Free Republic

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the day the House of Representatives voted to impeach President William Jefferson Clinton for the high crimes of committing perjury and obstruction of justice while in office.As more Americans and Congressmen are coming around to the lawless conduct of President Barack Obama and the reality of impeaching to rein in his imperial presidency, it is important to remember that FReepers played a key role in impeaching Bill Clinton.On October 31, 1998, Free Republic held the first online-organized national protest to call for Clinton's impeachment and removal from office. The rally was broadcast live...

Full Title: "Newtown anniversary: US schools keep trying wrong fixes to deter school shootings, experts say." It happened after Columbine, after Virginia Tech, and after Newtown, too. After every massacre in a school, Americans grasp at quick cures. Let's install metal detectors and give guns to teachers. Let's crack down on troublemakers, weeding out kids who fit the profile of a gunman. Let's buy bulletproof whiteboards for the students to scurry behind, or train kids to throw erasers or cans of soup at an attacker.

It wasn’t quite cold enough to need a vest on a mid-November Texas morning, but Matt Dossey was wearing one anyway. Made of heavy-weight beige canvas, the vest just might have been concealing a pistol. There was no way to tell. Perhaps that was the point.

MILWAUKEE -- Frank Kruck was 7 when he saw his mother crying and fingering her rosary beads as she listened to the terrible news on the radio. The announcement on a Sunday morning in December 72 years ago: Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor, ships were burning, sailors and soldiers were wounded and dying. Frank's mother was praying for his brother Gene, a sailor aboard the minesweeper USS Widgeon. It would be more than a week before the Western Union telegram was delivered to the Kruck family home in Waukesha: Gene was OK.

On November 22, 1963 — just 50 years ago today — three eminent men died: President John F. Kennedy and the writers Aldous Huxley (b. 1894) and C. S. Lewis (b. 1898). In 1982, the philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote a clever and valuable fictional “dialogue of the dead” among the three, imagining them meeting and conversing just after death in a purgatorial state — Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere beyond Death. The fortunes of the three figures’ reputations over the last half-century make for an interesting comparison. The young, handsome, glamorous Kennedy, brutally slain by a left-winger at...

John and Ann Betar eloped on Nov. 25, 1932, fleeing their close-knit Syrian neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and driving as fast as they could to Harrison, New York, to avoid Ann's father's plans to marry her off to a man 20 years older. Now, as their 81st wedding anniversary approaches on Monday, the couple, named on Valentine's Day by Worldwide Marriage Encounter as 2013's "longest married couple" in America, can only laugh as they look back on the commotion they caused. "Everyone was hopping mad, and my wife's aunt consoled my father-in-law by telling him not to worry, the marriage...

On the surface, President Obama’s refusal to speak today at the ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is nearly incomprehensible. This is especially true given Mr. Obama’s acknowledged talent as a public speaker. There is also the widely held belief that he is in love with the sound of his own voice and passing up a golden opportunity to make his mark on history by walking in the footsteps of Lincoln is out of character for him. To compound the mystery is the way the snub was delivered. Rather than make the announcement of his decision...

And the Cuban Missile Crisis, on some subsequent readings of history, was not a triumph of bold statesmanship as it was hailed at the time, but a piece of foolhardy grandstanding that unnecessarily humiliated the Soviets and precipitated the arms race that defined the Cold War. Even on civil rights – the subject of one of Kennedy's greatest speeches in June 1963, when he vowed that "Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as he would wish to have his children treated." – the reality never matched the myth. Kennedy...

President Obama was unable to attend Tuesday's ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address because of scheduling issues stemming from the rollout of his signature healthcare law, the White House said Tuesday. Following stories questioning why the president had skipped the event, given his public affinity for President Lincoln, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted that "it didn't work schedule-wise." In response to a journalist's Twitter query about what could be more important, Pfeiffer wrote: "Oh, I don't know, there's this whole website thing that someone suggested might destroy the [Democratic] Party." According to the president's public...

President Barack Obama is skipping events marking 150 years since Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. This shouldn't be a huge shock. Yes, Obama has sometimes embraced the opportunity to compare himself to Lincoln. And what a historical opportunity to miss: The nation’s first black president honoring Lincoln’s legacy in person. But parks officials point out that the last sitting president to attend a Nov. 19 event in Gettysburg was Rutherford B. Hayes. No, what’s surprising is the White House's apparent explanation for Obama’s decision to turn down an invitation offered months ago: It’s Obamacare’s fault. Specifically, the HealthCare.gov debacle.

It’s been 35 years since 918 people, including 257 children, died on Nov. 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple massacre in Jonestown. The mass murder inside the South American jungle commune in Guyana was engineered by Jim Jones, a murderous cult leader, and was the only time in American history a member of Congress, Leo Ryan, D-Calif., was killed in the line of official duty. Most of the victims were forced to commit suicide by drinking a fatal cocktail of poisoned punch spiked with a Valium tranquilizer. In the days that followed the slaughter of the innocents, Jonestown became a...

It is only a week away. Next Friday will be November 22nd and the 50th anniversary. Dallas is steeling itself for the attention, the crowds, the people everywhere with their smartphones taking pictures. Nothing is real now till it is becoming an image. Not even that unreal day half a century ago now. Tourists will shoot pictures -- I hate that word, shoot, in this context -- of the restored old Texas Theatre on West Jefferson in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. That's where the assassin had tried to hide in the darkness after having killed again -- this time a...

Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords is teaming up with Sandy Hook mother Nicole Hockley to push gun control on the first anniversary of the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary. The crime took place on December 14, 2012, and beginning on November 14, 2013, Giffords and Hockley are encouraging schools to talk to students about "gun violence." According to The Sacremento Bee, Giffords and Hockley are asking teachers to talk to K-12 students about "[responding] to tragedies like Newtown and working to prevent them from happening in the future."

And still no lawsuits... amazing restraint considering the number of attorneys who live in CT and the diverse families affected... patience shown under tragic circumstances .... Or...

Father had launched into a holy rant. Mid-way through his homily, he startled us so we bolted upright in the pews. “You parents,” he said, as if by rattling our brains he could jump-start our consciences, “do not know evil when you are looking at it.” Although this homily took place years ago, I remember it still. Father was right. As parents in a sometimes wildly wicked world, we are often blinded by the evils that can pelt us and our children harder than a hailstorm. Parents need to sometimes wonder about the immorality hidden in things our “non-judgmental” society...

TEHRAN -- At least 10,000 Iranians protested outside the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran Monday, burning American flags and effigies of Barack Obama on the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the building. Annual demonstrations take place at the site, marking the date on which activists stormed the embassy 34 years ago and took 52 staff hostage for 444 days -- an act that severed diplomatic ties with the U.S. for more than three decades. But this year’s demonstration was larger than usual, fueled by anger among Iranians at President Hassan Rouhani's recent moves to reopen dialogue with the West....

Free Republic's first big event occurred on this day in 1998 in response to malfeasance in the Clinton Administration. Happy Anniversary! However, it is 15 years later and apparent that we are circling the drain. That said, it was a great time in D.C. low those many years ago.

Ignore, for a moment, the pea soup. Forget the head swivel, the crucifix, those 75 stone steps that tumble from Prospect to M Street. Forget that demonic voice and what your mother may or may not be doing in Hell. The creator of the scariest movie of all time would like very much if you’d remember that he wrote the Peter Sellers caper “A Shot in the Dark,” that his early collaborator in Hollywood was the comedy director Blake Edwards, that an esteemed book critic once wrote that “Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty.” This career in...

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the release of “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.” Critics frequently laud the Nintendo 64 title as the greatest video game ever. And yet the ways it deals with class, race, gender and animal rights are all deeply problematic. Some readers may take criticism of “Ocarina” as dismissal of the game. But this isn’t the case. As Feminist Frequency blogger Anita Sarkeesian says, “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” Because games’ technological capabilities have increased...

On September 26, 1983, the world came very close to nuclear war. Shortly after midnight, alarms inside Serpukhov-15 -- a bunker in Moscow where the Soviet Union monitored its satellites over the United States -- began to go off. The satellites had detected the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from a base in the United States. Then the system reported that five missiles had been launched and were heading toward the Soviet Union from the U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty that night, had no way of knowing that it was a false alarm: The satellites...