Free Republic

But the technology wasn’t quite ready for Robert E. Lee’s air cavalry It’s the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and Union forces on Cemetery Ridge await the final Confederate assault. But instead of witnessing serried ranks of rebels marching across a mile of open ground into the maws of Yankee cannons, the bluecoat regiments are shocked to hear the thud of rotor blades. It is the the sound of Confederate general George Pickett’s 13,000-strong division landing behind Union lines. Is this a neo-Confederate dream? The Red Badge of Courage meets Apocalypse Now? No, it turns...

What exactly happened at the Vatican's Extraordinary Synod on the Family yesterday? At the conservative NewsBusters site, Ken Shepherd observed that, if you look to "many liberal media reporters" for the answer, you will find them "giddy as schoolchildren" at the synod's midterm report on its discussions about gays and divorced Catholics. That's an advocacy journalist critiquing the work of people that he clearly considered to be advocates. A check of Twitter bears this out: Did the earth really move? It sure did for Josephine McKenna of Religion News Service (author of that last tweet), whose own story on the...

Kerry won Vietnam vets' wrath describing what he couldn't see BY HAROLD W. ANDERSEN Published Sunday, August 22, 2004 WORLD-HERALD CONTRIBUTING EDITOR It is one of the bigger gambles of the presidential campaign. But with most of the news media looking the other way, John Kerry has been getting away with it so far. I refer to Kerry's gamble that the news media won't finally take a hard look at his anti-war activities instead of concentrating on his four-plus months of combat-zone experience as a decorated, wounded veteran of the Vietnam War - experience that Kerry incessantly promotes as qualifying...

AIRWAY HEIGHTS, Wash. - A prison inmate due to be released Thursday after serving a drug sentence never made it to freedom because he asked friends to bring illegal narcotics when they picked him up, officials said. Wesley Jason Wayland, 35, was arrested Thursday at the Airway Heights Corrections Center and faces new drug counts. Wayland was finished serving time for drug possession and bail jumping in Benton County. But prison officials overheard him telling associates to bring drugs when they picked him up. When two of his friends showed up at the prison, law enforcement officers were waiting. Pamela...