Free Republic

Excerpt - Academy Award-winning director and producer Steven Spielberg has turned over to federal authorities Russian Schoolroom, a 1967 oil on canvas by Norman Rockwell that was filched from a Clayton art gallery in 1973, according to the FBI. No charges have been filed in the case, and federal officials say they have no evidence that Spielberg knew the painting had been stolen when he purchased it in 1989. "It appears that he is an innocent buyer," says St. Louis-based FBI agent Frank Brostrom, a member of the agency's Art Crime Team, who initiated the investigation. Spielberg is an avid...

The original of a Norman Rockwell painting found behind a fake wall has fetched a record $15.4m (£7.9m). Breaking Home Ties by the US artist was first sold to cartoonist Donald Trachte in 1960 for $900 when the two were neighbours in Vermont. But Mr Trachte made a replica of the painting and hid the genuine piece in a cavity in his studio. The original was discovered by Mr Trachte's sons after he died last year and sold at Sotheby's in New York. In April, David and Donald Trachte Jnr noticed a strange gap in the wall of a room...

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.-One of Norman Rockwell's most famous paintings was found hidden behind a fake wall in its owner's home, proving that the version the owner had long displayed was a forgery, family members and experts said.They believe that the owner, illustrator Donald Trachte Sr., made the copy of "Breaking Home Ties" himself in the early 1970s, deades after he bought it from Rockwell and made it the centerpiece of his art collection.

I have watched intently as your political party has attempted to use this war for political advantage and find it to be repugnant in the extreme. That your name is now inextricably linked to Senators Kennedy, Biden and Durbin-politicians who we believe do not support us-must be of great concern to your constituents. How can you ask us to leave? Must we forget all the sacrifices, the deaths, lost limbs, lost marriages and the daily struggle to win? What do I say to my 22 year old nephew, a Staff Sergeant with the 1/75th Rangers seriously wounded in Mosul last...

The Right’s Left TurnBy Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | October 5, 2005 In late September, as throngs of placard-wielding protestors were descending on the nation’s capital, Lew Rockwell, the nominally libertarian proprietor of the website LewRockwell.com, was holding forth at an anti-war rally convened by the far-left Alabama Peace and Justice Coalition (APJC).  That the APJC’s rallying cry – “Spend money for human needs, not war!” – was of questionable accordance with principled libertarianism’s aversion to government largesse, didn’t seem to phase Rockwell, who joined a roster of speakers with an altogether different view about the proper role of the federal government....

An outlawed Iranian opposition group, which obtained a permit from the New York Police Department to hold a demonstration in front of the United Nations today, attracted an estimated 2,500 supporters to protest the presence of Iran’s president at the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly. But many of the crowd, coming from Denmark, Germany, Canada, Eritrea and Sudan, acknowledged that they had been recruited by the organization to attend the rally for money, and that all their expenses – including international air fare, hotels, and a daily stipend - had been paid by the organization. “Basically, what you...

Christopher A. Ferrara I am privileged to introduce Dr. Peter Chojnowski's article "Corporation Christendom: The True School of Salamanca," which deftly exposes how the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, Sts. Bernadine of Siena and Antonino of Florence, and the late Spanish Scholastics on just prices and wages has been misrepresented by proponents of the so-called Austrian School of economics.Dr. Chojnowski's article is an important first step in mounting a traditional Catholic response to the swelling ambitions of the Austrian school, whose two major divines, the deceased liberal Jewish thinkers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, wrote the foundational works of...

--> IowaPresidentialWatch.com political artist Linda Eddy (IPWGOP) has been selected to exhibit 6 of her works in the upcoming national art exhibit, "Democracy in America" at the University of Arizona Art Museum, Aug. 31 - Nov. 19.She'll be going 'head-to-head' with 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Szep of the Boston Globe... and 'rubbing artwork shoulders' with works by world-renownRoy Lichtenstein and Norman Rockwell! click here for details 

From the LRC Blog:Whatever Happened to Hate Mail? Posted by Lew Rockwell at 11:11 AM When I wrote about the US spy plane in China a few years ago, and said China was within its rights to act as it did (and that the US claimed the right to shoot down such planes off its shores), I received more than 600 hate emails, including a number of death threats. I've also received plenty of hate mail in response to articles on Iraq. But over the last year, the number of such messages has dwindled. Yesterday's article on freeing Saddam resulted...

LOS ANGELES -- In a bid to keep a European-designed helicopter from becoming the next Marine One transport for the president, United Technologies Corp. (NYSE:UTX - News)'s Sikorsky Aircraft Co. said it will rely on U.S. companies to build its latest version of the chopper, pulling work from several international suppliers. Sikorsky, whose helicopters have carried all U.S. presidents since Dwight Eisenhower, will replace partners in China, Taiwan, Spain, Japan and Brazil on this particular version of its new S-92 helicopter. The international partners will continue to build large portions of the civilian version of the helicopter, Sikorsky said. Since...

We now commence the annual national ritual of noticing that the Declaration of Independence is among the "founding" documents that gave birth to the country. And pundits, following innumerable scholars for 150 years, will twist and mangle the text to discern some other meaning from the document besides the obvious one. In most parts of the world, the Declaration is understood as a bold announcement and explanation, with an underlying rationale of why the British government needed to be thrown off in an act of American secession. That's why the Eastern Europeans throwing off Soviet tyranny used it as their...

The hard-line (and simultaneously mainstream) left-liberal hash, that has been recycled for four decades, in regard to American interventionism, economic interests, unilateralism, and policy toward totalitarian regimes which threaten national security is simplistic, wracked with loopholes even a five-year-old in his right mind can spot, and wrought from a sentimental/ ad miseracordiam/ ad hominem rather than a rational/analytical basis. As it takes no profundity of thought to discern its wanton and brazen fallacies, it need not even be examined by serious examiners of the moral and economic justifications behind the Iraq War. The aim of this essay shall be to...

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected. My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language,...

It is now clear that the US government faces immense difficulties in Iraq. As bizarre as it seems, it would appear that the Bush administration knew nothing about the political demographics in this country before it decided to smash its state. Apparently, the administration failed to consider the implications of the fact that this country is 2/3 Shiite, and that its status as a liberal/secular regime, by regional standards, was highly tenuous. Now, I'm the last one to shed a tear for the crushing of any state, but even a libertarian extremist like me understands that there are prudential considerations...

Llewelyn Rockwell, the leading intellectual influence of the paleo-libertarian right, was interviewed last night by Bill Moyers on PBS, and if any doubts had remained about the character of Rockwell and movement he leads, they were settled by this program. Asked his principles of when war is justified, he gave as an example of an unjustifiable war the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which he said was carried out for no other reason than to strike out at somebody, anybody. Asked if he thought Saddam Hussein was evil, Rockwell said, of course he’s evil, he’s a politician. Asked if he feared...

The Irrepressible Rothbard Essays of Murray N. Rothbard Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. RIGHT-WING POPULISM January 1992 Well, they finally got David Duke. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a massive campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate, orchestrated by all wings of the Ruling Elite, from Official right to left, from President Bush and the official Republican Party through the New York-Washington-run national media through the local elites and down to local left-wing activists. It took a massive scare campaign, not only invoking the old bogey images of the Klan and Hitler, but...