Free Republic

A Richmond, Virginia, elementary school will switch its name from that of a Confederate general to that of the nation's first black President. On Monday, the Richmond school board voted to rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary as Barack Obama Elementary School. Members of the school's community submitted ideas for a new name and students at the Richmond school, which is 95% African-American, voted among seven choices. The top three finalists were: Barack Obama, Northside and Wishtree. Last year, a school board in Mississippi dropped the name Jefferson Davis, for the president of the Confederacy, in favor of naming an elementary school...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is allowing Ohio to clean up its voting rolls by targeting people who haven’t cast ballots in a while. The justices rejected, by a 5-4 vote Monday, arguments that the practice violates a federal law intended to increase the ranks of registered voters. A handful of other states also use voters’ inactivity to trigger a process that could lead to their removal from the voting rolls. Justice Samuel Alito said for the court that Ohio is complying with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. He was joined by his four conservative colleagues. The four...

/begin my excerpts N. Korea Punishes Those Linked to Bus Crash with Chinese Tourists... Four were Shot and Military Leadership Replaced According to N. Korean sources, four people were shot as a punishment for the bus crash which led to the death of 32 Chinese tourists, many of whom are left-wing (hardcore communist) Chinese academics. Hwang Yong-shik, the chief executive of Korea Kumgang Group (KKG), and its commissar were among the executed. In addition to the news of Hwang's execution, the sources also said that Kim Jong-gak, Director of General Political Bureau, and Park Yong-shik, Defense Minister, also took the...

The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) are gearing up for a new round of purges, even as they struggle to recover from the initial culling that followed the failed coup of July 2016.Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli announced April 18 that a secret cell of 3,000 officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) affiliated with alleged coup mastermind Fethullah Gulen, a Sunni cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, had been identified. All of them, he promised, would be dismissed. As of May 18, some 550 officers and NCOs had already been arrested. According to government investigators, senior leaders of the so-called Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO),...

<p>AP) — A nearly 80-year-old statue depicting a European settler with a weapon in his hand towering over a Native American that some say celebrates white supremacy has been dismantled by crews in southwestern Michigan’s Kalamazoo.</p> <p>And at the University of Michigan, regents have voted to strip a former school president’s name from a campus science building because he lent his scientific expertise to groups that were in favor of selective reproduction, also known as eugenics.</p>

Students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, are demanding the removal of white and European authors from a mandatory humanities course at the college. Reed College caved to student protesters in April after they demanded that white authors be removed from the college’s Humanities 110 course. Now, the course will focus primarily on ancient Mediterranean authors. Reed College professors have responded with confusion at the allegation that the Humanities 110 course is “too white.” “The idea that Hum 110 is a ‘white’ course is very strange to me,” Jay Dickson, a professor of English, recently said in a comment to...

I wrote at RedState for 12 years, from shortly after its founding in 2004 to the end of the 2016 primaries, and I continue to value many of its current and former writers as friends, so it is with a lot of sadness that I learned of this morning’s summary firing of its Editor-in-Chief, Caleb Howe, and about half of the site’s writers. The site will go on, and has retained a number of talented people who will still be worth reading, but this clearly marks the end of an era and the end of the site’s distinctive grassroots anti-establishment...

Student senators at the University of Washington-Seattle recently introduced a bill that would require fraternities to prevent "cultural appropriation" during social gatherings. [Snip] ... the bill is necessary because many "mainstream [fraternity] celebrations further perpetuate stereotypes minority groups have to face," adding that they contribute to the "harm that minority students face" on campus.

Stephen Foster's other songs include "Camptown Races," ''My Old Kentucky Home," ''Beautiful Dreamer" and "Old Folks at Home." A 118-year-old statue of the "Oh! Susanna" songwriter was removed from a Pittsburgh park Thursday after criticism that the work is demeaning because it includes a slave sitting at his feet, plucking a banjo. In October, the Pittsburgh Art Commission voted to take the Stephen Foster sculpture out of Schenley Plaza and find it a new home. For now, it will remain in a storage lot, out of the public view. On Thursday, workers used straps and construction equipment to lift the...

<p>A 118-year-old statue of the "Oh! Susanna" songwriter was removed from a Pittsburgh park Thursday after criticism that the work is demeaning because it includes a slave sitting at his feet, plucking a banjo.</p> <p>In October, the Pittsburgh Art Commission voted to take the Stephen Foster sculpture out of Schenley Plaza and find it a new home. For now, it will remain in a storage lot, out of the public view.</p>

Updated 23 minutes ago Pittsburgh's monument to native son Stephen Collins Foster has returned to its old stomping ground. A Department of Public Works crew removed the controversial statue of the Antebellum songwriter known as the father of American music early Thursday from Forbes Avenue in Oakland and hauled it by flatbed truck to a facility in Highland Park. The city will store it until officials find it a permanent home. The 1,000-pound, 10-foot-high bronze statue stood at the entrance to Oakland's Schenley Park for 74 years after the city moved it from its original location near the entrance to...

Monday, August 07, 2017 Understanding the McMaster NSC Purge Posted by Daniel Greenfield Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it. The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from. It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser...

PITTSBURGH - The statue of composer Stephen Foster that stood in Schenley Plaza in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood since 1940 was removed Thursday morning. Controversial for its portrayal of Foster, a Lawrenceville native, with an African American man seated below him, the bronze statue has been scrutinized as racist for years. Future of Pittsburgh's Stephen Foster statue in question Pittsburgh’s Art Commission decided with a unanimous vote on Oct. 25 that the 10x4 foot statue, which sits on a granite base, would come down within six months. Under city code, the Art Commission is responsible for overseeing the alteration, relocation or...

There is a tragedy of historical and philosophical ignorance that is benefitting a tiny handful of people at the expense and well-being of the vast majority of black Americans. This tragedy is the purposeful erasing from the education system the history of successful black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the reason for their success and that of large numbers of other blacks. The leading black American at the turn of the 20th century was Booker T. Washington, whose approach was the virtual opposite of todayÂ’s grievance-focused approach that looks to government for personal progress. Washington,...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday she recently urged Mike Pompeo, President Trump's pick to lead the State Department, to retain senior career officials to handle global crises should he be confirmed. Clinton, who served as secretary of State from 2009-2013 under former President Obama, said during an event in Michigan that she warned Pompeo against a "purge" of experienced administration officials when he called her recently. "I told him that I thought he should take a hard look at retaining career diplomats who could advise him. Because you never know what might happen. You never know where...

Over the decades, this quiet coastal hamlet has earned a reputation as one of the most liberal places in the nation. Arcata was the first U.S. city to ban the sale of genetically modified foods, the first to elect a majority Green Party city council and one of the first to tacitly allow marijuana farming before pot was legal. Now it's on the verge of another first. No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who...

Over the decades, this quiet coastal hamlet has earned a reputation as one of the most liberal places in the nation. Arcata was the first U.S. city to ban the sale of genetically modified foods, the first to elect a majority Green Party city council and one of the first to tacitly allow marijuana farming before pot was legal. Now it's on the verge of another first. No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who...

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences — including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish — while adding programs with “clear career pathways” as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit. Students and faculty members have reacted with surprise and concern to the news, which is being portrayed by the school’s administration as a path to regain enrollment and provide new opportunities to students. Critics see something else: a waning commitment to liberal arts education and a chance to lay off faculty under new rules that...

Strangers I meet are always surprised when they discover they’ve met a third-generation Northern Virginian. “Wow, a native!” they exclaim, “you don’t meet many of those!” This surprise is often accompanied by a strong opinion about NoVA, as it’s often called—they suggest that the area just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. has little regional identity or unique culture, or little worthy of praise. It’s quite a bracing commentary to hear about one’s home. Yet I contend that whatever deficit in cultural identity NoVA may have has been accrued by the technocratic elite that has come to dominate the...

A space at a Baltimore park that had long honored two Confederate generals has been rededicated to abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The Baltimore Sun reports that hundreds of people gathered Saturday for the ceremony at Wyman Park Dell. The ceremony took place just feet from the now-empty pedestal where a large statue of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson once stood. The statue was removed in August after a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia reignited the national debate over what to do with symbols of the Confederacy. Saturday was the 105th anniversary of Tubman's death. The space...