Free Republic

1st PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1789-97 FAMILY ESSAY "Washington came of very good blood - aw, quite good - I b'lieve." Attributed by his classmates to Amory Blaine in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. The Washingtons are of unusual antiquity in European terms, let alone American ones. A direct male ancestry has been traced back to William de Wessington or Wessyngton (i.e., Washington, a town in Tyne and Wear, formerly County Durham, in northern England), who was living in the late 12th century. The remoter ancestry is not absolutely certain but a detailed argument has...

Dear Dave, My son has a $115,000 mortgage at 5.8 percent. He also has a home equity line of credit of $40,000 at 9 percent. Currently, he can get a 30-year loan at 3.5 percent, or a 15-year note at 2.75 percent. His take-home pay is between $70,000 and $80,000 a year, and these are his only debts. Should he combine the mortgages into one loan? Daniel Dear Daniel, First, I only recommend mortgages of 15 years or less. Now we’re looking at a 2.75 percent loan versus a 5.8 percent loan versus a 9 percent loan. I advise people...

The Celts were long considered a barbaric and violent society. But new findings from a 2,600-year-old grave in Germany suggest the ancient people were much more sophisticated than previously thought. The little Bettelbühl stream on the Danube River was completely unknown, except to local residents. But that changed in the summer of 2010 when a spectacular discovery was made just next to the creek. Not far from the Heuneburg, the site of an early Celtic settlement, researchers stumbled upon the elaborate grave of a Celtic princess. In addition to gold and amber, they found a subterranean burial chamber fitted with...

I would like to read the first years of National Review articles from the 50s and 60s. Does anyone know where I can access these online? I am a National Review print and online subscriber, but I can't find them on the National Review site.

Listen to Rush 'best of program' on Saturday and Sundays at different times and stations.

This question has stirred much debate. Historically, Christians have voted for candidates of different faiths, including Mormons, based on how they live their lives and how deeply committed they are to upholding the U.S. Constitution. Remember, God ordained government, and we are not electing a pastor-in-chief, we are electing a commander-in-chief. George Washington was Episcopalian, Abraham Lincoln had no religious affiliation while he was president, John Kennedy was Catholic and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were outspoken Southern Baptists. Over a period of 223 years, our nation’s cities and states have been governed by people of many different faiths, including...

Dear Carrie, I have a 3-year old daughter who I hope will go to college one day. Given the increasing costs, what's the best way for me to save? I've opened a 529 plan, but is there anything else I can do? --A Reader Dear Reader, The first thing you can do is to give yourself credit for starting to save so early. While saving for a child's college education is an enormous challenge, making it a priority when it's so far away can be the first big hurdle. So you're off to a good start. As someone who believes...

I listen to you often and enjoy your radio show, but why don’t you ever ask women to go to work? When a family is broke, and the woman is at home raising one child who is already in the fifth grade, why can’t the wife get a “second job?” George Dear George, I think far too many ladies, in the name of paying for stuff they don’t need, have left the household and the children for the workplace. Many of them didn’t even want to do this; they just felt obligated to do it by people like you. There...

Wondering if any other TH-using FReepers have been having this problem. I had been a regular on Townhall.com, with a valid user name and log-in for over 8 years. Recently I found I had been logged off, and the website didn't recognize the username/password combination when I tried to log back in. I tried the "forgot password" link, which sent a reset e-mail to me, and the link seemed to accept a new password. But it still doesn't work. I even tried the "Sign up" link, but get this error message: "Signup is temporary disabled, please try again later." I've...

A while back I received several e-mails from guys requesting my advice on how to attract a female like me. You see, they seem to have a hard time attracting women that are into shooting and the outdoors… and I understand this. Being that we humans aren’t whitetail deer and you can’t rub your scent on a tree to find yourself a mate, it makes things harder for guys. I’ve decided to throw these guys a bone, and any others who need help, on how to attract such a lady. Here are essential points to follow in attracting the Katniss...

Once upon a time, a teacher would teach American History. On exams, students would be asked questions about American history. Testing was straightforward and needed little discussion. In the modern era, however, content is disparaged and facts are scorned. The goal, seemingly, is to keep kids busy but to teach as little as possible. The big problem is, how do you design exams when the teacher hasn’t taught much, the kids don’t know much, and there is little actual knowledge that the school intends the children to retain? In this fact-free world, what would a valid examination look like? At...

Dear Dave, I’m a stay-at-home mom now, and my husband brings home $2,600 a month. We’re trying to get out of debt, but we need more money coming in. I want to go back to work, but emotionally part of me feels like I should stay home with our 2-year-old daughter. What do you think? Kayla Dear Kayla, I understand the feelings involved, especially if you’ve spent all of your time home with your child. But don’t make the mistake of blaming the debt if you simply want to go back to work. You’re not a bad person if you...

Virtual tour of Herculaneum, documenting the site, and the work of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Click on the node-markers to view an interactive 360-degree panorama (in a new window). The plan above shows the locations of panoramas made mainly in 2001 (a few are from 1999), where the aim was to provide an overview of the site (as it was then), along with tours of a few selected houses. The menu of houses and other areas at left accesses additional, more recent coverage (including revisits to some houses and other structures) made from 2003 onward.

Mapping the world with Tweets Posted By Joshua KeatingWednesday, May 8, 2013 - 3:39 PM   A new paper on the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday summarizes the results of a project to use geographic data gathered from Tweets to create a picture of the world according to Twitter. The researches, led by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru, used the Twitter decahose, a massive feed of 10 percent of all tweets, access to which is normally sold at high price to marketers. The project covers the period of the Oct. 23, 2102, to November 30, 2012. During this time, 1,535,929,521...

*Video* Everything You Need To Know About Benghazi

"But the Administration still blamed filmmaker Nakoula, who is still in jail. They did this to keep the Benghazi debacle from exploding before the election. It worked. And filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail......Some Obama-defenders will note that Nakoula was jailed for probation violations, of which he may have even been guilty. .... prosecutors can always find a reason to put someone away if they really want to. The question is, why, exactly, were they so eager to put Nakoula away?...Because what it’s looking like is that Nakoula was targeted and jailed so as to provide a scapegoat/villain in a...

Has the average American citizen even HEARD of Kermit Gosnell? This video says no...

The central sales pitch for the Gang of Eight’s immigration legislation has been the claim of strong border security triggers that are supposed to be the “toughest border immigration enforcement measures in U.S. history.” But a close examination of the legislation reveals that the promised enforcement is nowhere to be found. The triggers aren’t triggers at all—and in fact would actually weaken requirements previously enacted by Congress—while granting extraordinary new discretion to the Department of Homeland Security to waive security protocols, removal proceedings, and denials of entry. The day the bill passes, there will be an effective amnesty for the...

"Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, the Executive is charged with enforcing the laws that Congress enacts. In Obama’s America, the executive office has aggregated to itself a previously unknown power: the power to pick and choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore. ......That arrogance has trickled down to Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who is actually in charge of immigration matters. Last year, agents from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (“ICE”) sought an injunction against Napolitano challenging her directive that the agents must stop any efforts to deport illegal immigrants....

8 things to think about as we mark the conflict's 150th anniversary. Some ring strong: of course the end of slavery, perhaps the worst disgrace in the nation's history. And the 620,000 ancestors lost. Other vestiges have weakened with the passage of time but are no less legacies of the four horrific, heroic years that shaped us as one nation. Here are eight ways the Civil War indelibly changed us and how we live: 1. We have ambulances and hospitals. The Civil War began during medieval medicine's last gasp and ended at the dawn of modern medicine. Each side entered...

My brother sent a short quote from a book that was written in 1955 and is excerpted in the body of comment ...

The genetic makeup of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,000-5,000 years ago, researchers have discovered. An Australian team found the unexplained change while analysing several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old. They say the rapid expansion of the Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key.

556RECON.com tracks trends and pricing for 5.56x45 NATO from on-line vendors (Cheaper Than Dirt, AmmoNet, etc.), and the average price has started to drop, if just by a few pennies per round. 62gr Green Tip has dropped from $1.10 to as low as $1.03. This is the average price, the lowest PPR is at 70 cents per round. 55gr Average PPR has dropped to $.90, with the lowest price at 70 cents per round. Interestingly, Cheaper Than Dirt, where I (used to) buy, is consistently at the expensive end of the list, with LAX and Palmetto being the best buys....

I have friends and relatives in Germany that just do not know the true story of Barack Hussein Obama. I go on Amazon.de and the only books about the guy are all lavish encomiums, books from the left, or his own two books written by Bill Ayres. Are there any conservative books written in German that anyone knows about? Is there a German version of Dinesh d"Souza's film or book? Appreciate your help. Thanks

I need help with a photo. Linked from The Blaze. This was floating around on the internet and I just happened to look at it, again. The younger brother (who police are chasing) is clearly pictured leaving (the one circled). If you look at the picture closely.....I think his older brother is on the right wearing khakis and that hat. Am I wrong? My son and I think it's him. He's near a baby stroller tucked behind another woman.

I think Drudge has set a new record on the amount of sub- headlines today on these two Chechens.

Colorado --(Ammoland.com)- It has been brought to our attention that FOX31 reporters Julie Hayden and Josh Bernstein have been attempting to set up straw purchases via online firearm markets. Keep an eye out for these FOX31 reporters trying to SCAM you in their “investigative reporting”: Many of our members have made us aware of these activities through a website called armslist.com. If you are selling a firearm through this website, or any other website for that matter, please make sure that you exercise caution and your best judgment when completing a transaction in person. Remember, while journalists have used these...

In pictures: Baroness Thatcher's funeral

James Madison wasn’t a big supporter of Bills of Rights. He wasn’t alone. His notes toward the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 are sketchy, but one thing is clear; every State (though not every delegate) voted against a Bill of Rights (BOR). Less than a year later, at the wild Virginia Ratification debates of June 1788, the Federalist team lead by Madison and Anti-Federalists by Patrick Henry went back and forth as to the pro and con of formal inclusion in the Constitution. Anti-Federalists were furious; many Anti-Federalists demanded Virginia withhold ratification until their amendments were ratified by...

I was just read about life in North Korea. I found the Following interesting...do You? Parents who send their kids to schools are expected to provide desks, chairs, building materials and cash to pay for heating fuel. Some students are put to work producing goods for the government or gathering up discarded materials. Parents can bribe teachers to exempt their kids from labor or just keep them away from school And this is OBAMACare is action! North Korea has a "free" medical system, but hospital patients must pay for their own drugs, cover the cost of heat, and prepare all...

Mark is working on another book. Every night it seems, he wants to bust out and talk about it, but his publishers have put the ixnay on too much disclosure. Still, he shows a little leg now and then. That happened in the second hour of his show last Thursday, April 11, 2013. With the help of sixteen rinos, Dingy Harry got 68 votes to proceed with a gun control bill that few, if any Senators had read. After wailing on the lack of process and regular order, Mark focused on the nature of the Senate and how it differed...

"The conflict between law enforcement and armed military personnel in the community around Fort Hood, one of America’s largest military bases, has recently and repeatedly involved the issue of gun control —....The conflict reached a fever pitch last month, when Texas police arrested an active-duty Army sergeant for “rudely displaying” a hunting rifle. The sergeant, C.J. Grisham, established an online legal defense fund after he was, in his words, “illegally arrested and disarmed” for carrying the firearm.... -Video of the incident obtained by The Daily Caller shows officers defending their behavior to Grisham while restraining him.... “In this day and...

Rankings - Overall 1. North Dakota +4 2. South Dakota -1 3. Tennessee = 4. New Hampshire -2 5. Oklahoma -1 6. Idaho +11 7. Missouri -1 8. Virginia +1 9. Georgia +11 10. Utah

uhm... i guess i created an account MAYBE ten minutes ago, and its saying my account is too new to do anything... do i need to register anything? i already registered my email, so do i need to do anything else? am i missing something?

Happy Anniversary! Today marks one hundred years of the horrible 17th Amendment. Its Progressive purpose was to democratize the Senate, and boy, did it! In a complete about face from the philosophy, experience and warnings from the Framing generation, the States no longer participate in the federal government. One hundred years ago today, the republic ceased being federal, and overnight became a single un-confederated republic that spanned a continent. It also created a temporary, partial power vacuum, and set the stage for total consolidation of authority in the national government. Once State agency was removed, all that was left were...

Happy Anniversary. Today marks one hundred years of popularly elected Senators. Can’t you feel the democratic love? The 17th Amendment, which replaced State Legislatures as Senatorial electors with the general voting public, just doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Without it, Obama could not rule as the despot he is. Background. A wave of Populist/Progressive change began in earnest in the late 19th Century. Intellectuals such as Professor Woodrow Wilson rejected the Natural Law basis of our revolution and Declaration of Independence. Congress was too cumbersome, slow, restrictive and inattentive to the changing needs and demands of an emerging industrial...

Happy Anniversary! Today is the 100th Anniversary of the horrible 17th Amendment. In 1787-1788, Anti-Federalists warned that history’s lesson regarding republics would result in a despotic American government. Because republics rested on the will of the people, republics demanded among their communities a certain commonality of interests, traditions and morals. Absent commonality, society was certain to disintegrate into warring factions bent on besting and oppressing each other. Only an authoritarian government of force could keep the peace and control these hostile groups. Government could be one or a few men at the top lording over the many, or it could...

n a famous 2002 article in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer named the so-called “Curley Effect” after its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four (non-consecutive) terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950. This phenomenon, the authors explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic...

Oh Happy Day! Today is the hundredth anniversary of the 17th Amendment!Lets Make a Deal. When consumers purchase goods, they expect the products to last. Everyone expects some durability to their purchases. Legislation is also a product. Retail consumers of Congressional law can only catch a glimpse at the give and take of brief public hearings and meager open debate. What we do not see is more important. An incredible amount of personal and monetary capital goes into major legislation. Various interest groups invest tremendous sums in lobbyists, polling, media, etc to get their pet interests passed by Congress. Within...

Happy Anniversary! Today marks 100 years of the 17th Amendment.To Freepers, our statist government is a daily “fingernails across the chalkboard” experience. What will the likes of Senators Schumer and Durbin or Representatives Hoyer, Lee and Pelosi try to pull next? Why did our national government morph from one designed to protect our freedoms into one that promises increasing oppression? More to the point, why did the federal government generally remain within its Constitutional bounds prior to WWI and not thereafter? Thank the 17th Amendment. It fundamentally altered the Constitution; it pulled the keystone from the arch of our Framers’...

"Margaret Thatcher couldn’t be elected today. It’s not just that she was a great woman and such people don’t come along every day. Rather, the British Left made sure of it by altering the electorate through mass immigration. This isn’t conspiracy mongering. Andrew Neather, a former Labour-party speechwriter, admitted in 2009 that the immigration boom engineered after 2000 was specifically intended to import a new people: The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”,...... He said Labour’s...

Before us lies eternity: our souls are love, and a continual farewell. — “Ephemera,” W.B. Yeats LAWRENCE AUSTER, traditionalist writer and culture critic, was buried by friends and family on Tuesday, April 2 in Pennsylvania. His body was carried at 11:30 a.m. into the vestibule of the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Mount Airy in a simple oak coffin made by Trappist monks in Iowa, a fitting enclosure for a man who lived as austerely as a monk, without many of the basics of modern life, such as cell phone, car or cable television. The church was just two miles...

"PALO ALTO, California, April 1, 2013 — A formal announcement will be made April 7 at the NASCAR STP Gas Booster 500 at Martinsville Speedway, but Edmunds has learned exclusively that Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, will enter the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series ......Industry sources suggest that the reveal was supposed to take place one week later, at the NASCAR race at Texas Motor Speedway, but with the announcement that the National Rifle Association would be the title sponsor of that race, the federal government decided to move the announcement to Martinsville. "We aren't sure how many fans would be...

1973 REPORT OF THE ABA SPECIAL CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION STUDY COMMITTEERECOMMENDATIONWHEREAS, the House of Delegates, at its July 1971 meeting, created the Constitutional Convention Study Committee “to analyze and study all questions of law concerned with the calling of a national Constitutional Convention, including, but not limited to, the question of whether such a Convention’s jurisdiction can be limited to the subject matter given rise to its call, or whether the convening of such a Convention, as a matter of constitutional law, opens such a Convention to multiple amendments and the consideration of a new Constitution”; and WHEREAS, the Constitutional Convention...

March 2013 will be remembered for its cold, miserable weather, and Environment Canada confirms that it ranked as the second-coldest March in the last 50 years. "It was so winter-like, my gosh it was even more winter-like than February," said David Phillips, chief meteorologist with Environment Canada. In Regina, the average daily temperature during March measured around -12.3 C. "The normal would be around -5 C," explained Phillips, "and I needn't remind you that last year, the temperature was close to 1 C. So think about it, (that's) 13 degrees colder than it was the year before."

The discovery of the structure of DNA and the subsequent developments in genetics and genomics have had a great impact on all of the biological sciences, including human evolution. Our ideas about human evolution 60 years ago came primarily from the fossil and archaeological records. These fields revealed that the last two million years were a dynamic period of our evolutionary history. The human lineage two million years ago was a population with ape-sized brains limited to sub-Saharan Africa. The human lineage expanded into Eurasia around 1.85 million years ago, and our brain size increased throughout the Pleistocene. Anatomically modern...

I knew that the Scions had LOTS of money and have infiltrated in the past. But they are still at it with various 'front groups' (just like the mafia). Where in the heck is 'Anonymous' on this?

Motoring through LA in the early 1950s one's shocked to see freeways that are wide open, streetcars, even Model A Fords still on the streets, a bustling downtown and the first malls, a Ford and Chevrolet Factory and it all looks so clean.

1) The AA12 Atchisson Assault Shotgun: The AA12 Atchisson Assault Shotgun can fire five shotgun shells per second, can launch a fragmentation grenade and has such a minimal amount of recoil that it can be fired with one hand.---7) M-134 Minigun: When you absolutely, positively have to put 4,000 rounds a minute on target, this is the weapon for you!---8) Metal Storm: This is a stacked weapon that fires off ONE MILLION rounds per minute. So, if we ever run across anything that can handle 900,000 rounds per minute, but not a million, we can thank the Aussies for getting...

"You’re sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way. With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks...