Free Republic

My wife saw Pat Bucahanan's recent book on Nixon for sale at Dollar Tree in hardback for $1. If you like Buchanan as an author, or respect him as an authority on Nixon, that's a hard bargain to pass up.

The leader of the New York arm of the Black Lives Matter movement is calling out New York gubernatorial candidate and actress/activist Cynthia Nixon for her comments on legalizing marijuana over the weekend, in which she said that the industry could provide a form of “reparations” for communities of color. While he supports cannabis legalization, Black Lives Matter of Greater New York president Hawk Newsome told the Times Union on Monday that candidates for office should not use words like “reparations” lightly, a topic on which there is a growing body of serious scholarship. “Cynthia Nixon’s comments that the legalization...

Donald Trump and the tainted Nobel Peace Prize jury deserve each other. So just go ahead and award the President the sullied prize. After all it was created by Alfred Nobel, the international arms merchant keen to recast his blood-stained legacy after pocketing a fortune making mass killing far more cost-efficient. And Trump, unlike some of the warmongers, racists, handmaidens to genocide, and terrorists already among the pantheon of winners, might actually have a credible claim to it. At least 18 slavish Republican Congressmen and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in are already on record saying Trump deserves the award. At...

After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’s strong showing in the primary, many in the Democratic Party are able to read the writing on the wall: They need to move left. But who wants to step in? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. In the past two years, Mr. Cuomo - with an eye on national office - has rebranded himself from conservative insider to left-wing populist. Last year, he even held a news conference with Mr. Sanders to announce a “free college” plan. The truth is, the governor wears his new identity like a cheap...

Cynthia Nixon's answer to a question that has perplexed New Yorkers for generations is turning heads on social media. Nixon, the Sex and the City actor challenging Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was asked by The New York Times Magazine where she believes upstate New York begins, a query that regularly sparks fierce debate — and a wide-ranging array of responses — on Twitter and Facebook. Her answer? Somewhere near Ithaca. "I don't think the Hudson Valley is upstate," Nixon said, according to the Times. "Once you get to Ithaca, by around there, you're starting to get upstate."

Anna Chennault, for many years one of the most visible private citizens in Washington as a Republican fundraiser, writer and Chinese-born, anti-communist lobbyist who dabbled in foreign intrigue after the death of her husband, the renowned leader of the Flying Tigers in China and Burma in World War II, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 94. Her death, in her apartment at the Watergate complex, was announced today. The cause was complications of a stroke she suffered in December, her daughter Cynthia Chennault said. In her memoir photographs, wearing a high-necked white ao dai, Chennault appears with...

Clearly, much of the country is consumed by a mounting wave of fascination with the budding candidacy of Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City star who says she’s challenging incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York in the September Democratic primary. Hardly anyone cares. Our Jazz Shaw is from New York, so he has an excuse for this interest. He’s written about Nixon’s candidacy (boy, that phrase brings back stale memories from the 70’s, doesn’t it?). Here, he examined CNN’s developing fascination with her challenge. And here he wrote about her dismal opening poll numbers. What intrigues us is...

During her second week waitressing at a barbecue restaurant in Sydney, a customer asked Yating Yang if she was Chinese. “No, I’m Taiwanese,” she said. Her boss, who was from mainland China, never gave her another shift. Man-Tzu Tuan said her loyalty test came even sooner: on her first day at a hot pot restaurant in a comfortable Sydney suburb. “Is Taiwan part of China?” her manager asked in Mandarin over a walkie talkie. “No, definitely not,” she said. A half-hour later, she was fired. China’s assertiveness has already set off alarms in Australia, with officials warning that Beijing has...

Tax the rich some more. That recommendation comes from many politicians. It seems obvious to tax the rich. We tell ourselves they won’t miss that little extra bit we take. And after all, it’s only right that they pay their fair share. The technical name for taxing the rich more is progressivity. And it’s hard to oppose a concept that shares its roots with an optimistic word like progress. But this surface logic obscures some important truths about progressivity. So let’s stand back. The first thing we see when we take our distance is surprising. It is that many people...

Although he does not foresee a quick end to the special counsel probe into Russian election meddling and aides to President Donald Trump, former White House counsel John Dean noted that the modern media landscape may prevent it from lasting as long as the Watergate investigation, which he said stretched on for 928 days. “There’s social media, there’s the internet, the news cycles are faster. I think Watergate would have occurred at a much more accelerated speed than the 928 days it took to go from the arrest at the Watergate to the conviction of (H.R.) Haldeman and (John) Ehrlichman...

The specter of Watergate has loomed large over Washington, D.C. recently — great timing for a television series looking at the scandal. Bridge of Spies writer Matt Charman has partnered with George Clooney and Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov for Watergate, an eight-part limited series. We hear that the project has landed at Netflix for development in a competitive situation.

A limited series exploring the Watergate scandal is currently in the works at Netflix from Matt Charman, George Clooney, and Grant Heslov, Variety has learned from sources. Charman, who co-wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg film “Bridge of Spies” with Joel and Ethan Coen, will serve as the writer on the eight-part limited series, which will delve into the stories of certain key figures in the infamous scandal. Clooney and Heslov will executive produce, with sources telling Variety that Clooney may also direct part of the series should Netflix pick it up. Sonar Entertainment will produce. Sonar inked...

Multiple fires sweeping through Los Angeles are creating nightmarish scenes that, for many longtime residents, may bring back memories of the Bel Air-Brentwood Fire of 1961—arguably the most destructive in the city’s long history. The blaze started the morning of November 6, and at at 8:15 a.m., a construction crew reported that brush was burning above Stone Canyon, just off Mulholland Drive. As former Los Angeles firefighter Frank Borden recalled in 2015, a “dark billowing cloud of smoke” soon began to appear above the canyon, making it clear before many fire crews were even dispatched to the scene that this...

Because finally, finally this country has elected someone not of, by, and for the swamp, someone who owes them nothing and does not fear them: Donald J. Trump. I freaking love Donald Trump. The reason the swamp hates him, of course, is manifold. He is proven to be a potent crusher of political correctness and polite society, the way things are supposed to be said, i.e. not on Twitter, and a crusher of that elite vanguard also known as the swamp. He came in and he promised to smash their corrupt existing order, to overturn the money changers' tables. Right?...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: By Oliver North October 16, 2017 Richard Nixon kept his promises, Ken Burns did not When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent. Mr. Nixon’s...

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans there was a brief moment of shocked compassion before racial anxieties flooded the Internet. Victims of the disaster were quickly recast as looters, criminals, and layabouts. They were government “dependents” seeking even more entitlements now that they were bona fide survivors. Some of these hideous opinions drew on the physical “evidence” of the bad character of hurricane survivors: their size. The mostly black bodies crowding the Superdome, getting on rafts, and being carried away by helicopters, were too large for online critics. Obesity, while common in the US and over-represented in the South, was...

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (Reuters) - The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims. Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979. "I saw Duch kneel in front of the trees where Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed children to death," a policeman told reporters...

On January 20, 1961, Richard Nixon retired from public life. After losing a painfully close race for the White House, the former vice president relocated his family to California—his home state and scene of so many early political triumphs, where he and his wife, Pat, now planned to build a handsome, four-bedroom ranch house in an exclusive subdivision in Bel Air. For the first time in his life, Nixon was earning real money—roughly $3 million annually in today’s dollars—as a lawyer, syndicated columnist and book author. So it gnawed at his ego when the Los Angeles Times ran a sensational...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/history-shows-rushing-to-impeach-the-president-could-backfire-20170522-gwaasw.html

This Conversation recorded in 1971 between President Nixon and his advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan focuses on an article read by the two men regarding IQ. Nixon was preparing to "close the gap" between high-performing and low-performing students in schools (which has cost billions) and wanted to have as much information before he made his decision. The two men, in the recording do use the slur "eskimos" to refer to Jewish folk, but only in the sense that they say "eskimos" have a higher IQ than Caucasians, so not much of a slur. I just love listening to recordings like this,...