Free Republic

Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier. Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our...

Jeb Bush hasn’t announced whether he’s decided to run for president in 2016, but the former Florida governor has promised that if he does he will strive to govern like former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Speaking at Saint Leo University in San Antonio, Fla., the Republican praised Mr. Johnson last February, not for his “Great Society” programs that conservatives blame for significantly expanding the size and scope of the federal government, but for his forceful, hands-on leadership, The Miami Herald reported at the time.

War On Terror: The death of skilled diplomat Richard Holbrooke is said to be a devastating blow to our Afghan war effort. But diplomats don't win wars; they do, unfortunately, often lose them. 'A huge vacuum." "A major void." "A towering, one-of-a-kind presence." These are some of the extravagant descriptions bandied about after the unexpected death Monday of the 69-year-old Obama administration envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, "AfPak czar" Richard Holbrooke. The media love personalities, so it's no surprise to see this foreign policy adviser to four Democratic presidents rendered larger than life, especially since he'd been expected to become...

From the beginning of recorded history, humans have made monumental decisions based upon the needs of their children. Some parents would move far away from the land in which they themselves were born and raised, because they wanted their children to have a better chance in the world. The Pilgrims, who left England, and many who followed them, came to America both for religious freedom, and a better future for their children. Many may remember the television series based upon Laura Ingalls Wilders’ novel, Little House on The Prairie. It’s the story of a man who moved west so...

WHEN I WAS young, public service television commercials were not uncommon. One of the more famous ones featured an American Indian looking at a polluted landscape. At the commercial's close, there was a tear in his eye. Less iconic was a commercial about fair housing. A superintendent is showing a substandard apartment — it needs a lot of work. If I recall, he shows the bathroom and how getting a nickel washer from the hardware store would fix the plumbing. The commercial's goal was to educate people of color that there were laws protecting them against housing discrimination. I was...

AUSTIN, Tex. — Former President George W. Bush called the achievement gap between white and black children “a national scandal” on Thursday and urged both parties to come together to address it as the central civil rights issue of the modern era. Paying tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Bush said the real test of the nation’s commitment to equality would be to fix an educational system that has tolerated low standards for too long. “There’s a growing temptation among public officials in both political parties at...

Texans like to talk all the time about how big Texas is, and how if you´re driving from the bottom of Texas to Canada, then you´re spending half of your time just getting through the state itself. So is that true? It´s pretty close. Texas really is gigantic. Redditor Armeleon put together a map that gives you a good idea of the massive size of Texas. Texas spans about 800 miles from north to south. Everything seen in red on the map is closer than 791 miles to Texas (the longest straight-line distance in Texas from north to south is

Well we now know how much these two old battle-axes go to church and believe in the word of the Lord. Saying LBJ would be for sodomite "marriage" is the biggest joke in the world. Like anyone that lived back then, the very thought of two men or two women "getting married" would be the most repugnant thing they ever heard.

...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...