Free Republic

Stonewalled in Obama’s Garden of Beasts Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, by Sharyl Atkisson, 2014In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Eric Larson, 2011 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~~George Santayana “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” ~~Attributed to Mark Twain, unverified “Goddammit, Sharyl! The Washington Post is reasonable, the L.A. Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, you’re the only one who’s not reasonable! So, Sharyl Atkisson is the only...

Molly Guptill Manning, with her collection of Armed Services Edition books, discovered that soldiers liked nostalgic books and those with sex scenes. Armed Services Editions created a new audience of readers back home. A decade after the Nazis’ 1933 book burnings, the U.S. War Department and the publishing industry did the opposite, printing 120 million miniature, lightweight paperbacks for U.S. troops to carry in their pockets across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. The books were Armed Services Editions, printed by a coalition of publishers with funding from the government and shipped by the Army and Navy. The largest of...

If current worldwide demographic trends continue, whites are seriously an endangered race. A new baby boom of Hispanic, Asian and black children will make whites a minority in the USA by 2050. White birth rates in America are falling, while immigrants and minorities are having more children. The population surge does not derive directly from immigration, but rather from immigrants alreday in the USA having children. This is in the new book Diversity Explosion by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey. The book contains highly detailed charts and maps showing how falling white birth-rates and rising minority birth-rates will change...

By the time John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for his great American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, he had been dead for 12 years. Toole reportedly killed himself in part due to years of frustration over unsuccessful attempts to get his outrageously funny book about New Orleans published. It was only after his mother browbeat author Walker Percy into taking up the cause that Louisiana State University Press published the book in 1980. The following year, it won the Pulitzer for fiction. It went from being considered a cult classic to a must-read: More than 1.5 million copies...

It’s hard to get too far into reading a newspaper these days without hearing about how nasty the political game has become. At first glance, it’s an easy assertion to buy into: between the government shutdown, Congress’ inability to pass any meaningful legislation, the vitriolic opposition to compromise coming from both sides of the aisle, etc., etc., things do seem to have changed. The media plays a role in selling the idea, too. Magazine covers and op-eds all trumpet the same message: America just doesn’t seem to work any more. Our collective memory is startlingly short. Anyone who has read...

The fiancée of Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died of Ebola in Dallas, has landed a deal to publish a memoir. “I am writing this book to tell people about Eric, about our love story, about our family and about my faith that has been tested but not broken,” Louise Troh said in a statement released Thursday. “The love of my life and the father of my son came to America to marry me,” she added. “It was supposed to be the first happy day of a new life of joy for us all. But before we could...

"[If] the monetary authorities are intent on depreciating the currency, then I think that in the fullness of time they will succeed all too well. …The important thing about QE [quantitative easing] is this idea, this radical precedent is now on the books — the virus as it were is in the monetary bloodstream. ...all of this is…in the books as precedent, and the monetarists and Keynesians are rather preening about the evident success of these interventions, and we can be sure I think that they will not forebear to do more still next time. There will come a time...

Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men. The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians. Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and...

One of my favorite little moments in the very entertaining new “Star Trek” movie comes when the young James T. Kirk activates the computer system of a car he swiped for a joyride, and the Nokia logo comes up. It’s nice to see Nokia’s still in business in the twenty-third century. Such simple touches help to humanize the Star Trek universe, which had drifted a bit too far from recognizable human experience for audiences to fully engage with its characters. The presence of a good old-fashioned corporate logo in the new movie put me in mind of a long-ago, free-wheeling,...

The Times columnist suggests a government crackdown for selling conservative books too quickly. Big-government aficionado Paul Krugman is calling for “public action to curb the power” of an entity he can’t quite bring himself to call a monopoly, even as he nonetheless compares its “abuses” to those of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company. The subject of his ire? “Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America,” Krugman whines. “Does Amazon really have robber-baron-type market power? When it comes to books, definitely,” Krugman insists. “Amazon overwhelmingly dominates online book...

It has been widely reported that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of President John F. Kennedy, shared with family members she was certain that Kennedy’s Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, arranged to have her husband murdered. Soon that conclusion will be heard in the late First Lady’s own words, because audio tapes, recorded of discussions with historian and close family associate, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., between March and June 1964, will be released and excerpts featured on an upcoming ABC News program in November marking the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) The tapes, which insiders describe as...

A counterjihadist and Christian apologist takes on the Obama administration narrative.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Penelope Cruz is Esquire's "sexiest woman alive." Cruz is the 11th woman to be given the title by the magazine. Previous honorees include Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Rihanna, Charlize Theron and Scarlett Johansson.

In 2007, Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, Inc., published a book titled “The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company,” laying out five principles that comprise his market-based management philosophy, to which he attributes the exponential growth of Koch Industries. As political observers are likely aware, the success of Koch Industries has enabled the Kochs to spend millions of dollars funding libertarian ideological initiatives and Republican political campaigns, something Democrats are not enamored of. Sen. Harry Reid most famously has attacked the Kochs — using them as a caricature for the villainous one percent...

"[The U.S. is] reducing our [nuclear] arsenal. We are investing less. All the while our enemies are exponentially increasing their expenditures, making more sophisticated weapons, flouting arms control agreements, and…Vladimir Putin announced a couple of weeks ago that he was taking titular control personally of the Russian arms control agency. So we have a crisis here, and one that’s both been unacknowledged and un-discussed.”

“In short, there is a new Cold War in progress, with our old adversaries back in the game, more powerful than they have been for decades, and with America more confused and tentative than it has been since the Carter years.”

Obama and psychohistoryby John Ruberry | March 9th, 2014 Isaac Asimov’s greatest and best-known work was the Foundation series. The plot is centered on the mathematical model created by Professor Hari Seldon–one that can scientifically predict the history of our galaxy. On the surface it appears to be a dry read, but plot twists and intriguing characters make the stories work. Barack Obama is not a mathematician and he may not even be a reader of science fiction, but he is a believer in psychohistory. Obama all but tells us he knows how the future looks–and what will remain in...

The major thrust of the books on West’s list — namely that Roosevelt’s cabinet and much of the federal bureaucracy was filled with Communists, fellow travelers, dupes and “useful idiots,” and that at the very least this influenced an FDR agenda that proved heavily favorable towards “Uncle Joe” Stalin and the Soviet Union, enabling its expansion and increasing its sphere of influence well beyond its borders — leads to a total paradigm shift when thinking about the World War II era. It bears noting that in “American Betrayal,” West herself seeks to draw a parallel between the modern-day whitewashing of...

An extensive interview on all things Benghazi with radio host, investigative journalist and author of the new book, "The Real Benghazi Story," Aaron Klein.

Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) president Greg Lukianoff “Freedom From Speech,” a 61-page broadside written by Freedom for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) president Greg Lukianoff, deftly illustrates the evolving assault on free speech. “The public’s appetite for punishing attempts at candor gone wrong, drunken rants, or even private statements made in anger or frustration seems to be growing at an alarming rate,” Lukianoff warns. The author cites a range of incidents to make his initial point, covering a large and diverse cast of characters. They include former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson,...