Free Republic

Last week, I gave 12 examples of how religious liberty has been assaulted in just the past two years in the U.S. Here are about two dozen more instances just for good measure, as reported by the Family Research Council, the office of Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., and various media outlets. --The following public institutions recently have joined the growing ranks of those that have banned the use of the word "Easter" in order to diminish or eliminate references to religion: East Meadow School District in New York, Prospect Heights Public Library in Illinois, Heritage Elementary School in Alabama,...

On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god. He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending...

The never-ending Obama campaign announced this week that it was raising funds from big donors — only a relative handful — to put together a $50 million fund for an army of grass-roots activists in swing states to go after Republican Congressmen and Senators who dare to vote against the president’s wishes. Over the next two years, they will be spreading their tentacles all over the nation, invading currently-Republican districts but might be turned to blue in 2014, in pursuit of a House majority and of a sixty-vote Democratic Senate. This “purge” of Republicans is reminiscent of 1938 when FDR...

From his very first state-of-the-union utterance last night, associating himself with President Kennedy, President Obama got it wrong, and it was mostly downhill from there: “51 years ago,” he began, “John F. Kennedy declared to this chamber that ‘the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.’” Great alliteration; bad constitutionalism. Yes, in a very narrow sense the Constitution makes the political branches partners for progress. But it also, most definitely, makes the branches, and those with authority within them, rivals for power. Indeed, throughout the Federalist Papers we learn how the Constitution pits power against power...

A pair of professors objected to our coverage of them at the Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Boston this year. Near as we can figure out, what they objected to was the fact that we covered them. “Glad you could make it to my paper on 1930s propaganda and popular culture,” Matthew Stratton, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California-Davis wrote in an effort at cordiality that belied what was to come. “I must admit, however, that I’m a bit confused by your account of the panel.” “What exactly in my paper did you find objectionable...

Former Obama administration regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has published an op-ed: that the president wants a "second Bill of Rights" alongside the existing one. Sunstein located the source of Obama's inspiration in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, rather than the South African constitution--though the American academics whose writings inspired South Africa's ambitious Bill of Rights could well have taken Roosevelt's proposals as their foundation. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights--not a list of constitutional amendments, but policy goals--was as follows: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak,...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

Washington -- The year 2012 is about to expire. It was a blank in my judgment -- poof and it is gone. We have the same sorry vacuity in the White House, bereft of knowing how to run the government. Just now he is off to Hawaii to loll in the sun, having left behind questions as to how to avoid our "fiscal cliff." Yes, he wants to raise taxes on the top two percent, but how do we reduce the deficit and finish off the tax bill? He has headed for the beach -- and practically no one remarks...

Guest: Author John Koster discusses his book, "Operation Snow - Who instigated the attack on Pearl Harbor?" Interview begins at 11 mins into the broadcast. Link to streaming audioLink to download MP3 audio file

CLICK HERE:YOUTUBE:FDR:A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMYCLICK HERE: History Channel:WWII in HD:Attack on Pearl HarborCLICK HERE:December 7, 2012 AP Today in HistoryCLICK HERE:YouTube:Harry Truman Announces Atom bombCLICK HERE:YouTube:Truman Warns Japs To Give Up Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay CLICK HERE:Interview With Crew of the Enola Gay HiroshimaCLICK HERE:YouTube: Hiroshima DetonationCLICK HERE:YouTube:Hiroshima Detonation NagasakiCLICK HERE:BBC:Nagasaki DetonationClick Here:Hundreds of Fantastic Pictures of Japanese on Board USS Missouri During Surrender Ceremonies

Andrew Napolitano: Why are GOP leaders helping Obama spend us into oblivion? Do you know anyone who voted Republican this past election in order to further President Obama’s big-government agenda? Or is it more likely that Republican voters sought to advance a smaller version of the federal government? And if they did, why are Republican congressional leaders offering to help the president spend us into oblivion? I suspected that those questions might have been asked when Mitt Romney was nominated to oppose Obama. My view of his campaign then and now has been that he presented a choice to the...

A university professor says the recent discovery of a carrier pigeon’s corpse in a chimney in Normandy, France has shed new light on events of the last year of World War II in the European theater. Harvard professor of European History Albee Leftkowitz believes that the failure of the pigeon’s mission may have hampered the advance of American forces on the Western Front and forced President Roosevelt to accede to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. “Right-wing critics of President Roosevelt have made much of what they call FDR’s misplaced trust in ‘Uncle Joe’...

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. As William Bradford recorded in his -- Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been...

Comments about TCM movie "Gabriel Over the White House" missed the real core issue: totalitarian dictatorship. William Randolph] Hearst believed that the country needed a dictator, but he wasn't sure FDR knew how to fill the role.

I am an immigrant from a formerly socialist country who now lives in Palm Desert. I arrived in the United States on March 12, 1974. It's been a long journey. If you had my background, you would understand my concerns for the seeping of socialist policies into the laws of our great country, the "Land of the Free." Here is a piece I wrote regarding how seemingly "nice," "just," and politically correct ideas can be unfair and jeopardize freedom itself. I originally wrote the following essay on March 29, 2010 examining the merits of FDR's Second Bill of Rights -...

[written September, 2011, but even more applicable today] Re:  Could this time have been different?Ezra Klein     Washington Post columnistEzra Klein: Some partisans offer a simple explanation for the depth and severity of the recession: It’s the stimulus’s fault. If we had done nothing, they say, unemployment would never have reached 10 percent.This is the wrong way to look at it. The unemployment rate numbers are so skewed as to be virtually worthless. For instance, if all of the people that have given up searching for jobs were included in today’s unemployment rate it would be over 11%: Townhall Total employment is...

As polls continue to indicate a shift in favor of Romney, former President Bill Clinton castigated voters for their impatience. “Four years isn’t that much time,” Clinton complained. “In the 1930s voters easily reelected President Roosevelt even though his policies were even less effective in dealing with the economy than President Obama’s have been. Unemployment was twice as high as it is now. Businesses everywhere were shuttered. People stood in soup lines in every city. Stock prices were a fraction of what they are now. It was, from every perspective a disaster. Yet, FDR was reelected by a huge margin.”...

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 238 pp., $15) As a Jewish liberal-turned-conservative, I am asked the question with mind-numbing regularity: how can Jewish voters remain so attached to a Democratic Party seemingly so often hostile to their interests? Given Barack Obama’s stance toward an Israel facing the threat of Iranian nuclear annihilation, needless to say, that question has been posed with particular urgency and confusion during the 2012 campaign. Generally, I offer a variation of the answer...

I’ve explained on many occasions that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was bad news for the economy. And the same can be said of Herbert Hoover’s policies, since he also expanded the burden of federal spending, raised tax rates, and increased government intervention. So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal, I quickly said yes.I was asked to respond to this question: “Was that an FDR-Sized Stimulus?” Here’s some of what I wrote.President Obama probably wants to be another FDR, and his policies share an ideological kinship with...

Buoyed by polls showing him pulling away from his opponent, President Barack Obama says “it’s time for all patriotic Americans to rally for the common good by giving me four more years.” The President acknowledged that “things may be tough for many of you, but whatever setbacks you may have experienced are just bumps in the road compared to the existential threat to this country that is posed by the risk that I might not prevail on election day.” The President declared that the latest report showing extraordinary weakness in the nation’s economy “reemphasizes the importance of continuing the work...