Trump calls Wisconsin recount request a ‘scam’

Via Billy

This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded,” Trump fumed, calling the recount effort “ridiculous.”

“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than 1 percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money,’’ the president-elect added.

Stein’s crowdfunding campaign to raise money for election challenges had racked up $5.9 million by late Saturday — which is more than enough to pay for the Wisconsin recount, estimated at $1 million.

Election rules in Pennsylvania, which require candidates to challenge the tally at the county level by Monday, make recounts a daunting prospect there.

Wednesday is the deadline to file recount requests in Michigan.

The results in all three states would have to be overturned for Trump to lose the Electoral College vote on December 19.

More @ New York Post

Grant Never Faced Stonewall Jackson

 

The scale of the New England trade to West Indian sugar plantations was nothing short of astoGrant’s relentless and costly attacks on General Lee in Virginia earned him the title of “Butcher” among his own troops and was kept in command by Lincoln who was unbothered by the vast casualty numbers amassed by Grant. He quickly saw that following the Radicals after his master’s assassination was the proper path, and he was rewarded with election to the presidency, though only with the votes of freedmen herded to the polls in the South. His administration was marked with scandal, and his own vice president indicted for corruption. The following able criticism of General Grant’s claim to great generalship was published in the New York Tribune in July 1883.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

Grant Never Faced Stonewall Jackson

“To the Editor of the Tribune:

Sir, — The attitude in which General Grant has so long been posed before the world is likely to receive a severe blow from the publication of General Humphrey’s last volume of “The Campaigns of the Civil War,” of which the Tribune contained a review yesterday.

Colonel Hambley, of the British army, in his great work on the Art of War . . . speaks of General Grant as one “who was successful on a moderate terrain like Vicksburg, but whose Virginia campaign was a failure,” and elsewhere of “Grant’s useless sacrifice of ten thousand men at Cold Harbor.” This judgement is tacitly supported by General Humphrey’s book by what would seem to be a column if indisputable facts.

I understand from him that General Grant was at least seven times conspicuously and with enormous loss defeated by General Lee before the exhaustion of his war materials and the universal collapse of the Confederacy compelled the latter to surrender. These were not reported as defeats in the bulletins of the day, and some of them were even supposed to be victories, as in the case of Hancock’s magnificent attempt to break through Lee’s centre at Spottsylvania Courthouse; but they were defeats nonetheless.

Many things conspired to prevent General Lee’s victories from being decisive: The overwhelming superiority of the Union army in numbers and munitions of war, his own lack of absolutely necessary war materiel . . . and the lack of an able coadjutor like Stonewall Jackson.

One can well believe that had Jackson lived a year longer Grant would not only have been defeated, but, as a consequence of his stubborn adhesion to a single military idea, pretty nearly destroyed. Grant possessed an advantage over all his predecessors in Virginia; that he never had to contend with Jackson. The dry truth of it is that Grant lost more battles in Virginia than he ever won elsewhere.

In the tenacity with which Grant followed out a determination once fixed in his mind, perhaps no man has ever surpassed him; but it was an expensive virtue for his soldiers, as the hundred thousand men he lost in Virginia are a witness. Whether he should have been removed after Cold Harbor, a disastrous blunder only equaled by Burnside’s at Fredericksburg, is a difficult matter to determine.

Yet this man . . . received the credit of having suppressed the Confederacy; without education for or experience in civil affairs was made President for eight years; and finally was carried around the earth and exhibited to the nations as the greatest prodigy of the age.

F.P.S. College Hill, Mass., July 4, 1883”

(A Northern Opinion of Grant’s Generalship, Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume XII, 1884, J. William Jones, editor, Broadfoot Publishing, 1990, excerpts, pp. 21-22)

Slaves Doing the Business of New England

 

The scale of the New England trade to West Indian sugar plantations was nothing short of astonishing, with nearly 80 percent of all overseas exports supporting slave-labor sugar production. By this time as well, the Narragansett region of Rhode Island and neighboring Connecticut both developed their own plantation systems employing African slaves as forced labor.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

Slaves Doing the Business of New England

“At the same time that John Winthrop left England to establish his city on the hill, another group of Puritans left England for the Caribbean. While the New England colonists shipped beaver pelts, codfish, and timber back across the Atlantic, the West Indies group ended up on Providence Island raising tobacco and cotton, using slave labor.

Europeans . . . prized sugar [that was slave-produced in the West Indies]. The crop roared its way across the Atlantic like an agricultural hurricane. It denuded islands of their forests and siphoned hundreds of thousands of Africans into slavery to feed a boundless, addicted market.

Between 1640 and 1650, English ships delivered nearly 19,000 Africans to work the fields in Barbados. By 1700, the cumulative total had reached 134,000. The pattern was repeated on other islands. Jamaica, barely populated when the English invaded it in 1655, had absorbed 85,000 African slaves by 1700. The Leeward Islands, including Antigua, took 44,000.

That same year a Boston ship made one of the earliest known New England slave voyages to Africa, delivering its cargo to Barbados. The Puritans thought about using captive labor for themselves. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, John Winthrop’s brother-in-law, advised Winthrop: “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.”

Although residents of New England and Middle Atlantic States owned slaves and trafficked in slaves, they profited more from feeding the increasingly large numbers of Africans in the West Indies and providing the materials to operate the sugar plantations and mills.

The flow of commerce between America, Africa and the West Indies entered history as the Triangle Trade. In its classic shape, Northern colonies sent food, livestock, and wood (especially for barrels) to West Indian sugar plantations, where enslaved Africans harvested the cane that fed the refining mills.

Sugar, and its by-product molasses, was then shipped back North, usually in barrels made of New England wood and sometimes accompanied by slaves. Finally, scores of Northern distilleries turned the molasses into rum to trade in Africa for new slaves, who were, in turn, shipped to the sugar plantations.”

(Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, Profited from Slavery, Farrow, Lang, Frank, Ballantine Books, 2006, excerpts, pp. 46-49)

 

After the mine under Confederate lines at Petersburg was exploded in late July, 1864, the Northern assault into the crater was to be led by black troops, ordered by Gen. Ambrose Burnside, though criticized by Gen. George Meade as they were inexperienced. The black troops were not committed until after the initial assault, but intense defensive fire routed them and their white counterparts caught in the crater. It was reported that black troops were the most visible participants in the retreat and an observer recalled being brought to a halt by “terror-stricken darkies who came surging over [us] with a force that seemed almost irresistible. They yelled and groaned in despair and when we barred their progress” (Army of Amateurs, Longacre, pg. 190). Gen. Grant later stated that he was confident that the black troops would have carried the assault if they had led it, though agreeing that they were inexperienced troops.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Grant’s Sable Arm at The Crater

“Lieutenant Colonel Charles Loring, a [General Ambrose] Burnside aide who had been observing matters [at the Crater battle] all morning, was so appalled by the prospect of the black soldiers’ advancing into the confusion that he countermanded the order and raced off to report directly to [Burnside, who simply restated his previous order to attack].

The officers commanding the black troops now discovered that it was nearly impossible to advance their men in any orderly fashion. Confederate artillery ranged all surface approaches to the jump-off point . . . [but the] 30th [US Colored Troops] was the first black regiment to advance toward the crater. “The slaughter was fearful,” one [young regimental officer] later wrote home . . . “bullets came in amongst us like hailstones . . . Men were getting killed and wounded on all sides of me.”

[Northern commander U.S. Grant] found Burnside in a small fieldwork overlooking the front. Grant wasted no time. “The entire opportunity has been lost,” he said, rapidly. “There is now no chance of success. These troops must be immediately withdrawn. It is slaughter to leave them here.” Burnside . . .”was still hoping something could be accomplished.”

[At a court of inquiry, Grant stated that] “I blame myself for one thing, I was informed . . . that General Burnside . . . trusted to the pulling of straws [as to] which division should lead [the attack]. It happened to fall on [who] I thought was the worst commander in his corps . . . I mean General [James] Ledlie.”

[Grant continued:] “General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front [to lead the initial assault], and I believe that if he had done so it would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his objections to that plan [that the colored division was “a new division, and had never been under fire – had never been tried . . .”].

General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front . . . and it should prove a failure, it would then be said, and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.”

(The Last Citadel, Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864-April 1865, Noah Andre Trudeau, Little, Brown and Company, 1991, excerpts, pp. 115-117; 126)

Melania Trump Reveals Her Heartbreaking Journey To Achieving The American Dream

Via Butch

Despite being married to the most controversial presidential candidate in American history, Melania Trump remains an enigma.

The mystery that comes with her reserved personality makes Melania an easy target for liberals as articles labeling her as a “mannequin” and condemning her silence are published daily.

Although the famous former model seems to have it all, Melania’s testimony tells the story of someone who’s struggled against all odds — and overcame.

More @ Q Political

Fidel Castro Goes To Hell...At Long Last!

Via comment by JWMJR on Cuban Americans Celebrate Castro's Death with Trum...

 

 Mephistopheles by Mark Antokolski, 1884.

The year 2016 is drawing to a close and the good news just keeps coming! First Donald Trump prevailed in the general election and now Fidel Castro finally kicks the bucket. Poor Bernie Sanders must be so sad about the passing of his hero. Hopefully he will go to Havana for the funeral...and stay!!

I first published this piece back in 2012. With today's announcement I'm moving it back to the top.

Mephistopheles greets Fidel Castro at the gates of hell, “Hello my friend, welcome to your new home!”  He escorts Fidel through the gate and firmly closes it behind him.  “Before we go any further I have to ask you a few questions.  I hope you understand.”

“Of course.” Castro replies, “Go right ahead.”

 

More @ Joe Martin's Ghost

Strangers in New England

 

J.J. Smith’s Plantation, South Carolina by Timothy H. O’Sullivan (b.c.1840–1882), Beaufort, SC, 1862

Well before African slaves populated the American South in any number, New England’s Puritans were enslaving the Indian tribes whose lands they appropriated. Also, the closed society of New England did not welcome non-Puritans, white, red or black, and once the slave’s labor was done they could be sold for profit and to labor elsewhere. This may offer a clue to New England’s future sweeping itself clean of the slave trade they had nourished and profited from, and blame the institution on the American South.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Strangers in New England

“Slavery began in New England during the first years of settlement in Massachusetts, and thus, the Puritans learned how to be slave owners immediately on arrival. As white New Englanders conquered their new settlements, they enslaved Native American populations both to control them and to draw on them for labor. Although John Winthrop did not immediately see Indians as slaves, it dawned on him quickly that they could be.

Winthrop recorded requests for Native American slaves both locally and abroad in Bermuda. Wars with the Narragansett and Pequot tribes garnered large numbers of slaves. The trading of Indian slaves abroad brought African slaves to Massachusetts shores. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, John Winthrop’s brother-in-law and a barrister, welcomed a trade of Pequot slaves for African slaves.

However, the enslavement of American Indians had a different tenor than the enslavement of Africans. The indigenous slaves represented an enemy, a conquered people, and a grave threat to [Puritan] society. African slaves represented a trade transaction, laborers without strings attached. Moreover, Indian slaves . . . served as collateral with which to negotiate with Native leaders. Further [Puritan] colonists could expel troublesome Native slaves out of the colony, or they could just control them as slave property.

[In] Massachusetts first legal code, the 1641 Body of Liberties . . . outlawed slavery among the Puritans. However, the exceptions of strangers (foreigners who lacked protection from the king) and war prisoners gave an opening to enslave other human beings.

The exception in the case of war prisoners gave the colonists direct permission to enslave Indians . . . such as in the Pequot war they had just concluded. Conveniently the slave trade had already begun to spread strangers throughout the Atlantic world.

[Most] Puritans sought a homogenous society that made any kind of stranger feel unwelcome [and] Puritans’ efforts to expunge untrustworthy members with white skin were legendary. Men and women from other cultures with different skin tones posed a more complicated dilemma. The cultural differences of Africans and Native Americans automatically made them undesirable additions to the closed Puritan societies.

As King Philip’s War drew to an end in 1678 . . . [it had] brought in a huge number of [Indian] slaves. Hoping to socialize Indian children, Plymouth’s council of war forced them to apprentice in white families. The council sold hundreds more Indians to Spain, Jamaica, and the Wine Islands.”

(Tyrannicide, Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts, Emily Blanck, UGA Press, 2014, excerpts, pp. 12-14)

Jim Crow's New England Origins

 

 1950

Indian and African slavery was a primary factor in the development of New England commercial economic prosperity, “the key dynamic force,” as colonial historian Bernard Bailyn wrote. He added that “Only a few New England merchants actually engaged in the [transatlantic] slave trade, but all of them profited by it, lived off it.” With the influx of African slaves into Puritan society, laws and codes had to be developed to cope with the “strangers.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Jim Crow’s New England Origins

“The rapid rise in the number of slaves at the dawn of the eighteenth century caused Massachusetts leaders to take action. Spiritually, slavery proved an obstacle for the local ministers, as some congregants began to question whether a Christian should own another Christian.

In 1693, Cotton Mather took on the challenge of Christianizing the heathen population without ending enslavement. In his 1701 pamphlet, The Negro Christianized, Mather assured nervous masters that conversion did not free the slave. Mather’s vision of slavery . . . idealized the relationship between master and enslaved . . . [and] promised that if owners mistreated their slaves “the Sword of Justice” would sweep through the colony.

In 1701, Boston, which had the largest slave population in the colony, began passing municipal laws aimed at setting standard limits on slave behavior . . . They could not drink alcohol, start fires, or assemble. So as to not hamper slave owners’ profits of property rights, slaves were whipped rather than imprisoned, a punishment that few whites suffered in the early eighteenth century.

As slaves became more numerous . . . the colony of Massachusetts responded in similar fashion to Boston by passing legislation to control the behavior of African slaves. The legislature feared that a “turbulent temper in spirit” would grow into “an opposition to all government and order.” The law targeted assemblies at night, begging, and starting fires. In the eyes of the legislators, blacks, free and enslaved, posed the greatest threat to the good order of society.

Having children was also difficult for enslaved women from New England. Masters found childbirth inconvenient and actively discouraged it, which contributed to the low birth rate among African Americans in Massachusetts.”

(Tyrannicide, Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts, Emily Blanck, UGA Press, 2014, excerpts, pp. 15-16)

Gangs of New York The Draft Riots

Tulsi Gabbard is the pick (Should be) for Secretary of State, not Mitt Romney

Rep. Gabbard embodies the very essence of the President-Elect’s ideological departure from the interventionist policies that have plagued this nation for the past two decades. One need look no further than her June 17 interview with Wolf Blitzer for evidence of her commitment to breaking with the current orthodoxy.

When Blitzer asked Rep. Gabbard if she was endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, she replied, “I am not prepared to do that. There are a lot of things that I'm looking at, in particular this issue that she has not moved on at all in this campaign, which is this commitment to continue this interventionist regime change policy in Syria that's proving to be so disastrous.”

Rep. Gabbard is uniquely qualified to make these judgments. In 2002, at age 21, she was elected to the Hawaiian state legislature. 

Within the next two years, Rep. Gabbard had joined the Hawaii National Guard and volunteered to deploy to Iraq, in which she served two tours of duty. At the time, the Honolulu Advertiser quoted Rep. Gabbard as saying, "Although I was not activated, . . . I volunteered to go with (her fellow Guardsmen) because I felt it was my duty as a soldier and a friend to join them in the service of our country.”

More @ The Hill

The Obama Era is Over

Via John

Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an inevitable arc that bent their way.

The tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America. We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national future.

The past was gone. We were falling into the gorgeous wonderful future of dot com instant deliveries and outsourced everything. We would become more tolerant and guilty. The future was Amazon and Disney. It was hot and cold running social justice. The Bill of Rights was done. Ending the First and Second Amendments was just a clever campaign away. Narratives on news sites drove everything.

More @ Front Page

Cuban Americans Celebrate Castro's Death with Trump Signs

Via Billy

Communist tyrant Fidel Castro passed away late Friday night in Cuba.

The miracle Cuban medical system couldn’t save the old Marxist.

Cuban Americans celebrated in the streets of Miami after hearing the news.

In case anyone was wondering, Cuban Donald Trump is still going strong. And a surprisingly good salsa dancer pic.twitter.com/nhdzlxD9yI

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) November 26, 2016

In Miami, Cuban Americans flocked to the streets with Trump signs to celebrate the dictator’s death.

More @ The Gateway Pundit

Isis cell ‘planned to attack Disneyland Paris and Champs Elysees Christmas market NEXT WEEK’

Via comment by Giles B. on France on the Verge of Total Collapse

 

 Terror suspects had made internet searches on several targets in French capital

AN ISIS terror cell was planning to target Disneyland and a Christmas market on the Champs Elysees during another horror attack on Paris next week, French police have revealed.

Jihadists were plotting to strike on Thursday, December 1 and had also researched other bustling sites including a police headquarters, Metro station and city centre cafes.

More @ The Sun

A Distant Trumpet: Army Celebrates Thanksgiving by Ordering Sioux Camp to Disperse

Via comment by Cav Med on The Appalachian Messenger November 25, 2016

 

For the Sioux, this is being treated like trespassers on their own land, and according to the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties, this IS their own land


Spotted Tail, Siŋté Glešká of the Brulé Lakota (1823-1881) lamented, “This war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price.”

Some things never change. One of those things is the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent a letter on Friday to Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault informing him that the Corps is ordering the Sioux’s Oceti Sakowin camp, the center of protests against the DAPL, to disperse by closing the “corps-managed federal property north of the Cannonball River to all public use and access” starting December 5.

More with video @ Politicus USA

"This Thanksgiving,

I am thankful for Barack Obama and the political Left who mainstreamed identity politics, which after eight years of stagnating in its broth, now ironically marginalizes the future of Democratic Party as it evolves into a fratricidal junta of hippies, limousine liberals, Muslims, illegal aliens, LGBT fruits, trial lawyers, professional protestors, and welfare queens. Meanwhile the white working class makes its exodus from the Democratic Party." #winning

--Ryan Setliff