Free Republic

Nice to listen to on many fronts.

Go figure, yet another example of allegedly non-existent rhetoric from a liberal using violent and/or gun-related imagery. Not to worry though, apparently it's only conservatives who set off left wingers when this occurs and and not the other way around. Back on Dec. 16, I wrote about a conversation between liberal radio host Ed Schultz and his producer James "Holmy" Holm, who also helps Schultz with "The Ed Show" on MSNBC. Schultz's radio listeners have grown quite familiar with Holm, who has come on the air to chat with Schultz several times a week over the last year. Let's hear...

Today is my 12th anniversary as a Freeper. I came across Free Republic in the summer of 1998 as a lurker, troubled by an increasingly lawless President Clinton, and what was happening to our country. I lurked for about four months, reading every day and being amazed at the group of talented and knowledgeable people on this site. When Jim Robinson put out the call for people to come to Washington, DC to attend the March for Justice Rally on October 30, 1998, I came from NJ on my own, not knowing a soul there, because someone was finally calling...

Poole and Rosenthal found that the House and Senate grew steadily less polarized from around 1900 to 1980. Then something happened; polarization has been sharply increasing ever since. A statistical method is fundamentally sound only if it tells you things you already know. The DW-NOMINATE maps tell us, first of all, that throughout the last 100 years both houses of Congress have split into two grand clusters, Democrats and Republicans. Within the Democrats, the Northern and Southern members form two clusters. Sometimes the Northern and Southern Democrats meld into each other without a gap, and other times (especially in the...

Ohio Democrat Congressman Charlie Wilson was first elected to Congress in the Democrat wave year of 2006. Prior to that, he had been a long-time member of the Ohio state legislature, first elected to the Ohio House in 1996 and the Ohio Senate in 2004. (One of his four grown sons succeeded him in the legislature and is currently an Ohio State Senator.) He was also married for 27 years to his wife, Clara. The marriage ended in divorce in 1990. BigGovernment has obtained a trial brief filed by Mrs. Clara Wilson prior to the formal divorce proceedings. The brief...

Many of you will still be alive in 50 years. It’s interesting to think about what life will be like in 50 years technologically and otherwise. Predictions are risky, especially when they’re about the future, but I believe we can make some pretty good guesses. To predict a predictable future, you need to look at the past. What was technological life like 50 years ago? 50 years ago was 1959. The world of 1959 is pretty much the same world we live in today technologically speaking. This is a vaguely horrifying fact which is little appreciated. In 1959, we had...

BAGHDAD – Built by the Persians on the northeast bank of the Tigris River almost 1,500 years ago, an arch from the ancient city of Ctesiphon still stands today as an impressive monument to the talents of ancient builders. A U.S. Soldier stands in front of the Arch of Ctesiphon, built by the Persians nearly 1,500 years ago in what is now Salman Pak, Iraq, May 31, 2010. The arch used to be an important tourist attraction, and Iraqi authorities hope to revive that tourism in the coming years. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Rebecca Schwab.Considered the oldest and largest...

How will we remember the 2000s? What were the high and low points? Who were the heroes and villains? Already, our impressions and perspectives have changed. Foreign affairs, an afterthought in 2000, exploded in 2001 and dominated the decade until the economic collapse of 2008. The war in Iraq looked good in 2003, then bad in 2006, then better again in 2008. To find out how our perceptions have evolved, we'd like your help with a short interactive experiment. We've selected some notable political moments from the last decade, going back to 1999. We'd like to show you four of...

I was recently scanning some of my mom's old slides into digital format. She was a teacher at a public school in the 1960's. I couldn't believe some of the religious symbols in her classroom. This is my first time posting a picture, so I hope it works:

The past and future of the Leftby Guy Rundle Monday, 28 September 2009 Years ago, I remember seeing a Hinze cartoon in the study of a friend, a Left Labor activist. It showed an inner city 90s teenager — opshop clothes, funny haircut — with a placard “no third runway” about to go off to a demo. “Coming to the airport protest Dad?” she said to an aging figure hunched over a chunky 90s computer. “No thanks, I’ve got to write another article on the death of the left,” said the harried, bearded figure. It was clear that Hinze’s sympathies were with the kid,...

Lectures in Medieval History -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Great Famine (1315-1317) and the Black Death (1346-1351) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 14th century was an era of catastrophes. Some of them man-made, such as the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Great Schism. These were caused by human beings, and we shall consider them a bit later. There were two more or less natural disasters either of which one would think would have been sufficient to throw medieval Europe into a real "Dark Ages": the Great Famine and the Black Death. Each caused millions of deaths, and each in its way demonstrated in...

The Ghost of Freedom Past I had a dream the other night, I didn't understand A figure walking through the mist, with flintlock in his hand. His clothes were torn and dirty, as he stood there by the bed, He took off his three-cornered hat, and speaking low, he said ... We fought a revolution, to secure our liberty, We wrote the Constitution, as a shield from tyranny, For future generations, this legacy we gave, In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. The freedom we secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep, But tyrants...

Hey, guys. Here's everything the Media hasn't reported on Obama in one place. Check it out and pass it on. http://www.ObamasPast.com

Univ. of Chicago Press Release, 2002: Obama was a Community Organizer in NY Many researchers and reporters have highlighted Obama’s secrecy about his years at Columbia University in New York City. In our recent article on Obama’s friendship with William Ayers, I wrote: Now the Mainstream Media is onto this story too, and has (finally) noticed that Obama is hiding records from Columbia University, where he completed his undergraduate studies after transferring from Occidental College in California. To be more precise, it’s not just Obama’s academic files that are missing, but more curiously, the files of his life. The Wall...

My radio partner Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas noted an appalling instance of historical ignorance in the Minneapolis public schools, and added his thoughts on the current epidemic of amnesia: When asked what historical figure they'd most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham's eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, "Yoko Ono" and/or "John Lennon." I weep for the future. The great historian David McCullough was on C-SPAN this past week, looking like a beaten man while describing the crushing level of historical ignorance among...

Barack Hussein Obama is no bambi, he learned dirty politics from the pros in Chicago's political underworld. Apparently, both Obama and Biden have ties to that famous lunatic, George Soros and his one-world view. As more and more information about Obama's own statements, his choices of activities and people with whom to associate himself after graduation from Harvard Law School, one aspect of him becomes abundantly clear...he is NO patriot of the United States of America. If he is not a patriot, then what is he...what is still unknown that is being kept hidden in his closet?The Chicago-type strong-arm tactics...

Animals Are 'Stuck In Time' With Little Idea Of Past Or Future, Study SuggestsNew research indicates that rats are able to keep track of how much time has passed since they discovered a piece of cheese, be it a little or a lot of time, but they don't actually form memories of when the discovery occurred. That is, the rats can't place the memories in time. (Credit: iStockphoto/Maria Bibikova) ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2008) — Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals...

From The TimesNorman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent March 24, 2008 The lowly sweet potato may unlock America’s past How the root vegetable found it's way across the Pacific One of the enduring mysteries of world history is whether the Americas had any contact with the Old World before Columbus, apart from the brief Viking settlement in Newfoundland. Many aspects of higher civilisation in the New World, from the invention of pottery to the building of pyramids, have been ascribed to European, Asian or African voyagers, but none has stood up to scrutiny. The one convincing piece of evidence for pre-Hispanic contact...

Unravelling the North West’s Viking past08 February 2008 The blood of the Vikings is still coursing through the veins of men living in the North West of England — according to a new study which has been just published. Focusing on the Wirral in Merseyside and West Lancashire the study of 100 men, whose surnames were in existence as far back as medieval times, has revealed that 50 per cent of their DNA is specifically linked to Scandinavian ancestry. The collaborative study, by The University of Nottingham, the University of Leicester and University College London, reveals that the population in...

Once I went hot-air ballooning in Normandy. It was the summer of 1991. It was exciting to float over the beautiful French hills and the farms with crisp crops in the fields. It was dusk, and we amused ourselves calling out "Bonsoir!" to cows and people in little cars. We had been up for an hour or so when we had a problem and had to land. We looked for an open field, aimed toward it, and came down a little hard. The gondola dragged, tipped and spilled us out. A half dozen of us emerged scrambling and laughing with...