Free Republic

At the Shadow Party’s "Take Back America" conference in Washington on June 3, 2004, following a glowing introduction from Hillary Clinton, George Soros stepped to the podium to explain to the audience that when it came to electoral politics in the USA, he was a newcomer. Only his outrage over Bush’s invasion of Iraq had stirred him to get involved in the partisan struggle. "[I]t is the first time that I feel that I need to stand up and do something, and become really engaged in the electoral process in this country," Soros said.[1] This was far from the truth,...

ALBANY, GA (WALB) - Alice Coachman Davis, the first black female to win Olympic gold, died Monday. She was 90 years old. Coachman Davis suffered a stroke in April, and died at an Albany hospital Monday morning.

Palestinians marched in the West Bank and Gaza on Thursday to commemorate their displacement in the 1948 Mideast war that followed the establishment of the state of Israel. Sirens wailed at noon in Ramallah and elsewhere across the West Bank for 66 seconds to symbolize the number of years since the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in Arabic—the term Palestinians use to describe their defeat and displacement in the war. Israel overcame the armies of surrounding Arab states as well as local Arabs who attacked after the Jewish state was declared on May 15, 1948. […] “It is time for the leaders...

Yom HaAtzmaut 2014 begins at sundown, Monday, May 5th, and ends at sundown on Tuesday, May 6th

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Founders Series, preserving the statement of the 1948 generation.

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. Many of our friends continue to register shock at the election returns of last month. How can it be?, they ask. It’s not so hard to figure out, we reply. The first Romney bumper sticker that appeared last year bore a startling resemblance to another famous corporate logo. What were they thinking? The first bumper sticker for the President’s re-election said simply: “ObamaCares.” Brilliant. We are not saying that President Obama does actually care about “people like me.” But voters polled on that question chose Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by...

It is a rare Midwestern morning when a major candidate can conjure up to comparisons to three candidates from a single past presidential election. But Mitt Romney’s bizarre recent Ford Field appearance somehow managed to remind historians of not one, not two, but three major contenders in 1948’s historic presidential contest: the over-confident Thomas E. Dewey, the scrappy Harry S. Truman and the dour conservative Robert A. Taft. Now, general Mitt Romney-Tom Dewey comparisons are nothing new. Both Romney and Dewey served as moderate-to-liberal Eastern Republican governors. Both featured bland, poll-driven messages. Both had repeatedly sought the presidency (Dewey in...

For over 2,500 years, Jewish communities have existed in the lands now known as the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Iran. Around one million Jews lived there at the start of the twentieth century; today less than 3 percent of that one million still remain (including Iran). Upon the establishment of the State of Israel, the status of Jews in Arab countries changed dramatically. The Arab world’s rejection of the Jewish state triggered a deliberate surge in state-legislated discrimination and abuse by Arab regimes and their citizenry, making Jewish residence in Arab countries simply untenable. As...

• Will the Obama administration's policy toward Egypt be based on a perception that the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood would be extremely dangerous? Or have they taken the position - voiced in parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment - that the Brotherhood has become moderate and can be talked to? Initial administration reactions indicate that it does not rule out Muslim Brotherhood participation in a future Egyptian coalition government. • Since January 28, the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement has become more prominent, with its support of Mohamed ElBaradei to lead the opposition forces against the government. In the streets...

With bland, hapless Michigan-born Mitt Romney betraying a greater likeness each day to bland, hapless Michigan-born Thomas E. Dewey, the comparisons of 2012’s presidential marathon to 1948’s Dewey-Truman match-up slog steadily forward—with the latest installment arriving on our doorstep in the form of tonight’s State of the Union Address. Like many a politician before him, Barack Obama preaches a lilting bi-partisanship but practices a harsh partisanship. Predictions that his 2012 State of the Union Address will in reality be a campaign roadmap are near universal. In this instance, once again, “Give ‘Em Hell” Barry, scold of the “Do Nothing 112th...

It's starting to look like 1948 all over again. Mark Twain observed that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes. The 2012 presidential campaign is now rhyming with that of 1948 in iambic trimeter - the poetic form tragedians of Ancient Greece such as Aeschylus and Sophocles used to best express portending doom. So let's revisit that extraordinary yesteryear of 1948, resulting in the most famous upset in American politics - Democrat Harry Truman defeating Republican Tom Dewey - and see how we can avoid a similar outcome by using it to our advantage. In 1944, FDR was running...

Harry Truman is the one president widely admired today who was generally reviled in his own times. There was no cult of personality around Truman while he was in the White House; to the contrary, he eventually logged the lowest approval ratings in Gallup’s history, just nudging out Richard Nixon on the eve of resignation. His legislative record was anemic. He failed to curb the anti-communist fervor known as McCarthyism, and the carnage of the Korean War is part of his resume. The fact Truman endures is a testament to two factors: the first, his exemplary decision to assert American...

In the spirit of the recent holiday, among the many things for which Americans should be thankful is a political decision made more than 67 years ago as the Second World War was beginning to wind down and as the nation’s voters prepared for a presidential election. It was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s finest moments of decision, though admittedly, one he exercised reluctantly. By 1944, FDR was living on borrowed time. It was a hardly a secret that health issues he had been dealing with were reaching critical mass, though only a few insiders had any idea as to the...

It’s always interesting to read predictions of what life and society will be like in the future. I remember in the 1950s that experts were predicting what America would be like fifty years later. We’d all be wearing clothes made with synthetic material that would never ear out. Cars would fly. There would be no more war and people would be flying all over the solar system. In 1949, Eric Arthur Blair published his most famous novel under the pen name of George Orwell. 1984 described a socialistic society where the people were constantly watched and monitored by a godlike...

(Really worth watching, folks)

In the wake of recent reports of a joint Israeli-Jordanian plan to link the Red Sea on the Israeli side and the Dead Sea on the Jordanian Side, parliamentarians in Egypt are agitating for the nation's caretaker junta to demand Israel surrender the port-city of Eilat. Egypt has insisted it has a claim to the city of Eilat since it lost the city to the nascent state of Israel in the wake of the Egyptian army's defeat in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, but after the 1979 Camp David Accords the claim was officially dropped. Or so it seemed. The...

Some Milestones in Israel-Palestine1834 - 1886 - 1920 - 1922 - 1929 - 1938 - 1941 - 1948 - 1950s-1960s - 1970 1972 - 1973 - 1975 - 1976 - 1982 - 1987 - 1994 - 2000 - 2001 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2010 1834 First recorded attack on native Jews in Israel by Muslims, is the one in June 1834, Safed (the Plunder), the massacres and mass rapes went on for 33 days, (an inciter, Muhammed Damoor, a self-proclaimed prophet, ‘prophesied’ the attack for which he agitated). It was repeated in 1838. 1886 First...