Free Republic

AUSTRALIAN Journalist Lauren Tomasi has been shot by a rubber bullet fired straight at her by an LAPD officer in Los Angeles. Demands are being made in Australia that Anthony Albanese call Donald Trump to protest. Should The Donald pick up the phone or have any such call redirected to Newsom?

Since I first started following Aussie Rules footy at the age of 9 in 1967, the qualities I have most loved seeing are courage at the contest and skill, speed and flair. Outstanding players I have seen in this regard are Barry Price, Keith Greig, Robbie Flower, Barry Cable, Garry Ablett Senior, Eddie Betts, The Krakouer brothers and the current Number 5 of the North Melbourne Kangaroos AFLW team, Tess Craven. As a human being Tess is modest, kind, friendly and helpful and always puts her team ahead of herself. The strength, skill and determination she shows above in tackling...

84 years ago today, Bob Dylan was born. At his Nobel Prize winning best, from 1961 to 1966, he challenged us to rethink everything with everything he wrote. Donald Trump, born about 5 years after Dylan, in 1946, looks to me like he is just entering into a period of his Dylanesque best. Trump forces us to revealuate this modern world all the time. Bob Dylan mastered and elevated American music twice to great literature in a few short years, first as a folkie but then as a great rock n roller. Potus 45 surprised everyone to come down a...

I think that men and women should be treated as equal in everything except the three female spheres of activity of being pregnant, giving birth and breast feeding. But I think that there are subtle differences in abilities and tendencies between men and women such as a slight tendency for women to be more empathetic than men. Overall, empathy is also a very common quality in men, but my life experience has been to see a little more empathy in women than in men. To me there is an emotional beauty in the way that the Fitzroy footballer pictured in...

Donald Trump and Pope Leo. How will they get on? Who will win?

On January First, 1953, Hank Williams died of heart failure in the back seat of a car on the way to a gig. (He had hired a student to drive him from Alabama to West Virginia to be there. Dedication.) Hank liberated the pop music voice to sound wholeheartedly and powerfully American with unparalleled directness and emotional honesty on the hit song charts in ways no one had done before. He is not the father of The First Amendment but he is for me a pivotal grandfather of modern freedom of speech. The cultural achievements I revere of Dylan, Elvis,...

Weldon Kees write in his poem “June 1940″ : ” ……. the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform./An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.” Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind is a masterpeice or a messterpeice of fractured emotions and traces of deep love (“Sweet lady ……. a lone soldier on the cross (who) won the wars after losin’ every battle ……. Down the road to ecstasy/I followed you beneath the stars/Hounded by your memory/And all your ragin’ glory ……. } What I hear Dylan sing in the Chris is “Yediot Wind” What is that? A condemnation of...

Pat Buchanan wrote of suicide of a superpower. Australia sings of choosing suicide over persecution every chance it gets. Banjo Paterson started writing the lyrics in August, 1895. I had another go at the first verse today: "Now the modern Swagmen sleep on the city streets Under the shade of Australian trees And their hearts sing with their modest yearning in: 'Who'll come a Waltzing Matilda ..... with me?' "

Over the course of my lifetime these are some of the film makers I have revered: Charlie Chaplin (more for his silent features than his talkies) and Shirley Temple, (both as a child and adult for the former and as a child only for the latter), Woody Allen (when i was a tertiary student in the 1970's and 1980's but less so now) Steve Bochco, primarily for the reinvention of what television can do through Hill Street Blues and Shawn Ryan and Micheal Ciklis for The Shield which I consider an even better drama than HSB and the best thing...

French screen legend, Brigitte Bardot, was born on the 28th of September, 1934, in Paris. She has, in different ways, and for two very different sets of beings, been a great libertarian all her life. I believe her own words prove that: “I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian ……. I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy ……” “It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen ………. I gave my...

Patsy Cline was born on the 8th of September, 1932, in Winchester, Virginia. As her words attest, she is a country music great: “You want me to act like we’ve never kissed, you want to forget; pretend we’ve never met , and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but I haven’t yet… You walk by, and I fall to pieces.” “I’m gonna walk a little bit of dog.” “Oh, I offended you with my opinion? You should hear the the ones I keep to myself.” “Carnegie Hall was real fabulous, but you know, it ain’t as big as the Grand Ole...

Anne Boleyn was a beautiful woman who died for an effectively polygamous man, Henry the VIIIth. In 1532, on September the first, he made Anne the Marquess of Pembroke in her own right. Henry created this title for her. These words attributed to her suggest she was very much a woman who was ready for a man: “Seduce me. Write letters to me. And poems, I love poems. Ravish me with your words. Seduce me.” Anne married Henry but when he did not have a son by her to be heir to his throne he had her executed. She spoke...

Ingrid Bergman was one of her photographer father’s favourite subjects. She once said, “I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.” When she was two and a half years old her mother died and when she was 14 her father died. Later she said, “The theater was my mother and my father.” and “I have had my different husbands, my families. I am fond of them all and I visit them all. But deep inside me there is the feeling that I belong to show business.” She died at midnight on her birthday, August 29, in 1982. Does that mean something?

Ruby Keeler was born into a catholic family in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, on this date in 1909. She worked hard in tough times: "Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning." She supported Eisenhower's campaign in 1952. In the movie “Dames”, Ruby Keeler’s character Barbara Hemingway said, “I’m free, white, and 21. I love to dance AND I’m going to dance.” Those...

Arma Virumque Me Cano. Rewriting Vergil, I sing of weapons, and of myself as a man. In this land where, as freedom fighter Steve of Wonthaggi tells it, " ......... men have been decommissioned of traditional roles. ....... (Some people) want us to be demonised as non accepting, small minded , woman-bashing shits." That isn't what we are. It is misandry. Lest We Forget.

Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, born On August 13, 1860, Was A Very Tough Woman. In this century, Oakley, for me, is a beacon of deeply American and female toughness and freedom. She said: "God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house." "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies." "Any woman who does not thoroughly enjoy tramping across the country on a clear frosty morning with a good gun...

Melbourne Freedom Fighter Pauline is shocked at the torture of Julian Assange for telling truths. All we mortal human beings usually seem to need to speak our truths as best we can. Godless tyrants now frequently destroy what's best in themselves and too many innocent victims. “I do not play games," Mila Kunis has said, "but always just say what’s on my mind. Ostentatious Godless tyrants now frequently destroy what's best in themselves and too many innocent victims. – for fools. If a man's afraid of your honesty, it means that he is not the one you need."

Norma Shearer (121st birthday today on august 11, tomorrow, American time) said "A woman today is good, or she is bad, according to the way she does a thing - and not because of the thing itself." And “The morals of yesterday are no more. They are as dead as the day they were lived. Economic independence has put woman on exactly the same footing as man.” This is easy to disapprove of. And to be drawn to. Freedom works. Morality? Whose?

On August 8 in 1967 Vivien Leigh died and in 2011 Betty Ford died. Scarlett O'Hara. Blanche DuBois. Alcoholism overcome. Leigh said: "Sometimes I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show." Ford said: "It's always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they're about eighteen years old. If you haven't made your points with them by then, it's too late." She used her freedom.and spoke her mind. God Bless Truth

Lady Godiva and her hubby, Leofric, the Earl Of Mercia were both generous to Christian religious houses. He established a Benedictine monastery in Coventry. She gave gold and silver jewelry to monasteries. One necklace was hung on the neck of the Virgin Mary. The first known Rosary-like string of prayer beads was made by her. That's history. Different times. According to legend, LG was deeply troubled by oppressive taxation of the people by her husband and entreated him again and again to lower taxes but he refused. However she persisted and eventually he gave in on the condition that she...