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Saturday, October 15, 2011
William. Dorsey Pender WBTS Roundtable: Fort Branch NC
Pictures
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Fort Branch Confederate
Earthen Fort Civil War Site
Earthen Fort Civil War Site
.. is located two miles below Hamilton, North Carolina and 60 miles upriver of the town of Plymouth. Sitting 70 feet above a bend in the Roanoke River, this Confederate earthen fort provided a safe and clear view of Union gunboats approaching from down river.
Eleven cannon offered significant protection for the railway bridge over the river at Weldon, a weak link in the "Lifeline of the Confederacy" between Wilmington, NC and Richmond, VA. The fort also protected the nearby construction site of the ironclad ram C.S.S. Albemarle which later helped regain control of the lower Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound by sinking wooden Union ships. Citizens of the entire Upper Roanoke Valley benefited from the fort, as well.
Today, the site is the winter headquarters for the First North Carolina Volunteers, a Civil War re-enactment group. A battle re-enactment is held annually at the fort on the first weekend in November and includes a unique Living History Program. The annual events schedule often includes a springtime Living History Program and a unique Civil War Christmas celebration, as well.
Visit the site and you can see eight of the fort's original cannon, making Fort Branch the only earthwork fortification in the South with its original artillery in place. You can also see a restored late 1800s steam engine from The Ranger, and local Native American pottery and artifacts from Hoggtown, a nearby eighteenth century river community. Other attractions include rebuilt gun emplacements and an 1850s farmhouse which is being restored.
The Fort Branch Battlefield Commission works to preserve and restore the Fort and its heritage. Browse this web site to learn more about the history of Fort Branch and the ongoing preservation project. We invite you to visit during one of our events and to take part in supporting the fort's preservation.
18 minutes, 47 seconds.
That’s how much time I’ve been given TOTAL during the last three Republican debates to explain my message of liberty to the voters.
But since poll after poll has shown me in third place nationally over these past few months, surely that amount of time left me in the middle of the pack when compared to my establishment opponents . . . right?
WRONG.
Out of all the candidates, my speaking time was DEAD LAST – even behind candidates I’ve been beating in the polls for months!
Ron Paul
Black This Out
College Professor Offers Students Extra Credit for Attending Occupy Protest
A sociology professor at Northern Michigan University has purportedly offered her students extra credit for taking part in a local Occupy protest.
According to an email obtained by The Blaze, Professor Jeanne Lorentzen is offering students in her introductory sociology course 20 extra credit points if they attend an Occupy the Upper Peninsula demonstration with her on Saturday. Students who do not wish to attend the protest have the option of writing a 20-page term paper about a social movement to receive the same extra credit. Neither assignment is compulsory.
The email says students who choose to attend must make a protest sign that can say anything as long as it’s not “offensive, rude or divisive.” To qualify for the extra credit, students must sign an attendance sheet twice, at the beginning and end of the march.
Herman Cain and the Death of the Political Pro
Via bigtimer
Karl Rove doesn’t think Herman Cain stands a chance of being POTUS. Bush’s number one consigliere said as much on Fox Thursday night.
But is he right? I sure don’t know, but I certainly have a suspicion why Karl thinks what he does. The Herman Cain candidacy is a direct threat to his occupation. Rove — arguably the reigning monarch of political pros — went on to register his disapproval that Cain was wandering around Godforsaken places like Tennessee flogging his book, when any serious candidate should be pressing the flesh where it counts — to wit, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Worse yet, the candidate isn’t raising any money (or not enough to have flashing neon signs that say “9…9…9…” like Burma-Shave along every highway in America — not that we have to be reminded).
Now I have no beef with Rove. In fact, I rather like him, having interviewed him for PJTV. But it’s obvious that times have changed and that Herman Cain is running a very canny media campaign virtually all by himself. Yes, I know he has a staff, but you do get the sense this man is his own thing, which is part of the tightrope walking fun. Can he make it to the other side — Pennsylvania Avenue — without falling? Whatever the case, Rove and others like him (the sorry David Axelrod, the Carville-Matalin duo, etc.) are in danger of becoming, if not extinct, at least more marginal than previously assumed.
Brady Bunch Alert: BB gun found in W.A. Pattillo student's bag!
School massacre narrowly averted........
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The Daily Southerner
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The Daily Southerner
TARBORO — A W.A. Pattillo School student was found in possession of an unloaded Air Soft Pistol BB gun on campus Thursday.
Following a tip received by school officials Wednesday after school hours, Assistant Principal Rachel Mills apprehended a student as the child exited the bus at school Thurday morning.
The student was then taken directly into isolation where Principal Ronda Sortino searched the child's backpack where the weapon was found.
Sortino then contacted the child's parents, along with the Tarboro Police Department.
Edgecombe County Public Schools is not at liberty to reveal the details of disciplinary actions administered to individual students.
However, possession or use of a firearm on a school campus is prohibited by Board of Education policies as well as state and federal laws.
The school district notified all Pattillo parents and staff using ConnectED, the automated phone calling system to keep them informed and to help everyone understand the serious nature of bringing a gun onto a school campus.
The message to parents restated the Edgecombe school district’s commitment to maintaining safe and orderly schools. In addition, the administration asks parents and community members to help in the following ways:
• Review the Code of Student Conduct with students and discuss the importance of good behavior at school, as well as on school buses.
• Help students understand the consequences for misbehaving and/or violating the law.
• Talk frequently with young people and their friends about what they are hearing and seeing at school or in the neighborhood.
• Check students’ backpacks and pockets each day and make sure they are bringing to school only those items that belong here.
Encourage students and their friends to report any threats or suspicious activity to a teacher or another trusted adult. Reports may be called in directly to a school office, to the Superintendent’s Office at 641-2600 or the Crime Stoppers Anonymous Hotline at 977-1111.
Jack Sides Memorial Service 08 October 2011 Jacksonville NC
Ceremony for Private Robert Wesley Sandlin, Company G 3rd NC Infantry.
Rob Huling of Stainless Banners on the far left and Ron Civils Commander of the General Lewis A. Armistead Camp 1302 Sons of Confederate Veterans to his left. Relatives were very appreciative and took many pictures. 3 volleys were fired in salute.
Raising CAIN? A Critical Look At Policy
Well look at the dichotomy we have here.... both from Bloomberg this morning.
Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s plan to create a national sales tax would hurt retailers, threaten economic growth and shift the tax burden onto the middle class and poor, tax experts and business groups said.
Would it? I'm not sold. All that matters to the average person is purchasing power.
That is, the number of dollars you have is not particularly material. What they will buy is what's important. And here's the rub: You pay 15% of your income right now - everyone does that has "wage" income, whether self-employed or working for someone else.
Yes, half of that is "hidden" from you in the form of the payroll tax, but make no mistake, it's your money being taken. Your employer calculates the cost of that tax into your hiring decision, just as he does with all the other levies he pays, such as unemployment tax (FUTA and SUTA) and similar. He may be prohibited by law from itemizing this on your pay stub (he is - I attempted to do it and was told by our accountants that I'd get a date with Bubba for doing so) but that doesn't mean you don't pay - you do, and it's hidden through accounting fictions enforced at federal gunpoint.
So let's presume you pay the "9 + 9" - 9% of your gross income (no deductions) and 9% sales tax on what you choose to buy.
If you spend everything you make, what's your effective federal tax?
That's easy to calculate. You start with $100.
You pay 9% in federal income tax, withheld at the point of payment. You now have $91.
You go to the store. You spend the entire $91. How much goods do you buy?
$83.48 worth ($83.48 * 1.09 = $90.99 on the register tape.)
So your actual effective tax rate is approximately 16.5%, or 1.5% more than you pay right now in FICA and Medicare alone!
This assumes you spend every penny you make.
But let's assume you save 10% of your gross. That is, instead of spending $83.48 you spend $73.48. Now the total bill at the register is $80.09, representing $6.61 in tax added to the $9 you have withheld. Your effective tax rate is now 15.6%, or a full percentage point lower.
If you manage to save 15% of your gross you pay almost exactly the same tax rate you pay now for Medicare and Social Security alone! In other words if you spend every nickel you pay an effective income tax rate of 1.5% and if you save 15% of your pre-tax income your effective income tax rate is zero.
So who gets "screwed" with this plan? Well, nobody. It forces everyone to have "skin in the game." Refundable tax credits disappear which means that everyone pays social insurance taxes. This is how it should be!
What Cain is missing (and perhaps intentionally; if so he's a jackass, not a savior) is that saving 15% of your income is more than sufficient, along with a modest help from Social Security and Medicare, to self-fund your entire retirement from savings alone. That is, it requires no risk-taking in the "capital markets." There's only one condition on this: The Federal Government and The Fed must be forced to stop debasing the currency -- that is, they must run a zero inflation policy under penalty of imprisonment (or worse.) If Cain supports this, then he's a reformer. If he does not, he's simply playing politics and intends to screw you blind via hidden taxation.
There are others who bleat about the impact on financial services. If I'm understanding Cain's proposal correctly, they're wrong: You would pay sales tax on the service of brokering a trade. If you pay $8 a trade at a brokerage the tax would be 9% on the $8, not on the value of the securities.
The 9% income tax on corporations would redress the double-taxation of dividends, again, if I'm understanding the proposal correctly. This would go a long way toward fixing the abortion that is found in the current tax code that provides incentives for corporate borrowing and makes the payment of income to shareholders prohibitively expensive through double-taxation of capital return. That, more than anything else in the corporate tax code, is responsible for the abuse of leverage in business. Cain has this part of the plan exactly right.
I also want to look at another part of his pronouncements:
Herman Cain’s self-described “bold” 9-9-9 tax proposal has received most of the attention in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. His plans for the federal budget are more radical.
Cain this week pledged at a debate to balance the government’s books in a single year if elected. This would require the elimination of what the Congressional Budget Office projects may be a more than $800 billion deficit in 2013.
Erasing the deficit that quickly would mean a more than 20 percent cut in spending, which could force reductions in politically sensitive programs such as Social Security, Medicare or defense, since they make up more than half the budget.
Actually, it's more than that. $800 billion is a fanciful number; we ran $1.7 trillion in deficits in calendar 2010, and are going to be well over $1 trillion in 2011. To believe we will get under that number by 2013 presumes forward economic conditions that are, on balance, pure fantasies.
The complaint that this would require "massive" budget cuts is in fact accurate. The bad news is that due to the nature of compound growth in any economic system the longer we wait the worse the problem gets and the more pain we must endure to correct it.
In other words while Cain's proposal is "radical" it is only as radical as it is because we intentionally ignored this idiocy for 30 years, and in the last three years we went from a ~20% cut in federal spending that was required (from nearly zero a decade before!) to a 43% one. Before another decade passes we will reach the point that achieving balance will require a default, not a cut in government programs. At that point we are literally Greece.
Republicans in Congress have had to settle for promising to put the government “on the path” toward balance and calling for a constitutional amendment that would require the government to balance its books. While the amendment has little chance of being approved, it does allow lawmakers to underscore their desire to cut spending.
No they don't. And it doesn't matter whether the people are "ready" to hear this or not.
Mathematics does not care if you're politically correct or "politically willing" to hear what it proscribes. It just is.
Cain's plans are not "radical", they're mathematically sound. I understand the screaming that is coming from the left and right on the issue, but the fact that politicians are trying to find yet another Unicorn that craps out pretty colored candies will not make it so. These same politicians produced this:
Did you REALLY think the British were going to blast you, Mrs O?
Via A Trainwreck In Maxwell
A British Royal Navy ship was ordered to turn its guns around because they were parked pointing at a hotel room Michelle Obama was staying in.
Fearing the First Lady might be in danger, minders ordered the captain of the HMS Edinburgh stationed in Cape Town, South Africa, to switch them away from her five-star suite.
The U.S. agents have since been accused of overreacting after it emerged the Sea Dart missiles were, in fact, loaded with blanks having been used during a ceremony in honour of a sailor who had died.
Former Royal Navy officer Mike Critchley told the Daily Mirror: 'This is typical American Secret Service going over the top.
Book Review: Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Patrick J. Buchanan
Via Peter
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
New York; Thomas Dunne Books; October 2011; 496 pages; $27.99
The Happy Warrior
by Peter B. Gemma
Pat Buchanan’s hundreds, if not thousands, of incisive articles and commentaries have appeared in print and on the internet for decades (he became a columnist for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat at age 23). His writings have proven to be both controversial and courageous—defending Middle American values, defining an America First foreign policy, and dicing up the elitist-driven multicultural agenda. The Christian Science Monitor calls him “Dennis the Menace with the pen of H. L. Menken.”
Along the way he stopped to run for President on three different occasions. In 1992 he had a major impact on the Republican nomination process, scoring an upset victory by decisively defeating incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the crucial New Hampshire GOP primary. Buchanan continued his influential political crusade for traditional conservative issues in 1996—besting Bob Dole, the favored Republican candidate, in several states. In 2000, he hewed the tough road as a third party presidential candidate and was the lone voice supporting fair trade, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and opposing illegal immigration (as well as capping legal immigration). Columnist George F. Will says “Pat Buchanan is the pit bull of the American Right.”
Buchanan finds time to write best-selling books too—thought-provoking albeit foreboding and sternly worded titles including, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006), The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002), and The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (1998). Somehow he can investigate and interpret the threats to America’s sovereignty, economy, and its traditional culture—yet find a way to offer practical and encouraging solutions. This is why the left-wing newspaper Village Voice conceded “Buchanan is one hell of a wordsmith.”
He obviously enjoys the battle as he enters the fray on every front.
Now comes his eleventh book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? and Pat Buchanan is at his combative best explaining the question he poses:
“Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth.”
Then, with sword drawn, he defiantly defends the roots of the American republic as “a people of common ancestry, culture, and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heros, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, [and who] share the same music, poetry, art, and literature.”
Buchanan asserts, however, that the revolutionary agenda the secular elites are trying to impose:
“... is failing and will continue to fail. For it is based on ... an ideology whose tenets are at war with the laws of nature. Like Marxists who were going to create a new man and a new society, our establishment is attempting the impossible.”
Still, he sees the confrontation between the elites and Middle America as teetering in favor of the establishment: “The cycle is inescapable” he writes, “when the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people die.” Buchanan observes, “This appears less a bold prediction of what may happen than a depiction of what is happening now.”
A significant portion of Suicide of a Superpower deals with issues and ideas from a spiritual standpoint. Two chapters are solely on the subject—one is entirely devoted to the “Crisis of Catholicism” (Buchanan’s worldview is seen through Roman Catholic glasses). He notes that, “Catholicism and the country together went through the cultural revolution that altered the most basic beliefs of men and women. Both came out changed. ... What was immoral and scandalous in 1960—promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality—is normal now.” He states: “‘One nation under God, indivisible’ has become an antique concept in an age that celebrates diversity and multiculturalism. Our intellectual and cultural elites reject the God our parents believed in and the moral code they lived by.”
Buchanan is pointed when he addresses the reader: “Our system is rooted in a societal failure. We are not ruled by the same ideas nor do we possess the same moral character as our parents did. Today freedom takes a back seat to equality.” Here is what will make Pat Buchanan’s new book his most controversial: his opinions on immigration, multiculturalism, demographics, and even race. Suicide of a Superpower is about as stark and dark as Pat Buchanan gets.
In the chapter entitled “Demographic Winter,” he writes that demography should not always be equated with destiny “for all human capital is not created equal. In making history, it has often been the quality of a people who mattered most.” The author cites such examples as the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and the Founding Fathers of this nation—how just a few men can change the course of history in defense of blood and soil. He does note, however, that:
“As the West worships at the altar of democracy, is deeply egalitarian, and has thrown open its doors to a Third World in which ethnonationalism is embedded, it is the West whose destiny will ultimately be determined by demography.”
Drawing from UN findings, US Census Bureau studies, research papers, and news investigations on the world’s demographic trends, he warns that by 2050 only one of the ten most populous nations will be a “First World” country—the United States. But the kicker is that by mid-century America will be essentially a Third World country demographically: 54% of its people will trace their roots to Asia, Africa, and Latin America according to a UN report.
Buchanan says, “Peoples of European descent are ... aging, dying, disappearing … among the peoples of color who will replace them, the poorest and least developed nations are reproducing fastest.” He notes that in 1950, Europeans and North Americans accounted for 28% of the world’s population. In 2050, that number is expected to be 12% with a median age close to 50. The author cautions that in First World countries, the birth rate is as low as 1.3 children per woman—pathetically below the 2.1 level necessary just to maintain even current population levels. In contrast, Africa’s population will double to 2 billion by 2050—under-achieving nations such as Niger will quintuple its population; Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, et al will triple theirs.
Without younger workers to pay taxes, boost the economy, carry the load of pensions and health care, etc., the West’s international debt crises will get dramatically worse. The author cautions, “The riots that tore through Greece, France, and the UK in 2010 are rooted in the demographic crisis of the West and are harbingers of what is to come.”
Similarly, on the domestic front, Buchanan writes of “The End of White America.” According to the 2010 U.S. Census, white Americans will be a minority by 2042—whites under the age of 18 are projected to be a minority even sooner: 2019. The author refers to a Washington Post story which revealed that in the period from 2009-2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs while white—and black—construction workers lost 511,000 jobs. In the second quarter of 2010, native-born workers lost 1.2 million jobs, while foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs. Blue collar white men constituted 11% of the workforce but represented 36% of those who lost jobs.
In 2010, more than 15% of America’s workers were foreign born—in California illegal aliens hold down 10% of California jobs, a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation. By 2040, 30% of the Texas labor force will not have a high school diploma and the average household income will be drastically lower than 2000.
As with Europe, the root cause of this problem comes from the white birth rate being dramatically below replacement level for decades. And, of course, there is the invasion of illegal aliens—and a tidal wave of legal émigrés as well.
The author categorically states, “Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 [the boundary-setting U.S.-Mexican War] is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation-within-a-nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to ‘insure domestic tranquility’ and ‘make us a more perfect union?’ Or has our passivity in the face of invasion imperiled our union?”
Buchanan opines, “Mexico is moving north.”
A side note. Beside his own pithy observations, Buchanan has peppered Suicide of a Superpower with short quotes that range from profound to highly provocative:
• Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations: “The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event.”
• President Harry Truman: “This is a Christian nation.” ... President Barak Obama: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.”
• Historians Will and Ariel Durant: “Utopias of equality are biologically doomed.”
• Commentator Sam Francis: “The real meaning of the doctrine of equality is that it serves as a political weapon.”
The latter two quotes come from the chapter entitled “Equality or Freedom?”
In that compelling section, he sets out with a perceptive discourse on the original definition and newer development of “equality” in politics and public policy—from the ideals that inspired the Founding Fathers to the social experiments in the name of egalitarianism today. Then Buchanan focuses on the political correctness of “equality.” Lyndon Johnson established a PC police academy with the motto, “To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed.” As outlined in Suicide of a Superpower, the demands for equality have grown exponentially from the 1960s to near hysteria today: children are bused out of their neighborhood into culturally strange and academically substandard schools; government-dictated racial quotas and “affirmative action” programs veto the merit-based hiring and promotion practices of businesses; Christianity, “our cradle faith” as the author puts it, has been kicked out of the public square and demoted to just another religion—all faiths are on an equal par with atheism for that matter.
“When one considers the scores of thousands of bureaucrats in federal, state, and local government, at colleges, and in corporations, all working to secure proportional representations of races, ethnic groups, and genders,” Buchanan notes, “we begin to see how equality and freedom are at war and why America is a failing nation.” He warns:
“Eventually one realizes that this transfer of wealth and power from one class to another is really what the ‘equality’ game is all about.”
It is raw political power that drives the multicultural forces and the open borders lobby, and like the radicals in the French revolution, American elitists lead the charge for revolutionary change in the name of égalité. Neo-conservative godfather Ben Watternberg boldly wrote, “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of almost transcendental quality,” while writer Susan Sontag proclaimed, “The white race is the cancer of human history.”
Buchanan drives his counter-point home with precision:
“Ethnomasochism, the taking of pleasure in the dispossession of one’s own ethnic group, is a disease of the heart that never afflicted the America of Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower. It comes out of what [author] James Burnham called an ‘ideology of Western suicide,’ a belief system that provides a morphine drip for a people who have come to accept the inevitability of their departure from history.”
Pat Buchanan, the happy warrior, has no tolerance for such “inevitabilities.” He asserts that there still exists in hearts of Americans “the will to remain one nation under God and one people united by history, heritage, [and] language ...” The author notes that in the 31 states where elections have been held, all but one have voted against same-sex marriage; in every state that had the opportunity to vote for English as its official language, the issue has prevailed; and bans on public funds for illegal aliens—housing, tuition, employment benefits, etc.—have been enacted in hundreds of local, county, and state jurisdictions.
The author invokes Thomas Paine of 1776: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
In his concluding chapter, “The Last Chance,” Buchanan gives us marching orders to re-take the barricades. Among them are ...
1. Dismantle the empire. “It is absurd that the United States, stumbling toward a debt default, must borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from Europe to defend Europe, and borrow from the Persian Gulf to defend the Persian Gulf,” he writes. Buchanan wants the cost-cutting, policy-reviewing process to address “an archipelago of 700 to 1,000 bases in 130 countries, our imperial embassies, foreign aid, the military-industrial complex at home, and the hidden billions spread through the government for intelligence work and nuclear weapons.”
2. Downsize the state. “To balance the budget by cuts alone, spending would have to fall 40%,” he warns, “were tax increases alone be used to balance the budget the tax load on corporations and citizens would have to rise 67%.” The author outlines a variety of options, from “a halt to foreign aid unrelated to national security” to tying Social Security and COLAs to the consumer price index. An economic nationalist—in line with other countries who protect their workers—Buchanan advocates reducing:
“our dependence on goods made abroad and grow our dependence on goods made in the United States. We should impose tariffs on all imports and use every dollar of tariff revenue to reduce taxes on U.S. producers.” Imposing a 25% tariff on imports of $2.5 trillion in imports “would yield $600 billion, which would virtually eliminate corporate taxes in this country.”
3. A moratorium on immigration. “If America is not to disintegrate, if she is to regain the ‘out of many, one,’ unity we knew in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, the first imperative is to re-adopt the immigration policy that produced that era of good feeling, so that the melting pot, fractured though it is, can begin again to do its work.” Buchanan declares the U.S. must cut “new immigration until unemployment falls to 6 percent. To bring in foreign workers when 23 million Americans are still underemployed or out of work is to put corporate profits ahead of country.”
He favors no amnesty, a return of illegal aliens to the homelands, and reforming:
“our immigration laws to give preference to those from countries that have historically provided most of our immigrants, who share our values, speak English, have college or advanced degrees, bring special skills, and can be easily assimilated. We need more taxpayers and fewer tax consumers.”
4. End reverse discrimination. “Congress should settle the question with finality by enacting into law Ward Connerly’s Civil Rights Initiative, which has won the support of the electorate in every state but one where it has been on the ballot,” Buchanan advises. Here is the Connerly wording:
“The state shall not grant preferential treatment to or discriminate against any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
Those “three dozen words, written into the Constitution or federal law,” Buchanan says, “would bring down the evil empire of reverse discrimination ...”
Buchanan warns that, “the crises that afflict us—culture wars, race division, record deficits, unpayable debt, waves of immigration, legal and illegal, of peoples never before assimilated, gridlock in the capital and possible defeat in war—may prove too much for our democracy to cope with. They surely will, if we do not act now.”
But the happy warrior is indeed acting—counter-attacking—and is asking for reinforcements. That’s the real answer to Pat Buchanan’s rhetorical question “Will America Survive to 2025?”
This article appears in the Fall issue of The Social Contract Quarterly (http://www.thesocialcontract.com ).He generously allowed it to appear here by lowering his writer's fee to $1000 (in gold coins)
“The Ten Cannots’ and ‘Seven National Crimes’
I hadn't heard of The Seven National Crimes before.
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Godfather Politics
VERBATIM
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Godfather Politics
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William John Henry Boetcker (1873–1962) was an ordained Presbyterian minister. He was a rock-ribbed conservative. This was before so many Presbyterian denominations went liberal. In addition to his ministerial duties, “he quickly gained attention as an eloquent motivational speaker, and is often regarded today as the forerunner of such contemporary ‘success coaches’ as Anthony Robbins.”
Boetcker is “best remembered for his authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Ten Cannots that emphasizes freedom and responsibility of the individual on himself.” It was originally published in 1916 and is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. “The mistake of crediting Lincoln for The Ten Cannots has been repeated many times since, notably by Ronald Reagan in his address to the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston.”
Boetcker’s worldview is very much up-to-date. Unlike so many ministers today, Boetcker believed that it was important to engage the culture, not only with action, but with memorable rhetoric. Here are his The Ten Cannots:
- You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
- You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
- You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
- You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
- You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
- You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
- You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
- You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
- You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
- And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
In addition to The Ten Cannots, Boetcker developed a list entitled Seven National Crimes, possibly patterned after the Seven Deadly Sins, that if committed would inevitably lead to the end of everything the United States was built to be:
- I don’t think.
- I don’t know.
- I don’t care.
- I’m too busy.
- I leave well enough alone.
- I have no time to read and find out.
- I am not interested.
“Never mind what others do,” Boetcker said. “Do better than yourself, beat your own record from day to day, and you are a success.” With the all-important 2012 election nearly upon us, we cannot rest for a moment. We must take Boetcker’s tried and true aphorisms to heart and actupon them.
National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap 10-14-11
Here are the 18 reports of police misconduct tracked in our National Police Misconduct News Feed for this Friday, October 14, 2011:
Richmond Courts Gays, Snubs Confederates?
Via SHNV
Gay travel writers adore Richmond. Confederate conventioneers won’t come here.
Wait. When did this happen?
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization founded in Richmond in 1896, hasn’t held its July national convention here for more than a decade. Richmond already has lost two bids to serve as host to the group during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
“I don’t think the city really welcomes the Sons of Confederate Veterans,” says Brag Bowling, chairman of the Stephen D. Lee Institute and a past commander of the Virginia division of the organization. The national reunions draw between 1,200 and 1,500 people.
Bowling blames Richmond’s “anti-Confederate policies” — meaning the emphasis on emancipation and the exclusion of the SCV from sesquicentennial planning.
“I absolutely disagree with that,” says Jack Berry, president and chief executive of the Richmond Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. Richmond welcomes every group, Berry says.
Richmond bid for the 2012 Sons of Confederate Veterans’ convention 18 months ago, Berry says, but lost because the group felt the city “was not engaged in the bid.” Six months ago, Berry tried again — and tried harder.
THE COURAGEOUS HEART OF IRENA SENDLER: Movie Trailer
Via Cousin Colby
THE COURAGEOUS HEART OF IRENA SENDLER: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Movie Trailers, Marcia Gay Harden