Free Republic

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last...

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When President Obama ponders tough decisions at the White House, he may join the cadre of presidents who have sought inspiration in the Truman Balcony’s stunning vista, gazing at the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, which commemorate our first and third commanders in chief. But there’s a man missing from this presidential panorama. Where is John Adams, our feisty second president and lifelong American patriot? If George Washington was the sword of the revolution and Thomas Jefferson the pen, why have we neglected the voice of our nation’s independence? Adams himself predicted this omission. “Monuments will never be erected...

President Obama and the Secular Left - just alone the last two years - have sought every opportunity to transform, undermine, eradicate, rewrite, slander, bulldoze, and undo what is left of our sacred Constitution, our Judeo/Christian heritage, our national security, our free markets, liberties and republic ideals. The rise of the Left and godless Liberalism in America has been slowly but ever rising since the 1920’s until today, where it is at a fever pitch. The Left has always sought to make war with America’s Judeo/ Christian values (moral and spiritual) by imposing their secular and godless immorality on the...

When I was a boy my family had a Time-Life book on the mind which featured a chart of the presumed IQs of famous dead men. Goethe, as I recall, led the pack, at 210. But the Founding Fathers did very well: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington all scored over 150. As the Fourth of July approaches, we'd do well to remember that the Founders were a smart lot, with few gentleman's C's among them. Yet they didn't know everything. They were strongest in law, political philosophy and history--all essential subjects for revolutionaries and statesmen. But another subject,...

I think Jefferson sorely misunderstood in his theology. His politic was too often identified as atheism. Jefferson might be described today as a Libertarian, running counter to most of his contemporaries who were zealously Christian, bleeding into their political views. Comments like, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This comment was simply to say that government had no place in religion, it should be...

Free Speech and the Constitution are under attack. These research notes will help us gain historic perspective. The Sedition Act of 1798. A. The Philosophical Difference Hamilton and John Adams were the driving force behind the philosophy of power. They wanted strong military, powerful industry, and strong central government -- the Federalist Party. Thomas Jefferson led the opposing view -- lean military budget, weak central government, and an agricultural society that was considered to be more virtuous. [For the most part, I like America to be strong. But how much power should one political party have?] Democrats claim that Thomas...

Thomas Paine's political writings, I am singular enough to believe, have done more harm than his irreligious ones. He understood neither government nor religion. From a malignant heart he wrote virulent declamations, which the enthusiastic fury of the times intimidated all men, even Mr. Burke, from answering as he ought. His deism, as it appears to me, has promoted rather than retarded the cause of revolution in America, and indeed in Europe. His billingsgate, stolen from Blount's Oracles of Reason, from Bolingbroke., Voltaire, Berenger, &c., will never discredit Christianity, which will hold its ground in some degree as long as...

Congress approves the Declaration of Independence, brilliant scene from John Adams mini-series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvpZxMfKaU&feature=player_embedded

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is set to marry his longtime girlfriend, Kathryn Rogers, next week in an intimate ceremony at his beachfront home in Palm Beach, Fla. Limbaugh, 59, met 33-year-old Rogers, a direct descendant of Founding Father John Adams, in 2004 when she ran a golf tournament/charity fundraiser and Limbaugh was a celebrity guest, Jose Lambiet reports in his column in the Palm Beach Post. At the time, Limbaugh was getting divorced from third wife Marta. That split was finalized later that year, and Limbaugh and Rogers were an item by the summer of 2007.

Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency's former general counsel said Wednesday. John Rizzo, who was the agency's top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators' identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba. "Well I think this is far more serious than...

WASHINGTON—Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), ranking member of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee today, sent a letter cosigned by 47 colleagues to President Obama urging a full and thorough investigation of the ACLU’s John Adams project which may have intentionally revealed the identity of covert CIA operatives to members of Al Qaeda currently held at Guantanamo Bay. The following is the list of cosigners on the letter to President Obama regarding the alleged outing of covert CIA agents by ACLU’s John Adam’s project: Todd Akin (R-MO), Robert Aderholt (R-AL), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), Rob Bishop (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn...

QUINCY — Paul Hines, an assistant city solicitor, was combing through dozens of old boxes in the musty basement of City Hall, searching for records to defend the city from a lawsuit, when he made an unexpected find. A dust-covered box in one of the 126-year-old building’s former jail cells was filled with old scrapbooks. As Hines leafed through the brittle pages earlier this month, he came upon a letter from 1826 that addressed the burial of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, in First Parish Church across the street from City Hall. And when he flipped over the sheet...

A team of CIA counterintelligence officials recently visited the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and concluded that CIA interrogators face the risk of exposure to al Qaeda through inmates' contacts with defense attorneys, according to U.S. officials. The agency's "tiger team" of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort...

Oh, Mr. Adams, how we need your spiritual heirs today!

Few could fathom why 55-year-old John Jay turned down President Adams’s nomination to rejoin the Supreme Court when his two terms as New York’s governor ended. What would lead him, in the hale prime of life, to retire instead to the plain yellow house he’d just built on a hilltop at the remote northern edge of Westchester County, two days’ ride from Manhattan, where visitors were few and the mail and newspapers came but once a week? After 27 years at the forge of the new nation’s founding, why would so lavishly talented a man give up his vital role...

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- More than 200 years after they were written, about 5,000 previously unpublished documents of the founders of the United States -- including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison -- are now available to the public at no cost. The Documents Compass group of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia has spent much of the past year proofreading and transcribing thousands of pages of letters and other papers. The documents are available online for free at the University of Virginia Press' digital imprint called Rotunda. "It's an exciting project," said Penelope Kaiserlian, director...

"Resolved, That Dr. Franklin, Mr. J. Adams and Mr. Jefferson, be a committee, to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America." – July 4, 1776, Journals of Continental Congress For the design team, Congress chose three of the five men who were on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Although these distinguished committee members were among the ablest minds in the new nation, they had little knowledge of heraldry. To help convey their vision, they chose the artist Pierre Eugène Du Simitière to work with them.

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department is investigating whether Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with roles in the Sept. 11 attacks were improperly given photos of CIA officers or contractors, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The investigation, headed by the Justice Department's counterespionage chief, John Dion, is trying to determine if military lawyers defending the detainees divulged classified information or compromised covert CIA officers, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke only on condition of anonymity. It is a violation of federal law to identify CIA covert personnel, and it is a...

It seems John Quincy Adams was way ahead of his time. The sixth U.S. president was fond of making one-line-a-day entries in his diary. A student visiting his archives noticed how similar those entries are to today's Twitter updates, which are limited to 140 characters. Starting Wednesday, the Massachusetts Historical Society will tweet daily doses of Adams' trip to Russia as U.S. minister 200 years ago. The tweets — taken verbatim from his diary — will include his favorite reads, memorable meals, weather and the daily drama of months at sea.

John Adams Said :Ideology = an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes ,a systematic way of going wrong with confidence.

John Adans: Yesterday, the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." ...

In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams told her of the actions of the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. "The second day of July, 1776 [the actual day the Declaration was signed], will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations,...

Frequently Asked Dead Presidents Questions Which Two Presidents Died On The Same Day?? I don't know why (maybe it's on a lesson plan for schools around the country) but this little question with a quick answer (and one that is quickly found in any ready reference) has been asked of me so often that I finally decided to list the answer here. The answer is John Adams (second President) and Thomas Jefferson (third President). These two men died on the same day. But that's not all; read on....The question with an even more interesting answer is, "On which day did...

Excerpt from John Adams' famous letter of July 3, 1776, in which he wrote to his wife Abigail what his thoughts were about celebrating the Fourth of July: "I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think...

Very interesting. When men were men and women, women No corrections made. "I have a great Deal of Leisure, which I chiefly employ in Scribbling, that my Mind may not stand still or run back like my Fortune." John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, 29 June 1774, (third letter written on that date) From Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. March 1 1780 My Dearest Friend I had scarcly closed my packet to you when I received your Letters dated Ferrol [John to Abigail, 11 December 1779 ( L17791212ja)] and Corunna [John to Abigail, 16 December 1779] . I am...

Last week Obama told the planet on his Dixie Chick America Sucks Euro-Tour that ol’ bigheaded America is not and has never been a Christian nation. I believe he said that right after he bowed and curtsied to the Saudi King and told the French that the US has been stuck-up meanies to their jealous and ungrateful Euro-socialist cousins. Damn you, Yankee doodle dandies. America’s not a Christian nation? Well, it’s not a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim (yet) or Tai Chi nation. I know Barack is auguring for the USA to become an Obamanation, but heretofore from what I’ve read regarding...

John Adams was always one to take a stand and be counted. With his reputation for scrupulous honesty, Adams had been elected a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and to the second one in 1776. It was at the second one that he found some of his fellow delegates undecided about naming a commanding officer for a proposed Continental Army. Adams (1735-1826) believed it was time for decisive action and for them "to declare themselves for or against something," he said to his cousin Samuel Adams. "I am determined this morning to make a direct motion that...

John Adams Prophecy on the Constitution and Morality February 17, 2009 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is Joe in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Great to have you here, sir. Thank you. CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing? RUSH: Just well, just fine. CALLER: Hey, Rush, I wonder if you remember me from over a year ago. I called you in '07 complaining about George Bush, and I likened him to our Jimmy Carter in the Republican Party. I was just really complaining about his support for Specter, and now I'm just so angry to see what we have today with Specter supporting...

John Witherspoon was not only a Founding Father, but in his roles as preacher and professor he taught and influenced many of the great men of the Founding era.On November 15, 1794, a 72-year-old Presbyterian preacher lay dying on his farm near Princeton, New Jersey. In some ways he may have welcomed death. His wife had died five years earlier, and for over two years he had been blind, so his associates had to lead him into the pulpit, where he still preached with his usual earnestness and perhaps with more than his usual solemnity and animation. Even though his...

John Adams, one of the most revered living classical composers, has claimed that he is blacklisted in his native America and is being followed by the security services. The 61-year-old musician has accused the United States of being in the grip of a political and moral panic and has complained that he is now grilled by airport immigration officers whenever he flies home because of his controversial reputation.

THE NEW YORK TIMES VS. HELMS, PART 529,876July 9, 2008 Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great American patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God. Helms is now the second great American patriot I've always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: "I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.") After a week of...

Name your three top American Revolution Heroes

A Nation of Men and Not Laws: The Leftist Perversion of American Thought By: Rob Shepherd (Mr. Shepherd is a first-year law student at Quinnipiac School of Law and the former three-term Treasurer of the Club; he doesn’t like hippies) As National Review's Richard Brookheiser noted in his most recent work, answering what the Founding Fathers would think of our modern nation is largely left up to interpretation. Thus, while some may claim that issues such as the abortion or drug legalization run contrary to the goals of our nation's founders, this assertion is left up to debate. What is...

Based on David McCullough's 2001 best-selling book, "John Adams," the HBO 7-part mini-series starring Paul Giamatti as John Adams and Laura Linney as Abigail Adams is as important for the message that it sends as it is for the history it conveys. Beginning with young attorney Adams's defense of the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre (for whom he won an acquittal), the story follows the political career and personal life of Adams as he becomes a key member of the Continental Congress, editor/co-drafter of the Declaration of Independence, minister to France and England, vice president, then president....

But I have been listening to all of the attempts that people are making to bring Obama down -- and, by the way, these attempts are not so much to destroy him or harm him in the Democrat primary because it isn't going to happen. So we're looking at the general election in terms of Obama. This weekend, I ran into some Republicans who were for Obama. They know full-fledged he's a liberal. They don't care. They like his personality. So when you tell 'em about William Ayers, they don't care. When you tell 'em about Jeremiah Wright (and they...

I don't know about you, but I'm amazed - amazed at the courage, fortitude and strength of our Founding Fathers. They put their lives on the line for an untested and abstract concept called America, not knowing if it would succeed or fail. We owe them everything. Sometimes I think we have squandered our inheritance. What are your thoughts?

HBO's Crabby Abby "..My Wife who had always encouraged and animated me, in all antecedent dangers and perplexities, did not fail me on this Occasion..." -- John Adams, Autobiography, on the news of his leaving for France. Memo to Laura Linney, HBO: Abigail Adams was smart, well-read, loving, devout, and certainly forthright. She was not, however, a peevish, brooding feminist bore. America's Second First Lady, at the outset, is quite capable of speaking for herself; you can read everything she ever wrote here, but somehow you get the feeling Ms. Linney's shooting schedule didn't allow for a reading light in...

Exchange: HBO's 'John Adams' (Part 3) Two scholars of early U.S. history debate the high-profile miniseries with its writer. John Patrick Diggins, Kirk Ellis, and Steven Waldman , The New Republic Published: Monday, March 24, 2008 HBO's seven-part miniseries, John Adams, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about America's second president, premiered last weekend. The New Republic asked historian John Patrick Diggins and author Steven Waldman to critique the series. Click here to see their discussion of Parts 1 and 2. This week, Kirk Ellis, the series' writer and co-executive producer, will be joining the discussion. Below, Waldman kicks...

HBO miniseries on "John Adams" demonstrates early form of vaccination for smallpox For many who watched Sunday night's airing of "John Adams," the new HBO series, one scene seemed almost barbaric: A doctor makes incisions with a lancet in the arms of Abigail Adams and her children and places smallpox material directly into the wounds. Abigail Adams believed that you could protect healthy people by injecting them with a deadly disease. Wouldn't that be just as dangerous as hanging around with the infected soldiers shown in the movie? No, Abigail knew what she was doing when she insisted that her...

Thanks to the marketing power of HBO, John Adams is no longer the forgotten American revolutionary — at least for a week. Adams feared his role would be neglected. Thomas Jefferson got all the credit for writing the Declaration of Independence, even though Adams was on that committee and had suggested that Jefferson draft it, since he was a better writer and a Virginian. (Adams wanted some geographic diversity to bind the southern colonies with New England in a common cause.) For the same geopolitical reason, Adams proposed that George Washington of Virginia command the Continental Army. Adams also worked...

When John Adams begins acting like a pompous windbag, his wife, Abigail, reproaches him with a single word. John Adams on hbo.com “Ambition,” Abigail warns, when Adams tells her that he will get a lot of attention if he defends British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial. “Vanity” is what she says to steer her husband away from what she calls “ostentatious erudition.” “Casting,” she might have told the producers of this new seven-part HBO mini-series, which begins on Sunday evening with a double episode. John Adams is the weakest part of “John Adams.” Based on David McCullough’s biography of...

When Hollywood's movie-makers and docu-dramatists get their hands on American history, accuracy, reality and truth often are tortured beyond recognition. But starting at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 16, HBO Films will be delivering the seven-part, nine-hour mini-series "John Adams."

When Hollywood's movie-makers and docu-dramatists get their hands on American history, accuracy, reality and truth often are tortured beyond recognition. But starting at 8 p.m. Sunday, March 16, HBO Films will be delivering the seven-part, nine-hour mini-series "John Adams." ... it is by all accounts a high-quality, historically accurate and meticulously faithful adaptation of super-historian David McCullough's blockbuster 2001 book of the same name. I talked to McCullough about the making of the HBO series Tuesday by phone from his home in West Tisbury, Mass.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Mint is hoping that Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore can do what Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea couldn't - get Americans to use dollar coins. The Mint on Monday revealed the design of the new U.S. $1 coin, which will be issued in a series that will eventually include the faces of each U.S. president. It will release four new presidential dollars each year, starting with George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 2007.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love. To make the point, I want to discuss a single human being and why we should know him. And the first thing I want to say about him is that he is an example of the transforming miracle of education. When he and others wrote in the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” what they meant by “happiness” wasn't longer vacations or more material goods. They were talking about the enlargement of the human experience through the life of...

NEW YORK, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- New York-based Home Box Office is looking to cast "Deadwood" star Paul Giamatti as the second U.S. President John Adams in a miniseries to begin in January. Giamatti, best known for his role as the wine-loving schoolteacher in "Sideways," will play the founding father in a seven-episode series produced by Tom Hanks, the New York Post reported Giamatti begins as the young Adams, a Harvard-educated lawyer who identified with the patriots' cause and became involved in the Revolutionary War. "John Adams" is being filmed in Virginia with several scenes shot at the College of...

Critics of higher education who say American colleges do not prepare students for life after graduation may be way off base: Among federal judges, the problem may be that they do try to apply their education to the post-graduate day jobs that they hold. “At a seminar for federal judges in Kansas City, one of the more conservative judges said, ‘Isn’t it a shame that people don’t know the five rights in the first amendment,’” historian John Kaminski remembered in a recent forum at the Cato Institute. “One of the more activist judges said, ‘Five rights, I’ve been giving 25...

On this July Fourth, our Independence Day, let us consider patriotism. And let us first consider what patriotism is not. Patriotism is not a flag-burning amendment. It is not a lapel pin. It is not red, white and blue bunting on a political platform. It is not the property of any politician or political party. It is not associated with a particular strategy in Iraq. And while these rituals are admirable ways of expressing affinity for our nation, patriotism is not the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem. Uniquely among nations, the United States was founded on principles so...

On the morning of July 4, 1826, the leading residents of Quincy, Mass., and Charlottesville, Va., began their last celebration of the nation’s birth – and their last day on Earth. They faced eternity as friends. High on his small mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the master of Monticello lay asleep. Throughout the spring, Thomas Jefferson had become increasingly feeble. By mid-June, the daily horseback rides were over. In Quincy, John Adams’ health had also declined during the late winter and spring. On sunny days, he was able to take short carriage rides, but even they had...