Free Republic

On Thursday, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation named Barack Obama the 2017 “Profile in Courage” award honoree, and no one in the major media caught the irony of it. According to the foundation, the award is given to those “whose actions demonstrate the qualities of politically courageous leadership in the spirit of ‘Profiles in Courage,’ President Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer prize-winning book.” The reader should forget for a minute about Obama’s alleged courage and focus instead on the phrase, “President Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer prize-winning book.” This phrase would carry a little more weight, and the award would make a little...

Fareed Zakaria has tried to make “The Case for Gun Control” in Time. The results are not pretty. Virtually every argument he makes misrepresents the underlying data. After a lead that cites the Sikh-temple shooting, the Aurora massacre, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others, Zakaria trots out the usual international comparisons: “The gun-homicide rate per capita in the U.S. is 30 times that of Britain and Australia, 10 times that of India and four times that of Switzerland. When confronted with such a large deviation, a scholar would ask, Does America have some potential cause for this...

Was The Book of Mormon given to Joseph Smith by an angel or created from a work of fiction? Who was Solomon Spalding and did he have a connection with Joseph Smith? This book critically examines key historical documents, personal testimonies, and records of 19th-century Mormon history concluding that The Book of Mormon is an "adaptation of an obscure historical novel" written by Revolutionary War veteran Solomon Spalding during the War of 1812. In twelve chapters, the authors lay out the evidence for the assertion that Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, and Joseph Smith Jr. adapted and embellished the Spalding manuscript...