Free Republic

What’s even more American than turkey, cranberries and pumpkin pie these days? An Italian gun, that’s what. The only known surviving firearm that crossed the wild Atlantic aboard the good ship Mayflower, settled with the pilgrims at Plymouth Colony and ultimately helped the first colonists not only survive, but prosper. Meet the Mayflower Gun. The GunAffectionately dubbed the Mayflower Gun and thought of as an American icon, the gun is actually an Italian-made wheel-lock carbine. This single-shot musket was originally chambered in .50 caliber rifle, though ages of heavy use have worn away the majority of the rifling. Given...

PROPOSITION 76 attacks funding for our most important government services, including education and public safety, and should be defeated. Proposition 76 contains many radical and disturbing provisions, but two are especially dangerous: - It eliminates the Proposition 98 guarantees for education funding, and several other voter-approved expenditures, allowing the governor to cut literally billions of dollars from schools; - It allows the governor to make unilateral cuts in government spending in the middle of the fiscal year to nearly any program he chooses, without any input from any other branch of government. Under these two rules, many of the services...

Saul Alinsky died in 1972. He was a Marxist grassroots organizer who spent much of his life organizing rent strikes and protesting conditions of the poor in Chicago in the 1930s. However, unlike Christian socialist and activist for the poor Dorothy Day, Alinsky's real claim to fame was as strategist for anti-establishment '60s radicals and revolutionaries. Indeed, Alinsky wrote the rule book for '60s radicals like Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Miller and Nancy Pelosi. He considered Hillary Rodham to be one of his better students and asked her to join him in his efforts as an organizer of radical...

The Secret Plan of the DFRC for the Middle East