Free Republic

James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, had all the makings of a great president. So why didn’t he become one? Louis Picone, author of The President Is Dead!, answers this tragic question.

When President James Garfield was gunned down at the Washington, DC, train station in 1881, his assassination came at the hand of a man who was arguably one of history’s first incels: Charles Guiteau. Guiteau wasn’t unable to find love only in the real world — he also failed to find it at the Oneida Community, an upstate New York colony that practiced “regulated promiscuity.” Traditional marriage was banned there, but the male and female members were all considered man and wife, meaning anyone could sleep with anyone who agreed. The problem for Guiteau is that not one woman at...

A Newark Police Officer struck and killed a nurse with his car and then drove the body to his mother’s house seeking advice before returning to the scene with the body, officials said on Wednesday. Louis Santiago, 25, of Bloomfield was arrested and charged with reckless vehicular homicide, desecrating human remains and other charges after he hit and killed 29-year-old nurse Damian Dymka, of Garfield, on the Garden State Parkway, according to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.

On this date in 1882, America’s weirdest assassin recited fourteen verses of the Gospel of Matthew and (sans requested orchestral accompaniment) a poem of his own composition entitled “I am Going to the Lordy,” and was hanged in the District of Columbia jail for shooting forgettable Gilded Age president James Garfield. Mad as a march hare, Charles Julius Guiteau had irritated the obscure reaches of the Republic near four decades, trying his hand at free love, law, newspapering* and evangelism....Having failed at each characteristic American monkeyshine more comprehensively than the last, he naturally gravitated to politics; while today Guiteau might...

For more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from? The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion. From the stray...

It's President James Garfield's birthday - when he was shot, Alexander Graham Bell showed up with a metal detector to try to locate the bullet. Born in Moreland Hills, Ohio to a widowed farm wife, Garfield worked at a series of menial jobs but eventually attended Williams College, graduating in 1856. He entered politics as a Republican and served in the Ohio State Senate until the outbreak of the Civil War, in which he saw combat as a Union major general. In 1862 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served in that body until 1880, after...

Today is the anniversary of the birth of James A(bram) Garfield (1831-1881), 20th President of these United States, in Moreland Hills, Ohio. Born to a widowed farm wife, Garfield worked at a series of menial jobs but eventually attended Williams College, graduating in 1856. He entered politics as a Republican and served in the Ohio State Senate until the outbreak of the Civil War, in which he saw combat as a Union major general. In 1862 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served in that body until 1880, after 1876 as Republican Leader of the House....

Chicago Police said Sunday night that a child’s head was found in the Garfield Park lagoon, and the case has been classified as a death investigation. Earlier in the day, doctors were awaiting the results of a post-mortem examination of a child’s hands and feet found Saturday in the lagoon. The Cook County medical examiner’s office examined the body parts Sunday morning. Results were pending, but office spokesman Frank Shuftan said it would be impossible to determine the cause and manner of death from the four body parts alone. Reached by phone on Sunday, Dr. Stephen Cina, the Cook County...

Newspapers across the country are afraid to run this comic strip penned by outspoken conservative cartoonist Jim Davis. But we here at the Spring Hill Courier aren’t afraid of controversy. Je suis Charlie!

Roger Garfield, the former antiques dealer who shot and killed an unarmed homeless man in 2006, has been released from prison and granted a new trial based on a change in self-defense laws. As we explained in our March 11, 2010 article, Shoot to Kill, the prosecution of Garfield for the 2006 shooting in an antique store he once owned turned into a legal odyssey of court rulings and new statutes. He's been jailed, then released, then jailed, then sent to prison -- and now he's out again. He was in court with his wife last week as a free...

Does anyone ever wonder why the last member of the House of Representatives elected to POTUS was from 1880? It is a simple matter of Executive experience. Congress critters have for all practical purposes ZERO executive experience. The last member of the House elected to POTUS was Garfield in 1880. He had served 18 years in the house was a Brigadier General during the Civil war and President of Hiram College. With all of this, Garfield only won the nomination on the 36th vote at the convention and won the POTUS with less than 10,000 votes to spare. He was...

It's been nearly four years since audiences last saw his acrobatic web spinning prowess. And now Spider-Man is back, this time with Andrew Garfield playing the iconic superhero. Colombia Pictures today released the first image of the British actor in the infamous blue and red suit, with a few visible changes. The suit looks a little more high-tech and modern than that worn by Tobey Maguire, who played the iconic character for three hit movies - the last one back in 2007.

INDIANAPOLIS – Cartoonist Jim Davis apologized Thursday for a Garfield strip that some veterans may have found offensive. The strip ran on Veterans Day in newspapers across the country. It shows a spider daring the pudgy orange cat to squash it. The spider tells Garfield that if he is killed, "they will hold an annual day of remembrance in my honor." The final panel shows a spider-teacher asking its students if they know why spiders celebrate "National Stupid Day."

Standing in front of a wall-to-wall mural featuring a who's who of revolutionaries, including Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and boldly displaying the motto Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!!! (Fatherland or Death, We Shall Overcome!!!), a group of teachers, students, parents and community activists in the Los Angeles Unified School District gathered last month for an unusual field trip — to Arizona, to protest that state's controversial immigration law.

Every Rebel guerrilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-hunter, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag, every man who loves slavery and hates liberty. . .and every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat (and an endorser of Andrew Johnson). James A. Garfield, 1866

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Every Sunday, Jun Kwon drives his mother to a Polish-Catholic neighborhood in Garfield, to a modest, red brick house. A Korean flag flutters outside of this house turned church turned Buddhist meditation center. Taking his mom to Sunday morning services at the Santisukha Meditation Center boosts Kwon's good karma. "She's pretty old," he explains. She's 43. Korean-American Buddhists, who in the United States represent just 5 percent of their ethnic community, have a double minority status, according to Sharon A. Suh, professor of theology and religious studies at Seattle University, and author of "Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender...

National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Garfield lingered on his deathbed for 80 days, attended by doctors who disagreed on his treatment, and by his wife and daughter. Even Alexander Graham Bell tried to help locate the bullet that was lodged in the president. Correction Appended WASHINGTON — Three vertebrae, removed from the body of President James A. Garfield, sit on a stretch of blue satin. A red plastic probe running through them marks the path of his assassin’s bullet, fired on July 2, 1881. The vertebrae form the centerpiece of a new exhibit, commemorating...

On an oddly shaped lot at the intersection of Westminster Place and Passaic Street in Garfield, the steel frame of the Rev. Calvin McKinney's new church rises to meet the clear, February sky. McKinney has dreamed of building this church for 33 years, since he took over as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, where the modest stucco building belies McKinney's status as one of the most influential blackministers in New Jersey. It was a dream deferred, until Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine gave McKinney $1.8 million from his charitable foundation. The foundation, with Corzine as its only trustee, has showered charities...

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. -- A cat in Missouri is a contender for the world's fattest feline. Iggy the cat weighs more than 40 pounds. "On the bathroom scale he weighs 50 pounds. We took him out to the hog scales and he weighed 46 pounds," said Joyce Kirk, Iggy's owner. Iggy stands 14 inches tall, measures nearly 40 inches from whiskers to tail, and boasts a thickset 33-inch waistline. He is larger than most toddlers. "I've been asked several times if he's a bobcat, and, no, he's a normal cat. We had him tested for that, and he's normal," Kirk...