Free Republic

Starting with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, I began noticing something. That year, people like Rush Limbaugh screamed from the airwaves, “This is the most important election of our lifetime!” In every election since then, both sides have repeated this same mantra. You’d think the electorate would have figured this fear-mongering out by now, but they haven’t. In this article, I make a different argument. Instead of it being the most important election of our lifetime, I think this is the most dangerous election since 1968. Why do I say that? In the 1968 election, the country was...

Riveria Beach renamed Old Dixie Highway in honor of [Hussein] Obama during a ceremony on Thursday, a change that city officials say will help move the community past its segregated history. It is the second road in Palm Beach County to be named in honor of [Hussein], county officials said. Two years ago, Pahokee in western Palm Beach County renamed East First Street to Barack Obama Boulevard. A crowd cheered as a crew lowered the Old Dixie Highway street sign in Riviera Beach and raised one bearing the [Hussein's] name...

White South Africans are in grave danger; there may be a solution. Things are very bad in South Africa. When the scourge of apartheid was finally smashed to pieces in 1994, the country seemed to have a bright future ahead of it. Eight years later, in 2002, 60 percent of South Africans said life had been better under apartheid. Hard to believe — but that's how bad things were in 2002. And now they're even worse. When apartheid ended, the life expectancy in South Africa was 64, the same as in Turkey and Russia. Now it's 56, the same as...

Hillary Clinton has started faking a Southern drawl to speak to Southerners, just as she did during her last presidential run eight years ago. The tactic drew chuckles, derision and not a little resentment when she tried it in 2007 and 2008. But she was back at it again in Alabama on Saturday, putting on a heavy twang to express her contempt for Republicans. With Bernie Sanders narrowing her lead or overtaking her in early caucus and primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton is hoping for a "Southern firewall," and her itinerary of upcoming events reveals a determinatiion...

Most Americans tend to agree that Abraham Lincoln was one of this country’s better presidents, having saved the nation from imploding on itself with the Civil War. Former IRS chief Lois Lerner, however, does not apparently have the same thoughts about keeping the South in the union. “Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in 2014. “He should (have) let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.” The Senate Finance Committee released a report yesterday that examined 1.5 million pages of IRS emails. A significant focus...

The other day, my son asked why there are such a variety of accents in the country. Why does a fellow from Mississippi have a twang that’s different from a fellow in Texas? Long ago, I asked my father a similar question. He pointed out that it isn’t just in America – a wide range of dialects and accents are common for French, Arabic, whatever. In recent days, some interesting pieces have appeared online. One in Slate has a list of the top slang terms from every state. Here’s what was included for the Mid-South: Arkansas: “tump” -- to tip...

Megan Barry has been elected mayor in Nashville’s runoff election. Barry called the night historic. “This one is going down in the history books,” she said. “This one is all about the fact that today, you went to the polls and you elected the first woman mayor.” As Barry’s victory speech went on, the crowd began chanting her name. “Tomorrow our real work begins,” she said.

A North Korean military official says a meeting of senior party and defense officials led by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Thursday night and "reviewed and approved the final attack operation." He gave no details on what kind of military retaliation North Korea would see as appropriate punishment for South Korea's shelling of its territory on Thursday. Kim Yong Chol, director of the general reconnaissance bureau of the North Korean army, on Friday denied South Korean allegations that Pyongyang has been raising tensions on the peninsula. He denied the North fired anything across the Demilitarized Zone and says...

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday declared his frontline troops in a "quasi-state of war" and ordered them to prepare for battle a day after the most serious confrontation between the rivals in years. South Korea's military on Thursday fired dozens of artillery rounds across the border in response to what Seoul said were North Korean artillery strikes meant to back up a threat to attack loudspeakers broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda.

Protesters who claimed affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement stormed the stage during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Seattle on Saturday, taking over the microphone and forcing Sanders to leave without ever speaking. Moments after Sanders took the stage at Westlake Park, two women and one man climbed the stage and confronted the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding a chance to speak. After several moments of confusion and confrontation, an event organizer took the microphone and said the protesters would be allowed to speak before Sanders.

An exclusive Newsmax poll released Tuesday shows businessman Donald Trump sweeping to a commanding lead among Republican presidential candidates across the South, with retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson surging in popularity. Trump, who has led in the polls since his campaign began on June 16, finished with 28 points in the exclusive Newsmax-Southern Political Report Survey conducted by OpinionSavvy.

Pollster Matt Towery released the exclusive Newsmax-Southern Political Report Survey conducted by Opinion Savvy late Tuesday. The poll, which has a margin of error of just 1.3 percent, showed Trump dominating the rest of the GOP field in the South with 28 percent of the vote, compared to his national standing of 23 percent of the GOP vote, as reflected in the latest RealClearPolitics poll average.

This 1938 Jackson Daily News article tells the story of how the Southern governors fought to level the playing field with the North when it came to railroad freight rates. The railroad commissions kept the freight rates very slanted towards the North. Canada, yes- Canada, enjoyed lower freight rates on railroads than did the South; so slanted weighted against the South were the rates. Thus a builder in New Orleans could get steel shipped more cheaply from Pittsburgh than he could from Birmingham....

UNLIKE previous Alabama governors, Robert J. Bentley is not a fount of oratory. Nor is he a champion of “kinder and gentler.” His dyspeptic refusal to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion, in a state where more than one million of 4.8 million residents depend on the program, betokens a stunning indifference to the Hippocratic oath. (The governor is a dermatologist.) Yet Mr. Bentley recently took a page from the Obama playbook and used a surprise executive order to remove four Confederate flags from the Alabama Capitol grounds, not far from the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in...

Why did the southern states reward a racist murderer by making him the most significant southern political figure since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Are southern politicians so ignorant that they don’t understand that the people who commit such crimes do so to get attention? Why are they aiding and abetting his effort to steal the Confederate Flag and make it a symbol of racism? Why are they trying to cause whites to be mad at blacks and possibly hate them?

An eight-mile convoy of pickups, motorcycles and cars wound through a central Florida town on Sunday in a show of support for the Confederate flag, as a backlash against its banishment from public landmarks across the South picks up steam. Horns blared and hundreds of the rebel flags fluttered as more than 1,500 vehicles and some 4,500 people turned out for the "Florida Southern Pride Ride" in Ocala, according to police estimates. Vehicles from states across the South and as far away as California participated. "That flag has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people," said...

Thought I would post this because this is Lynyrd Skynyrd playing in front of a huge Confederate flag in 1977 which you can see more clearly around the 7 second mark, and to me, I take this flag as more of symbol of Southern pride than of racism. These guys absolutely worshipped black blues guitar players and musicians, were they racist? Hell no. This just goes to show that things change, which is exactly what Democrats keep telling us anytime the history of the Democratic party is brought up. "Oh, it's not the same party it was 100 years ago..things...

Everybody has an opinion about whether the Confederate flag is good or bad. They’re all dug in. Some are certain it’s racist and the very signature of evil. Others say it’s purely an expression of Southern pride and reverence for ancestors who fought and died a long time ago. Some of them have devoted careers and personal reputations to these propositions. A newspaper column is not going to change any minds. The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular...

Every year the Fourth of July is marked by ringing affirmations of American exceptionalism. We are a special nation, uniquely founded on high ideals like freedom and equality. In practice, however, much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/how-the-south-skews-america-119725.html#ixzz3evoOFM1c

With the revulsion against Confederate symbols that has resulted from shooter Dylann Roof's internet picture with the Confederate battle flag, Robert E. Lee has been put in the gunsights of social radicals. Lee was one of the two great generals of the Civil War and due in part to his good fortune in having an excellent biographer in Douglas Southall Freeman, is generally regarded as the greatest, although it should be noted that Grant won the war. Lee came from one of the oldest families in Virginia and arguably its most distinguished. His father, Light Horse Harry Lee, was a...