Powerful: Aaron Weiss, combat vet, speaks heartfelt on gun control

Via TSP

188 Veteran Affairs Employees Were Paid to Do Union-Related Work Instead of Help Vets

Via TSP

Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in a letter addressed to Secretary of Veteran Affairs Eric Shinseki claim that from January 1, 2012 through February 2013, 188 VA employees were paid full-time to do union-related work instead of assisting the nation’s veterans.

“Recently, it has come to our attention that a number of VA employees are paid government salaries, funded entirely by taxpayers, to perform work totally unrelated to their formal governmental duties,” the letter reads.

“In a practice known as ‘official time’ taxpayers pay for federal employees to perform union duties instead of their formal jobs they were initially hired to do,” it adds. “Federal employees not serving veterans during official time could lead to the failure of VA’s top goals and the well-being of those who have sacrificed in the service our nation, could be compromised. “

More @ The Blaze

Continue The Fight To Pass HB 937

Push now for HB 937 Senate hearing! Your continued vigilance helped carry HB 937 through the NC House last month despite coordinated efforts to kill the bill before it could pass to the NC Senate, where it may soon receive a committee hearing. We must insure that the Judiciary Committee members know that you are expecting to pass as is, without key provisions such as Campus Carry being removed! The Senate Judiciary I Committee now has a chance to send HB 937 to the Senate Floor for a full vote as early as this week.  Despite efforts to derail the bill through coordinated attacks from UNC President Tom Ross and others, HB 937 is now closer than ever to bringing several real changes designed to enhance the safety of all of North Carolina’s residents. UNC President Tom Ross continues attacks on HB 937 University of North Carolina president Tom Ross continues to fight campus carry provisions of House Bill 937. As you recall, the bill, which passed the NC House and now resides in the Senate, contains restaurant carry, a limited measure for guns in locked vehicles on state university campuses, and other pro-gun initiatives. When HB 937 received its hearing in a House Judiciary Committee meeting, representatives for NC State testified that it would hinder campus security's efforts to "protect" students, echoing opposition previously expressed to the media by Ross. Just hours after their testimony, however, a student was raped outside the NCSU Free Expression Tunnel and, two days later, another was robbed at knife point near Reynolds Coliseum, demonstrating clearly that UNC can't "protect" students, who must therefore be allowed to protect themselves. Given his inability to protect even his own students on college campuses across the state, North Carolinians cannot sit back and do nothing while Tom Ross and others try to stop the passage of this bill. We must act now! New GRNC radio spots promote HB 937 GRNC has launched a new round of radio spots in Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte targeting NC House Speaker Thom Tillis (R-Mecklenburg, GRNC ****) and NC Senate leader Phil Berger (R-Guilford, Randolph, ****), both of whom are potential challengers for US Senator Kay Hagan (*), challenging them to show support for gun rights by passing HB 937 THIS YEAR and WITHOUT WEAKENING AMENDMENTS. To hear the spots, CLICK HERE or go to: http://grnc.org/home/grnc-in-the-media/485-hb-937-radio-spot Action, please

Dixie is not happy

She scored 99 on the CAT test the last three years, but received a 97 today. Mind boggling, I would have been ecstatic to get anywhere near that mark in my derelict school years.

Patriots of ’61 – Sergeant Thomas Wood Uzzell, Company I, 66th North Carolina Regiment

Born 17 June 1844 at his parent’s plantation in Wayne County, near Beston, North Carolina, Thomas W. Uzzell was educated in local schools and took the occupation of farmer.

He enlisted on 11 August 1863, probably at Snow Hill in Greene County, in a company formed by Major John H. Nethercutt of the 8^th Battalion, North Carolina Partisan Rangers.   

Most of the men of this company were drawn from Onslow, Duplin, Greene, Sampson, Lenoir and Wayne counties and mustered into Company F of the 8^th Battalion on 5 September 1863, Thomas W. Uzzell with the rank of sergeant.  He joined family members in this unit with cousin Jesse Parker Williams holding captain’s rank and Uncle Mathew Uzzell a corporal.

Initially stationed at Kinston, Uzzell’s unit picketed the roads between there and occupied New Bern to prevent enemy cavalry from raiding further into North Carolina and disrupting the Wilmington and Weldon railroad.  On 2 October 1863, The 8^th Partisan Rangers was transferred into the newly formed 66^th North Carolina Regiment and Sgt. Uzzell assigned to Company I of that unit, comprising part of Gen. William W. Kirkland’s Brigade. 

On 12 October the regiment moved from Kinston to Camp Ashe on Topsail Sound to guard the New Bern Road above Wilmington; by 21 November it had relocated to Camp Burgwyn nearer to the city (today, the intersection of Princess Place Drive and 23^rd Street). 

Under General James G. Martin in late January 1864, Uzzell’s regiment marched up the New Bern Road to threaten Morehead City and act as a diversion for a main assault on New Bern.  The 66th encountered enemy pickets at Bogue Sound, then fought a sharp two-hour engagement near Newport Barracks. After routing the enemy, firing stables, storehouses and a railroad bridge, and learning that the attack on New Bern had failed, the regiment returned to Wilmington.

Sent to Virginia in May 1864 to oppose an enemy offensive against Richmond, and battle at Bermuda Hundred and Cold Harbor, Sergeant Uzzell was hospitalized in Petersburg mid-June 1864 for an unspecified complaint, sent to a hospital in Richmond in late June, and furloughed for sixty days on August 2, 1864.  His furlough was extended for thirty days on October 2, 1864, and returned to duty in time to be sent to Fort Fisher in late December, 1864.  There the 66^th Regiment fought enemy forces at the Sugarloaf and Forks Road engagements, withdrew through Wilmington to Duplin Roads, then hard fighting again at Wise’s Forks, Southwest Creek and Bentonville.

While home on health furlough Thomas Uzzell married Elizabeth “Bettie” Ann Parks (1848-1902) on 21 August 1864 at the Lenoir county home of grandmother Annie Sutton. Bettie was the daughter of Major Parks and Martha Sutton Parks; the union of Thomas W. and Bettie Ann produced six children between 1866 and 1880: Major, Essie, Thomas, Polly, Atlas and Martha.

Sgt. Uzzell was surrendered with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s forces at Durham Station on 26 April 1865.  Older brother Dunn was killed at Manassas and Uncle Mathew died of wounds in May of 1864; Sgt. Uzzell and father “Big Tom” (1814-1875) drove a wagon to Virginia shortly after the war to retrieve their bodies for burial at the family plantation.

He and Bettie returned to farming on his father’s property near White Hall (later Seven Springs), on the Neuse River.  He supplemented their farm produce with fish and plentiful wild game, and by 1879 had built a commodious home to house their growing family.

Though the war interrupted Thomas Wood Uzzell’s plan to become a lawyer, he later studied law by mail and became a magistrate in Seven Springs who handled warrants, wills, marriages and minor hearings or trials.

Living fourteen years after losing wife Bettie Ann in 1902, Sergeant Thomas W. Uzzell crossed the river to rest under the shade of the trees on 28 July 1916, age 71 years.

(Sources: North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865; The Civil War in North Carolina, Barrett; and the Uzzell Family Papers)

Rebel Soldier

Via Cousin John

Counterfeit Compassion: Faithful Servant of Greed and Tyranny

Mike Scruggs

 

In 1992, while a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, Marvin Olasky wrote a book called The Tragedy of American Compassion.” His book is about how the misguided policies of political leaders, continually trotting out the word, “compassion,” to justify their actions, did not really help the needy to a better life but multiplied their number. Such misguided compassion also multiplied the tax burden on most Americans. The influence of Olasky’s book at least slowed the growth of the Great Society Welfare State.

Compassion is an important Christian virtue, but like any virtue, it can be applied unwisely. Biblical compassion is not a license for permissiveness, which often makes human conditions worse. 

Thoughtless, “feel-good” compassion frequently ignores important facts, conditions, and reality. It makes the thoughtless feel good but blindly hurts innocent people. True compassion requires an analysis of its likely consequences, and analysis requires facts and numbers. It cannot be based on a few emotional anecdotes—a communication style especially favored by demagogues. It must represent as near and objectively as possible the total truth and must attempt to see secondary as well as immediate consequences. Shallow, feel-good compassion has proved one of the great failings of American politics.

Of course, feelings of compassion are by no means exclusively Christian. However, I hear appeals to compassion addressed specifically to Christian audiences to justify political policies and actions that actually turn thoughtful compassion upside down.

A 1922 book by Presbyterian seminary professor J. Gresham Machen, with the provocative title, Christianity and Liberalism, made a strong Biblical case that Christianity and theological liberalism are not the same thing, the big difference being liberalism’s growing disdain for the authority of Biblical truth. Theological liberalism has adopted humanism in place of Biblical Christianity. Machen expressed it even more forcefully in asserting that Christianity and liberalism are two different religions. Machen was comparing theological rather than political liberalism with Christianity, but today the overlap between theological liberalism and political liberalism is very great. Hence the values of political liberalism often run counter to Biblical Christianity.  In addition, a high percentage of political conservatives base their conservatism on a Biblical worldview.

Machen also pointed out that liberal theology retained most of the vocabulary of traditional Christianity but with altered meanings. This makes knowledge of facts and intellectual and moral discernment critically important to evaluating both religious and political persuasion.

Misguided, shallow, and feel-good compassion are dangerous enough, but the involvement of strong economic and power-driven partisanship magnify the danger immensely. Big money and political power are inclined to distort and cover-up facts.

Some recent radio ads playing on Christian and politically conservative talk-show programs have been aimed at convincing Christian listeners that amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants is the compassionate and therefore Christian thing to do. 

The ads called for prayer that Christian principles would be used to resolve our immigration problems and “provide a path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. 

 Amnesty was not mentioned, but amnesty is a necessary step before citizenship.  The radio ad claimed an evangelical and implied conservative identity. It is inappropriate, however, to ask people to decide on that question by abstractly balancing considerations of law and compassion without the pertinent facts, numbers, and a rigorous analysis of historical precedents and future consequences. The ad also confused individual responsibility for a forgiving heart with government responsibility for justice and social order.

Lets look at a few facts regarding immigration.

According to Edwin S. Rubenstein Economic Consultants, since January 2009, when President Obama took office, foreign-born employment increased 1.651 million or 7.6 percent, but native-born employment increased only 20,000 or .02 percent.  Essentially, approximately 1.6 million native-born American workers were displaced by lower-paid immigrants. Yet no one seems to have any compassion for these American workers and their families.

 A very basic rule of economics is that a shortage of goods or labor drives prices or wages up, but that an excess supply of goods or labor drives prices or wages down.

According to Harvard’s George Borjas, the cost of unprecedented numbers of both legal and illegal cheap foreign workers flooding our labor markets has been enormous to American workers. It has accumulated to a $402 billion or $2,800 per worker annual loss. On the other hand, the American corporate and individual users of cheap foreign labor profit $439 billion per year. The corporate lobbyists spend $150 million per year to sustain these cheap labor advantages. What Americans are hurt the most? The burden falls on almost every level, but those hardest hit are the unskilled poor, minorities, and new college graduates, even those with technical degrees. This is scandalous cheap-labor greed driving bad policy. Where is the compassion for these American workers, whose living standard has not risen in over a dozen years?

According to a recent report by the Heritage foundation, amnesty would cost $6.3 Trillion dollars added to our already dangerous national debt of $16.5 Trillion. We are already running annual deficits of $1.0 Trillion per year. The U.S. does not have the money.  We will have to borrow all of it, probably from the Chinese.

The average net household debt of benefits less taxes paid for illegal immigrants is $14,387 per year. Their average education is only 10^th grade. Amnesty will eventually run the cost to $28,000 due to more benefit eligibilities.  States and local communities pay most of this. It basically represents a subsidy for employers of illegal immigrants. Cheap labor users win. Big cheap labor using corporations win big. Taxpayers and American workers and their families lose. Compassion?

Yet the Schumer-Rubio-Obama amnesty and open borders bill will result in 33 to 50 million more immigrant workers over the next decade, not counting millions of “temporary” guest-workers. Once they are made citizens, an estimated 75 percent of them will vote for big-spending Democrats. That doesn’t look good for American workers, their families, or taxpayers. What sort of compassion is this? Counterfeit compassion and tyranny!

Marseille, France June 1947

More @ panzer_papa

The Stainless Banner April, 2013

 

 

April, 2013

Military told not to read Obama-scandal news

 

President Obama has said the outrage over the federal government’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone activity is all “hype.”

He might want to share his opinion with the U.S. Air Force, which is ordering members of the service not to look at news stories about it.

WND has received an unclassified NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) that warns airmen not to look at news stories related to the data-mining scandal.

The notice applies to users of the Air Force NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), which is the only way that many troops stationed overseas and on bases in the U.S. are able to access the Internet.

The last line of the executive summary states:

“Users are not to use AF NIPRNET systems to access the Verizon phone records collection and other related news stories because the action could constitute a Classified Message Incident.”

Cindy McGee, the mother of an airman stationed in the UAE, spoke with WND.

“The fact that our government is attempting to censor our service members from the truth of what is happening here at home is truly frightening and disheartening,” said McGee.

 More @ WND

Once Upon a Time in Peking

More @ FP

300 Muslims detained in Russia ahead of Winter Olympics

& our worthless President........

he Washington Times reported on June 9, 2013, that 300 Muslims were detained by Russian authorities on Friday at a Muslim prayer room in Moscow.

Of those detained, 170 included foreigners. Fox News had reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a crackdown on radical Islamists in view of next year's Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Police said that the Muslims were held at a prayer room in Moscow and extremist literature was confiscated. Watch video.

This is the third time this year of rounding up radical Muslims, targeting Muslim places of worship has been ordered.

More @ Examiner

Rand Paul vows to use Nuland confirmation to probe Benghazi

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday called the appointment of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to be Obama’s National Security Adviser “appalling” and threatened to use the confirmation hearings for other nominations to press for more answers on the Benghazi Consulate attacks.

While Rice does not need Senate confirmation to assume her post, former State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who has been tapped to head European affairs, will face tough questions on the administration’s Benghazi response, Paul said.

“Both Ms. Nuland and Ambassador Rice were intimately involved with a misleading campaign or a misdirection campaign after Benghazi and I think really that you shouldn’t promote someone who’s been misleading, purposely misleading, the American public,” said Paul on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I think it’s appalling and so I think neither one of them should be to their position.”

More @ The Hill

Faith and religion during my fight for survival

I had many questions and comments about faith, religion and God. I did not answer many of them with too much details just because usually this would started discussions without too much connection to survival, but with lots of hate and anger.

Today I want to talk a bit about this.

Of course faith and religion played big part of survival when SHTF, but maybe not like most of the people would guess.

One of the questions that I had few times is „did the folks who had faith cope better with everyday problems?“ Answer is probably „yes, most of them“.

But I also must say that lots of people who had lots of faith and were good folks died with terrible deaths too.

I knew more than one man, some whole families who died, or lost family members simply because they had attitude „it is gonna be what God wants it to be, and we can not do too much“.

I always prefered attitude that „ I ll do whatever I could and rest is not in my hands anyway“.

More @ SHTF School

Marco Rubio: In immigration reform, legalization comes first — ‘It is not conditional’

Via avordvet

 

Traitor. 

In a Spanish-language interview Sunday with the network Univision, Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform group, made his strongest statement yet that legalization of the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants must happen before any new border security or internal enforcement measures are in place, and will in no way be conditional on any security requirements.

More @ The Examiner

The Real Coup Was in 1861

Via Billy

According to an article on http://www.theblaze.com for June 7th Rush Limbugh has stated that Barack Obama and his administration are leading a “coup d’ etat’ to take over the United States.

Limbaugh said this on his radio show on Friday, June 7th. Limbaugh noted the recently-discovered National Security Agency domestic surveillance (spying) programs being carried on against millions of Americans, all in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Of course the supposed “terrorists” that this Marxist administration are fighting are those patriotic Americans that oppose its Marxist agenda.

After all, doesn’t opposing any form of Marxism automatically qualify you as a “terrorist?” According to this administration it does.

I can somewhat agree with Limbaugh’s rationale except that his timing is off by 150 years. The real (and ongoing coup) took place in 1861, during the early days of the Lincoln administration. All Obama is trying to do is to mop up the residual resistance that still lingers, and this is what his puppet-masters put him in office for.

More @ Revised History

“The main thing, the absolute priority, is to get rid of the Americans at any price."

Via SF Medic

 

Viktor Kalashnikov is a Russian freelance journalist and a former KGB colonel. In the autumn of 2010, he and his wife Marina, a historian, were treated in a hospital in Germany for mercury poisoning in what they said had been an attempt on their lives by Russia’s FSB, the successor to the KGB. He is a distant relative of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47.

Kalashnikov and his wife have been publishing articles critical of the Kremlin since the 1990s. After living in Europe for several years they are now back in Moscow.

A few days ago I received a call from Victor Kalashnikov in Moscow, a former KGB officer who now works as an investigative journalist. He was eager to share his analysis of recent global events. This was also an opportunity to ask his opinion about the global economy and the crisis in Syria. “Your side is losing,” he complained. “Did you read Barack Obama’s speech at National Defense University? What was this reference to the Twilight Struggle of the Cold War in his speech? What is this?”

Obama had spoken of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, saying that “a new dawn of democracy” had taken hold abroad. It was the sort of thing American presidents liked to repeat.

“I’m sorry to say,” Kalashnikov continued, “the president’s statement is at variance with my own perception. He says that your homeland is more secure today and there have been no more big attacks. Usually supreme commanders refrain from saying things like that. Undoubtedly you know what Hezbollah is. It’s not a loose group of fighters. It is a large organization. They use satellite TV programs to spread their radical Islamic ideas. So you may dismantle a bomb or destroy a terrorist network or base, but it would be premature to feel somehow relaxed. Moreover, Hezbollah’s program of indoctrination is going on worldwide. That’s the point. You Americans, whether you like it or not, are confronting an aggressive Islam, and Islam is a huge thing. It is very flexible, very motivated.”

More @ Trevor Loudon

Staples backs off after banning NE gun dealer from contest

Via avordvet

 

Office supply chain Staples is backing down after banning a Nebraska gun shop from entering a company contest.

Maple Creek Gunsmithing, a gun retailer in Fremont, tried to enter a Staples small business “Push it Forward” contest for a shot at winning a $50,000 marketing campaign. Instead, the owners got an email from Staples saying they couldn’t participate because their business promotes firearms and weapons.

Well, the little gun shop has since gotten some free publicity anyway, thanks to outrage from the gun community.

The gun shop owners — Travis Vonseggern and Bill Jackson — posted the Staples email on their Facebook page and wrote, “Wow we spent a ton of money with them and this is the support we get. We are never spending a dime in that store again and would encourage you to do the same.”

Vonseggern said the store has gotten calls and emails of support from across the country from people who are boycotting Staples.

More @ Nebraska Watchdog