Free Republic

I was seven years old in early 1968 watching lots of television on a black and white picture set in my bedroom. One of my favorites was the "Batman" series on ABC with Adam West in the title role and Burt Ward as Robin. One of the guest villains on the program was "Catwoman" Eartha Kitt, whose entertainment career blossomed in the 1950's. Kitt, was black and a woman, which clearly qualified her for an invitation to the White House for a ladies luncheon in January of the election year, 1968. The First Lady, who was known by her nickname...

In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history. The latest maiming of the historical record and elementary historical logic has come over Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson--and the presidential primaries of 2008. The media echo chamber is now booming with charges that Senator Hillary Clinton has disparaged Dr. King, praised President Johnson in his stead, and thereby distorted the history of the civil rights movement. It is the latest evidence, say the talking heads, that Clinton is running a subtly racist campaign--or, as the theology and African-American studies professor...

The "deathbed confession" audio tape in which former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt admits he was approached to be part of a CIA assassination team to kill JFK was aired this weekend - an astounding development that has gone completely ignored by the establishment media. E. Howard Hunt names numerous individuals with both direct and indirect CIA connections as having played a role in the assassination of Kennedy, while describing himself as a "bench warmer" in the plot. Hunt alleges on the tape that then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in the planning of the assassination and in...

They always say that the passage of time sometimes dulls the memory of a person's past, that oft times only the good memories remain. More often, though, time plus a large dollop of myth making and lies creates a whole new world out of the past. Dick Simpson is more evidence of the later than the former. In a whitewashing of the foolishness and destruction wrought by his anti-American comrades in the vaunted "summer of love," Chicago Sun-Times columnist Simpson wonders "Can we revive '60s-era ideals?" Surely, anyone who has a clear memory of those tumultuous days would quickly reply,...

Tapes support new book showing who really assassinated JFK. Newly released tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone conversations corroborate the central premise of an explosive new book that promises to completely reshape the debate over who killed President John F. Kennedy. President Johnson believed what Richard Nixon always suspected... The surreptitious recordings, released from the Johnson library in Austin, Texas, Feb. 28, offer this bombshell missed by the press, Rosen writes: The Kennedy White House did not merely tolerate or encourage the murder of its ally, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, but organized and executed it. "Triangle" authors present...

Older Americans tend to think of Social Security as something we ought to be able to afford. Indeed, many seniors tell themselves that when Washington pours extra cash into the New Deal pension program, the action is something like investing in a new Volvo. The purchase may look extravagant but is, in reality, deliciously necessary. This attitude is also held by some of our most respected pension officials. The longtime Social Security Administration commissioner Robert M. Ball wrote on this page recently that "it's the essence of responsibility, in my view, to insist on no benefit cuts" ["A Social...

WELLESLEY, Mass. — Senator Clinton is describing her opposition to the war in Iraq as an extension of Eugene McCarthy's position in the 1960s movement against the war in Vietnam. Mrs. Clinton's comments came at an energy-charged rally yesterday at her alma mater, Wellesley College. Her visit, the ostensible purpose of which was to announce a new Web site aimed at younger voters, hillblazers.com, created palpable excitement on campus. Hundreds of students lined up amid Wellesley's autumnal splendor for a chance to hear the speech of the 1969 graduate and then moved and bopped to the strands of Smash Mouth's...

This morning I received an e-mail from a crusty lady in Sheridan Wyoming who happens to be a Fred Thompson supporter. This lady has e-mailed me before adding a little to each of my articles supporting Fred Thompson. Charlotte isn’t the only one who tells me they are behind Fred Thompson 100%. I would have used the popular Democratic statistic of 110% except like so many things Democratic 110% doesn’t exist. Democrats are always trying to convince the voters they can go several steps beyond what’s physically possible. Every time Hillary opens her mouth she goes 110% beyond reality, she’s...

George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he's arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ. “He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group. The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group.

FDR essentially got the Supreme Court to ignore the 10th A. so that the Court would give the green light to his constitutionally unauthorized federal spending programs. Then, as a consequence of having the political license to ignore the 10th A., renegade, anti-religious expression justices then unconsitutionally limited our religious freedoms. More specifically... Justice Owen Roberts rewrote constitutional history in the Cantwell v. Connecticut opinion by writing the following. "The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states...

You’ve heard of institutional memory? Well The New York Times has developed institutional Alzheimer’s.Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus outlines the details of a story that is familiar to anyone who’s picked up a newspaper, watched the news on TV or listened to talk radio over the past few days: [A]n important political figure, arrested for engaging in lewd conduct in a public men's room. Married, with children, he told no one. Instead he pleaded guilty without even hiring a lawyer, hoping the problem would quietly disappear. When, as was inevitable, the press got hold of the story, his erstwhile supporters...

Sir: I've been a straight-ticket Democrat for 50 years but if Lyndon Johnson picks them beagles up by the ears one more time, he's a dead duck in my book. J. S. WHITE West Palm Beach, Fla.

AUSTIN, Texas — Lady Bird Johnson made a final trip Friday to her beloved wildflower center, where friends and family followed the former first lady's casket into a gallery for a private memorial service. About 180 people gathered at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, where her coffin, draped in white cloth with blue embroidery, rested in front of a large portrait of Johnson in a field of flowers. Nearby, two vases held lavender-hued bluebells, her favorite flower. "We are here to let Lady Bird go and to celebrate her glad release," said the Rev. Stephen Kinney, former rector at...

Just reported.

Forty years ago this week, I was asked to investigate the heaviest attack on an American ship since World War II. As senior legal counsel to the Navy Court of Inquiry, it was my job to help uncover the truth regarding Israel's June 8, 1967, bombing of the Navy intelligence ship Liberty. On that sunny, clear day 40 years ago, Israel's combined air and naval forces attacked the Liberty for two hours, inflicting 70 percent casualties. Thirty-four American sailors died, and 172 were injured. The Liberty remained afloat only by the crew's heroic efforts. Israel claimed it was an accident....

http://www.nsa.gov/liberty/ U.S.S. Liberty What’s new? On 08 June 2007, the National Security Agency (NSA) finalized the review of all material relative to the 08 June 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. This additional release adds to the collection of documents and audio recordings and transcripts previously posted to the site on 02 July 2003. The attack on the USS Liberty, like others in our nation's history, has become the center of considerable controversy and debate. It is not NSA's intention to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of...

Ever since that late morning is Dealey Plaza Dallas Texas, November 22nd 1963, the soul of America has been tortured by lingering doubts about the official version of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed by Lyndon Baines Johnson to head the official investigation, the Warren Commission. After reviewing all the evidence, the Commission's final report named Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman responsible. In 1966, the book, Six Seconds in Dallas, raised important questions pointing to evidence which indicated that there was more than one shooter. More than one shooter would...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jack Valenti, the former White House aide and film industry lobbyist who instituted the modern movie ratings system and guided Hollywood from the censorship era to the digital age, died Thursday. He was 85. Valenti had a stroke in March and was hospitalized for several weeks at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore. He died of complications of the stroke at his Washington, D.C., home, said Seth Oster of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Response from the Hunt Estate

WASHINGTON ? Its front entrance now touts President Bush's education policy, but the Education Department headquarters will one day honor Lyndon Baines Johnson and his work to improve U.S. schools. Bush signed legislation Friday naming the agency's offices after the follow Texan, with 17 members of the Johnson family looking on. Johnson's children, Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb and their spouses, their children and grandchildren gathered at the Oval Office for the signing that was not open to reporters. First lady Laura Bush also attended. Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, was unable to attend but...

Only the most far-out conspiracy theorists believe in scenarios like Hunt's. But in a new memoir, "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond," due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: "Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part. "LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of...

Triumph Forsaken The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 by Mark Moyar Cambridge, 542 pp., $32 In the late summer of 1963, President John Kennedy dispatched two observers to South Vietnam. Their mission was to provide the president an assessment of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. The first, Major General Victor Krulak, USMC, the special assistant for counterinsurgency for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited some ten locations in all four Corps areas of Vietnam. Based on extensive interviews with U.S. advisers to the South Vietnamese army, Krulak concluded that the war was going well....

We had a neighbor, when I lived in DC, who was part of the secret service presidential detail for many years. His stories of Kennedy and Johnson were the same as those I heard from the guys who flew the presidents' plane. Yes, Kennedy did have Marilyn Monroe flown in for secret "dates," and LBJ was a typical Texas "good ole boy" womanizer. Nixon, Bush 41, and Carter never cheated on their wives. Clinton cheated, but couldn't match Kennedy or LBJ in style or variety. The information below is accurate: The elder Bush and current President Bush make it a...

Dear Friend, I remember when I was back home from Vietnam and veterans were speaking out against the Vietnam war policy, someone yelled at the vets: "You should support the troops." One of those veterans said simply: "Lady, we are the troops." With a war in Iraq gone horribly wrong and a Republican attack machine determined to smear those who speak out, there's nothing more important this fall than electing veterans to Congress who can speak out about Iraq with a special moral authority. And man, do we need them. Recently, John "Randy" Kuhl, a Republican incumbent House member from...

The Census Bureau last week released its latest estimate of the U.S. poverty rate... The 2005 poverty rate of 12.6 percent...was substantially higher than the 11.1 percent level back in 1973... The results seem to suggest a prolonged failure of national policies to address poverty. However, the problem here lies less with actual living conditions than with the flawed and misleading poverty measure .... Today's poor households are more likely to have telephone and television sets than non-poor households in 1970; much more likely to have central air conditioning than the typical home of 1980, almost as likely to have...

Forward: During this election season, you will certainly hear the mantra "Bush lied". To counter that, here is a REAL example of how intelligence was distorted, resulting in TENS of THOUSANDS of American lives lost. "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later -- Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam" Signals Intercepts, Cited at Time, Prove Only August 2nd Battle, Not August 4; purported Second Attack Prompted Congressional Blank Check for War Johnson-McNamara Tapes Show READINESS TO ESCALATE, EVEN ON SUSPECT INTEL. TOP AIDES KNEW OF MISTAKEN SIGNALS, but Welcomed Justification for Vote (Emphasis added) Washington, D.C.,...

Why is the father of The Great Society ignored? Sure, he messed up with Viet Nam, but that's blamed on W anyway, but he made sure to transfer zillions of dollar$$$ from your back pockets to the back pockets of other people. What's up with that?

10. John F. Kennedy's ambition. JFK displayed impressive Presidential leadership in three highly important yet previously unrelated areas. He enhanced American prestige as he inspired public support for space travel and exploration, despite steep risks, frequent failure, and high cost.

Eminent presidential historian Michael Beschloss has now transcribed the most revealing and historically important conversations taped by Lyndon Johnson during his presidency-the period between fall 1964 and 1965. In these conversations Johnson demands that Congress pass landmark Civil Rights legislation, even as he allows the FBI to spy on Martin Luther King. He pushes his Great Society legislation, including Medicare, through Congress as he escalates the war in Vietnam. Beschloss places each conversation in historical context as he plays passages from the tapes, which capture Johnson’s presidency at its most crucial stage. 1 ---------- Book Description Reaching for Glory ...

Former President Clinton to speak at LBJ School graduation Event will be open to media, invited guests. By Laura Heinauer AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Wednesday, April 12, 2006 Former President Clinton will give this year's commencement address to graduates at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the school announced Wednesday. Clinton will speak at the school's May 20 convocation ceremony, which is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. at the LBJ auditorium, school spokeswoman Marilyn Duncan said. The event is open to graduates, their families, invited guests and members of the media, she said. "We are delighted...

(This is the html version of the file)Introduction “This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” So said President Lyndon Johnson at the signing of the Hart-Celler Immigration Bill thirty years ago next month, on Oct. 3, 1965. The legislation, which phased out the national origins quota system first instituted in 1921, created the foundation of today's immigration law. And, contrary to the president's assertions, it inaugurated a new era of mass immigration which has affected the lives of millions.

This article by Myron Magnet was written last February, but it still resonates, especially will the failures of liberalism laid bare in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He gets a little wordy here, but the bottom line is undeniable: Government handouts will never solve poverty.

On Feb. 13, the federal government stopped paying hotel bills for roughly 12,000 families nationwide who lost their homes to damage caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Once as high as 85,000, the number of hotel rooms being paid for by FEMA is down to 8,000. By March 6, FEMA says the hotel subsidies will be completely cut off. At the Country Hearth Inn & Suites near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, people carted their belongings through the lobby and into the cars of family members and friends. Some were headed to new FEMA-subsidized apartments or trailers. But a few lagged behind,...

Presidents and their wives have been an amorous lot, their White House years coming at the pinnacle of lives entwined. The men pursued and loved these women as intensely as they clawed to power and unleashed armies. "Touch you I must or I'll burst," Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy three years before he became California governor. Lyndon Johnson, then a young congressman from Texas, declared to his valentine, Lady Bird, mere weeks after they had met, "This morning I'm ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you." College graduate Teddy Roosevelt put Alice Lee on a pedestal, telling...

So this is how it went down: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. never stood a chance in Chicago. Now we know. When King came to Chicago in 1966, bringing his civil rights movement to the North, he squeezed out only a pathetic sop of a victory: a bland and toothless agreement to do this or that about neighborhood racial segregation. Down South, King had won huge civil rights gains by going right over the heads of the local yokels and appealing to the White House for help. His Birmingham campaign led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His...

If Tom DeLay was blind to the perils of mixing money and politics, business and government, he was true to the tradition of his state, where the long-dominant Democratic Party plumbed all possible permutations of that intimate connection. To take but one example, consider the phone conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and George Brown, chairman of the board of Brown & Root, the construction giant, on Jan. 2, 1964, soon after Johnson became president, as quoted in "Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964."[snip] [As] Michael Ennis writes in the current issue of the Texas Monthly, "the government --...

Christened Claudia Alta Taylor when she was born in a country mansion near Karnack, Texas, she received her nickname "Lady Bird" as a small child; and as Lady Bird she is known and loved throughout America today. Perhaps that name was prophetic, as there has seldom been a First Lady so attuned to nature and the importance of conserving the environment. Her mother, Minnie Pattillo Taylor, died when Lady Bird was five, so she was reared by her father, her aunt, and family servants. From her father, Thomas Jefferson Taylor, who had prospered, she learned much about the business...

The Democratic Party of the 21st century still labors under the decades-old legacy of former U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota maverick who died Saturday at age 89. It was McCarthy, dismissed by President Lyndon Johnson's coterie as a "footnote in history," who ignited the raucous 1968 protests against the Vietnam War that helped trigger a tumultuous year of riots and assassinations. McCarthy's often-quixotic campaign drove Johnson from the presidency but failed to halt the war, which lasted another five years. However, the political upheaval he led saddled the Democratic Party with the "soft on security" label that remains its...

Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, who galvanized legions of youth in a campaign which unnerved a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died yesterday. He was 89. McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael. “He was a brave and courageous person who was very true to his ideals,” said Mary Murphy, a retired Framingham State College professor, who traveled extensively with McCarthy as he challenged President Lyndon B....

Democrat presidents misled and troops wound up dead? That's what Sen. Barack Obama seemed to be saying in a wide ranging interview with the Chicago Tribune this week. Commenting on claims that President Bush used on bogus intelligence to take America into the Iraq war - he noted that more than one Democratic president has done the same thing. The revelation came as Sen. Obama recounted a recent town meeting where an audience member had asked him about the war, saying: "Shouldn't the president be impeached for lying?" The top black Democrat recalled answering: "Well, FDR, JFK, LBJ -- we...

George Bush is the biggest-spending president of the past 40 years, surpassing even Lyndon Johnson and his "Great Society" spending spree, a new report by the Cato Institute reveals. The increase in discretionary spending - that is, all nonentitlement programs - in Bush's first term was 48.5 percent. That's higher than LBJ's 48.3 percent, and more than twice as large as the increase during Bill Clinton's entire two terms, 21.6 percent. When spending is adjusted for inflation and length of time in office, Bush has an annualized real growth in spending of 8 percent, compared to Johnson's 4.6 percent. In...

On Halloween night, crusty conservative Judge Laurence H. Silberman had a scary tale to tell fellow right wingers gathered for dinner at Washington's University Club. He told in more detail than ever before how J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director ''allowed -- even offered -- the bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes.'' He called for the director's name to be removed from the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. ''In my view,'' Silberman said, ''it is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to...

Leftists have devised a simple yet amazingly effective formula to engender social discord: break up the family, marginalize fathers, and then blame the whole mess on men. The pattern can be traced back to LBJ’s Great Society which spawned welfare programs that withheld benefits as long as dad was around. Then came Roe v. Wade, which disenfranchised fathers from the most fundamental decisions involving their unborn young. Next, no-fault divorce laws set the stage for widescale child custody awards to moms. And finally draconian child support programs sent low-income dads shuffling off to debtor’s prison. Judging by Census Bureau reports,...

THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM, "the nation's highest civilian award," was established by Harry Truman in 1945 to recognize notable service in World War II. Eighteen years later, John F. Kennedy, prompted by White House aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, decided to revive the moribund honor by awarding it to people of distinction--and not just U.S. citizens--who might otherwise remain unrecognized by the American government.The first class of recipients was supposed to get its medals on the Fourth of July, 1963, but for one reason or another, the White House ceremony was repeatedly postponed. By the time it was finally...

Despite the fact President Bush's job approval ratings have dropped to the lowest point of his presidency, they still remain higher than the low-point ratings of the last seven presidents, including his predecessor Bill Clinton. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows Bush's job approval at 38 percent. "President George W. Bush's poll numbers are going from bad to worse," said the Pew report. "His job approval rating has fallen to another new low, as has public satisfaction with national conditions, which now stands at just 29 percent. And for the first time since taking office in 2001,...

In the latest Cato Tax and Budget Bulletin, Stephen Slivinski uses revised data released during the summer by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make side-by-side comparisons of the spending habits of each president during the last 40 years. While the data show that all presidents presided over net increases in spending, George W. Bush is shown to be one of the biggest spenders of them all, even outpacing Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending. An excerpt from the report: "The increase in discretionary spending - that is, all nonentitlement programs - in Bush's first term was 48.5...

Failure of an Idea—And a People In his 1935 State of the Union Address, FDR spoke to a nation mired in the Depression, but still marinated in conservative values: “Continued dependence upon welfare,” said FDR, “induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Behind FDR’s statement was the conviction that, while the government must step in in an emergency, in normal times, men provide the food, clothing and shelter for their families. And we did, until the war pulled...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ramsey Clark, Attorney General in the LBJ administration from 1967 to 1969, addressing an anti-war rally in the Capitol today, called for the replacement of President George W. Bush by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed President of Haiti. Saying Aristide would be a better President of the United States than Bush, Clark called for the impeachment of President Bush.

September 24, 2005 L.B.J.'s Political Hurricane By BRIAN WILLIAMS New Orleans [snip] Sept. 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy, a Category 4 storm, roared into Louisiana with winds of up to 160 miles per hour. The next day, President Johnson followed coverage of the damage, watching the three television sets in the Oval Office and monitoring the news service wires clacking away inside the soundproof cabinet next to his desk. Then, at 2:36 in the afternoon, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, son of the legendary Huey Long, called the president and urged him to come to New Orleans. Floodwaters had spilled over...

In a recent New York Observer column, Richard Brookhiser argues that if George W. Bush "is now a lame duck, it is by his own hand." Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina, says Brookhiser, was doubly disastrous. First (and most important), people died and anarchy was loosed because Bush acted slowly and had surrounded himself with incompetents. Second, as in the immediate aftershock of the 9/11 attacks, Bush failed to provide the proper symbolic rhetoric that is part of the job: "If you can't speak, act," Brookhiser wrote. "Gesture is also a form of speech. Go to your desk. The news...