Free Republic

It took 150 years, but a Pennsylvania newspaper said Thursday it should have recognized the greatness of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the time it was delivered. The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, about 35 miles northeast of Gettysburg, retracted a dismissive editorial penned by its Civil War-era predecessor, The Harrisburg Patriot & Union.

Northeastern Illinois needs to be educated on its political heroes. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, not a Democrat. But the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies apparently would prefer to just make up their own version.

President Obama has declined an invitation to speak at next month’s ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The event, slated for Nov. 19 at the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, instead will feature Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and renowned historian James McPherson as the keynote speakers, the Gettysburg National Military Park said in a press release. “President Obama will not attend and the Secretary of Interior will represent the administration,” the park pointed out in the first paragraph of its press release. It’s unclear why Mr. Obama, a noted admirer of President Lincoln, declined the...

On Saturday, at a little before 9:30 a.m., citizens determined to break through the “barrycades” around the Lincoln Memorial moved the government barricades aside and proceeded to enter the Memorial. According to Taylor Hemness from KLTV 7: [The protesters] went completely up those steps, past the National Parks Service members who didn’t do anything to stop them as they made their way up to the Lincoln monument asking people to come with them, begging them to make people in DC listen to what they were doing.

At the Million Vet March in DC people have torn down the barricades at the Lincoln Memorial and are carrying them to the White House to Barricade the White House. One man carrying a barricade said,"We are taking these things where they belong." Watch Live on Ustream. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mlr13

Check out this video of tourists in D.C. storming past the barricades to see the Lincoln Memorial. Video By KLTV.com

A high-power camera on the Mars Curiosity rover snapped a picture of a 1909 American penny featuring Abraham Lincoln. The coin is used as a calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) that is at the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm. In just over an Earth year on the Red Planet, you can see the bright copper is muted by lots of Mars dust. Although the image has public relations appeal, there are scientific reasons behind picking that particular calibration target. It is supposed to measure how well the camera is performing, which is important as it zooms...

Lincoln, Nebraska. KLKN’s HD Towercam on Channel 8 showed something strange in the early morning weather segment. Meteorologist Sean McMullen spotted a pulsating diamond-shaped UFO on the network’s HD camera. The strange object hovered over Lincoln, Nebraska in the early hours of September 4th, 2013.

Obama Committing US to Syrian Conflict Source: By Pete Souza (White House Flickr account) According to a recent UN report, at least 93,000 have been killed in just over two years of conflict in Syria. While the rising death toll is indeed shocking, it is important to note that this conflict is a civil war and not an ethnic cleansing or genocide. It is a civil war, with many factions vying to wrest power from the dictatorial tyrrant and president that is Bashar al-Assad. Unfortunately, Syria is attracting far more foreign influence than any civil war should reasonably warrant. Remember...

My parents were New Deal Democrats, but I grew up at a time and in a place when Republicans were extraordinarily rare. I’ve often said I never actually met a Republican until I went to college and, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until my junior year. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I became an ex-Democrat, and so I completely understand the quasi-religious reverence that Democrats have for FDR, Harry Truman and JFK. What puzzles me nowadays is that some conservatives seem to share that attitude. National Review has published a...

Ford justified killing Mercury because Mercury wasn't providing a sufficient chunk of market share in the US. Ford recently announced how much market share Lincoln has and it makes Mercury look good. Justin Berkowitz at Car and Driver made the association, citing Ford's 2010 statement explaining why they were ending the Mercury Brand. Mercury originally was created as a premium offering to Ford and was an important source of incremental sales. Of Ford Motor Company’s 16 percent market share in the U.S., Mercury accounts for 0.8 percentage points, a level that has been flat or declining for the past several...

As you watched Travyon Martin’s father sit in Congress and set a 50-year time line for a law that would ban profiling and killing minors in self-defense in Florida – it was easy to forget the King Holiday took 15 years to pass. The Dr. Martin L. King Jr. Holiday moved at glacier speed but kept moving. “When someone shows you their worst side believe it,” Maya Angelou once said, not referring to the fact that legislation was introduced to honor King four days after his 1968 assassination. Or how a 1979 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives fell...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. Park Police in Washington say the Lincoln Memorial is temporarily closed after someone splattered green paint on the statue and the floor area. Police say the apparent vandalism was discovered early Friday morning. No words, letters or symbols were visible in the paint. Police say the memorial on the National Mall will be closed until a maintenance crew from the National Park Service can finish cleaning up the paint. That's expected to happen Friday morning.

The U.S. Park Police in Washington say the Lincoln Memorial has been temporarily closed after someone splattered a splash of green paint on the statue.

The Lincoln Memorial was shut down Friday morning after vandals splashed the statue of the nation’s 16th president and the marble floor around it with green paint, U.S. Park Police said. Police are reviewing surveillance footage from the popular tourist attraction on the west end of the Mall, but so far they have released no information about who may have been responsible. Authorities believe the vandalism happened around 1:30 a.m. The National Park Service will work to clean up the paint, police said, and the memorial will be closed to the public until cleanup is complete. Police said no words...

DES MOINES, Iowa — Some Republicans are accusing the party’s neoconservative hawks of playing dirty pool in an attempt to smear Sen. Rand Paul as a bigot for having an aide who once expressed admiration for Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. The aide, Jack Hunter, who quit on Monday, was eased out by Mr. Paul after a neoconservative publication revealed that, as a radio “shock jock” some years ago, Mr. Hunter advocated that the Southern states secede once again from the union. Saying he had become more libertarian and broad-minded since his days as the “Southern Avenger,” Mr. Hunter revealed...

The State Legislature of Maryland prepared to vote on secession in 1861 to join the Southern Confederacy but Federal troops were sent to squash their attempt.

Governor Palin has written a beautiful piece for Breitbart News commemorating the 150th Anniversary of Gettysburg: Today marks the beginning of the week-long ceremonies commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. There will be a full re-enactment of the battle, discussions with panels of historians, and of course a re-reading of the Gettysburg Address.But as Lincoln affirmed when he dedicated that hallowed ground, nothing we say or do can “add or detract” from the great sacrifice made there. Gettysburg was a defining moment in the history of our nation; and consequently, one of the most important battles in...

Weighing the economics of Abraham Lincoln isn’t easy to do in today’s terms. Lincoln was pro-subsidy and pro-tariff, both of which stances tend to be assigned to the interventionist left in today’s discussions. But Lincoln’s infrastructurally and financially primitive economy was not ours, and it’s worth thinking about how he might govern today given that in his words there is an unshakeable faith in free enterprise. Lincoln was pro-business, laudatory of wealth creation (and the inequality that goes with it), against class warfare and in favor of exploiting natural resources. “Property,” he said in 1864, “is the fruit of labor...

Until recently, only 10 leaves of the oldest manuscript prepared by Abraham Lincoln were thought to have survived. However, Nerida Ellerton and Ken Clements, professors in Illinois State University’s Department of Mathematics, have determined that a fragment in the archives in Houghton Library at Harvard University is in fact an 11th leaf from the oldest surviving manuscript written by the future president... The young Lincoln prepared his arithmetic manuscript -- known as a cyphering book in Lincoln’s time -- when attending schools in Indiana between 1820 and 1826. The Harvard University leaf was probably completed by Lincoln when he was...