Free Republic

The word Hero is often used casually in modern American Society. Occasionally, however, someone comes along who truly fulfills the meaning of the word.~snip~ Joan of Arc, I am sure, never planned to be the heroine* of the 100 years war. And Emily Miller, on New Year’s Day, 2010, scared and angry, surely never gave thought to the notion that she would be soon hailed as a heroine of the gun rights and self defense community.

“Actually, there are parallels between the firearm bans and registration requirements enacted by the Weimar Republic and those proposed by President Obama,” Halbrook, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, told The Daily Caller when asked what he would say to those who will argue making such a comparison sounds a bit hysterical. ”Only law-abiding persons obeyed those laws. Weimar authorities warned that the lists of gun owners must not fall into the hands of ‘radical elements.’ The lists fell right into the hands of the Nazis when they assumed power. Gun owner data can be misused by the government...

Dort, wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where books are burned, they will, in the end burn people, too) –Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German Poet Eric Metaxas in chapter 10 of his celebrated book, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy,” in a subsection called “Where Books Are Burned . . .” in dramatic fashion chronicles the rise of Nazi book burning in early Nazi history just four months after Hitler assumed power on January 30, 1933. In May 1933, the Nazification of the German people continued in full force using two established Nazi tactics—Gleichschaltung (e.g., forcing into line)...

I had a good response to putting the Enemies trilogy novels on Kindle free runs the last three weeks, so I decided to go ahead and do it with everything I have. The Bracken Anthology is a good introduction to my stuff, both fiction and nonfiction, so if you can spread the links to your "low information" friends and family, it might slap some sense into them. Or just entertain them. I'm doing these free runs prior to going sailing next year, and spending (I hope) a lot of time over the horizon and unconnected.All of these "internet published" short...

Foreign Enemies And Traitors, the final novel in my Enemies Trilogy, is free on Kindle through the end of October. You don't need to have read the other books to enjoy it. About five years pass between the three novels, only a few characters carry over, and they take place in different regions with different subjects and scenarios. This is not a series where you get to the end of a book and it leaves on a cliffhanger, forcing you to buy the next one. Each is a complete novel standing on its own. Just click the book cover to...

A new book covering the 2012 presidential campaign uncovers a series of scathing remarks from political figures, but one alleged comment has stirred controversy around President Barack Obama and his administration’s use of targeted drone strikes. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book “Double Down: Game Change 2012” notes President Obama commenting on drone strikes, reportedly telling his aides that he’s “really good at killing people.”

German soldiers cross into Belgium in August 1914 Photo: RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts Like one of Field Marshal Haig’s family whiskies, Max Hastings is a dram that steadily improves with age. His own trenchant views on war, and caustic opinions of the commanders who ran them, tended to obtrude too obviously in his early works, suggesting that if only he had been present at key military conferences costly errors would have been avoided. However, Hastings’s recent massive volumes on his specialist subject, the Second World War, have shown why his position as Britain’s leading military historian is now unassailable. They...

Hands down, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been one of the most controversial pieces of national legislation ever passed by Congress.The nation was told that health care had become unaffordable. Too many Americans lacked access to affordable health care and, thus, either did without or went bankrupt when faced with significant medical expenses. Many Americans were also considered “uninsurable” due to pre-existing conditions. The solution, we were told, was to overhaul the way health care was paid for and to bring the entire operation under the wing of the all-knowing, all-seeing federal government.Between the Senate and the...

JACKSON, Tenn. – April 20, 2009– A new book by Union University’s Harry Lee (Hal) Poe seeks to correct some of the misconceptions about his ancestor, Edgar Allan Poe. “He’s generally thought of as a gloomy, dark loner, obsessed with death and that sort of thing, said Hal Poe, the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union. “Actually, he was a rather cheerful, witty, friendly person who enjoyed music and singing with his friends around the piano.” In the new book, “Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories,” Poe provides some biographical information about Edgar...

Members of Congress and their staffs are on red alert tonight for a CBS 60 Minutes investigation by veteran CBS reporter Steve Kroft and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer exposing how lawmakers convert campaign donations into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members. Sources say top CBS executives thought the report was so explosive that they made it the show’s lead story and delayed airing it for another week in order to capture tonight’s much larger NFL-viewing audience. The report features selected revelations from Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract...

Members of Congress and their staffs are on red alert tonight for a CBS 60 Minutes investigation by veteran CBS reporter Steve Kroft and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer exposing how lawmakers convert campaign donations into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members.Sources say top CBS executives thought the report was so explosive that they made it the show’s lead story and delayed airing it for another week in order to capture tonight’s much larger NFL-viewing audience. The report features selected revelations from Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line...

Complete Title:Alan Greenspan: What Went Wrong The Former Fed chairman on Where the Economy Went Wrong, Where He Went wrong—and Ayn Rand. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, "sort of get invited everywhere," he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. "It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties—the doyennes...

Republican Gov. Scott Walker is using his new book to renew his criticism of 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and raise his own national profile as a reformer who took on public sector unions and won. Walker’s book provides a detailed account of his 2011 battle against public unions, the campaign he won against their efforts to recall him, and his unhappiness with Romney and other Republicans he says didn’t learn the lessons of his political victories. The volume could set the stage for Walker’s own candidacy in the future. The Associated Press on Friday obtained a copy of...

In “Hitler’s Furies,” recently placed on the long list for the National Book Award, Wendy Lower presents the harrowing evidence of crimes committed by German women during the Holocaust. Dwight Garner wrote that previous books “have offered up poster girls of brutality and atrocity” and “Ms. Lower’s revisionist insight is to track more mundane lives, and to argue for a vastly wider complicity.” In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Lower discussed the changing view of women’s role in the Nazi regime, the challenges of writing for a non-academic audience, what she found most shocking in her research and more. Below...

It certainly makes for a good story: a scrappy kid from Baltimore flunks out of an English class at what is now Loyola University Maryland only to become an international bestselling author. The problem is that the oft-told tale concerning Tom Clancy is just as fictitious as Jack Ryan. “It was an urban legend that just wouldn’t die,” said Carol Abromaitis, the English professor accused of giving Clancy an F in her class. For decades, Abromaitis urged English majors to let others know the truth. Her efforts bore little fruit. “One major said to me, ‘Of course not. It makes...

Big news from author, warrior, and patriot Matt Bracken. On Monday (10/14), "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" will be available for free download on Kindle for four days. "Domestic Enemies" will be made similarly available the following Monday (10/21), and then "Foreign Enemies and Traitors" on 10/28. On social media, the author stated: "I can't see much point in 'hoarding' the Enemies trilogy. If it's going to do any good, make any impact outside of the already-converted patriotic American 'choir,' it has to happen pretty soon. Nobody will give a damn about the Enemies Trilogy as a footnote to history if we...

Best-selling conservative author Ann Coulter, who has used her nine books to launch vicious attacks on Democrats, is turning her guns on Republicans in a new book out Monday, calling Florida Sen. Marco Rubio a hypocrite, urging donors freeze contributions to the GOP, and demanding that only governors or senators run for the party’s presidential nomination. Her point in “Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 -- Especially a Republican” is to shake the party out of its doldrums in time for the 2014 and 2016 elections. “Elections matter. We’re trying to make the country a better place. But if our...

I have always been a reader and one of my snobbish instincts has been to shun people who do not read. Houses without books or magazines leave me cold. Yet now I realize that I have not bought a dead tree book in months and I have hit that Amazon link "Tell the publisher" many many times! On my iPad I have more than 240 books plus several Bible versions and multiple periodicals. Now I find myself refreshing my mind about a particular passage in a book in minutes instead of almost never. Additionally, I am privileged to be able...

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by...

•Axelrod wanted campaign manager Jim Messina fired, but he wound up the odd man out himself• Palace intrigue led 'Axe' to refer to Messina and White House messaging chief David Plouffe as 'two strongmen running the Kremlin'• The two men resented Axelrod for getting rich by taking a percentage of the hundreds of millions spent on campaign ads •An aloof Obama stayed out of the way as his inner circle fought a political gladiator game that pushed out Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs The man most responsible for getting Barack Obama to the White House – the man who...