Free Republic

THE CATHOLIC KNIGHT: One of the most overlooked facts of the American Civil War Era is the sympathy the South gained from Europe's most influential monarch - the pope of Rome. Pope Pius IX never actually signed any kind of alliance or 'statement of support' with the Confederate States of America, but to those who understand the nuance of papal protocol, what he did do was quite astonishing. He acknowledged President Jefferson Davis as the "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." From this we can glean three things about Pope Pius IX... 1. He considered Jefferson Davis worthy...

..."All the signs are that the stimulus spending will be opposed by congressional Republicans, whose shrunken ranks are increasingly dominated by right-wing Southerners who care not what their stance does to harm the party's national image..."

I recall reading that a Union soldier, observing his comrades fleeing in wide-eyed panic from the "rebel yell" at Chancellorsville said his former unit resembled "close-packed ranks rushing like legions of the damned."

Attention, y'all in the South: Urban crime is partly your fault. You see, if you didn't own so many guns, you wouldn't have so many of them stolen or sold at gun shows. Right now, those evil guns cross state lines and get used to commit crimes in urban areas. Got that? I know all of this because the Associated Press's Seanna Adcox, acting as a mouthpiece for the Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has told me so (link is dynamic; 2 AM version saved here for future reference): Ten states are responsible for the bulk of illegal guns that are...

College football has been conquered, in nearly every respect, by the Deep South. The Southeastern Conference, a 76-year-old coalition of 12 universities in nine Southern states stretching from Louisiana to Florida, has won three national college football titles in five years, including the last two by blowout, and has an unrivaled 11-4 record in the Bowl Championship Series since 1999. Its teams lead the nation in average attendance, have five of the 12 highest-paid coaches in college football and just signed two broadcast deals worth as much as $3 billion over the next 15 years. Tomorrow, Alabama and Florida, ranked...

Health Tue, December 02, 2008 05:11 PM Washington, DC (CapitalWirePR) December 2, 2008 –On World AIDS Day December 1, 2008 the Latino Commission on AIDS released “Shaping the New Response: HIV/AIDS and Latinos in the Deep South” Report, documenting the extraordinarily high rates of HIV and AIDS diagnoses among Latinos, the apparent contributing factors to this health crisis and recommendations for future action in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina)*. Shaping the New Response reached its conclusions after two years of research including more than 300 interviews, 8 roundtables covering all 7 states,...

Alan Wolfe, announcing the end of the culture wars with the election of Obama, accuses the South of voting against Obama because Southerners are racists: “The single most disturbing aspect of last night’s election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy. Yes, Republicans remain strong in states such as Wyoming and Idaho, and Obama won Virginia and is leading in North Carolina. But both these latter two states flipped to the Democrats because they contain large numbers of white professionals who moved there from other parts of the country and because blacks came out...

The South's McCain voters are racists. They are also uneducated, out of step with the rest of the country, to be pitied, isolated, suffering in the area of “jobs, education and development”, ideologically aligned with the old Confederacy, at odds with the values of the rest of the country, and are getting what they deserve because they won’t “… get with the right program.” Or you could ask Dwight Lewis at The Tennessean. Lewis learned all this in a phone interview with “… David A. Bositis, senior political analyst for the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies …”...

Why Jefferson Davis Opposed Roe v. Wade by H. W. Crocker III 10/31/08 Okay, he didn't, really, because he never had the chance -- but it's as certain as magnolia blooms in the spring that if Jefferson Davis were to rise again and take his place as the extremely senior senator from Mississippi, he would make the Senate ring with his denunciations of Roe v. Wade. In fact, he might even threaten secession over it. His bill of indictment would, of course, include that Roe v. Wade violated states' rights -- indeed, this would be the very grounds of secession:...

Why do you look so worried, Bubba? Barack Obama is not going to win Georgia. He might come close, but he can't win. Maverick McCain and his little moose-hunting buddy should keep Georgia safe for Republicans for at least two more years. Still, Bubba, you should brace yourself for a good dose of shock and awe. Even if Barack doesn't carry the Peach State, you may be shaken the morning after the Nov. 4 election. You will see the sun rise on the real new Georgia - a Georgia filling up with new voters and minority residents. The dramatic changes...

The Presidential Election of 2008 will mark the end of the Eastern wing of the Republican Party. The Eastern wing of the Republican Party has dominated the party since the founding of the GOP in the mid 1800s. However, since the 1960s the power base of the Republican Party has shifted West and South. This has left an increasingly orphaned Eastern wing of the Republican Party. They have had a mild resurgence in the mid 1990s when a swathe of North Eastern states including (incredibly!) Massachusetts fell under Republican Governorships. However in the last 8 years, state after state in...

I have been reading my Bible all night and praying hard. My son had on that awful Rachel Maddow show earlier. I cried because I could hear it from my room, and he wouldn't turn it off. What is this world coming to? What are we going to do to survive?

Democrats regard southerners as hayseed, gun-toting, backwater hicks who are especially embarrassing when screaming for their favorite NASCAR driver or pledging allegiance to “one nation under God.” Let’s face it, southerners are simply not genteel or refined enough for NARAL, Democrat-sponsored D.C. cocktail parties, or the European Union. Nor are we accustomed to surrendering on the battlefield as quickly and as frequently as the French-loving Democrats. If you really think about it, the gap separating Democrats, who claim to represent “the people,” and southerners, who constitute a large enough segment of “the people” to make or break a politician’s electoral...

Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Wild deer also display this behaviour - a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

The sea of shining, hope-filled faces that routinely flood Barack Obama's rallies would be an alien environment for the grizzled features and tobacco-stained temperament of Dave “Mudcat” Saunders. His preferred habitat is up a tree gunning down deer or on the mud flats — which lent him their name — catching catfish, part of an endless struggle with Appalachian wildlife. Along with his Confederate flag bedspread, the stag heads on his walls, his preference for profanity over punctuation, he would horrify what he calls the “northeastern elitist, Metropolitan Opera wing of the Democrats”. But, as one of the party's few...

"One in five American adults - 22% - believe that any state or region has the right to "peaceably secede from the United States and become an independent republic," a new Middlebury Institute/Zogby International telephone poll shows." "Broken down by race, the highest percentage agreeing with the right to secede was among Hispanics (43%) and African-Americans (40%). Among white respondents, 17% said states or regions should have the right to peaceably secede." "Politically, liberal thinkers were much more likely to favor the right to secession for states and regions, as 32% of mainline liberals agreed with the concept. Among the...

South Africa's governing African National Congress President Jacob Zuma says he is shocked and embarrassed about white poverty in the country and the issue must not be ignored. Mr Zuma was speaking after visiting Bethlehem near Pretoria where white families live without running water or electricity. A report by the charity, Helping Hand, says the number of homeless white people in South Africa has increased by 58 per cent in the last six years. Mr Zuma says the high level of black poverty does not mean white people do not suffer too. "Poverty is one of the leading challenges in...

ABC News' Jan Simmonds reports: Republican vice presidential prospect Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., told reporters today that removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of South Carolina's Statehouse would not be a priority during his final years in office.

THE interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South. Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the...

THE interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South. Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the...