Free Republic

The Democrat Party died yesterday in Hartford, Connecticut. Present when this venerable institution breathed its last were a minority of the Democrats in the Nutmeg State. The Party was the child of the Republican-Democrat Party, and the Anti-Federalist Party. It leaves no known descendants. However, political parties sometimes spawn children many years after their deaths. Is that verdict too harsh? The leaders of the Democrat Party in Washington, New York, and elsewhere, are not admitting even to a serious illness. It’s difficult to conduct a proper Irish wake when on-lookers insist on prodding the deceased to sing and dance. These...

Most Americans probably think the Islamic terrorists declared war on the United States Sept. 11, 2001. Actually, it started a long time before – right from the birth of the nation. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were commissioned by the first Congress to assemble in Paris to see about marketing U.S. products in Europe. Jefferson quickly surmised that the biggest challenge facing U.S. merchant ships were those referred to euphemistically as "Barbary pirates." They weren't "pirates" at all, in the traditional sense, Jefferson noticed. They didn't drink and chase women and they really weren't out to...

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques. “Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation 'Phi Beta Cons') cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander...

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997.   Over 100,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic, and the forum is read daily by tens of thousands of concerned citizens and patriots from all around the country and the world. A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day was introduced on June 24, 2002. It's only a small room in JimRob's house where we can get to know one another a little better; salute and support our military and our leaders; pray for those in...

On the morning of July 4, 1826, the leading residents of Quincy, Mass., and Charlottesville, Va., began their last celebration of the nation’s birth – and their last day on Earth. They faced eternity as friends. High on his small mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, the master of Monticello lay asleep. Throughout the spring, Thomas Jefferson had become increasingly feeble. By mid-June, the daily horseback rides were over. In Quincy, John Adams’ health had also declined during the late winter and spring. On sunny days, he was able to take short carriage rides, but even they had...

No metaphor in American letters has had a more profound influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state.” Today, this figure of speech is accepted by many Americans as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed church–state arrangement, and it has become the sacred icon of a strict separationist dogma that champions a secular polity in which religious influences are systematically and coercively stripped from public life.In our own time, the judiciary has embraced this figurative phrase as a virtual rule of constitutional law and as the organizing theme of church–state jurisprudence, even...

American Muslim News Briefs Thursday, May 25, 2006 KY: High School Prayer Axed After Muslim Complaint Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS SHELBYVILLE - The principal of Shelby County High School said the school will not have formal prayer at graduation exercises next month after receiving a complaint from a student and the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. Principal Gary Kidwell met Monday with the Board of Education and a lawyer as residents held a prayer vigil outside. Tuesday, Kidwell said the school will break from the tradition of student-led invocations and benedictions at graduation June 2. The school "will be compliant...

THE GREAT DIVIDE Ever since its first European settlements, in the early 1600s, America developed as two completely different republics. We have been politically divided ever since, and will always remain so. This is because our two founding republican traditions are both opposite and irreconcilable. On one side of the divide were the agrarian republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with their foundation stones of equal creation, personal freedom, and the inalienable rights of every citizen. Theirs was a republic of innate virtue, where crime and vice were nothing...

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets—emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, known collectively in Arabic as the Maghrib). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent...

Jihad in the days of Jefferson By Erik Schechter, The Jerusalem Post Apr. 26, 2006 Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation By Joshua E. London John Wiley & Sons 276pp., $24.95 A fledgling republic without a navy, the United States seemed ripe for the picking. In 1783, Muslim pirates - the sea-faring terrorists of their day - began attacking American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean, and the following year, the Moroccans captured a brig called Betsey and enslaved its crew. Soon afterwards, the ruler of Algiers declared war...

Issue Date: May 1-7, 2006, Posted On: 5/1/2006 Steyn: Liberal fabrications about Thomas JeffersonCommentary by Mark Steyn John Kerry announced this week’s John Kerry Iraq Policy Of The Week the other day: “Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military.”With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?Did he get that from Winston Churchill? “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight...

Today is Thomas Jefferson's birthday, and given the state of American politics, with neither major party really putting Jeffersonian ideals into action, wouldn't it be great if we could resurrect the Sage of Monticello and get his take on current affairs? ~~~snip~~~~ Jefferson was complex and somewhat contradictory, and doubtlessly the answers to some of these questions could differ depending on Jefferson's age and state of mind. I've tried to come up with passages that most accurately reflect his views. All quotations can be found at the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson quotations page: Q: The Republican Party claims to...

While the issue of homosexuals in the military has only recently become a point of great public controversy, it is not a new issue; it derives its roots from the time of the military's inception. George Washington, the nation's first Commander-in-Chief, held a strong opinion on this subject and gave a clear statement of his views on it in his general orders for March 14, 1778: At a General Court Martial whereof Colo. Tupper was President (10th March 1778), Lieutt. Enslin of Colo. Malcom's Regiment [was] tried for attempting to commit sodomy, with John Monhort a soldier; Secondly, For Perjury...

Commemorating the day Thomas Jefferson declared religious freedom for all Americans, the nation today celebrates Religious Freedom Day as declared by President George Bush. "The right to religious freedom is a foundation of America," said Bush in his proclamation Friday. "Our Founding Fathers knew the importance of freedom of religion to a stable democracy, and our Constitution protects individuals' rights to worship as they choose." In 1786, Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, protecting the civil rights of people to express their religious beliefs without suffering discrimination. Now, 14 years after the first Religious Freedom Day proclamation by...

Historic Nickel with Forward-Facing Jefferson Heads into Circulation WASHINGTON – Pouring hundreds of shiny, new 2006 nickels from a silver goblet designed by President Thomas Jefferson, officials at the United States Mint launched into circulation today the Nation’s first circulating coin that features the image of a United States President facing forward. The Nation’s coinage has depicted profiles of presidents for nearly a century. This new image of President Thomas Jefferson is based on a Rembrandt Peale portrait of Jefferson, painted in 1800. The United States Mint expects to ship approximately a billion of the new five-cent coins (nickels) to...

On New Year's Day, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson received a gift of mythic proportions. Amid great fanfare, a mammoth cheese was delivered to the White House by the itinerant Baptist preacher John Leland. It measured more than four feet in diameter, thirteen feet in circumference, and seventeen inches in height; once cured, it weighed 1,235 pounds.The colossal cheese was made by the staunchly Republican, Baptist citizens of Cheshire, a small farming community in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. The religious dissenters created the cheese to commemorate Jefferson's long-standing devotion to religious liberty and to celebrate his recent electoral victory...

America’s Earliest Terrorists Lessons from America’s first war against Islamic terror. By Joshua E. London At the dawn of a new century, a newly elected United States president was forced to confront a grave threat to the nation — an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim terrorists. Worse still, these Islamic partisans operated under the protection and sponsorship of rogue Arab states ruled by ruthless and cunning dictators. Sluggish in recognizing the full nature of the threat, America entered the war well after the enemy’s call to arms. Poorly planned and feebly executed, the American effort proceeded...

Even today, sources on inventions list six by Franklin that are still in active use today. One of those sits in my back hall, cheerfully and economically heating the back of my home – the Franklin stove. Another sits on the bridge of my nose as I write this – a pair of bifocals. But this is about Franklin’s greatest invention, one that the lists never mention because it is mere words, not a physical object. Franklin made seven trips to Europe, as a diplomat and scholar. He was welcomed into all the learned societies that existed in Europe then....

Thomas Jefferson 3rd President (1801-1809) Periodic revolution, “at least once every 20 years,” was “a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Meeting, July 1809 Considering the nomination of former President Thomas Jefferson to the Supreme Court: Chairman: We're honored to have you to appear before us, Mr. Jeff … I mean, Mr. President. We thank you again for your outstanding service to our country, especially as president of the United States for the last eight years. We particularly honor you for originating the phrase "wall of separation between Church and State." We on this committee are concerned about giving any place to public displays of religiosity. Jefferson: Thank you, gentlemen. Yes, I did coin the phrase you mention...