Knippenberg Last month, I made the argument that the debate over the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping would ultimately be resolved politically, not legally or judicially. The question, I argued (following John Locke), was whether “the public good” was better served by a rapid and unencumbered response to new intelligence, or by strict adherence in all instances to legal procedures. When this occurs, the ultimate safeguards of our liberty reside in the character of those acting on our behalf, and in the capacity of our political system to rein them in—either through the legislative...

Bush personifies all that pseudo intellectuals detest President George W. Bush is reviled by the Lib-Left media and its adherents and the pseudo-intellectual set in much the same way as President Ronald Reagan was reviled by the Lib-Left media and the pseudo-intellectual set. As we now know, Reagan was actually smarter than all of his detractors, and it may well be Bush will turn out that way, too. The likes of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul ignored the hyenas and the catcalls of the Liberal-Left and backed Reagan to the hilt and thereby brought down one...

I just heard that Ronald Reagan, our 40th President, was named as the greatest American by a Discovery channel poll. I just heard it on Fox News a few moments ago.

But What Made Him Great? Even the secular world against which he stood so defiantly recognized his greatness. But what was it that was so special about John Paul II, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church? What set him apart and above all the secular leaders of his time? At 84, he was old, stooped, suffered from Parkinson’s and slurred his speech. He was decried by our media and cultural elites as a moral reactionary who had failed to bring his church into the 21st century. Yet, even as the editorial writers fulminated and the dissident clergy fumed,...

George Washington was born 273 years ago today in the British colony of Virginia. At his death in 1799, after an active life as soldier, surveyor, planter, politician, revolutionary, and first Chief Executive of the greatest republic since Rome, he was widely regarded as the greatest man of his time. And although he was once routinely voted the “best” president by Presidential scholars, recent surveys of the public unaccoutably have demoted him. Very few average Americans, one would venture to guess, would be able to give a cogent reason why. Perhaps this is simply a further example of our dismal...

For weeks now, I have been working on an essay, hoping to inspire everyone to get to the polls next week. It was going to be about our brave men and women on the battlefield, fighting to defend our freedom, and why they (and you) are hated by European and Arab nations. I told FReepers to watch for it, but I’m not doing that essay any longer. Instead, I just want to share a few thoughts with you all that have been on my mind, but they require a bit of background. I’ve been called long-winded with my essays before,...

Upcoming appearances of Ann Coulter on Television:

If anything is laid to rest with him at the end of this remarkable week, it ought to be the lazy condescension of the elites. That's all but indestructible, alas. Last Monday, the Washington Post and many other papers carried an Associated Press story by Adam Geller on Reagan's economic legacy which began, ''He had almost no schooling in economics...'' Actually, that's one of the few things he did have schooling in: In 1932, he earned a bachelor's degree in social science and economics from Eureka College. I guess a certificate from Eureka just doesn't impress these reporters the way...

A Time for Choosing aka The Speech: Ronald Reagan's stump speech for Barry Goldwater 27 Oct 64 I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this. It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government." This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This...

World Pays Tribute to Reagan - Post your Pics HereThere have been some really nice pics of independent, spontaneous memorials that are going up around the world to honor President Reagan. You know, the kind, the ones that are sprouting up in city parks, on bridge overpasses, at people's homes. Post them here so. There are some scattered about FR that have been really great. Thought we could collect them here as our FR scrap book on the passing of a great president.God Bless Ronald Reagan

"The Great Communicator" was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our dessicated elites: "We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." And at the end of a grim, grey decade -- Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages -- Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of Nato, with free markets and freely...

June 05, 2004: I sit here not surprised at the announcement of President Ronald Reagan's passing, but incredibly affected. While it was clear that his time was drawing near, I can say with all certainty that I was unprepared for the actual moment, the event, of his passing. In the end, it was the effects of Alzheimer's doing what both political foe and mortal enemy could not do to "The Great Communicator." It is always a somber time in America when a former president passes away. Some have fallen to the assassin's bullet. But most go quietly into the afterlife,...

In his final "Sermon By the Sea" given in 1959 at Asilomar, California, Ernest Holmes shared with us his vision of the outcome of global well-being, the human species and Earth transformed by the consciousness that he had articulated as Science of Mind. His Sermon is a prescription for planetary resurrection, a prophetic, millennial assertion of the role of Religious Science in bringing about the world's rebirth: [Science of Mind] is the most direct impartation of Divine Wisdom that has ever come to the world, because it incorporates the precepts of Jesus, and Emerson, and Buddha, and all the rest...