Free Republic

...Lyndon Johnson was a loutish psychopathic willing to do anything to advance his rise to power. His rise was fueled by graft, corruption, and murder. Yes, murder. LBJ's hitman, Malcolm Wallace, had killed seven other people in Johnson's rise to power, including LBJ's own sister, Josefa Johnson. ...As the rift between Kennedy and hardliners widened, into the void stepped Lyndon Johnson. Never to let opportunity go to waste, LBJ found the ultimate solution to his Bobby Baker scandal that was coming to a boil on Capitol Hill. LBJ's days were numbered, and he was facing possible prison. Kennedy was already...

It was 1964 and I was a liberal confident that society could be greatly improved by large infusions of money. With all the talk currently being bruited about the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty, I am reminded that for a year, between 1964 and 1965, I was the director of the antipoverty program of Pulaski County, Ark., which included Little Rock, the adjoining city of North Little Rock and the surrounding rural area. I was then 27 years old, appropriately left-wing, and confident that society could be greatly improved with the help of large infusions of money and...

Citing the need to replace “despair with opportunity” 50 years ago this week President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty. His effort to roll back severe economic distress, along with a host of other Great Society programs, was the largest push to help Americans on the economic and racial margins since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many of Johnson’s programs were key to creating economic possibility for millions who had never known it, and a whole host of them such as HeadStart, Medicaid, food stamps, and loans for higher education continue to do that. Given the success of...

When Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his War on Poverty in 1964, I wonder if he expected we’d still be waging it 50 years later? We’ve now spent over $20 trillion on the War on Poverty, and what have we got to show for it? A welfare system that has been institutionalized into one of the country’s main industries, the creation of a new, permanent, underclass of non-contributing members of society, and the destruction of the black family: in short, a system that does more to perpetuate the existence of poverty than eliminate it. You could call it collateral damage. By...

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been spent, and the number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964, while the poverty rate has held steady at just under one in five. That contrasts unpleasantly with the trend before President Johnson declared his war: The poverty rate had been dropping since the end of World War II. That progress came to a halt as President Johnson’s expensive and expansive vision...

Stealing elections is an old game politicians play. Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president, got to the U.S. Senate in 1948 by “winning” the closest race in Texas history by a margin of 87 votes out of more than a million cast. An election judge in tiny Alice, Texas, said he counted more than 200 names on the voting roll for Box 13 that were written in alphabetic succession in the same hand, same color of ink. When a federal court subpoenaed Box 13, it was discovered to be “lost.” LBJ took his seat in the Senate. Voting machines were...

Why did one of the most politically savvy leaders ever to occupy the White House—Lyndon Baines Johnson—decide not to attend the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965? And why didn’t he send his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey? Questions remain nearly 49 years later. Nearly 100 world leaders are now making their way to South Africa for the state funeral of Nelson Mandela. It will be a who’s who of global power-players. It’s important for them to be there, because it’s a risky thing to miss a great man’s funeral. President Obama invited George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and...

Reflections on the succession process, on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination The historians of ancient Rome – both contemporary and throughout the ages since – have written a great deal about the difference between “bad emperors” and “good emperors.” Nero and Caligula, for example, were off-the-charts terrible, while Augustus, Trajan, Antonius Pius, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were terrific. Of the dozens of emperors in Rome’s long-lasting empire, why were some good and others bad, when they all tended to have similar education, family background, ethnicity, experience, and military background? One of the theories was adoption vs. birth. Not...

"After tomorrow those godd-n Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's not a threat. That's a promise." – LBJ to his mistress Madeleine Brown on the eve of JFK assassination Did LBJ have JFK killed? This question has endured ever since that fateful day of 50 years ago – Nov. 22, 1963. Former Nixon White House adviser and self-proclaimed "GOP hit man" Roger Stone makes this central argument in his new book, "The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ." Stone's very interesting narrative isn't another "conspiracy theory" book to add to the already voluminous number of fantastical JFK...

Did LBJ have JFK killed? This critical question has endured ever since that fateful day of 50 years ago—Nov. 22, 1963. Former Nixon White House advisor Roger Stone makes this central argument in his new book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. Stone’s interesting narrative isn’t another “conspiracy theory” book to add to the already voluminous number of fantastical JFK assassination claims. Roger tells Reason Magazine Editor, Nick Gillespie that, “The whole term ‘conspiracy theorists’ is a pejorative that the mainstream media uses to denigrate anyone who questions the government’s version on virtually anything… I’m not talking...

Richard Nixon thought Lyndon Johnson killed John F. Kennedy, according to legendary political operative Roger Stone. “Richard Nixon told me in 1982 that he immediately knew who Jack Ruby was when he saw him shoot Oswald,” Stone told The Daily Caller in an extensive interview. Stone’s new book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ is currently tearing up the Amazon bestseller list and even earned praise from Ron Paul. Among other revelations, Stone told TheDC that Nixon hired Jack Ruby as a House committee informant at Johnson’s request years prior to the Kennedy assassination, which occurred 50...

It has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and most of the world still wrongly believes that the culprit was the CIA, or the FBI, or the mafia, or right-wing American businessmen. It has been also 50 years since the Kremlin started an intense, worldwide disinformation operation, codenamed “Dragon,” aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s connection with Lee Harvey Oswald. Not unrelated are the facts that Oswald was an American Marine who defected to Moscow, returned to the United States three years later with a Russian wife, killed President Kennedy, and was arrested before...

Invariably at some point in the history of a nation an event occurs which precipitates or dramatically accelerates the potential demise of that nation or empire. The United States experienced such an event in Dallas fifty years ago Friday. Within months of the assassination of John Kennedy, America turned dramatically to the left as the avowed disciples of Franklin Roosevelt and European socialism assumed the reins of power and were the catalyst that unleashed into the American mainstream those true-believers in Marxist ideology determined to transform the nation, and who have now metastasized into a cancer on the American society....

<p>In a recent study of U.S. presidents' personality traits, Lyndon Johnson ranked highest in grandiose narcissism.</p> <p>While it frequently gets a bad rap, grandiose narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors, according to a group of researchers who published a paper in October in Psychological Science.</p>

I realize that delving into the world of assassination research and a belief in a conspiracy will lead some to brand me as an extremist or a nut, but the facts I have uncovered are so compelling that I must make the case that Lyndon Baines Johnson had John Fitzgerald Kennedy murdered in Dallas to become president himself and to avert the precipitous political and legal fall that was about to beset him. Snip When Lodge was in his eighties, he served vigorously as the chairman of Ronald Reagan’s campaign for President in Connecticut, a post I had recruited him...

These days there doesn't seem to be a politician in America who is both as loved and hated as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas). With the adoration of Tea Partiers and the antipathy of just about everyone else, the newest conservative it-boy has captured the nation's political imagination. Following his now-infamous 21-hour fauxlibuster, his political puppetry of the House of Representatives that all but assured the government shutdown, and the fact that Cruz's poll numbers with conservative Republicans have skyrocketed while the overall public view of the Tea Party has tanked, the one question on everyone's mind is: What's next for...

Here's my response to Commander Zer0's verbal assault on reason that took place last night. I realize that our Dear Leader's plans to provide al-Qaeda air cover may not materialize, but keep this in mind: We have a failing dictator who's willing to start world War III to distract the country from his varied scandals and Zimbabwe-like economy. Anything is still possible with this pile of human debris in the White House. Without further ado: *** For the last couple of days, we've been exposed to an endless stream of war propaganda in support of Chairman Obama's Syrian adventure. Without...

Here's something I'll wager that we don't hear about from Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson, or Sheila Jackson Lee, or Jeremiah Wright, or Barack Hussein Obama, or the NAACP, or any Democrat for that matter. Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), a Democrat and civil rights icon, speaking while aboard Air Force One about his "Great Society" to two sympathetic governors, said, "I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years."

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he would strive to be like Lyndon Johnson, the Democrat famous for expanding the U.S. welfare state through the "Great Society," if he were elected president. According to the Miami Herald, Bush made those comments Wednesday night in San Antonio, Florida at Saint Leo University, while speaking about education, immigration, and energy policy. Bush did not address Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty programs, about which Ronald Reagan once famously quipped, "We had a war on poverty, and poverty won." Instead, he was referencing Johnson's mastery of the so-called sausage-making process in Congress....

There are a couple of dozen competing conspiracy theories as to what happened to JFK and until recently I'd assumed they were all more or less equally plausible; that no longer appear to be the case, this one is a whole lot more plausible than any of the others. That fingerprint of Mac Wallaces at the shooting scene IS a match: http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/23rd_Issue/breakthru.html and the story about the 5-year suspended sentence for killing the golf course owner does check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Douglas_Kinser There is no way any of us could just kill somebody with a pistol, turn himself/herself in, and walk off...