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WASHINGTON, May 23, 2006 – The D.C. United Major League Soccer team will express its appreciation for the military June 3 with its 7th Annual Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The team, working with corporate sponsor IBM, will provide 1,000 free tickets to its game against the New England Revolution for active-duty servicemembers who get a kick out of the sport. It also has partnered with the United Service Organizations of Metropolitan Washington to distribute the tickets through USO's five outreach centers. The 7th Annual Armed Forces Appreciation Day will begin two hours before the start of the 7:30 p.m. game...

– This month we honor the extraordinary contributions of the men and women who serve our country in the Armed Forces. I am proud to serve alongside 2.4 million Americans in the Active, Guard and Reserve Force who have chosen to take the oath to defend our Constitution. Whether deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, or supporting humanitarian operations at home or abroad, today's military personnel continue to serve this Nation with honor and distinction. In a month honoring the military, it is only fitting that on the 12th of May we specifically recognize military spouses - our silent heroes. They...

It is definitely time to finish my series of art “lectures.” So today I want to explore Neoclassicism, from about 1780, to Romanticism in the 1830s and 1840s. The style just before Neoclassicism was the fluffy Rococo style. This in turn was a reaction to the heavy style of the Baroque, especially under the absolute monarch Louis XIV, whose home was in that little “hunting lodge” of Versailles. In contrast to King Louis’s massive weight, in body and in taste, we have the lighter “fluffier” forms of the Rococo. My favorite is The Swing, on the right, by Fragonnard. What’s...

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., May 7, 2006 – Military Appreciation Month is under way, as millions of people have jammed the beach here this week for "Fleet Week USA - A National Salute to America's Heroes," sponsored by McDonald's. The company kicked off the salute on May 1. Today's McDonald's Air and Sea Show, featuring the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels demonstration team and the Army's Golden Knights parachute team, will conclude the week's festivities. The Canadian Forces Snow Birds precision aerobatics team is adding an international flavor to the weekend. The salute has been a fixture here for 12 years running,...

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Driving liberals crazy .. and having fun doing it! Support Free Republic! Donate Here By Secure Server Or mail checks to FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794 or you can use PayPal at Jimrob@psnw.com Thank you paulat for the graphic

The following article appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on December 22, 2005 Here's a Yule Story That Ought to be a Movie By Ronnie Polaneczky AND NOW, in time for the holidays, I bring you the best Christmas story you never heard. It started last Christmas, when Bennett and Vivian Levin were overwhelmed by sadness while listening to radio reports of injured American troops. "We have to let them know we care," Vivian told Bennett. So they organized a trip to bring soldiers from Walter Reed Army MedicalCenter and Bethesda Naval Hospital to the annual Army-Navy football game in...

This November we honor the extraordinary contributions of our nation’s military families as part of National Military Family Appreciation Month. Throughout our history, the steadfast support of military families has always been a source of inspiration. You have faced the special challenges of long deployments, family separations and frequent relocations with great courage and resolve. In doing so, your selfless dedication has directly contributed to the mission readiness of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Merchant Marines. My heartfelt thanks to the families who sacrifice so much—you are patriots in a quiet, strong way and you make all...

Art Appreciation/Education: Visit to NY III: Elizabeth Murray: Return to Color and Energy This is one of the great retrospective shows of the year. And I was lucky. Due to great kindness on the part of members, whom I had just met at lunch at the Museum of Modern Art Café, I was able to get a member’s guest pass to see the retrospective of Elizabeth Murray. I knew her work; I loved her work; I had written about her work for various academic papers and conferences. In fact, I was attending such a conference in NYC, and if I...

Art Appreciation/Education: Visit to NY I: Robert Smithson and James Turrell: Monumental Works of Earth and Light I recently went to NYC for a conference and delivered a paper which mostly dealt with the works of James Turrell. While in NY, I was able to see many galleries and a few museums, most notably the Whitney, which had shows on the work of Oscar Bluemner and Robert Smithson. I just posted John Haber’s review of the Bluemner show and am integrating ideas of Robert Smithson here. Robert Smithson was born in NJ in 1937 and was so fascinated with minerals...

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (Oct. 20, 2005) -- When Sgt. James Wright's unit came under intense fire April 7, 2004, the last thing on his mind was bouncing over waves during a nautical adventure. Twenty-six enemy dead, one bronze star and a year later, a speedboat is exactly what that battle got him. To show gratitude to the Marine for his tremendous sacrifices, Ultra Boats, producers of custom-made boats, presented Wright with the boat of all boats Sept. 15 at the Del Mar Boat Basin here. During the fight, a round from a rocket-propelled grenade struck his humvee...

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In our last “class” on Greco-Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, we saw how the realism of Greece and Rome was repudiated for more spiritual abstraction. The Christians saw the soul as more important than the weighty, physical body, and thus their works were flat and filled with the gold of paradise. My connection to spiritual twentieth century abstraction received mixed results, but that’s fine. Today, we’ll see how artists gradually added some bulk and realism to their work from 1000-1400. Then in the next “class,” we’ll study how the Italian Renaissance united a rebirth of Greco-Roman realism with Christian...

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The title of this first lecture in a new chronological series is: Greco-Roman Realism and Early Christian Abstraction. Christian abstraction in art? How and why can that be? Well, let’s see how early art developed and why the Christians rebelled against Roman values in art and culture. This is the first “lecture” in my second series of Art Appreciation/Education classes. I figure we need to establish more of a base in how early art developed before we can explore Renaissance and other exciting periods of art. Let’s look back even to Egyptian art, because then we can see how Greek...

Free Republic: Art Appreciation/Education “class” #10: Postmodernism Now it is time to truly finish these mini-lectures on the development of modern art with this final lecture of Postmodernism. Andy Warhol and other Pop artists may have made the first forays into Postmodernism, and some textbooks begin their postmodern sections with Pop Art. But I like to save Postmodernism for the 1980’s and thereafter. One question to consider is whether postmodernism (or at least its validity) might have come to a screeching halt on 9/11, (when thinking people realized that there were indeed evil people in the world and that the...