Free Republic

This is an obituary about a dead communist lawyer, not particularly thrilling; but you must read it to see who interned at his radical firm back in 1971. Amazing what gets printed in the New York Times: December 2, 2001Robert Treuhaft, Lawyer Who Inspired Funeral Exposé, Dies at 89 By PAUL LEWIS Robert Treuhaft, a crusading radical lawyer who inspired his wife, Jessica Mitford, to write her best seller "The American Way of Death," died in New York on Nov. 11. He was 89. As a union lawyer representing longshoremen in the San Francisco area in the 1950's, Mr. Treuhaft ...

In the early 1900s, Charlie Harger, a writer for this magazine, visited a small country store on “the frontier” to talk to its proprietor. (He did not mention, in the eight full pages of the story where exactly that small retailer was located, because that’s how journalism was done in those days.) The unnamed proprietor was looking out beyond his windows stocked with hoes and pancake flour, to the parcels sitting at the train depot that were mail-ordered from Chicago and New York. The rise of mail-order delivery was going to drive him out of business, he worried. {snip} Just...

Born in 1912, Kim Il Sung went to the Soviet Far East in the 1930s to train with Stalin's military during the war against Japan, which had occupied the Korean peninsula since 1910. The North makes much of Kim, the heroic soldier. But whether he actually fought against the Japanese is a matter of debate. What's clear is that Stalin believed Kim was trustworthy, and after the Soviet invasion of the peninsula in 1945, installed him as the Communist leader in the North. A virtual unknown in his country, he seized power with considerable help from the Soviet Union and...

The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored. This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews...

June 6th, 1912 The morning of June 6th arrived on the Alaska peninsula to find the area which is now Katmai National Monument being shaken by numerous strong, shallow earthquakes. The most powerful volcanic eruption of the 20th Century was about to begin – but very few people knew about it. The Alaska peninsula has a low population density today, but in 1912 it was even lower. Beyond the land shaken by the earthquake activity, the beginnings of this event were almost unnoticed. On June 6th, 1912, a tremendous blast sent a large cloud of ash skyward, and the eruption...

Michael Sandford stopped calling his mother last May. He was in a foreign country, unemployed and living out of a car, but he had a plan. He had learned how to shoot a gun. He wanted to kill Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The autistic 20-year-old British man set out from California at about the same time his mother, Lynne, reported him as missing. In June, Sandford showed up at a Trump rally in Las Vegas. As the candidate spoke before a raucous crowd, the Briton moved close to the stage. He noticed a holstered gun strapped to a policeman's...

Would a candidate for president of the United States ever officially condone a riot on the floor of a national convention? Would a candidate actually ever seek to provoke one? Should delegates at a convention be permitted to carry guns? Can supporters of a candidate try to buy delegate votes? Could any of these things happen at a contested Republican Convention this year in Cleveland? It seems unlikely, but there would be precedents. Amazingly, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt tried to wrest the nomination from William Howard Taft, there were plans for riots, plenty of guns, and more than a...

A Kentucky 8th grade exam from 1912 was donated to the Bullitt County history museum. The questions feature the fundamental foundation of education that we seem to have lost due to the dumbing down of the American education system. Now with the common core epidemic we can see our youth transformed by a cookie cut education system and a near total loss of critical and independent thinking. If you can not read the fine print or zoom in, then here are some examples of 8th grade level testing in 1912. 1) Define the following terms of government: Democracy, Limited Monarchy,...

A World-Weary Puppy In Antarctica, Circa 1912 This poignant image (cheer up, buddy!) of a pup named "Blizzard" was taken in 1912 by Antarctic adventurer Frank Hurley, who two years later would be the photographer on Ernest Shackleton's famed Endurance Expedition. This shot is from the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1911. Over a period of years, Hurley visited the frozen continent six times and came away with a trove of stirring images.

The violin played by the bandmaster of the Titanic as it sank beneath the waves is expected to fetch a world record fee for memorabilia from the doomed liner when it goes on sale on Saturday. The instrument belonging to Wallace Hartley was found strapped to his body after he drowned with his seven bandmates and some 1,500 others on board the supposedly unsinkable ship in 1912.

There is one problem with the entirely justified if self-interested media squawking about the Justice Department snooping into the phone records of multiple Associated Press reporters and Fox News's James Rosen. The problem is that what the AP reporters and Rosen did arguably violates the letter of the law. The search warrant in the Rosen case cites Section 793(d) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. Section 793(d) says that a person lawfully in possession of information that the government has classified as secret who turns it over to someone not lawfully entitled to posses it has committed a crime....

Today in Osawatomie, Kan., Barack Obama laid bare his progressive agenda, calling for more federal involvement in education, increased spending on infrastructure, an extension of the payroll tax cut and increased taxes on the rich. He even invoked Teddy “the Trustbuster” Roosevelt, who, if you’ll recall, became increasingly socialistic as the sun of his national stardom began to set. Not surprisingly, Obama was disingenuous in a few places — but just a few. At one point, he said he had already signed $1 trillion in spending cuts into law. Presumably, he was referring to the cuts included in the debt...

OSAWATOMIE, KAN. -- President Obama will give an economic speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Tuesday at a location the White House says it was very specific in picking and was meant to stir echoes of President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt spoke in the very same town more than 100 years ago on Aug. 31, 1910, where he presented his vision for America and the coming 1912 election. Sound familiar? That's by design. snip Roosevelt gave what was called a "New Nationalism" agenda, talking about regulation on special interests (even using that term), and calling out for welfare, human rights and a greater...

OK, I'll lay off making vanity posts for a while after this. But I think this is a good idea. I was asking myself, why is it that ANYBODY still supports the liberal/fascist/socialist/Marxist/ Stalinist/Democrat agenda? I think it's because it takes an able mind to really grasp the full scope of the conservative message of liberty. We need to KEEP IT SIMPLE if we want to expand the base. I suggest we start using the term "1912er". Basically, Conservatism 2010 comes down to this: the need to roll back the USA, legally and governmentally, to about 1912 — before the...

NEW YORK — The tragic sinking of the Titanic nearly a century ago can be blamed on low grade rivets that the ship's builders used on some parts of the ill-fated liner, two experts on metals conclude in a new book. The company, Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Northern Ireland, needed to build the ship quickly and at reasonable cost, which may have compromised quality, said co-author Timothy Foecke. That the shipyard was building two other vessels at the same time added to the difficulty of getting the millions of rivets needed, he added. "Under the pressure to get these...

Lillian Gertrud Asplund, the last American survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, has died, a funeral home said Sunday. She was 99. Asplund, who was just 5 years old, lost her father and three brothers -- including a fraternal twin -- when the "practically unsinkable" ship went down in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg. She died Saturday at her home in Shrewsbury, said Ronald E. Johnson, vice president of the Nordgren Memorial Chapel in Worcester, Mass. Asplund's mother and another brother, Felix, who was 3, also survived the Titanic sinking in the early morning of...

I look for something close to a rerun of the 1912 presidential election in 2008. President William Howard Taft was the incumbent Republican. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, a good big-government progressive, was unhappy with his successor, so he decided to challenge Taft in the Republican primary. Roosevelt lost. He was popular, but he was also controversial within the party. Roosevelt then bolted the Republican party, formed the Bull Moose party, and, of course, ran for president. Woodrow Wilson wound up the unexpected nominee of the Democratic party. Wilson won the presidency with 42 percent of the vote, with Roosevelt coming in...