Free Republic

Why is a Senate office building named for a racist? While the secular Taliban of the Left has been busily destroying statues like they’re ISIS in Palmyra, scrubbing American history and reducing Founders, such as Declaration of Independence authors, to racist caricatures, they’ve missed one big, glaring target: the Russell Senate Office building. But there’s big reason why groups such as antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other professional protesters probably don’t want to touch the issue. The building, previously known as the Old Senate Office Building, was renamed for Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell, a Democrat, in 1972. Senator Russell, a...

The Biden administration is vacating a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of World War II-era scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb.” In a written statement first shared with The Hill, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the 1954 decision barring Oppenheimer’s clearance went through a “flawed process” and noted that there was evidence of bias. “In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and...

Classic flick about the clash between emotional anti-gun war widow and a WW2 veteran (Sterling Hayden) who is sheriff of a small town where the POTUS is set to pass through. A psycho (Frank Sinatra) is planning to beat the odds and take him out. Grand old character actor James Gleason plays the lady's father-in-law, and has the honor to deliver the line: "When the old boys wrote those words 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,' they sounded mighty nice -- but they wouldn't've been worth a plug nickel if somebody hadn't made 'em stick."

After back-to-back potentially serious laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced on Friday that they had closed the flu and anthrax laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The accidents, and the C.D.C.'s emphatic response to them, could have important implications for other laboratories around the world engaged in research into dangerous viruses and bacteria. If the C.D.C — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could have, in theory, killed not just laboratory...

On this date, Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced the Southern Manifesto in a speech on the House Floor. Formally titled the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had once composed the Confederacy. It marked a moment of southern defiance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision, which determined that separate school facilities for black and white school children were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an...

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

While it’s perfectly okay for people to have different opinions about what churches should say from the pulpit, especially with regard to politics, what’s not okay is for the federal government—rather than congregations themselves—to be in charge of what is said. And it won’t do to dangle the threat of taxing the church if it won’t comply. That’s why the Johnson Amendment has to go. The Tax Code’s restriction on political speech by non-profit organizations is popularly known as the Johnson Amendment, named after its sponsor, Lyndon Johnson, who maneuvered the levers of senatorial power to insert the provision into...

Hope you enjoy. Money Burns A Hole In My Pocket

Bill Clinton bashed President Bush in a speech delivered from the pulpit of a prominent Manhattan church on the Sunday before the Republican National Convention began. Yet, Americans United for Separation of Church and State does not view Clinton's pulpit-based diatribe a violation of tax laws. Ever since then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D.-Tex.) slipped a provision into a bill back in 1954, federal law has prohibited tax-exempt churches from engaging in partisan political speech. Every election season, Americans United files complaints against churches that it alleges have violated this law. The group also opposes the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration...

LAS VEGAS – The U.S. Air Force is giving an ultimatum to owners of a remote Nevada property that over time has been surrounded by a vast bombing range including the super-secret Area 51. They're being told to take a $5.2 million "last best offer" for their property by Thursday -- or the government will seize it through condemnation. The owners include descendants of a couple who lost their hardscrabble mining enterprise after the Air Force moved in in the 1940s. Nuclear tests then began in 1951, their mine mill mysteriously exploded in 1954 and they ran out of money...

In a speech at a Council on Foreign Relations dinner in his honor, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announces that the United States will protect its allies through the "deterrent of massive retaliatory power." The policy announcement was further evidence of the Eisenhower administration's decision to rely heavily on the nation's nuclear arsenal as the primary means of defense against communist aggression. Dulles began his speech by examining communist strategy that, he concluded, had as its goal the "bankruptcy" of the United States through overextension of its military power. Both strategically and economically, the secretary explained, it was unwise...

In the early to mid 1950s, especially after publishing The Conservative Mind, Kirk began to develop his own own three pillars of a good society, “Order, Justice, and Freedom” as he would frequently put it in the 1970s and 1980s. In this 1954 article (excerpts below), published in the University of Notre Dame’s Review of Politics, Kirk–fully within the Christian Humanist tradition–considered the virtue of Justice from a classical as well as a Christian perspective. Harmony, not contention, brought together the two traditions. Only a true Justice–the recognition of “giving each man his due”–would allow the flourishing of a well-ordered...

Inouye reported ownership of Central Pacific shares worth $350,000 to $700,000, some held by his wife, at the end of 2007 [5]. The shares represented at least two-thirds of Inouye's total reported assets. Inouye has requested a delay in filing his annual financial disclosure for 2008, which was due this spring, and he declined to provide the current value of his investment. Since the end of 2007, the bank's stock has lost 79 percent of its value. Central Pacific was founded in 1954 by a group of World War II veterans including Inouye who were emerging leaders in Hawaii's Japanese...

This article analyzes the history of labor union violence, and how Rep. Capuano's comments are a perfect continuation of this historical truth. Labor Unions: A History of Murder and Sabotage The New American 28 February 2011 The raging union-led protests in Wisconsin have resulted in many Americans taking a closer, more critical look at labor unions and their political clout and influence in shaping policy. With the ubiquitous announcement from AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka that he is granted an audience at the White House “nearly every day,” the American people have become more skeptical of unions and the role...

This week's feature is Disney's epic version of Jules Verne's classic underwater adventure novel "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea." One of the best films from the Disney Studio of this era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLJ1m7artbE It's hard to imagine Hollywood making an animated short with this message nowadays but back in 1954, WB produced this Looney Tune teaching a short primer on capitalism and in favor of it! After seeing all those DNC delegates tell Peter Schiff how they want to "ban profit" makes me realize how many folks need to watch this cartoon.