Free Republic

US Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, 1932: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” You governors are now seeing, whether you like it or not, a competitive situation developing among the states. Some states are loosening the COVID restrictions; others are tightening them.

An interesting phenomenon in politics is the flip flop. What would cause a politician who takes a stand on an issue to reverse himself and take precisely the opposite stand on the same issue? Even more interesting is the about face or volte face. The volte face goes beyond the flip flop because it represents a total and usually lasting shift of course, as when Reagan abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican. More interesting even than the volte face is when a whole group or party makes this shift. Perhaps the most dramatic example in our lifetime is...

Third Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois September 15, 1858 MR. DOUGLAS' SPEECH. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I appear before you today in pursuance of a previous notice, and have made arrangements with Mr. Lincoln to divide time, and discuss with him the leading political topics that now agitate the country. Prior to 1854 this country was divided into two great political parties known as Whig and Democratic. These parties differed from each other on certain questions which were then deemed to be important to the best interests of the Republic. Whig and Democrats differed about a bank, the...

Open Message to Mr. Beck (self proclaimed historian). Tonight on your TV show you said that you read the Confederate Constitution and I paraphrase "it had slavery written all over it, all about slavery blah blah blah". You are incorrect sir, I did a word search on the document and the word slavery appears "one" time. Everyone can try it for themselves at the link provided below.CS ConstitutionCan never trust a Yankee, even a goofy entertaining one.

Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 By: Last week while I was up at Harvard University meeting with black columnists from around the country, including several of my BlackAmericaWeb.com colleagues, Michael Dawson took me to school with his map that shows the overlap between Republican red states and the old Confederacy and slave-friendly territories. Dawson is a professor of government and Afro-American studies who specializes in the ways that race and politics intersect. I was sold. His map spoke to the...

by Mark Finkelstein August 27, 2006 - 13:49 If once is an aberration, and twice a trend, what's three times? The first time Joe Biden told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that he was "praying," it got my attention. By the third time - using the variant "I pray to God" - I was thoroughly curious. Then something happened at the end of the interview that might explain Joe's sudden bout of religiosity. By the way, Biden claimed to be 'praying' in response to various pieces of evidence that Wallace confronted him with suggesting that, at long last, the...

Confederate flags flown aboard the international space station — and seemingly signed by a NASA astronaut — showed up last week on the online auction site eBay. The original eBay listing indicated that the 4-by-6-inch flags were brought aboard the space station by Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov in 2004, and an accompanying photo showed a sample flag that seemed to bear Sharipov’s signature as well as that of Leroy Chiao, his NASA colleague on the station. Yet another photo showed several of the rebel flags floating in a space station module. The item was pulled from the auction on Monday...

Bank of America insists it can't find slave profits in its past April 30, 2005 BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter Under fire from the City Council's champion for slave reparations, Bank of America stuck to its guns Friday: The bank has hired a researcher to dig deeper but has so far has uncovered no evidence that a predecessor bank invested in or profited from the slave trade. To the contrary, Bank of America said its research suggests that the predecessor, Providence Bank, "distanced itself from and declined to support slavery-related activities." That's even though John Brown -- Providence Bank's...