Free Republic

In 1996, Reginald Dwayne Betts — a 16-year-old honor student with braces — used a pistol to carjack a man who had been sleeping in his vehicle. Shortly thereafter, he was caught, sentenced as an adult and sent to an adult prison, where he served more than eight years, including one year in solitary at a supermax facility. "I was 5 feet, 5 inches and 120 pounds. I went to prison with grown men, and I went into what people readily acknowledge as a treacherous and a wild place," Betts tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "My judge, when he sentenced...

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. Former Democratic President Woodrow Wilson may be purged from his alma mater, Princeton University. The old “Schoolmaster of Politics”, as he was known for his academic background at Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan and finally president of Princeton U, has been thrown under the bus by its current president for being a politically incorrect progressive. Also known as a plain old racist. Woody was indeed a racist. Though even on his worst day he was still about 40% less racist than...

Bill Clinton bashed President Bush in a speech delivered from the pulpit of a prominent Manhattan church on the Sunday before the Republican National Convention began. Yet, Americans United for Separation of Church and State does not view Clinton's pulpit-based diatribe a violation of tax laws. Ever since then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D.-Tex.) slipped a provision into a bill back in 1954, federal law has prohibited tax-exempt churches from engaging in partisan political speech. Every election season, Americans United files complaints against churches that it alleges have violated this law. The group also opposes the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration...

Politico Magazine runs a long article by Alex Thompson today with the provocative headline: "Could America Elect a Mentally Ill President? Yes. In fact, we probably already did." The story discusses the possible mental issues, and documented consumption of drugs used to treat mental illness, of numerous politicians, including several presidents, among them JFK, LBJ and Nixon. But here's the—excuse the expression—crazy thing. To illustrate the story, Politico features a large photo of Barry Goldwater. He is shown holding a finger to his lips, as if perhaps to suggest he wants to keep a secret. But of all the many...

It was a throwback moment at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday when Catherine Robb, the granddaughter of the late president Lyndon Johnson, was admitted to the court's bar. Her father Charles Robb, the former governor and U.S. senator from Virginia, moved her admission. It appeared that several justices recognized the presidential connection as she was sworn in to the bar. "It's something my father and I talked about years ago," Catherine Robb said afterward. "It was an opportunity for my father to move my admission—a special bond between us." Catherine Robb, 45, is counsel to Haynes and Boone in...

A declassified CIA report concludes former agency Director John McCone withheld information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr., according to a recent news story. The 2013 report, declassified last fall, concludes that McCone, who ran the spy agency when Kennedy was fatally shot in November 1963, kept information from the Warren Commission during its investigation into the assassination. The report’s author, CIA historian David Robarge, writes that McCone and other top CIA officials were part of a "benign cover-up" to keep the commission focused on what the agency believed at the time was the "best truth …...

At the peak of the 1965 war with Pakistan, India had asked the United States to covertly provide experts to work with Indian military officials to tackle the Chinese threat. This request was made to the US Embassy in Delhi by L K Jha, principal secretary to prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, on September 18, 1965, after India detected Chinese movements in battalion strength on the eastern border of Ladakh and in Chumbi Valley. Worried by indications that China was getting ready for military action against India to relieve the pressure on Pakistan, Jha stressed to the embassy that providing...

The Coinage Act of 1965 marked the end of silver coins, contrary to what LBJ promised. July 23 marks the 50th anniversary of the Coinage Act of 1965, which stripped U.S. coins of silver and made legal tender out of base metal slugs. It’s an anniversary that comes at an apt time, as Congress considers monetary reform. ... The anniversary of the 1965 Coinage Act is a reminder of why reform is needed. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, President Lyndon B. Johnson called the law he signed a “very rare and historic occasion.” It certainly was; it superseded...

At least 10 people were killed or found dead under suspicious circumstances since 3 p.m. Friday afternoon across Chicago. Among the dead were the decomposing bodies of a mother and her three children found in an East Chatham home with evidence of trauma and a fire that was never reported, and three men dead in a double-murder-suicide in the Mayfair neighborhood Friday afternoon. Thirty-five people were also wounded in shootings as far north as the Albany Park neighborhood and as far south as Roseland. Some of the wounded were in critical condition. No side of the city was without a...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

51 years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, theaters, parks, restaurants, and other public places. The Act guaranteed full and equal enjoyment of goods and services and public accommodations without discriminating or segregating on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. LBJ signed the document protecting the basic civil rights of minorities, stating that, “It’s purpose is not to divide but to end divisions,” he said. VIDEO ON LINK Life Dynamics‘ president Mark Crutcher points out that this nation still has a...

The U.S. and other wealthy nations have spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century trying to lift the world’s poorest people out of penury, with largely disappointing results. In 1966, shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty, 14.7% of Americans were poor, under the official definition of the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2013, 14.5% of Americans were poor. Finally, after decades of failure there is a movement afoot to launch “a new generation of experimental programs focusing not on large-scale social support and development but on helping the poor and indebted to save more, live better...

Different writers here and there have talked about 1965, fifty years ago, as a year of transition. It was a year in America when trends came into focus, culture was altered, and life changed—politically, socially, culturally, morally, and in the Catholic Church. Perhaps historian James T. Patterson provided the most detailed elaboration on these developments and their implication for the country in his bluntly titled book from a song of the time, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America.First, the national policies put in place that year as LBJ launched his Great Society made the federal welfare/entitlement state...

Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today’s black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let’s look at some of it. Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to...

ABC 7:30 Report on USA Mutiny on Australian soil. [Video]

The GOP’s destructive Vietnam mythology: How the right’s self-glorifying delusions led to decades of avoidable war It only took about five years from the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, for the American right to succeed in burying the moment under mounds of revisionist horse shit. Ronald Reagan, speaking at a campaign appearance in the summer of 1980, said, It is time that we recognized that [the American War in Vietnam] was, in truth, a noble cause… We dishonor the memory of 50 thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt...

Watching the "inevitable" Hillary Clinton campaign across Iowa reminded me of another profoundly flawed human being whose nomination was also seen as inevitable 18 month before Election Day: Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1967.  Actually it was Gene McCarthy I first thought about when I read this a few weeks ago: Again and again, the activists jumped to their feet, cheering on such promises as breaking up big banks, reining in Wall Street’s “reckless gambling” and addressing the country’s “gross concentrated wealth.” They might have been listening to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose populist crusade on income equality, health care and...

Now filled with nothing but cobwebs, the Houston Astrodome was once considered a palace for football and baseball fans. Less well known was the palace that the Dome's visionary Roy Hofheinz built for himself inside the Eighth Wonder of the World. Time Life photos show the apartment's whimsical style, highlighted by red carpet that coved the floor and walls of a conference room, which also featured zebra-print chairs and chalices in front of each seat. Psychedelic wallpaper covered the salon, while Asian dragon statues flanked the massive desk in Hofheinz' office. The apartment also featured a putting green, a shooting...

As state legislatures throughout America struggle with requirements to balance their state budgets, let us pause to remember that one-quarter of the budget is dictated by Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose damage to state budgets lives on 42 years after his death. As president, LBJ pushed for Medicaid -- free health insurance for poor people. This was a boon to the medical industry, particularly hospitals, doctors, sellers of wheelchairs, and nursing homes. But Medicaid comes at the expense of schools, highways, prisons and others state services because it requires states to pony up some of the money in this federally mandated...

On February 7, 1965, a company of 300 Vietcong guerrillas armed with AK-47s, mortars and rifle grenades attacked an American helicopter base named Camp Holloway in the town of Pleiku, located in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The raid, which came just a few hours after the end of a weeklong cease fire for the Tet holiday, lasted only five minutes; but it produced the highest single number of U.S. casualties in the war: Eight Americans were killed and more than 120 wounded. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an immediate military reprisal. Within 14 hours, U.S. jets were flying bombing...