Free Republic

We’ve seen the bumper stickers saying “If you are reading this thank a teacher”; but the better one says, “If you are reading this thank a teacher; but if you are reading this in English thank a veteran.” The wisdom in this simple statement is profound. As a young Marine recruit I often heard, “Private if it wasn’t for the Marine Corps you’d be speaking Japanese.” Yet the accomplishments of the Marine Corps are just a portion of the rich heritage of the United States Military. It’s always been brave veterans with guns, not liberals with white flags that have...

Selfless service is engrained into the fiber of our great state Years ago, reading Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel, The Lords of Discipline, I was struck by the single line – “No Southern man is complete without a tenure under military rule.” Not all Southerners serve, have served, or will ever serve their country. And today it is only a very small percentage of Americans overall who have served or will ever serve in the armed forces. Nevertheless, Conroy’s line speaks to many of us hailing from the South, and to an even greater degree those of us from the Palmetto...

Late in the evening on November 4, 2015, Dr. Ben Carson sat down to his computer, as he reportedly does regularly, to answer questions that had been sent to him on Facebook during the day. His November 4 post had the desired effect. With 300,000 likes and 180,000 shares (at this writing), read aloud by major talk show hosts from Rush Limbaugh in Florida to Joe Walsh in Chicago, this post is the dictionary definition of “going viral.” So as a politician, he deserves congratulations; the post was effective. But as an honest statesman, it fell short. The Question of...

Half- hearted measures rarely if ever succeed. More times than not they make situations worse because they waste time and energy that could be used to actually achieve our goal. Anyone who has considered the problem of illegal immigration is familiar with the half-hearted phrases “comprehensive immigration reform” and its companion “secure the border.” Thanks to Barack Obama’s cavalier attitude toward our safety and well-being we can clearly see that “secure the border” is an empty phrase. It was coined by clever politicians of both Parties to anesthetize us into thinking there is a real effort to shut down our...

Monday, November 02, 2015 Our Insecure Culture Warriors Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Culture War 2.0 is as inescapable as it is obnoxious. Its loudest proponents, the Social Justice Warriors, live off a drama that they create, playing enlightened victim-activists fighting micro-struggles against micro-aggressions in areas most people have never even thought about. The issues are ideological, but they're mainstreamed by focusing on personal narratives. The victim-activists are usually millennials from wealthy families with useless degrees. It's a story as old as radicalism, but in the dawn of the 21st century, it's activism and culture war...

More at Reaganite Republican Note: crude humor alert

It is up to Israel to display the wit and the will to resist this European pressure, because the Europeans, as with much of what they are doing to themselves and to us, are simply wrong As a million anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist migrants flood Europe they find a host continent in support of their anti-Israel passion. As Jews commemorate Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi brown-shirts burnt Jewish books, burnt down synagogues with Jews inside, and led a boycott against Jewish businesses; European politicians are drafting a plan to stick another Yellow Star on Jewish products from Judea &...

Our great nation was founded by men filled with integrity and honor who were willing to sacrifice not only their fortune but their lives. They were compelled to leave their homes and careers to help guide our new nation into a direction that would demand restraints upon the government’s role in the lives of the people. They fought to establish a republic that would grant limited power to a federal government, because they understand that any government with central power is a corrupt government. These great patriots understood that absolute power corrupts and a best form of government was best...

“Who did you vote for in the last election?” a senior female colleague asked me when I first entered the English Department of a Chicago area community college! Thankfully, in this case, I just had received tenure, because had I not, I very well would have been drummed out of their University of Chicago ghetto of political correctness when that crap all started, way back in the late 1960’s. “We don’t teach that any more. . .that’s old fashioned,” a minority female professor told me late in my teaching career. Horror of horrors, I still required my students to spell...

In a time where college students are offended by pretty much everything, The Federalist Papers reports that one professor at UNC-Wilmington decided to cut through the rhetoric and let his students know that they aren't the special snowflakes liberals and their parents would have them believe. His epic class introduction has gone viral, and for good reason: this is the most common sense lecture to come out of any college in a long time.

November 3, 2015 Re: Hammond Family Declared as Terrorist and Sentenced to Five Years in Federal Prison From: The Bundy Family Bunkerville, Nevada To: Aware Citizens & Government Officials Our hearts and prayers go out to the Hammond family with deep empathy. The magnitude of the injustices dealt to them is hard to comprehend. Their once happy lives have been forever darkened with pains of corruptions. The nature of their sentencing proves once again that justice is currently not found in the federal courts. The Hammonds are a simple ranching family that for generations has cared for the land...

This video has been redone for sound improvement and is full of memories and has two hymns, Nearer My God to Thee and Till We Meet At Jesus Feet. These hymns or covered by myself, playing my mandolin. As my mother would say; Thanks a million for watching and commenting.

The US Didn’t Create ISIS -- Assad and Saddam Did Dictators pay a price for allying with Islamic terrorism November 4, 2015 Daniel Greenfield 314 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russia-Iran-Assad axis and its useful idiots in the West claim that the United States created ISIS. Some of the loonier conspiracy sites that gleefully repost Russian propaganda allege that the Caliph of ISIS is a Jewish Mossad agent named Elliot Shimon or a CIA agent named Simon Elliot.  Elliot doesn’t exist, but ISIS’ Deputy Caliph...

This famous photograph of Al Gore, was supposedly posted on his web site when he was running for president in 1999.  It has been floating about the Internet ever since.  Many use it to mock Al Gore for his weapon handling skills, or lack thereof; but the weapon handling does not look too bad to me.  There is no magazine in the rifle, so it is likely unloaded, even if the selector switch is on "semi" and not on safe.  The muzzle, on close examination, seems to be pointing to the left (his left) of his head. He seems...

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, declassified in the 1970s. (Photo: Joe Loong/Flickr)When you think of Allied espionage, you might imagine disguised explosives, wiretaps, bat bombs, or other dramatic inventions. But declassified documents reveal that World War II was won in part by more everyday saboteurs–purposefully clumsy factory workers, annoying train conductors, and bad middle managers, all trained by the U.S.'s Simple Sabotage Field Manual.In 1944, World War II was in its final throes. Though the Allies were holding their own against the Axis, they were in need of more troops and more local cooperation. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor...

RedState's own Leon Wolf did a great job exposing the Politico story about Ben Carson and West Point as a lie. Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is also churning out great information on Twitter regarding the story. I want to focus on what Donald Trump is doing with the story, however. Yesterday, November 5, Donald Trump had this to say about Politico: Look, Politico is so dishonest in so many different things. This Politico website or whatever the hell they call it, I mean, they write about me. We don't deal with them anymore because the level of dishonesty is...

Mulberry Street, where New York's "Little Italy" is centered, c. 1909.  (Photo: Library of Congress)“Don’t eat gabagool, Grandma,” says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. “It’s nothing but fat and nitrates.” The pronunciation of “gabagool,” a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. The casts are heavily Italian-American, but...

  Certainly no lack of historical curiosity in my noggin, but this one's new on me. Hard to imagine how I missed it, because it's a delightful folk art form to be sure- pure Americana. Due to the relative cheapness, softness, portability, and (adequate) thickness for sculpturing, the US 5-cent coin proved perfect for carving into highly-creative works that can be carried around in your pocket.  Alterations of coins had occurred in Europe, S. Africa, and the US in the 18th and 19th century -in cruder forms- but introduction of the 'Buffalo' nickel in 1913 brought about a surge in popularity of...

President George H. W. Bush lost his bid for reelection in 1992. And it hurt. Until now, however, we didn't know how much. But with the special Fox News Reporting - Destiny and Power – The Private Diaries of George Herbert Walker Bush, we take a deep look at the man, actually hearing his own thoughts and feelings through the audio diary he kept while in the White House. It will be the first time this material has been released to the public. You can see this new special Friday, Nov. 6 at 10 p.m. ET on The Fox News...

One of the benefits of being 91 is you don’t have to hold back anymore—you can say what you want. And in a new biography, former President George H.W. Bush tells Jon Meacham just what he thinks about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s work in his son’s administration, as reported by Fox News and The New York Times. “He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” the elder Bush said of the man who served as his secretary of defense. “Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys...