Free Republic

President offers careful statement extending ‘hand of friendship’ to Cubans, while his successor launches attack on ‘brutal dictator’

"The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are...

As the Civil War seesawed and the Union scored one of its rare early successes, a man met a somber-looking Lincoln at the White House. Trying to cheer the president up, he suggested that the president should be pleased by the latest news from the battle front. Lincoln agreed but then sighed that "nothing touches the tired spot." And he should have had a tired spot. Abraham Lincoln's administration had to deal with the Civil War and its raft of incompetent Union generals; Indian uprisings; an ongoing monetary crisis of epic proportions; and a dozen major foreign issues, including the...

Russian mercenary Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was killed in an explosion in Donetsk, several news agencies reported on Oct. 16. Police in the Kremlin-controlled area were reportedly looking for suspects in the killing. Interfax News Agency, citing a source, said Pavlov was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated in the elevator of his apartment building. Other reports say the Kremlin-backed separatists blame Ukrainian officials for the blast. If his death is confirmed, he becomes the latest in a growing number of assassinations of separatist military leaders in the Donbas. Pavlov was a war hero in the view...

SAVCHENKO IS FREE... "Nadiya Savchenko has returned to Ukraine and greeted by huge crowds, as well as by their president. Now, her name is known to every Ukrainian elementary school student, most every free person in the world. Meanwhile, our two captives, Yerofeev and Aleksandrow, returned to Russia with their heads bowed down. No one met them in the airport, except their wives. Their names are known only to their colleagues from Putin's GRU (military intelligence). This illustrates the difference between what this war is for Ukrainians and what it is with russians. For them, it is a fight for...

Abraham Lincoln told an 1864 audience that "the world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.'" Different people can define liberty in different, even contradictory ways, so that both sides in a conflict can claim to the mantle of liberty. That was exactly the situation in the Civil War: Slaveholders defined liberty in such a way as to make themselves the guardians of liberty... The South's liberty was the liberty to hold other people as chattel slaves. What the slaveholders called liberty, the North quite rightly called tyranny; namely, the systematic deprivation of the natural rights of...

Blaine Cooper calls for John McCain to be arrested and tried for treason at town hall meeting Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has come under attack, and rightfully so. He has gone from being a Vietnam Veteran hero to crossing the line, in my opinion and many others, of being a traitor to the Constitution and the United States. I ran across a video of a townhall meeting that apparently took place sometime in September, in which Blaine Cooper called out John McCain on his treason for aiding and abetting the enemy of the United States.

The rope used to execute ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could be yours for the right price. Ex-Prime Minister Mowaffak Al-Rubaie has put the item up for sale more than eight years after he witnessed Saddam hanged in 2006. An unidentified senior Iraqi political official told the Middle East news site Al-Araby al-Jadeed this week that several individuals from Israel, Iran and Kuwait are vying to purchase the rope — with one making a $7 million bid.

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS-TV) - At this time in December 150 years ago, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his army were advancing on Savannah, leaving a wake of destruction behind. But the true wrath of Sherman's army was being reserved for South Carolina. "He wanted to cripple the Confederacy," said retired University of South Carolina journalism professor Patricia McNeely. Since the campus survived the burning of Columbia, the Horseshoe was an appropriate place for our interview. "He wanted them to give up fighting. He wanted them to lose faith in their leadership in the Confederacy. But most people have overlooked...

The widow of Nelson Mandela punctured the self-congratulatory mood of the UN summit on Tuesday, saying world leaders had failed to rise to the challenge of climate change. :snip: The Green Climate Fund was founded in 2010 to help poor countries cope with climate change. UN officials and developing country diplomats have said repeatedly it will not be possible to reach a climate deal in Paris, without a significant fund for those countries which did the least to cause climate change but will bear the brunt. South Korea and Switzerland went on to pledge $100m each, Denmark pledged $70m, Norway...

Professor and political activist Cornel West declared President Barack Obama a “war criminal,” arguing that his support of Israel and his drone policy make him complicit in the deaths of innocent people. The controversial activist made the comments at a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, DC on Saturday, according to Talking Points Memo. West began his speech by pointing to the deteriorating situation in Gaza, where more than 1,800 Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis have been killed, criticizing Israel’s offensive in the region in front of a “Free Palestine” banner. His comments regarding President Obama begin at around the three-minute...

Hillary Rodham Clinton retains broad public support for her performance as secretary of state, a sign that President Obama’s struggles abroad and Republican attacks over Benghazi have not been a major drag on her reputation. “More people blame the White House than they blame the secretary of state, and that strikes me as quite appropriate,” said Kori Schake, a former State Department official during the George W. Bush administration. The public “admires Secretary Clinton’s toughness and how much she got out there and tried to do stuff.” With many of the Obama administration’s foreign policy priorities still unresolved, Clinton has...

Hillary Clinton has not experienced any sustained after-effects from the concussion that sidelined her from her work at the State Department in late 2012 and early 2013, the former secretary of state told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview in advance of the release of her new memoir, “Hard Choices.” “No lingering effects,” Clinton told Sawyer, when asked whether she had experienced any. “No,” Clinton affirmed, when asked whether she still notices effects of any kind. The first piece of the interview with Clinton will air tonight on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer,” and the full interview...

The 2014 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which includes an award of $50,000, will go to co-winners Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College, for "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion," (Alfred A. Knopf) and Martin P. Johnson of Miami University Hamilton, for "Writing the Gettysburg Address" (University Press of Kansas). Steven Spielberg will also receive a Special Achievement Award for the movie "Lincoln," released in 2012, which won two Academy Awards, was nominated for twelve and grossed over $275 million worldwide.The Prize is awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The winners were chosen from 114 nominations. Guelzo...

President Lincoln has been all but deified in America, with a god-like giant statue at a Parthenon-like memorial in Washington. Generations of school children have been indoctrinated with the story that “Honest Abe” Lincoln is a national hero who saved the Union and fought a noble war to end slavery, and that the “evil” Southern states seceded from the Union to protect slavery. This is the Yankee myth of history, written and promulgated by Northerners, and it is a complete falsity. It was produced and entrenched in the culture in large part to gloss over the terrible war crimes...

Two professional colorists have combined their skills with photographs and fascination with the American Civil War to create a remarkable series of color photographs from the era. British colorist Jordan Lloyd, 27, met fellow colorist Mads Madsen, 19, from Denmark when he started posting on Madsen's subreddit 'Colorized History'. Initially it was Madsen who was colorizing images from the Civil War era, but Lloyd eventually got interested and now the two work together restoring the images, improving their technique by giving each other critiques. Madsen has been interested in the Civil War since he was 12, and was especially fascinated...

From the time Abraham Lincoln entered the White House nearly a century and a half ago, there has been an anti-Lincoln tradition in American life. President John Tyler’s son, writing in 1932, seemed to speak for a silent minority: “I think he was a bad man,” wrote Lyon Gardiner Tyler, “a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.” Throughout his presidency Lincoln was surrounded by rivals, even among his own cabinet. Outside the White House, his many enemies included conservative Whigs, Democrats, northern copperheads and New England abolitionists. Wisconsin editor, Marcus M....

In Stalin's Russia, genetics and cybernetics were treated as the cat's paw of imperialism and officially branded as "whores." But it was another branch of Soviet science, history, that was a far more deserving candidate to bear that not exactly honorific moniker. Russian historians loyally served the regime, meeting its propaganda needs in full compliance with a thesis propounded by the titular head of the Soviet school of history, Mikhail Pokrovsky: "History is the present telescoped into the past." Some American liberals have been faithfully following Pokrovsky's precept, reinventing the past in keeping with the progressive view of the world....

...Did he exert features of moral grandeur and heroism necessary to steer the country through its deepest political crisis? Or was he an aspiring tyrant, especially in his use of executive power? A recent example of how not to think about Lincoln’s leadership comes from the historian and television commentator Doris Goodwin. Goodwin wrote a book called “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” showing how Lincoln drew his cabinet from his personal and political competitors. In a subsequent discussion of Lincoln’s leadership titled “The 10 Qualities That Made Lincoln Great... If all of these sound a little...

That's right -- not just Nixon ... Nixon and Bush. Can vilification from the left get much worse than that? Cornel West continues to demonstrate why parents might want to think better of sending their children to Princeton, where West purportedly teaches when he isn't gushing over hip-hop and engaging in arcane rants over the airwaves. (audio clip after page break) On his most recent radio show with co-host Tavis Smiley, West condemned President Obama's legal justification for drone killings of Americans suspected of involvement with al Qaeda, saying Obama had become no different than George W. Bush and Richard...