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March 17, 1973: A special evening with country music legend Merle Haggard in the East Room of the White House on St. Patrick's Day, 1973. Includes performances and a reading of a poem Haggard wrote for First Lady Pat Nixon on the occasion of her birthday. The program was filmed and produced by the Naval Photographic Center. The Naval Photographic Center White House Motion Film Unit Collection consists of motion film coverage of selected official activities of President Nixon filmed between 1969 and 1974.

Conservative Christians are using religious liberty as a basis to oppress the marginalized as well as traumatize parents of children who identify as LGBTQ, according to a retired Episcopal Church bishop and a filmmaker. Retired New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson and filmmaker Daniel Karslake were hosted for a discussion by the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN), an unofficial United Methodist LGBTQ caucus, on July 15. The bishop and the film producer equated God’s purposes with intersectional identity politics of the Left. Robinson was the first man openly in a same-sex partnership to be consecrated a bishop in the Episcopal Church and...

“For the first time since President Richard M. Nixon’s divisive ‘Southern strategy’ that sent whites to the Republican Party and blacks to the Democrats …” began a New York Times story last week. Thus has one of the big lies of U.S. political history morphed into a cliche — that Richard Nixon used racist politics to steal the South from a Democratic Party battling heroically for civil rights. A brief stroll through Bruce Bartlett’s “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past” might better enlighten us. Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S....

With The Denver Post‘s DC reporter, Allison Sherry, under fire for her conflict of interest by dating a member of the Green Lobby without disclosing that to readers, it’s fascinating to see alternative Colorado publications leading the way on coverage of our nation’s capital. News today from The Colorado Observer is that they’ve hired a second Washington, DC -based reporter to cover federal issues and the Colorado congressional delegation. The media environment in Colorado has been weakened ever since the closing of the late, great Rocky Mountain News, virtually allowing Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton to be the sole press...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Woodstein for our purposes) now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that President Nixon was “far worse than we thought,” and accuse him of conducting five “wars”: against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats, on justice, and on history. In evaluating such a volcanic farrago of pent-up charges, the facts must be arrayed in three tiers: the facts of Woodstein’s activities and revelations; the facts of the Watergate case and related controversies; and the importance of Watergate in an appreciation of the Nixon record.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivVcfSBVSM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJEvxgfcOFw The conspiratorial connection that will blow your mind! ;)

I'm writing to offer my resignation from the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Docent Guild. While the decision was tough, the reason is simple: The president, who admirably redeemed himself in the sunset of his life from the monstrous shadow of Watergate, is now being enthusiastically dishonored at his own library by a "Manchurian" figure, Dr. Timothy Naftali, director of NARA. Naftali is so driven by his personal ideology that none of his unquestioned brilliance and tireless audacity is now capable of producing an ounce of basic common sense. What is that basic common sense? That presidential libraries are built,...

On this day in 1948, Rep. Richard Nixon (R-CA) and his House Un-American Activities Committee questioned Alger Hiss, a State Department officer suspected of being a Soviet spy. Nixon zeroed in on contradictions in Hiss's testimony, revealing that Hiss had lied about not knowing Whittaker Chambers, another Soviet spy. Though never convicted of being a spy, Hiss did go to prison for perjury. For decades, many Democrats asserted that Hiss was innocent and that Nixon had persecuted an innocent man. After the fall of the Soviet Union, de-classified records revealed that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy.

Roll out the bunting. Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the modern global economy. That's right: come Monday morning we will have managed to survive four decades of fiat money – though, given the chaos in markets in recent weeks, it is anyone's guess how much longer it will last. On 15 August 1971, with the US public finances straitened by the cost of the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon finally cut the link between the US dollar and gold. Until then, the US Treasury was duty bound to exchange an ounce of gold with central banks willing to pay...

Fifty years ago today, July 24, 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon engaged in what is called the "Kitchen Debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in which they debated back and forth on the virtues of Capitalism and Freedom and Soviet-style Communism. For all of Khrushchev's bluster, here we are 50 years later, and the United States is still the world's greatest superpower, and the Soviet Union is no more. Below is a video clip of the two debating, and then a longer audio clip of their debate . . . . . (Watch Video)

Library Throws Book at Nixon by Brian Calle Some controversy over the recently revised Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda has provoked some questions over presidential libraries, their value, purpose for public consumption and their role in the remembrance of past presidents. One docent at the Nixon library, my Register colleague Will Alexander, opted to resign in protest of the new exhibit after 10 years of volunteer service. And friends and former colleagues of Richard Nixon have been critical of the museum's new director, Timothy Naftali. Some critics have even suggested that the...

Malaysia’s first submarine, the Scorpene-class KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, successfully underwent underwater trials in the South China Sea yesterday. Defence Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said a technical team was aboard during the submarine’s dive to monitor its progress under water. “The dive was successfully completed by 4pm. Everything was pronounced to be okay,” Dr Ahmad Zahid said in an SMS. The trials were carried out at the Royal Malaysian Navy base in Teluk Sepanggar, Sabah. It was earlier reported that the KD Tunku Abdul Rahman was unable to dive after a mechanical defect was discovered by engineers....

Last week, the Malaysian submarine programme, which received much attention during the past months, suffered a temporary setback as Malaysian Defence Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi had to announce that the country’s first Scorpene-class submarine, delivered in September 2009, was unfit for diving. Originally scheduled for tropical water trials, KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, a diesel-electric attack submarine named after the country's first Prime Minister, was forced to remain on the wharf longer than expected. According to the Minister, “the defects are still covered by warranty, so the supplier and contractor are repairing them.” Since then, the technical problem has been repaired...

Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) Chief Admiral Abdul Aziz Jaafar has confirmed that the nation's first submarine, KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, was experiencing a mechanical fault which prevented it from submerging. He said the fault was detected on Jan 17, following maintenance works conducted at the RMN base in Teluk Sepanggar, Sabah. "The damage involves a part that channels water pressure movement which caused the submarine's failure to launch underwater," he told reporters after a ceremony where appointment letters were presented to members of the National Service Training Council here Thursday. Abdul Aziz was commenting on a local English daily on...

Malaysia's first submarine, a European-made Scorpene delivered last September, has developed problems that make it unfit for diving, the defence minister said Thursday. The KD Tunku Abdul Rahman sailed into a grand reception last year as the first of two commissioned from French contractor DCNS and Spain's Navantia for a total of 3.4 billion ringgit (961 million dollars). Named after the country's first prime minister, it was hailed as an important acquisition despite opposition allegations of corruption in the deal. "The submarine can still dive but when we detected the defects, we were advised that it should not dive," Defence...

AS SPECIAL COUNSEL to President Richard Nixon Charles Colson was known as Nixon's hatchet man and one of the most hated men in America. After he left the Nixon administration he was caught in the snare of Watergate. Although he was only peripherally involved in the scandal, he pled guilty and served seven months in prison on an attenuated criminal charge related to the Ellsberg break-in.In 1976 Colson published Born Again, a best-selling account of the conversion experience that followed his government service but preceded his incarceration. When Nicholas von Hoffman reviewed the book for the Washington Post that year,...