Free Republic

"These are the times which try Men's souls, the summer Soldier and the sunshine Patriot shall soon fade away", Thomas Paine These simple words were spoken during our first months of fighting for our American independence as we had suffered many losses. However, coming out of Valley Forge and crossing the Delaware River right before Christmas in 1776 George Washington led us to victory at Trenton and the tide began to turn. Our victory at Saratoga solidified our resolve and inspired the French to lend their resources to our fledgling Country. Even in the south where we faced Gen Cornwallis...

(Washington DC) Vets for Freedom is proud to announce its support of Allen West for United States Congress in the 22nd District of Florida. With a 20 year career as an officer in the Army, LTC West proudly served with distinction in Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom, earning a Bronze Star, three Meritorious Service Medals, three Army Commendation Medals (one with Valor), and a Valorous Unit Award. Vets for Freedom applauds Allen’s commitment to continue his public service as a member of the United States House of Representatives. As a proud Army veteran of Iraq,...

Howdy to all the FReeper's out there, just wanted to take an opportunity to convey my sincere gratitude for all of your support. Since returning a simple e-mail to Fox Mulder 77 we have truly enjoyed an incredible response to our Congressional campaign, due to your support. I would just like to share with all of you an awesome statistic, we have had a total of nearly 1.2 million website hits with over 400,000 hits in June alone. This can be attributed to the Free Republic postings which have been the biggest director of web traffic to our Congressional campaign...

I had an opportunity to attend a campaign event for Allen West, a Republican running for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District against incumbent Ron Klein (D), yesterday and can tell you that I walked away feeling better than I have in weeks. You see I too am one of the majority of Americans who believe that this country is headed in the wrong direction, a line Democrats and mainstream media love to toss around. But not for the reason they would have you believe like Bush’s policies, the war in Iraq or anything to do with Republican politicians. No like most...

Well FReeper's, here we are, a conservative leader running for Congress that needs our support!!

<p>A leading democrat says Americans need to get used to paying $5 to $6 a gallon for their gas.</p> <p>U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, has a double dose of predictions on gasoline prices that nobody wants to hear: Prices are going up a lot more, he says, and the nation doesn't have any good ways to bring prices down.</p>

Fight Taliban, But Not With Weapons Washington Post, United States In today's war against Islamofascism, there's no stronger weapon than the free flow of information from the outside world. Show pictures of how a fellow Muslim country like Turkey or Malaysia is doing, or of how the once impoverished countries like India and China are advancing. It will be a much more potent weapon than the barrel of a gun.

LtC. Allen West will be on at 4:05 and 4:30. Links below:

I had lunch with him today, and he REALLY liked this video!!

Obama's Amerikkka Corps is coming to your town. Barack Obama's campaign is mobilizing 3,600 volunteers for six weeks of political work in 17 states, calling the campaign jobs "Obama Organizing Fellowships," the Washington Post reports. In exchange for working on the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate's campaign, fellows are promised training in community organizing techniques, which is a euphemism for leftist political agitation. (Perhaps fellows will be instructed in the fine art of fraudulent voter registration ACORN-style.) As this month's Foundation Watch report on Obama's radical roots notes: Agitation is what Chicago-born Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), the father of community organizing, called...

Dubai: Roped in for a massive project to create 99 paintings on Arab culture by Qatar royal family, eminent painter M F Hussain, in self-exile after drawing the ire of Hindu outfits for his works, insists that art is India's "soul" and has the depth that is lacked by the West which has only "junk culture" to offer. In the last 60 years, India has emerged as a major force in many fields, including art, the 92-year-old artist said after inauguration of an exhibition in Omani capital Muscat. In India, art has a unique position. "It is our soul, a...

Truths for a new world of them and us By Philip Stephens Published: May 29 2008 17:47 | Last updated: May 29 2008 17:47 Globalisation belonged to us; financial crises happened to them. The world has been turned on its head. Consumers in the wealthiest nations are struggling with the consequences of the credit crunch and with the soaring cost of energy and food. In China, retail sales have been rising at an annual 15 per cent. I cannot think of a better description of the emerging global order. The trouble is that the politics of globalisation lags ever further...

Almost everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don’t recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic fancies don’t come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don’t fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic...

"This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper," wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of "The Hollow Men." ................ Some saw it as the whimper of a man facing the executioner's ax. Others say Eliot was referring to the middle-aged protagonist of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," who had "measured out my life with coffee spoons" and soon would "wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Recent reports suggest God has another end in store for us. .......... More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but...

WASHINGTON, April 22, 2008 – Success on today’s and tomorrow’s battlefields requires military leaders guided by conscience who refuse to be “yes men,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a speech last night to future Army officers at the U.S. Military Academy. Gates told the cadets at West Point, N.Y., that he considers principled dissent a sign of a healthy organization, but he also encouraged loyalty among the dissenters. The Army will need leaders of “uncommon agility, resourcefulness and imagination, leaders willing and able to think and act creatively and decisively in a different kind of world and a...

Sometimes in the history of art everything seems to be happening everywhere, all at once. The 16th century was like that. It was a grand global burst of lights. The Ming dynasty in China; the Renaissance in Europe; Islamic empires in India, Iran and Turkey were all burning at high incandescence. Visitors traveled from one to another, buying, selling, making plans, taking notes, amazed. Then, as also happens, there were slowdowns; dimmings, even blackouts here and there. Such shifts in energy form the background to “Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” a superb small...

The West stands by idly as its foundations are rent asunder.Last Friday the UN's Human Rights Council took a direct swipe at freedom of expression. In a 32-0 vote, the council instructed its "expert on freedom of expression" to report to the council on all instances in which individuals "abuse" their freedom of speech by giving expression to racial or religious bias. The measure was proposed by paragons of freedom Egypt and Pakistan. It was supported by all Arab, Muslim and African countries - founts of liberty one and all. European states abstained. The US, which is not a member...

American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World, New Analysis ShowsColorado River, Utah. The West's most pronounced temperature increase is in the Colorado River basin, which has warmed more than twice as much as the global average, with effects that put at risk a major water supply. (Credit: iStockphoto/Eric Foltz) ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2008) — The American West is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, according to a new analysis of the most recent federal government temperature figures. The news is especially bad for some of the nation’s fastest growing cities, which receive...

...The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds that the share of voters who call themselves Republicans has dropped six points nationwide since 2004. That doesn't matter much in the Northeast (where the GOP's already locked out) or Down South (where the GOP remains dominant). But in the interior West, it's a big, big deal. In 2000, none of these eight states had a Democratic governor. Now five do, including Colorado. A 2006 post-election Salt Lake City Tribune analysis showed that, where the GOP had beaten the Democrats by 20 points in the region's vote for the...

A team of researchers from Canada and Japan have uncovered some remarkable results on how eastern and western cultures assess situations very differently. Across two studies, participants viewed images, each of which consisted of one centre model and four background models in each image. The researchers manipulated the facial emotion (happy, angry, sad) in the centre or background models and asked the participants to determine the dominant emotion of the centre figure. The majority of Japanese participants (72%) reported that their judgments of the centre person’s emotions were influenced by the emotions of the background figures, while most North Americans...

SPOKANE — The era of massive dam construction in the West — which tamed rivers, swallowed towns and created irrigated agriculture, cheap hydropower and persistent environmental problems — effectively ended in 1966 with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. But a booming population and growing fears about climate change have governments once again studying dams, this time to create huge reservoirs to capture more winter rain and spring snowmelt for use in dry summer months. New dams are being studied in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and other states, even as dams are being torn down across...

Dust In West Up 500 Percent In Past Two CenturiesA dusty scene near Canyonlands in Utah. Dust in the West has increased by 500 percent since the 1800s. (Credit: Jason C. Neff, University of Colorado at Boulder) ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2008) — The West has become 500 percent dustier in the past two centuries due to westward U.S. expansion and accompanying human activity beginning in the 1800s, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. List of major natural disasters in the United States Annual sedimentary layer Sediment records from dust blown into alpine lakes...

Argh, my girlfriend and I were watching the Jackass marathon this weekend on MTV. They constantly played spots featuring West (whose racist and socialist past it was up to me to elaborate upon of course) and the idiotic "truth.org" anti-smoking ads. The biggest "Jackasses" weren't on the show. At least Margera, Knoxville, et all were funny-on-purpose.

Ironic, isn't it, that radical forces threaten violence, sanctions and other actions against democratic states while insisting - along with their Western apologists - that any attempt by their victims to put pressure on them is useless. Think about it. Every time someone proposes, say, economic sanctions (on Iran or Syria), an international tribunal investigating its involvement in terrorism (Syria), military operations or killing terrorist leaders (Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaida, the Kurdish PKK, or the Taliban), diplomatic isolation, or even not giving financial aid (Hamas), a chorus of voices says: It won't work. The extremists, you see, are tough....

There is nothing wrong with appreciating other cultures or with saluting various ethnic groups and subcultures. But multiculturalism as an ideology denies that a nation has a culture of its own and turns cultural differences into a pretext for moral relativism. The ideology of multiculturalism permeates America's intellectual and educational establishments, but it has gone even further in other Western nations. When a British schoolteacher in Sudan accepted a class vote to name a teddy bear Mohammed, she was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for the crime of insulting the prophet as angry Muslim mobs demanded the death penalty. Some Britons...

THERE’S SOMETHING QUAINT about the earliest paintings in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. In these religious paintings, you know who is important because of their relative size. The big people are the important ones. The little ones are less important. That seems like a nice simple way to organise the world. Or rather, there’s almost no sense of the world as a real place in these early paintings. That’s partly because the background is gold leaf. At most the figures exist in some very sketchy religious architecture, or they’re assigned little frames, like fragments of a comic strip. They don’t actually have...

Pakistan army failures 'put the West in peril' By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad Last Updated: 2:31am GMT 11/02/2008 The West remains at constant risk of large-scale al-Qa'eda terrorist attacks because the Pakistani military requires years of training before it will be able to combat militancy, a Western military official has warned. Pakistan has deployed about 100,000 troops to the tribal region where about 1,000 have been killed More than six years have elapsed since the September 11 attacks on the United States but the Pakistan army remains unequipped and untrained for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations, the official told The Daily...

WASHINGTON - Human activity such as driving and powering air conditioners is responsible for up to 60 percent of changes contributing to dwindling water supplies in the arid and growing West, a new study finds. Those changes are likely to accelerate, says the study published Thursday in Science magazine, portending "a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States." The study is likely to add to urgent calls for action already coming from Western states competing for the precious resource to irrigate farms and quench the thirst of growing populations. Devastating wildfires, avalanches and drought have also underscored...

"I just read in an Indian depredation claim I copied from the National Archives last summer that Black Kettle was understood by everyone in 1868 as being a spy for the raiding Indians. He would profess peace and all the time he was gathering information he would later share with the Dog Soldiers to assist them in their raids, etc." Dr. Jeff Broome, author of the very important book "Dog Soldier Justice", the most accurate depiction of the Indian massacres of 1868 "Some of the raiders came from Black Kettle's camp. As was the case on numerous previous occasions, his...

T.S. Eliot wrote memorably in The Hollow Men: Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow. In the case of the peace process and all the great ideas for fixing everything in Arab-Israel relations, the shadow has been Palestinian leaders' unwillingness - and now also inability - to make a compromise agreement ending the conflict. Close examination of the movement's ideology, organization and structure shows why this is true. Many, or most, of the young guard prefer a deal with Hamas to one with Israel, and a return to...

JEDDAH, 15 January 2008 — The history of science and civilization, as taught by many institutions in the West, often fails to include more than 1,000 years of Islamic heritage and civilization, according to Dr. Salim Al-Hassani of the UK-based Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization. “The Renaissance couldn’t have happened out of nothing,” said Al-Hassani while speaking at Dar Al-Hekma College here yesterday. “In the West, there’s total ignorance of the contributions of other civilizations. Did modern civilization really rise from nothing?” Al-Hassani explained how many Western discoveries are of Muslim origin. There was a lost age of Muslim...

Opinion surveys conducted in the UK and Germany report a growing tendency among young Muslims to reject mainstream norms. Their affirmation of Muslim identity and its critique of decadent western culture is an act of dissidence, argues Jörg Lau. The reservations of the non-Muslim majority towards self-segregating practices can be understood as a sign that the Islamic critique of decadence has been understood and its moral presumption rejected. Nevertheless, some commentators maintain that if young Muslims reject society, they have been driven to do so. An act of self-exclusion is thus reinterpreted as the fault of the majority. This alliance...

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said many interesting things in today's Jerusalem Post interview. Most striking, however, is not a particular remark but the contrast between his (unwittingly?) rather defeatist message and the strength that he ascribes to Israel's current position in the world. Olmert described Israel's position as struggling to implement a two-state solution because the alternative is to be demographically swamped by a one-state solution. He then pointed out that even the "world that is friendly to Israel - not the world comprised of fanatics and extremists - ... speaks of Israel in terms of the '67 borders. It...

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness. On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance. Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue...

Soldiers from Company B and Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division negotiate their way through a wall during clearing operation Rock Reaper in Hadid, Iraq, just west of Baqubah. The Soldiers clearing the town had to negotiate their way though deep canals and over high walls to reach their objectives. Photo by Pfc. Kirby Rider, 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. HADID -- A dim blue light pierced the darkness as someone yelled “one-minute out�, but the voice was drowned out by noise from the rotating blades...

Western financial aid to the Palestinians has, I showed last week, the perverse and counterintuitive effect of increasing their rate of homicides, including terrorist ones. This week, I offer two pieces of perhaps even stranger news about the many billions of dollars and record-shattering per-capita donations from the West: First, these have rendered the Palestinians poorer. Second, Palestinian impoverishment is a long-term positive development. To begin, some basic facts about the Palestinian economy, drawing on a fine survey by Ziv Hellman, "Terminal Situation," in the Dec. 24 issue of Jerusalem Report: # Palestinian per year per-capita income has contracted by...

This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” — or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.” Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of time...

Life in southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack. Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it...

China says West should deal with warmingBy MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer 1 hour, 59 minutes ago Activists representing indigenous peoples from around the globe protest that the U.N. is not allowing them to be recognized to speak at the U.N. climate change meetings Friday, Dec. 7, 2007 in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. Delegates from nearly 190 nations are attending the Dec. 3-14 gathering in Bali, which is charged with launching negotiations that will eventually lead to an international accord to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. (AP Photo/Ed Wray) BALI, Indonesia - China insisted Friday the U.S....

Ancient wheat suggests early China, Middle East trade The Xinjian mummies, discovered in 1987, may be linked to new carbon dating evidence of early East-West trade. Wheat grains nearly 5,000 years old found at a Chinese archaeological site two years ago, have revealed that western man travelled to China much earlier than previously thought. The research, published by Professor John Dodson and Professor Xiaoqiang Li, shows there are no modern wild varieties of the wheat and barley, which were found in the region in a domesticated form, and carbon dated to 2,650BC. It is now thought they originated in the...

THE BATTLE OF THE WASHITA (November 27, 1868, Indian territory - modern-day Oklahoma) Gregory F. Michno, ENCYCLOPEDIA of Indian Wars 1850-1890, pages 226-227 "On November 12, 1868 , 11 companies of the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George A. Custer, 3 companies of the 3rd Infantry, 1 of the 5th Infantry, 1 of the 38th Infantry, and about 450 wagons set out from Fort Dodgefor Indian territory to seek out hostile Indians. Across a snow-covered landscape Custer followed Indian trails to a 50-lodge Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita River. Early on the frigid morning of 27 November,...

Pakistan facing aid cuts by West By Isambard Wilkinson and Damien McElroy in Islamabad Last Updated: 1:40am GMT 05/11/2007 America and Britain threatened to cut billions of pounds worth of aid to Pakistan last night as President Pervez Musharraf arrested hundreds of opponents after imposing a state of emergency. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said Washington would "review" its aid after the military ruler suspended the constitution. Gen Pervez Musharraf cited terrorist attacks as justification for his action Gen Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led war on terror, invoked emergency powers on Saturday to stifle challenges to...

Set in 1898, Print Ritter and his estranged nephew Tom Harte become the reluctant guardians of five abused and abandoned Chinese girls. Ritter and Harte's attempts to care for the girls are complicated by their responsibility to deliver a herd of horses while avoiding a group of bitter rivals intent on kidnapping the girls for their own purposes.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week - Terrorism Awareness Project During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week/ Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week kicks off; Update ...Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week kicks off; Update: Just in time for IFA Week…a new bin Laden tape. http://michellemalkin.com/2007/10/22/islamo-fascism-awareness-week-kicks-off/ Interview on Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on National Review Online, It’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week — the brainchild of David Horowitz, warrior for truth on American college campuses. Horowitz’s Terrorism Awareness ...http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDI5NDA2YTFiMDkyZTJkYjI3NDIyMzhlOTc5MDc3ZjM= Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week Begins An open invitation to any college students who haven’t been brainwashed: email...

Undermined by IslamWhile Simon Jenkins rightly asks Muslim scholars to pay attention to “blood-curdling mullahs and madrasahs” rather than “writing platitudes to the Pope”, his assertion that Islamic militants do not “undermine western values” ignores reality (Comment, October 14). Freedom of expression is already restricted by Islamist intimidation. In many Islamic states equal rights for men and women are curtailed, and such restrictive attitudes are brought to the West by Muslims. Until the West acknowledges that the conflict with Islamic militancy has deep ideological roots it cannot win the struggle for preserving its freedoms. Hopefully, the Muslim scholars will join...

Suicide Bombings and Jihadists' "Love of Death" Counterterrorism Blog, NJ - Oct 5, 2007 As Iran's President Ahmadinejad calls for the destruction of Israel, AFP reports that Ahmadinejad's defiance on nuclear sanctions... Suicide Bombings and Jihadists' "Love of Death" How does America fight an enemy in a war, when the enemy embraces death? This is one of the major unresolved questions that a tactical "war on terrorism" fails to address, because the larger, more vital strategic issues of America's...

The jihadist elephant Jerusalem Post, Israel - Sep 25, 2007 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1189411488287&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ... while the greatest threat to the whole process - the rise of an Islamofascist arc from Hamas in Gaza, to Hizbullah in Lebanon, to Palestinian terror ...

Al-Qa'eda target west from Horn of Africa By David Blair in Addis Ababa Last Updated: 3:04am BST 22/10/2007 Special report In the rapidly changing battleground against international terrorism, the arid plains of the Horn of Africa are becoming a steadily more significant base from which al-Qa'eda's followers can launch their attacks. An armed and disguised Somali woman demonstrates her support for the Union of Islamic Courts last December The Horn now ranks alongside the Middle East as the area of greatest concern to British counter-terrorism officials, coming second only to Pakistan, where al-Qa'eda's core leaders are ensconced. Al-Qa'eda operatives based...

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was...