Free Republic

The National Parks Service is convening a group of scholars who will examine lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history and identify prominent locations from the LGBT civil rights movement for nomination to the agency’s registries of historic places and landmarks, the agency announced Friday. “One of the objectives of the park service is to tell the story of America,” Sally Jewell, secretary of the Department of the Interior, told a crowd of about 150 supporters in a speech outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s West Village on Friday. “The contributions of women, minorities and members of the LGBT community...

Full Title: Oliver Stone signs on to direct Edward Snowden biopic: ‘It is one of the greatest stories of our time’/// Oliver Stone doesn’t shy away from controversial topics and his latest movie project is no exception. The Oscar-winning director announced Monday that he will tackle a film based on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Guardian reports. Stone’s film was based on an adaptation of Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s book, “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man.” Harding and other Guardian journalists will serve as consultants to the film. “This is one of the greatest...

Calling slain civil rights hero Harvey Milk a “predator” on its website this week, the fundamentalist Christian group American Family Association (AFA) urged members to refuse any mail postmarked with a recently-released commemorative stamp featuring the late San Francisco supervisor. “Harvey Milk was a very disreputable man and used his charm and power to prey on young boys with emotional problems and drug addiction,” reads the AFA’s press release. “He is the last person we should be featuring on a stamp.”

"The problem here is not the president. It’s the media. The media doesn't know how to deal with a more sophisticated foreign policy. I happened to be driving from Vermont to New York yesterday, I listened to the whole speech on the radio. I thought it was a good speech. I think what this president has consistently said is that we are no longer living in a polar world. We are going to -- our foreign policy is based on cooperation with other people. He showed it in Libya. He has showed it in Ukraine."

Hillary Clinton offers a detailed account of the deadly attack on the American embassy in Benghazi — and a pointed rebuttal to Republican critics who’ve laced into her over the incident — in a much-anticipated chapter of her forthcoming book, “Hard Choices,” obtained by POLITICO. “Those who exploit this tragedy over and over as a political tool minimize the sacrifice of those who served our country,” Clinton writes in the gripping chapter, “Benghazi: Under Attack.” Casting doubt on the motivations of congressional Republicans who have continued to investigate the attacks, including with an upcoming House select committee, Clinton continues: “I...

...Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a stalwart believer that global warming is a “hoax,” dismissed the report as a publicity stunt. Perhaps the senator needs a history lesson, because climate change has been leading to global conflict — and even the collapse of civilizations — for more than 3,000 years. Drought and famine led to internal rebellions in some societies and the sacking of others, as people fleeing hardship at home became conquerors abroad. One of the most vivid examples comes from around 1200 B.C. A centuries-long drought in...

The National Park Service is launching an initiative to make places and people of significance to the history of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual Americans part of the national narrative. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is convening a panel of 18 scholars next month that will be charged with exploring the LGBT movement’s story in areas such as law, religion, media, civil rights and the arts. The committee will identify relevant sites and its work will be used to evaluate them for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, designation as National Historic Landmarks, or consideration as national monuments, Park...

There is an internet site called WatchMojo.com. It has numerous top ten videos - top 10 Queen songs, top 10 nominated actors who never won an oscar , top ten Marvel movies, etc. I like going there to see various top 10 lists and such. Yesterday while browsing through it, they had a Top 10 U.S. Presidents. I watched it to see if I would be disappointed and to no surprise, I was. Why? Two things. One - President Reagan was not in their top 10. They had one term James Polk in there - #8 I believe - but...

‘Two, four, six, eight. Stop the violence. Stop the rape.” So chanted a group of Ohio University students calling themselves “f***rapeculture” at a protest a couple of years ago. Rape-culture activists have become a fixture on campuses throughout the country, and now, 55 colleges — including Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley — are under federal investigation for mishandling sexual-assault complaints. Some of my conservative/libertarian sisters have pointed out that the statistics on sexual assault are wildly inflated. Christina Hoff Sommers notes that the “one in five women are victims of rape” statistic that the Centers for Disease Control popularized (and that...

In the Atlantic, resident racial theorist Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the idea that opposition to President Bill Clinton in the 1990s was due to racial animus, just like today! Famously known as the “first black president,” Coates explains that racism caused people to turn against many of his policies, eventually leading to his impeachment. She claims that it was opposition to Clinton’s supposed policies to help blacks that many Americans opposed him– and that racism animated most American politics: White supremacy birthed American politics. In the 1990s, as today, the Democratic Party was perceived by many as the party of black...

We have written a couple of times about street artists, especially in Southern California, who are conducting a guerrilla campaign against the Obama administration. That campaign has escalated, as this is well beyond street art: a nicely produced parody movie poster titled “Saving Barack Obama.” It mimics this famous poster for “Saving Private Ryan.” Note the identical font and the teleprompters. The text says, “A Steven Spielberg ploy,” and at the bottom, “the mission is a fraud.” According to the Free Beacon, the posters “have appeared on bus stops and benches throughout Los Angeles, including just outside Melrose Avenue, the...

....The Ballad of the Civil Rights Movement has long been liberals’ favorite bed-time story. Martin Luther King Day may be the only day of the year when they feel completely, unambiguously proud to be Americans. It’s hard to exaggerate how important this is to liberal political thinking. They are perpetually looking for new ways to recapture that high. Conservatives tend to miss this because we see the Civil Rights story as settled history. We’re all pleased to have sloughed off the bigotry of our ancestors. Of course we want people to be judged “by the content of their character” and...

A fifth grade worksheet in Florida declares that the Federalists were different than the anti-federalists because they “believed in a strong national government that would have power over the states.” The Federalists believed in a central government, but it was to be a “limited government.” The anti-federalists believed that there should be no central government, and pushed for full sovereignty of the states. The Federalists, according to the worksheet, included “John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton.” While it is true that the Federalists wanted a central, or a “general,” government, the worksheet does...

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

Bart Ehrman, prolific author, New Testament scholar and former evangelical Christian, says it took him eight years to research and complete his new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Yet, a group of fellow scholars responded in their book, How God Became Jesus, by claiming that the Christian-turned-agnostic's "sloppy" scholarship on Jesus' divinity leaves much to be desired. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says his research reveals that Jesus, a first century Galilean, never claimed to be God, and that it...

The Duke lacrosse case was a spectacular scandal – a cause célèbre that had the country abuzz about race, class and gender. Three wealthy Duke students, all of them white, were charged with raping a poor black woman during a spring break party at a scruffy rental house in Durham. Then the whole mess imploded in real time, in the national media, due to prosecutorial misconduct. North Carolina, of all places in America, was perhaps the most fertile soil for a case that ended with the state attorney general declaring the three players innocent and state regulators disbarring the prosecutor,...

An atheist group is combatting a Christian Easter display at Wisconsin's Capitol building in Madison by setting up a sign that reads "Nobody died for our 'sins,' Jesus Christ is a myth." The Freedom From Religion Foundation says it rushed to get a permit for their display after seeing that the Concerned Women for America group was able to set up their own display at Wisconsin's Capitol building. The CWA group's display reportedly included a Christian cross and pro-life literature. The conservative women's group says on its website that it's dedicated to bringing "biblical principles into all levels of public...

Obama - my father served in World War II Obummer in a speech saying his father served in WW2 and when he came home he got the services that he needed.

The band was introduced by Stipe, who delivered an eloquent speech that addressed the power and historical importance of the band as part of a counterculture that somehow became mainstream. "Nirvana tapped into a voice that was yearning to be heard," he said. "In the '80s and early '90s, the idea of a hopeful, democratic country had practically been dismantled by Iran Contra, by AIDS, by the Reagan, Bush Sr. administrations. With their music and their attitudes, Nirvana blasted through all that with crystalline, nuclear rage and fury. Nirvana were kicking against the system to show a sweet and beautiful,...

A new religious statue in the town of Davidson, N.C., is unlike anything you might see in church. The statue depicts Jesus as a vagrant sleeping on a park bench. St. Alban's Episcopal Church installed the homeless Jesus statue on its property in the middle of an upscale neighborhood filled with well-kept townhomes. Jesus is huddled under a blanket with his face and hands obscured; only the crucifixion wounds on his uncovered feet give him away. The reaction was immediate. Some loved it; some didn't. "One woman from the neighborhood actually called police the first time she drove by," says...