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This day in history..LBJ signed civil rights law.

These are just a few observations. I encourage other Freepers to add to this thread. I just just in the 8th grade at this time and was addicted to the race, having attended the '62 and '63 races. This event I watched on closed circuit TV at Graumann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Shortly into the race there was a picture that I cannot forget, a screen filled with smoke and fire in a wreck that was so bad it stopped the race and claimed the lives of two drivers. Dave McDonald drove Micky Thompson's car, which used gasoline. He lost...

I haven’t seen the new documentary MITT and I’m not sure I can bring myself to do so. Living in the real-life aftermath of Romney’s failed presidential campaign is depressing enough without sitting through a cinematic autopsy, too. Some say that if this documentary or something like it had been screened before election day, Romney’s chances would’ve improved. Obviously we can’t know that for certain. I feel more confident declaring that had an infamous but little seen Barry Goldwater campaign film called Choice aired in 1964, he still wouldn’t have won. That’s because Goldwater had no chance of winning anyhow....

William W. Scranton, the moderate Republican governor of Pennsylvania from 1963 to 1967, who lost a run for his party’s presidential nomination in 1964 and later served as the United States representative to the United Nations, died on Sunday in Montecito, Calif. He was 96. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, Micheal DeVanney, a family spokesman, said. A descendant of Mayflower colonists and the founders of Scranton, Pa., heir to a fortune in railroads and utilities, the soft-spoken Mr. Scranton was heralded as a “Kennedy Republican” in the early 1960s. His amiable patrician style, and his independence as a fiscal...

People always throw out weird stuff surrounding their death ("When I die I want blah blah blah") but you rarely see people follow through on it. Not Scott E. Entsminger, a Browns fan who died at the age of 55 on July 4. Entsminger "was an accomplished musician, loved playing the guitar and was a member of the Old Fogies Band." He was also, per his obituary in the Columbus Dispatch, a "lifelong Cleveland Browns fan and season ticket holder." The deceased wasn't just your average Browns fan: He apparently wrote a song each year about the Browns, which he...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

The more things change....

Excellent Video: Think of the Katangese as Israel, and Patrice Lumumba and the Central Congolese government as the PLO/PA/HAMAS. The UN, of course, plays the same role as ever...to bring about a world government dominated by socialists and communists. Description: UN troops wage an unprovoked war against anti-communist Katanga in 1960 and 1962. The last bastion of the free market in the Congo was decimated by UN forces in 1963 to bring it under Congolese communist control. If you don't want to watch the entire thing (an early 1960's documentary), fast forward to the end where Katanga's ill-fated and heroic...

NARRATOR: "Don't look now young man, but somebody has his hand in your pocket. It's the hand of big government. It's taking away about four months pay from what your daddy earns evey year — one dollar out of every three in his paycheck. And its taking the security out of your grandmother's Social Security." GOLDWATER: "You know, that's the great trouble with big, inflationary government. It takes more and more of your earnings. It slowly but surely destroys individual initiative and responsibility. The government must draw its strength from the people, and as it drains away this strength, it...

After edging out Rockefeller 51% to 49% in the winner-take-all race in California, Goldwater had a huge majority of delegates, enough to easily win the nomination at the Republican convention. George Romney set about denouncing Goldwater, and even raised a stink at the convention to have Goldwater′s delegates disqualified. Romney was accusing many of Goldwater′s delegates as being everything from racists, members of the Ku-Klux-Klan, the John Birch Society and even accused some of being Communists! Imagine that! Once Goldwater was named the presidential nominee, George Romney still worked to undermine his campaign, refusing to endorse or support him. So...

"I don't worry about the Constitution," said Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, at a town hall meeting where voters questioned his support of the legislation that became Obamacare. You can find the clip on Youtube, where it has 462,084 hits. That was before the 2010 election, in which Hare, running for a third term in a district designed by Democrats to elect a Democrat, was defeated 53 to 43 percent by Bobby Schilling, proprietor of a pizza parlor in East Moline. A lot of politicians are worrying about the Constitution these days. Liberal commentators were shocked this past week...

"I don't worry about the Constitution," said Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, at a town hall meeting where voters questioned his support of the legislation that became Obamacare. You can find the clip on youtube.com, where it has 462,084 hits. That was before the 2010 election, in which Hare, running for a third term in a district designed by Democrats to elect a Democrat, was defeated 53 to 43 percent by Bobby Schilling, proprietor of a pizza parlor in East Moline. A lot of politicians are worrying about the Constitution these days. Liberal commentators were shocked this past week...

It’s seven months before their convention in Tampa, a lifetime in today’s five-minute-news-cycle politics. But the split decisions in the first three primaries and the personal attacks in the televised debates beg the question: Are Republicans divided into so many parts they are about to engage in 1964-style “politicide”? As a teenage Democratic political junkie, I watched TV with partisan glee as Goldwaterites booed Nelson Rockefeller at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964. That was two decades before Jeane J. Kirkpatrick labeled those who nominated Walter Mondale “the San Francisco Democrats,” a year when my party, obsessed with...

The Palestinian Authority anti-corruption commission announced Monday it was seeking to restore plundered public funds hidden abroad by PA officials. Rafiq al-Natsheh told the PA affiliated Ma'an News Agency that the commission is chasing corruption suspects living outside PA enclaves pending an agreement with their countries of residence. Natsheh's remarks follow a report in the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour last week that PA officials were moving deposits from Jordanian banks to foreign accounts. "If suspects accused of stealing public money (are moving funds abroad), that falls within our jurisdiction," al Natsheh said. "We will ask these countries to help us restore...