Monday, October 15, 2012

1918 Military Parade in Richmond Virginia with Confederate Veterans

Via SHNV



These are some old film clips showing the John Marshall High School Corps of Cadets, the local Richmond Howitzers (The Richmond Blues and the Richmond Grays), along with some actual living Confederate Veterans during a parade down Monument Avenue in Richmond in 1918 during World War I. The parade ended at the Virginia State Capitol grounds.

Elizabeth Warren’s white great grandfather shot an Indian


Elizabeth Warren still is not Cherokee.  She never was.

Her family lore is grossly exaggerated, in all likelihood by Warren herself not her parents.  Yet whenever anyone questions this family lore, Warren acts like it is an attack on her family, thereby shutting down challenges to the stories.

Warren relies on family lore because it’s hard to disprove what she claims she was told.  It’s why Warren digs in deeper with her family lore stories as the campaign goes on.  She thinks she has found a safe place.

Yet there is plenty of evidence that the story about her parents eloping because her mother was Native American is not true, Warren didn’t self-identify as Native American until she was 38 and climbing the law professor ladder, and even her own adult nephew who researched family genealogy called the Native American claim just rumor.  The Boston Globe’s attempt to back up this family lore actually ended up calling it into serious question.

But, while Warren thinks she has found a safe place in her family lore, it’s still worth pointing out that she is not Cherokee.  The Cherokee line supposedly was through her maternal grandparents, the Crawfords.

But just to put another piece of evidence on the table, real Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has come up a newspaper clipping from the Muskogee Times Democrat on August 17, 1906.
The newspaper clipping relates to a story about how Warren’s great grandfather, John H. Crawford, shot a real Indian and was identified in the newspaper as white, via Twila Barnes:

Elizabeth Warren is the granddaughter of Hannie Crawford, daughter of John H. Crawford. Warren says the Crawfords were Cherokee.

According to the Boston Globe,
“Rosco Crawford, Hannie Crawford’s brother, told (his granddaughter) that as a young boy living in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory, the Indians were “pretty mean.” Once, when a Creek was hitting Crawford’s younger brother, their father shot and wounded the Indian, according to her biography, on file at California State University at Fullerton.”
The story Hannie’s brother, Rosco, told his granddaughter is true.

See newspaper clippings and more @ Legal Insurrection

Alabama teen shot in head during prank

Via Zombie Rush

 

A 15-year-old Alabama boy was in critical condition after being shot in the head by a friend during a prank gone "terribly wrong," police said.

Jesse Rainey and seven of his friends were spending the weekend in an empty house that belonged to the grandmother of one of the teenagers when a few of them decided to play a prank on their friends by faking a home intrusion, ABCNews.com reported.

"One of the young men cut the lights to the house, then a few of the other guys snuck back inside, wanting their friends to believe there was an intruder," Colbert County Sheriff Ronnie May said.
One boy targeted by the prank became scared and fired a shot into Rainey's head with a .38 caliber handgun, May said.

More @ UPI

The truth about the truth about guns and robert farago




Unless you are prepared for a veritable skyscraper of text (over 9,000 words) and a serious airing of grievances, you should probably go ahead and plan on skipping this post.

That disclaimer dispensed with, here is how it is. Over the past few years, Robert Farago – the editor of The Truth About Guns – has functionally leeched off of, exploited, stabbed in the back, maligned, abused, lied about, misrepresented, stolen from, and infringed upon the rights of countless other people, both actual pro-rights activists and people who are not at all involved in the firearm-related community. Recent events have shown us that people seem largely unaware of this pattern of misconduct in Robert’s past, so this post will serve as a centralized source of information on the same.

All of the statements, claims, and grievances posted here will be appropriately cited, sourced, and linked. If you see anything you think we missed, please let me know, and I will be more than happy to add it, so long as you have the evidence to support it.

It is worth noting that a good number of these violations of basic, common courtesy – to put it mildly – were perpetrated by someone other than Robert himself; however, Robert is, was, and remains the lead editor for The Truth About Guns, and therefore retains final responsibility and accountability for the actions of his writers on his site. A responsible editor would have serious considered letting some of the TTAG people go after repeat violations, but, then, responsible editors have some degree of backbone as well…

Robert Farago is not a friend of the Second Amendment, nor is he a friend of those who would defend it. This post will hopefully help alert people to those two simple facts.

[Note 1:

Ole Miss crowns first obese, black homecoming queen


Pathetic.  There must be many both black and white girls there who are actually slim and pretty.  Just amazing.


Unique: Courtney Pearson, the first ever African-American homecoming queen at the University of Mississippi, rides in the homecoming parade in Oxford, Miss. on Friday, Oct. 12 

More PC @  Mail Online


Forbes: Obama's Real Unemployment Rate Is 14.7%, And A Recession's On The Way

Via Hard Times Preparedness


The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported last Friday that 114,000 new jobs were created last month, according to its Establishment Survey of business payrolls that has been emphasized by the Obama Administration.  That is pitifully weak, especially for what is supposed to be the fourth year of a recovery (the National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as officially over in June, 2009).

As economist John Lott noted at FoxNews.com on October 5, the working age population grew by 206,000 last month.  With two-thirds of those working as would be expected during a normal recovery, 138,000 new jobs would have been necessary in September just to keep pace with population growth.

 Indeed, the working age population has increased by 8.4 million since President Obama entered office.  With the same labor force participation as on Inauguration Day in January, 2009 (which would be closer to a real recovery), that would require 5.5 million new jobs just to keep up with the aforementioned population growth.  But a generous reading of the data is that during President Obama’s entire term in office, a grand total of only 787,000 jobs have been created overall on net.  And all of that net growth came in the last month.  As of August, 2012, the economy was still suffering a net loss of jobs during Obama’s entire Presidency up to that point.

More @ Forbes

Science is hard: Andrea Mitchell graphic says ‘Fearless Felix traveled faster than speed of light’

Via Daily Timewaster

Oh, our aching sides! As Twitchy reported yesterday, daredevil and skydiver Felix Baumgartner made his space jump, in which he hoped to travel faster than the speed of sound.

Science is hard, to lapdogs. Especially for the ones at MSNBC, evidently. Sound? Light? Same difference! No need to let pesky science get in the way.


More @ Twitchy

A few goodies from Ol' Remus

 

Amazing fact - Albert Göring, the younger brother of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, was an outspoken anti-Nazi. Arrested several times by the Gestapo, each time being released by the intervention of the Reich Marshal... he helped many Jews escape the horrors of the Holocaust by forging his brother's signature on their travel documents.
George Duncan at iinet.net.au
Wikipedia adds: Göring also sent trucks to Nazi concentration camps with requests for labour. These trucks would then stop in an isolated area, and their passengers would be allowed to escape.
 Alan Abramowitz of Huffington Post and The Democratic Strategist noticed that Gallup has increased its share of nonwhites from 27 percent the week of the convention to 32 percent last week, a nearly 20 percent boost. In other words, Gallup seemed to have tweaked its methodology with just weeks to go until Election Day.
Jay Cost at weeklystandard.com 

Central banks: from safety nets to market manipulators - Various currencies will become the safe haven of the day, but none will survive what lies ahead.  We are living in an Entitlement Bubble along the lines of the Dutch Tulip Bubble in the 1600s.  No amount of printing or economic growth can prevent our destiny of currency destruction and entitlement collapse.
Robert Fitzwilson at kingworldnews.com

“What the Young Man Should Know” From Harper’s Magazine 1933

Via Ol' Remus


 

Glancing out of the window, I can see the subject–and eventual victim–of this inquiry, dangerously perched in the crotch of an old chestnut tree, about fifteen feet above the ground. Should I rush out and tell him to get down? Or should I let him be, hoping that he won’t climb any higher, or, if he does climb any higher, hoping that he will not fall?

It is probably all right, so I shall not bother him. Tree climbing is one of the things he has learned all by himself. There aren’t many things he will have the fun of learning all by himself. Most of the things he is going to learn will be hammered into him–Latin and history and grammar and mathematics up to the binomial theorem. I’m not worried about this progress up the ladder from high school or boarding school to college and from college to law school or medical school. It seems incredible that the young biped now perched in the chestnut tree will some day, without stupendous effort on my part or on his, eventually graduate from college or even become a Ph.D.–but he will almost certainly. The strictly educational side of his life, once he gets his hands firmly on the lowest rung of that ancient ladder, will take care of itself.

What concerns me is something entirely different, a good deal more like tree climbing. I have never heard of a school or college that gave a course in tree climbing. And human life is full of useful accomplishments and rewarding experiences, like tree climbing–like making a speech, for example, or being able to take care of oneself on a camping trip: abilities that seem to me at least as valuable as a knowledge of conjugations and the dates of battles–perhaps (if one is to become a self-sufficient well-rounded human being) much more valuable. What are those abilities, skills, or accomplishments, those extra-curricular proficiencies that every man should have in order to be rounded and self-sufficient, and when can he acquire them, and how?

Let me return–without looking at him, for he is probably by now thirty feet above the ground–to the seven-year-old imp in the chestnut tree. Impartially adding up to myself his skills other than tree climbing, I find that he cannot count money or give change, that he is unable to tie his own shoelaces, that he would most certainly starve if left alone in a well-stocked kitchen, but, on the other hand, that he can perform a rather startling back somersault off a diving board, that he speaks and understands elementary German, and can sit down at the piano and play, with only a few mistakes, a Mozart minuet. Clearly, to this handful of skills and accomplishments he must add others, many others, before he is even on the road to becoming a self-sufficient and well-rounded young man. Leaving all formal subjects out of consideration, he should learn how to:
  • Swim
  • Handle firearms
  • Speak in public
  • Cook
  • Typewrite
  • Ride a horse
  • Drive a car
  • Dance
  • Drink
  • And speak at least one foreign language well

Scotland countdown to secession poll

Roundabout via Michael Downing


 Flag of Scotland

 Hear!  Hear!

SCOTLAND has formally begun a two-year to a referendum on breaking up the UK, with independence campaigners banking on a surge of Scottish nationalism during the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
British Prime Minister David Cameron last night signed off on the holding of a referendum in the weeks after the Glasgow Games, where local athletes will compete under a Scottish flag, unlike at the London Olympics where they were part of "Great Britain" or "Team GB".
The agreement between the Mr Cameron and Alec Salmond, the pro-independence First Minister of Scotland, is a historic move, as the 5.25 million people living in Scotland will have the chance to undo the 1707 Treaty of Union that merged the kingdoms of England and Scotland.
Lengthy bartering between the two governments over the past eight months saw Mr Salmond win the right to control the timing of the ballot and he promptly rejected Mr Cameron's call for the referendum to be held as soon as possible. 
He plans a series of events to mark the 700th anniversary on June 24, 2014, of the Scottish victory over England at the Battle of Bannockburn, and from July 23 to August 3, the Commonwealth Games will have Scots barracking for their team against England and the other "home nations" Wales and Northern Ireland as well as Australia and other members of the Commonwealth.With opinion polls showing as few as 28 per cent of people now support independence, Mr Salmond wants as much time as possible to change public opinion, and the second half of 2014 offers some unique opportunities to heighten Scottish nationalism.
Despite Mr Salmond's victory on the timing of the ballot, Mr Cameron's negotiating team came out on top over the single most important issue, the matter of how many questions will appear on the ballot paper.
Knowing most Scots are currently likely to vote no to the question of full independence, Mr Salmond's Scottish National Party had hoped to put a fall-back option on the ballot paper by including a second question asking whether they wanted to see the devolution of more government powers from Britain to Scotland if it remained within the UK.
Mr Cameron refused to budge on that issue, forcing the SNP to accept that the ballot paper would include a single "in or out" question about Scotland's future in the UK.

Unreal… Obama Administration Didn’t Reach Benghazi For 17 Days Because They Were WAITING ON Visa’s (Video)

Can't make this crap up.

THIS IS INSANE…

The Obama State Department testified this week that the rational that they were not on the ground for 17 days in Benghazi was because they could not get Visa’s.
Former CIA officer Gary Bernsten was on with Judge Jeanine Saturday:


“It’s about leadership. In this particular case I saw the Department of State and I heard testimony that said that the rational that we were not on the ground in Benghazi after 17 days is because they couldn’t get Visa’s. Which is insanity. They should have gotten people on planes, both the agency and the FBI, and similarly they should have had military people there, moving there to aid an embassy that was under attack that was sovereign US territory in an area that weakly controlled by the government. And even if it’s a diplomatic problem, you move to save your people first.”
It’s true… Press TV reported on this back on October 6th.

Ohio coal miners rally against Obama’s ‘absolute lies’

 


More than 500 Ohio coal miners rallied Oct. 10 against President Barack Obama’s ‘War on Coal” and the president’s charge they were coerced to support Republican W. Mitt Romney at an Aug. 14 rally.
“I have a couple of letters that I would like to address today, regarding Mr. Obama’s stand on coal, as well as the current media and how they have represented us the coal miners, here at Century Mine and the coal industry in general,” said Mitch Miracle, a coal miner at the Beallsville, Ohio Century Mine, operated by Murray Energy, a Pepper Pike, Ohio-based, privately-owned coal mining company.

“Standing behind me are proud Americans, proud coal miners proud citizens of this great country, proud members of the Ohio Valley, where we live in and I am damn proud of them,” he said.

“Proud Ohio Valley workers, as you all know the economy has been tough for all of us, this is a great profession, these are great workers and we are proud to be a part of it, part of Murray Energy and we support our owner 100 percent,” he said. “We ask that the media, lets embrace coal, embrace what it does for all of us.”

The first letter asked the president to stop running ads that claim miners were forced to attend the Romney rally and the second letter was addressed to David Bloomquist, a radio talk show host for Wheeling, W.V.’s WWVA, he said. Bloomquist claimed to various media outlets that miners told him they were pressured to attend the Aug. 14 Romney rally.

Reading from the letter to the president, Miracle said: “You have approved and are running television and campaign ads about the Mitt Romney event that was held at our Century coal mine.  These ads state that we were forced to attend this rally and that is blatantly false. There are numerous false statements and absolute lies concerning our participation in this event, we the employees.”
Here is the Obama TV commercial:

Obama's refusal to deport illegal aliens unconstitutional, say law professors

 

Two law professors, including one who served in the Bush Justice Department, have published a paper charging that President Obama violated the Constitution with his directive to law enforcement not to deport illegal aliens.

In the paper entitled, “The Obama Administration, the Dream Act and the Take Care Clause,” authors Robert Delahunty of the University of St. Thomas [Minnesota] and John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, blast Obama's moratorium on deporting certain illegal immigrants. The professors dismissed the idea that the decision on whether to deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for minor infractions is a matter of prosecutorial discretion.
“It’s the duties of the president. He must always uphold the law.” 
-John Yoo, Berkeley law professor and former State Department attorney
“If there’s one case and it’s left to the prosecutor, well that’s fine, but what Obama did was take a million cases and leave it up to prosecutorial discretion," John Yoo told FoxNews.com. “The only reason it’s under [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano’s discretion is because Obama had made his decision. If she’s doing it under her own, she would have to be fired.”

More @ Fox

The Cheapest Garands

 

Somehow, in preparation for the first article in this series on ordering M1 Garand rifles from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, we missed the least expensive of the bunch. They are called “Field Grade” Garands, and at $525 (plus $24.95 S&H), they seem to be a great buy. We ordered both the Springfield Armory and Harrington & Richardson (HRA) versions of these guns, and the Winchester is no longer available. Of all the Garands we have ordered from CMP so far, if you are looking for a Garand to just shoot and enjoy, you can’t do any better for the money than these field grade guns.

Look around in gunshops and online and you will be hard pressed to find a nice looking and shooting Garand for under $600. Even at live auctions these days more Garands go for upwards of a thousand bucks. These “cheapest Garands” are a real find, and you order them directly from the CMP, just as we described in the first installment of this series. Our guns came in less than three weeks, each with its own hard plastic CMP case, and certification paperwork. Who knows when these guns will dry up, so if you are thinking long, heavy boxes under your Christmas tree this year, now would be the time to order.

The condition listed on the Field Grade guns on the CMP sales page shows them as “Fair to Good,” and there is an extensive warning that these rifles may contain mixed manufacturer parts, or even import parts, and that you should not expect rifles in “mint” condition in this grade. This could be the reason we didn’t order them for the first article. It is worded pretty harsh. But as you can see from the pictures, these guns are actually nicer than the the $625-$950 “Service Grade” rifles we got in the first order.
 

Rethinking the American Union

Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century 
 The contributors to Donald Livingston's valuable collection of essays defend two main contentions. Each of these contentions may be held independently of the other, but the first one provides a reason to welcome the truth of the second.
Livingston, with characteristic care, states the first of these contentions in this way:
As Aristotle taught, everything in nature has a proper size, beyond or below which it becomes dysfunctional.… The same holds for the functioning of other social entities [than a jury] such as committees, lawmaking assemblies, and bureaucracies and the ratio of population to representative (e.g., one representative for every million persons is not representation at all). None of these can function well if they are too large or out of scale. (pp. 16–17)
Livingston concludes that a republic must be of limited size. His argument, if I have grasped it, is this: A republic must have a representative legislative assembly. In order to count properly as representative, the number of persons that each member of the assembly represents must not be too large. But it is also the case that the number of people in the assembly itself cannot be overly large, for the reason stated in the preceding paragraph. In a large republic, these requirements cannot at the same time be met. Thus, the proper size of a republic is necessarily limited.
Livingston adds to this argument an appeal to tradition:

More @ Mises

Expecting Somebody Else to Save Your Country? A Survey of the Situation


Mike Scruggs

The latest Rasmussen tracking poll has Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama by 49 to 47 percent. That is close enough to mean that the race will come down to which side can get its voters to the polls.  The Rasmussen and Pew polls show Romney supporters to be only slightly more energized than Obama supporters.  The most recent Pew Poll taken just after the debate showed that Romney has strong support by 67 percent of his supporters, not quite matching Obama’s strong support by 68 percent of his supporters. However, another similar question indicated that Romney’s supporters were more interested in the race by 82 percent compared to 67 percent for Obama. Rasmussen’s latest poll indicated that 43 percent of Romney’s supporters are certain they will vote for him, while slightly less, 41 percent are certain to vote for Obama. The Rasmussen poll indicated that 78 percent of likely voters had a high interest in the election. This was higher among conservatives and Republicans at 83 percent.  Thus the energy level is close. It appears that Romney supporters feel they have more interest in both the economic and social issues, while Obama supporters are more oriented toward group identity. Ninety percent of blacks indicated a high interest in the election.

The differences in interest can be illustrated by some of Rasmussen’s statistics. Conservatives favor Romney over Obama 84 to 14. Liberals favor Obama over Romney 89 to 7.  Blacks favor Obama 93 to 5 over Romney. From 57 to 58 percent Republicans and conservatives respectively follow the presidential election daily, but 74 percent of blacks follow it daily. The most highly motivated segment of the voting population is black.

I was hoping that Obama’s position on gay marriage, which is unpopular among black churchgoers, would reduce his black group identity vote by a significant margin or weaken the energy of their support for him. A slight majority of blacks oppose gay marriage, but Obama’s recently admitted gay marriage approval has not caused a corresponding impact. Among Americans who attend church services at least weekly, Romney leads Obama 59 to 35. However, in the past 12 months Obama’s support among black Protestants has dropped from 97 to 87 percent, indicating that the vast majority of blacks still place racial identity above everything else. Blacks tend to oppose illegal immigration and amnesty, but they have not been well served by Obama on immigration issues.

The recent drop of the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent resulted from 873,000 new people reporting having jobs on the September BLS Household Survey. This may have improved Obama’s political position a bit even though it largely a fortuitous appearance of already employed illegal immigrant workers on the BLS September Household Survey, who now feel comfortable and encouraged to fill out the survey. These unlawful amnesties are the result of Obama’s recent usurpation of Congressional and Constitutional authority on immigration amnesties. Initially expected to be about one million, the Pew Research Center believes it may run 1o 1.7 million. Do not be surprised if more such amnesties result in another phony improvement of the employment situation. This is essentially a fortuitous difference showing up in the Household Survey—the equivalent of a mere accounting transfer.  No new jobs have been created, and the newly amnestied workers, now with legal status, have become a more formidable threat to black employment. The September survey indicated black unemployment was 13.4 percent versus 7.0 for whites. Obama is not only failing to help black workers; his amnesties are directly hurting them. The unemployment rate for black teenagers aged 16 to 19 is a whopping 36.7 percent. Yet they are undeterred and highly energized in their support for him.

Pew Research and several other polls show Obama having over 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, and this does not appear to be much in play. Except for Cubans, who vote majority Republican, Hispanics favor Obama because of Obamacare and other social welfare programs. An NBC News poll indicated that 81 percent of whites but only 26 percent of Latinos want to repeal Obamacare. 

Rasmussen believes that Romney must win at least three of four swing states to win the electoral votes to make him president. North Carolina is back on that list, with Romney currently leading Obama 51 to 48. Obama’s quiet but extensive grass roots campaign in North Carolina’s high-minority urban areas, however has reduced his deficit from 5 to 3 percentage points. Romney is now ahead in Florida 51 to 47 and in Virginia 49 to 47. Obama leads Romney 48 to 47 in Ohio, where Romney supposedly has only 52 percent of the white vote. However, internal details of the Ohio poll seem questionable.  

Getting out the vote will win the election one way or another. Television and radio ads and debates will have an impact, and I am hoping that the more people know about Obama’s economic failures, disastrous foreign policy decisions, debilitating military strength policies, and shocking opposition to Judeo-Christian worldviews and moral culture, the more his poll numbers will cave. That is my hope; the reality is that nothing seems to dent the Obama-mania of his major support constituencies. Moreover, the Democrats are extremely formidable in their ability to get out their vote. They have Big Labor and the numerous front organizations of the former Acorn organization.

Republicans and conservatives often have strong feelings about the election, but actually getting them to do the grunt work of phone banks, neighborhood canvases, serving as poll watchers, and polling place greeters, and talking to their friends about the importance of the election will be necessary to win this election.

We cannot depend upon somebody else to save our country. It has to be us.