Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- Now that the festivities are over, it is time for the masters of the media to stop asking inane questions of the new folks in town -- such as, "How do you like your new office?" -- and for the Obama administration to get down to work on a clear and present danger. Notwithstanding the "day one" and "first week" coverage, the most pressing issue confronting the American people isn't closing "Gitmo" or the always ephemeral "Mideast peace process" in the aftermath of Gaza or even "fixing the economy." Item No. 1 ought to be preventing the world's...

In 1960, during a joint press conference with then French President Charles De Gaulle, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s then prime minister stated that France was Israel's greatest friend. At that moment, De Gaulle interrupted him abruptly, asserting that "France has no friends, just interests." This statement summarizes much of French foreign policy. It certainly applies to the French relationship with Hizbullah. Indeed, there has been a noticeable recent change in France’s attitudes vis-à-vis Hizbullah to such an extent that France’s stance on the Lebanese Shia organization now seems almost identical to the American one. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether France and...

Ed Husain's autobiography The Islamist: why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left (Penguin, 2007) is a remarkably candid account of the life of a British-born Muslim who was initially seduced by radicalism but gradually came to his senses to return to the more spiritual and devotional Islam that had defined his early years. It is also an important work, in that it both carefully grounds the issue of radicalisation that has so dominated recent intellectual and political discussion of Muslim communities in Britain, and points to potential solutions. Ed Husain grew up...

FULL TITLE: Seattle's Green River killer confesses to slaying nearly DOUBLE the 49 women he's convicted of killing in first ever interview A Seattle-area truck painter who was unmasked as the Green River serial killer has claimed he murdered up to 80 women over two decades - nearly double the number he was convicted of killing. Gary Ridgway is currently serving 49 consecutive life sentences in a Washington state prison. But in a series of interviews conducted over the past five months, he is now claiming there are significantly more victims and he says he is coming clean to help...

McMaster had purged Derek Harvey, one of the NSC's best people on the Middle East, for trying to fire Obama holdovers. "In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicab—500 miles, village to village—interviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He [was] full of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right....

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

A little pill called Captagon turns Jihadists into superhuman soldiers. They dont feel pain, they dont fear death and they dont get tired. They become killing machines. Bonus; it makes them murderously psychotic and causes brain damage after prolonged use. It is cheap, easy to produce and highly addictive. The Syrians take it as do the rebels. And from what I hear, ISIS loves the stuff. They laugh when they are beaten, they are high when they rape, they are jazzed when they behead infidels. During the raid in Paris, French police said they found needles used by the attackers...

As The Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers." On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas. Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon. A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war torn country's black market economy each year, likely giving militias access to...

Senator Biden mentioned on ALF. Just a little light talk and thoughts reflecting on today's politics and how low we really fell.

Are Hong Kong's liberties gradually being taken away? THROW a frog into boiling water and it jumps out; gently bring it to the boil, and the frog, never noticing the incremental increases in heat, allows itself to be cooked. Is Hong Kong a frog in a pot in Beijing's kitchen? If so, then on September 24th the temperature rose another notch. On that day, Hong Kong's government formally began—by circulating a consultation paper—the process of enacting a controversial set of laws against subversion, sedition, treason and other ills, as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law, the territory's constitution....

Official Music Video for It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) performed by R.E.M.

The ghost of the early 1980s recession is haunting the Federal Reserve. With inflation still near 40-year highs and the U.S. economy slowing, the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes have fueled concerns of a central bank-induced recession akin to the one triggered by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker during the 1980s. While Volcker’s rate shock ended two decades of rising inflation, it did so at the cost of a severe recession. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has frequently praised Volcker’s refusal to back down and channeled that persistence into his own battle with inflation. But most economists believe Powell can wage a...

A team of researchers believes it has found proof that the Soviets-Russians hid information on Raoul Wallenberg It has long been suspected that Russia has deliberately concealed information on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Wallenberg was arrested in Budapest after Soviet troops entered the city in 1945 and never seen again. The Soviet Union claimed alternatively that he had died or had been executed shortly afterwards. Former Soviet prisoners testified that they saw him alive during the 1980s when he was merely identified by number rather than...

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Russian archivists have published new material from a German officer imprisoned after World War II who shared a cell with Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish diplomat credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Publication of the statements from Willy Roedel came as a surprise since the Russians had previously denied they existed, say two independent scholars who have researched the Wallenberg mystery for decades, in a paper released Monday. That raises suspicions that Moscow may be withholding information which could help solve the 66-year-old puzzle of Wallenberg's arrest and disappearance in the gulag, the vast...

They call her Assata Shakur but, no matter the name by which she’s known, Chesimard is a homegrown – and unrepentant -- American terrorist. JoAnne Chesimard: BLM unashamedly embraces her and, recently, the New York City school system decided to incorporate her so-called wisdom into its curriculum. Therefore, it is more imperative than ever to shine a bright light upon the life, times, and accomplishments of one JoAnne Deborah Chesimard, a.k.a., Assata Olugbala Shakur. If you are, like me, of a certain age and grew up or lived in New Jersey during the 1970s and 1980’s, the name JoAnne Chesimard...

The RMP video that was shown to "first time travellers" along the Berlin Corridor......from Helmstedt to West Berlin

On July 8, 1981, the Go-Go's released their debut album, "Beauty and the Beat." To call the LP a watershed musical moment release would be underselling the album's influence. Musically, the quintet's mix of nervy pop, gritty punk, rock, and girl-group harmonic gleam was a revelation. The five members — vocalist Belinda Carlisle, guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, bassist Kathy Valentine, and drummer Gina Schock — were cool and confident onstage. These were talented women making music their way, following their own unique path — and showing legions of fans that they too could carve out space for themselves...

“The most recent fad to catch on with kids in our big cities and metropolitan areas is rapping,” the Blondie singer explained to the audience on the network variety show “Solid Gold,” in 1981. After mentioning some of the genre’s rising stars from the Bronx — the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Funky 4 + 1 — Harry introduced her band’s latest rap-inspired video. “Using our new single, ‘Rapture,’” Harry said, in a professorial tone, “Blondie and some of our friends put together a number to show you what rapping in the street scene is like.”

Say what you will, the 80's were an interesting time musically, post up your memories of the 80s.Killing Joke~ 80's

The 80's were an absolute haven for great music from all different genres. Whether it was pop, rock, or even new wave, music was progressing by leaps and bounds in terms of new sounds and general hookiness. Though many musicians would need a Casio synthesizer to get their songs on the air, these bands stuck to their guns with letter-perfect rock and roll. Though many of these songs fall under the domain of rock in name, none of them seem to fit neatly in a single category. While many artists were still following in the bluesy tradition of bands like...