Free Republic

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

More and more Americans are opting out of Earth Day in favor of a holiday that offers a chance to fight back against Marxism and political correctness. The holiday, which is called “Holly Maddux Day,” is named after the young woman murdered by Ira Einhorn, a 1960s antiwar activist. Einhorn, who was a friend of Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman, is regarded by many as the founder of Earth Day. Einhorn emceed the first Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia in April 1970, at which Sen. Edmund Muskie gave the highlight address. Einhorn, an advocate of free love and drug use,...

LADYSMITH, Wis.- It wasn't quite Captain Ahab's great white whale Moby Dick, but a Wisconsin angler reeled in a huge white fish -- a rare 51-inch albino muskie, officials say. Paul Parise caught the white muskie Oct. 6 in the lower Flambeau River in Rusk County, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Tuesday. "That is a pretty fantastic catch," Tim Simonson, co-chairman of the state Department of Natural Resources' muskie committee, said in a news release. "Albino muskie are pretty rare to begin with, and for one to survive to that size is pretty uncommon given they don't have the...

Dr. Howard Dean’s fans come out for the big Democratic summer shindig As Tom Andrews, the director of the leading national antiwar coalition, began his speech at the Maine Democrats’ big outdoor summer shindig in Falmouth, John Baldacci signaled his bodyguard/driver to move the large, dark SUV up the driveway. The vehicle soon hid in the trees, its engine quietly humming. At first, the governor seemed to be paying attention as Andrews, the former First District congressman, launched into rousing tales of how the country, under President George W. Bush, had gone "from peace and prosperity to war and recession."...

One day's obituaries reveal the blind spots of the opinion establishment. On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times. The other man--eulogized in a mere...

History, in Marx's famous dictum, tends to repeat itself: the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. So what do you call it the third time around? A bad sitcom? A bad marriage? A bad dream? All three of those seem like viable ways of describing the Democratic Party's current predicament, locked in an endless and self-destructive struggle with itself, like a would-be Buddhist penitent unable to atone for eons' worth of bad karma. Even in the annals of Democratic ritual suicide, the 2008 campaign is something special: It's not just that the protracted and painful nomination...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Sen. Hillary Clinton teared up this morning at an event at the Yale Child Study Center, where she worked while in law school in the early 1970s. A doctor, who was introducing Clinton, began to choke up, leading Clinton's eyes to fill with tears, which she wiped out of her left eye. At the time, the doctor was saying how proud he was that sheepskin-coat, bell-bottom-wearing young woman he met in 1972 was now running for president.

A specter was haunting Hillary Clinton as she campaigned in New Hampshire this weekend: the specter of Ed Muskie. As the ancient or merely studious among us will recall, the Democratic senator from Maine, who'd been Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, entered his party's presidential contest in 1972 as the front-runner. His prospects were dashed in the New Hampshire snows, however. As popular memory has it, an indignant Muskie started crying while refuting a silly attack on him (though whether he was genuinely upset or merely sniffling during a frigid outdoor news conference was never authoritatively resolved). Muskie's more...

HAYWARD, WIS. - The National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame's board of directors today upheld angler Louie Spray's claim to the world record muskie, a 69-pound, 11-ounce specimen he landed on Oct. 20, 1949. Spray's record had been challenged by an Illinois fishing group. Spray's catch had unseated the previous record-holder, a 69 1/2-pound fish caught by Cal Johnson of Minneapolis. Had Spray's record been invalidated today, the honor would have reverted to Johnson, unifying the title between the Hayward hall and the International Game Fish Association.

WAUSAU, Wis. - This is indeed a fish story — not about the one that got away, but about a rare one. A white muskellunge is swimming in the waters of Lake Tomahawk, a northern Wisconsin lake in Oneida County. State fisheries experts captured it in nets during a population survey in April and released it back into the lake. "I've never seen nor heard of an albino muskie, so it's an unusual fish to say the least," said John Lyons, a longtime fisheries researcher for the state Department of Natural Resources in Madison. The nearly 33-inch long, 8-pound muskie...

Standing in the snow outside The Union Leader of Manchester, Muskie called the paper’s publisher a “gutless coward.” Muskie’s campaign flagged after the confrontation. Edmund Muskie choked up several times during that speech, and several news organizations reported that he cried, but a dispute has persisted for years whether it was tears or melted snowflakes on his face.

The Republicans launched a tricky new tactic this week, aimed at catching Teresa Heinz Kerry — and her husband — in the Muskie trap. Hardly anyone remembers Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, but back in the winter of 1972 he was as famous as John Kerry is today. A tall, Lincolnesque figure, Muskie came into the New Hampshire primary as front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. And then he lost it, literally and figuratively. The publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, famed Republican hit man William Loeb, did him in by accusing Muskie's wife of being a drunk. Muskie rented...

Two Who Made a Difference Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2003 America lost two tax-cutting heroes last week – former Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley and former Republican senator from Delaware, William Roth. I knew both men well, having worked with Roth and his staff in creating the Kemp-Roth bill and having served on Bartley's editorial page. Both men did much for America: Roth cut tax rates, gave us the Roth IRA and championed the taxpayer against IRS abuse; Bartley acquainted influential people with an alternative policy to Keynesian demand management, which had mired the economy in...

<p>Soldiers from the First Armored Division captured piles of top secret Iraqi intelligence documents, some of which refer to a nuclear program, in a raid on a community center in Baghdad last week.</p> <p>Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., probably wishes he'd had a peek at them before he accused President Bush of intentionally misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee dismissed Kerry's charge as political, and refused to join in it.</p>

'Mommy, there's a monster fish in the sand!' By Celeste Beam, Staff Reporter Friday, 9/13/02   Contributed photoJosie, Justine and Jordyn Jones (left to right) posed near the monster muskie that washed up on their Lake Miltona shoreline. The girls' mother, Genny, estimated the length to be between 54 and 55 inches. Local Muskies Inc. member Bob Volkert thought the fish may have weighed as much as 52 pounds. Catching a muskie is no easy task.But, for three little girls who live on Lake Miltona, it was as easy as taking a walk on their beach.When the Jones girls, Jordyn,...