Free Republic

On this day in 1858, Abraham Lincoln, the newly-minted Republican candidate for the United States Senate, addressed the Illinois Republican convention in Springfield. His remarks included some of his more well-known words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Although he lost the Senate seat to Stephen Douglas, he...

When I sat down to write a follow-up to my first series The Third World War: A Narrative History, I initially struggled for a topic. After writing a thousand-page epic story of armies of millions clashing across continents, almost any other subject seemed puny in comparison. I played with a concept called “The Tenth Crusade”, about an effort to carve out a Christian “homeland” in the Middle East but, after doing some research, that seemed to me to be a topic that could only genuinely be done justice after some years of research and some actual time spent in the...

Rep. Michele Bachmann, stressing her Iowa roots and appealing directly to Tea Party voters, came out swinging Monday as she formally launched her campaign for president. Buoyed by a strong showing in several recent polls, the Minnesota congresswoman cast her campaign as the voice for "constitutional conservatives" looking for a government that lives within its means while giving the private sector the room to grow. She launched a broadside against President Obama for racking up too much debt while stimulating too little job growth and vowed to make him a "one-term president." "We cannot afford four more years of Barack...

More information has just come out about the split between the Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis and the Australia-based Creation Ministries International. (UPDATED for clarification: CMI is composed of organizations from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada which were all formerly united with the Kentucky group under the Answers in Genesis name. The Australian group was the Creation Science Foundation prior to the association of the groups under the Answers in Genesis name.) CMI has published a number of documents on its web site about the split. These documents, which I'll describe below, make the case that the U.S....