Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Finding the Swamp Fox

 
John Oller, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution (Da Capo Press, 2016)

Francis Marion is better remembered today than he used to be. There was a time, however, when, outside of his native South Carolina, hardly anyone without a good knowledge of the Southern theatre of the American Revolution would have heard of him. And there just weren’t that many Americans with that particular knowledge. In whatever education they may have received about the Revolution, the South’s important role in that epic struggle was either unknown by those doing the teaching, glossed over, or ignored. The result was that the extraordinary efforts of men like Marion, Thomas Sumter, Elijah Clarke and so many others in the fight for American independence in South went largely unheralded while those in more northerly regions received sustained and sometimes fawning attention from historians, popularizers, documentary film makers, etc. For example, in the preface to his book The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas, published in1997, New York author John Buchanan claims that, “On learning of my subject, a friend of mine, well educated, well read, intellectually curious, looked surprised and admitted, ‘I really don’t know what happened south of Philadelphia.’”

We shouldn’t perhaps think too badly of John Buchanan’s friend. The Revolution in the South was bloody and complex and in many respects the sources historians need to do the work of telling its story are pretty thin in places, and obscure in others. It’s not a story quickly or easily told, not least of all because it’s such a compelling one. A peek through the door requires you to go on inside, have a seat, and linger for a while.

Let the Bear Flag Go

 

A large portion of California wants to secede.

That’s a good thing.

American conservatives should not only applaud the move, they should be doing everything possible to help them find the door.

Image a world without Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Diane Feinstein, or Kamala Harris; where Democrats would not start the presidential election cycle with nearly one quarter of the Electoral College votes needed to win the election; where the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit would disappear; where every radical Leftist group could set up shop and get out of real America; where every illegal immigrant could find a home in the sanctuary State.

And that is only the beginning.

Real America could finally get its culture back without the perversions of Hollywood.

'The Deed's' Sidney Torres: Mother a "huge Trump" fan.


 Sidney Torres in a scene from CNBC's "The Deed."

Sidney Torres is out to prove that the American Dream is still very much alive.

The host of CNBC's new show "The Deed" should know; He's achieved it.

"I really truly believe in [the American Dream]," Torres told Fox News.

Torres comes from humble beginnings. Growing up in New Orleans, the self-made entrepreneur struggled in school while dealing with dyslexia. Finally, in 1999, his grandmother agreed to cosign a loan for $50,000 so he could finance the first home he would flip.

"Not everybody has a grandmother that will cosign a loan for them, but there are mentors out there like myself that lend money to those who are serious," Torres said.

"The American Dream is not dead. I think it all depends on how our culture shows...that you can do it. It's a matter of wanting to do it," he added.

More @ Fox

None Dare Call It Treason

Via Billy


Treason – NOUN: The crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.

Polygraphing is a routine procedure in the intelligence community. Some of this classified information, that is now public, was known only by a very few. The Department of Justice should polygraph them and bring them before a grand jury. This is treason and someone needs to go to jail. 

**********************

When candidate Donald Trump warned his followers that there would be efforts to “rig” the election he was universally ridiculed and scorned. The media arm of the Democrat Party insisted that there was no evidence of voter fraud over the last many elections. President Obama lectured that the thousands of voting locations and election observers made the claim just plain wrong.

In the final presidential debate Trump was asked if he was prepared to accept the results of the vote count on November 8. Trump said he would wait and see, which horrified Mrs. Clinton. She spent the next 19 days insisting that Trump was willing to destroy democracy.

The disclosure last August that the Russians hacked the Democrat National Committee merely exposed the fact that the Democrat primary was rigged for Hillary and cost Debbie Wasserman-Schultz her job as chair of the DNC. Who cares?

My how times have changed.


The Good Life in the South

 http://www.johnpaulstrain.com/images/art/large/Alabama-900.jpg

Author Donald Davidson wrote of the decline of Northern cities committed to progress and the past resistance of Southern cities like Charleston and Savannah to the relentless march of industrial capitalism. But, he observed the ruins all around us as “the ruins of societies no less than the ruins of cities. Over the ruins stream mobs led by creatures no longer really human – creatures who, whether they make shift to pass as educators, planners, editors, commissars, or presidents . . .” lead the way on the path to destruction.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

The Good Life in the South

“Continuity of family, of family life, and family position – irrespective of economic status – was in fact a great distinction of Charleston among old American cities; for elsewhere that continuity had been generally broken by one cause or another. With this continuity Charleston had a stability that expressed itself in the pattern of its streets and the conservatism of its architecture. The map of Charleston in 1948 was not substantially different from the map of Charleston two centuries before.

If John Stuart, whom George III in 1763 appointed superintendent of Indian affairs in the South, could have returned in 1948 to seek his home, he would have found it at 106 Tradd Street, just where he built it in 1772 – for a brief occupancy, as it happened, since the Revolution ejected him, as a Tory, rather speedily from his new house.

The secret of Charleston’s stability, if it was any secret, was only the old Southern principle that material considerations, however important, are means not ends, and should always be subdued to the ends they are supposed to serve, should never be allowed to dominate, never be mistaken for ends in themselves.

If they are mistaken for ends, they dominate everything, and then you get instability. You get the average modern city, you get New York and Detroit, you get industrial civilization, world wars, Marxist communism, the New Deal.

Historians, noting that the antebellum South was in a sense materialistic, in that it found ways of prospering from the sale of cotton and tobacco, and relied heavily upon slave labor, have had the problem of explaining why that same South developed a chivalrous, courteous, religious, conservative and stable society quite different from that which obtained in the also materialistic, but more industrialized, rational, idealistic, progressive North.

The planters’ “aristocratic” leadership was the result, not the cause, of a general diffusion of standards of judgment that all the South, even the Negro slaves, accepted a basic principle of life. Mr. Francis Butler Simkins, in his book The South Old and New, has taken securer than the average historian when he notes that the South at the outbreak of the Civil War was almost the only true religious society left in the Western world.

That old, religious South set the good life above any material means to life and consistently preferred the kind of material concerns that would least interfere with and best contribute to the good life. Its preferred occupations were agriculture, law, the church and politics – pursuits which develop the whole man rather than the specialist, the free-willed individual rather than the anonymous unit of the organized mass.

[With] reference to material means of existence, such as money, one could clinch the discourse by pointing out the traditional attitude of the Southern Negro toward work and wages. If you paid the Negro twice the normal wage for a day’s work, you did not get more work from him – that is to say, more devotion to work within a given period, with increased production as the result. Not at all.

The Negro simply and ingeniously worked only half as many days or hours as before – and spent the rest of the time in following his conception of the good life: in hunting, dancing, singing, social conversation, eating, religion, and love. This well-known habit of the Negro’s, disconcerting to employers and statisticians, was absolutely correct according to Southern principles.

The Negro, so far as he had not been corrupted into heresy by modern education, was the most traditional of Southerners, the mirror which faithfully and lovingly reflected the traits that Southerners once all but unanimously professed.

That had been the idea in Charleston too. It was what Mr. Simkins in his book, perhaps being misled by his historical predecessors, had called the “country gentleman” idea. But Charleston, which had always been urban, always a town or a city of counting-houses, warehouses, factors, bankers, financial agents, and the like, was not a city of country gentlemen, exactly.

It had agreed with the country gentleman and with others of every sort, including the Negro, on letting the relationship between work, wages and life be determined by the metaphysical judgment indicated above. That was what made Charleston Charleston and not “The Indigo City” or something of the kind.”

(Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays, “Some Day in Old Charleston,” Donald Davidson, LSU Press, 1957, excerpt, pp. 221-224)

Trump-Sessions DOJ to Drop Govt. Opposition to Texas Voter ID Law

Via Billy


NPR reported:

The Department of Justice is reversing the federal government’s position in an important voting rights case, involving a Texas voter ID law. The switch was not unexpected following the election of Donald Trump and confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Both Trump and Sessions claim voter fraud is a major problem and have backed voter ID laws.

In a motion filed Monday, DOJ asked a federal court to dismiss the department’s earlier claim that the ID law was enacted with the intention of discriminating against minority voters. That claim was made by the Obama administration as part of a broader legal challenge to the law, which is among the strictest in the nation.

But the Trump administration notes that the Texas legislature is now considering changing the law to address concerns that it hurts minorities. DOJ says those efforts should be allowed to proceed.

Police union boss rips NYC for opposing Trump immigration rules, says cops want to assist feds with deportations

Via Billy

A TUESDAY, FEB. 7, 2017, PHOTO. AP PROVIDES ACCESS TO THIS PUBLICLY DISTRIBUTED HANDOUT PHOTO PROVIDED BY U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT

The head of the NYPD sergeants union blasted Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill for their refusal to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation policies.

“It’s almost like the world is upside-down right now,” Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said Sunday on John Catsimatidis' "The Cat's Roundtable" AM 970 radio show. “The people who are committing crimes, they don’t belong in the country.”

Intelligence Chairman: ‘Still NO Evidence of Trump Campaign Contacts with Russia’

Via Billy


On Monday, House Intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes said that lawmakers should not begin a McCarthy-style investigation based on a just a couple of reports from the media CBS reported.

From CBS:
“We just cannot go on a witch hunt,” Nunes told reporters.
Nunes went as far as to say that he hasn’t seen any evidence that the Trump campaign had any sort of contacts with Russian officials according to the Washington Times.

From The Washington Times:

We still don’t have any evidence of them talking to Russians,” Mr. Nunes said as he briefed reporters. “As of right now, the initial inquiries I’ve made to the appropriate agencies, I don’t have any evidence.”

German hostage beheaded by Philippine Islamists

Via Billy

German nationals Jurgen Kantner and his wife Sabine Merz pictured in Berbera, Somalia on May 5, 2009

Islamic militants in the Philippines have beheaded a 70-year-old German hostage they were holding for ransom, Manila officials said Monday, as Berlin condemned the murder as "unscrupulous and inhumane".

The Abu Sayyaf group, blamed for the worst terror attacks in Philippine history, had demanded a ransom of 30 million pesos ($600,000) be paid by Sunday to spare Jurgen Kantner.

After the expiration of the deadline the jihadists, which were monitored by intelligence group SITE, posted a gruesome video showing Kantner being killed by a knife-wielding man.

Shortly after the clip appeared Philippines government envoy Jesus Dureza confirmed the death of Kantner, who was abducted from his yacht off the southern Philippines last year.

More @ Yahoo

Bush undercuts Trump a month into presidency after staying silent on Obama for 8 years

Via Billy

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hxnJSqqI-jQ/0.jpg

For eight long years, George W. Bush refused to criticize Barack Obama.

“I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president undermine a current president,” Mr. Bush explained to Fox News’s Sean Hannity in 2014, on why he refused to critique his successor’s policies. “I think it’s bad for the presidency, for that matter.”

Yet one month into President Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Bush decided it was OK to offer a critique of the former real estate mogul.

Mr. Bush, speaking with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” Monday, insisted “we all need answers” regarding possible connections between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s campaign team.  He (thankfully) dodged the question on whether a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the matter.

Yes, Le Pen could win in France

Via Billy

French presidential election candidate for the far-right Front National (FN) party, Marine Le Pen speaks during a public rally on February 24, 2017 in Pierrelatte

With the polls narrowing and one of her main rivals embroiled in an expenses scandal, far-right leader Marine Le Pen could feasibly become French president in May, senior politicians and commentators say.

At the headquarters of her National Front (FN) party in Nanterre outside Paris, officials believe the same forces that led to the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump's victory in the United States could carry Le Pen to power.

Even some of her rivals concede a victory for the far-right firebrand is possible.

"I think Madame Le Pen could be elected," former conservative prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said this month.

Another former premier, the Socialist Manuel Valls, has also warned of the "danger" of assuming that Le Pen cannot win.

More @ Yahoo

Durham NC: Photo shows veteran lying on floor while waiting

http://mediaweb.wsoctv.com/photo/2017/02/27/Photo_depicts_veteran_laying_on_ground_w_0_7421039_ver1.0_640_360.jpg 

A couple posted photos on Facebook and said veterans waited for hours in pain inside the Durham VA Medical Center.

Stephen McMenamin, a former U.S. Marine, was there for treatment, and said his wife took the pictures because she "found it upsetting."

McMenamin said a veteran who was lying on the ground was using his bag of medication for a pillow after being denied an available reclining chair.

"The nurse started yelling at him, telling him he can't do that," McMenamin said. "He's, like, 'I can't get up and I won't get up. I will be here until you can see me. Can I please have a blanket?'"

More @ AJC

Judge orders stiff sentences for two in Douglasville Confederate Flag 'crime'

Via comment by Unknown Reaper on The Same Old Stand? UPDATE! Something is wrong with this picture. No injuries in this prank: Brock, guessing you recall this incident.


A travesty of justice.
 
As the defendants wept, a Douglas County judge on Monday sentenced two people to lengthy prison terms for their part in disrupting an African-American birthday party with Confederate flags, racial slurs and armed threats in 2015.
Superior Court Judge William McClain castigated the two, Kayla Rae Norton, 25, and Jose Ismael Torres, 26, for perpetrating what he called a hate crime.
He sentenced Torres to 20 years, with 13 to serve in prison. Norton was given 15 years, with six to serve. Upon their release, McClain ordered them to be permanently banished from Douglas County.

More @ AJC

Agents detail 'daily' border fence battle, seek post-Obama 'restart'

Via John


In the tiny Arizona city of Douglas, a Border Patrol surveillance camera is trained on a 10-foot-high fence with Mexico. After a few seconds, footage shows a figure appearing out of nowhere and the fence suddenly opens to allow a pickup truck through. A car follows, and they speed off into adjoining neighborhoods while the makeshift gate slams shut.
The Wild West still has a foothold here, more than 100 years after gunslingers Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday called Douglas home. Only the outlaws are cartels and traffickers.

And while President Trump is vowing to step up enforcement and seal off the southern border, agents in Border Patrol say they are still grappling with fallout from the Obama years – which they contend allowed security problems like this to fester.

“We weren’t allowed to do our job,” Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the border agents’ union, told Fox News.

More @ Fox

Obama loyalists suspected of ‘sabotage’ with leak of travel ban report

Via Billy

President Donald Trump, accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, right, speaks during a meeting on cyber security in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trump administration officials believe that a Department of Homeland Security report that undercut the president’s position on his travel ban was drafted with the express intent of leaking it to the press, a source close to the department says.

The source said the report was drafted by those loyal to the Obama administration inside the department’s office of intelligence and analysis. The drafters relied solely on open source material, which meant it could be delivered to reporters without violating federal laws on mishandling classified information.

“This was not really a leak but sabotage,” the source said. “This report was commentary. This is insurrection. They all took an oath.”

Trump Pushes For Massive Budget, Staff Cuts At EPA

Via Billy

WASHINGTON, D.C. - FEBRUARY 16:  (AFP-OUT) President Donald Trump participates in a congressional listening session with GOP members in the Roosevelt Room of the White House February 16, 2017 in Washington, DC.  Also pictured is Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY). (Photo by Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)


President Donald Trump will ask Congress to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget 24 percent, or nearly $2 billion, according to sources familiar with the budget plans.

The White House sent draft budget plans to agency heads Monday, detailing billions of dollars in cuts to a wide range of federal programs. Cuts to EPA and other agencies will fund a $54 billion increase in defense spending.

A source informed of the budget plans told E&E News Trump will push for a nearly $2 billion cut to EPA’s $8.1 billion budget. A source told Politico Trump also “proposed reducing EPA’s 15,000-strong workforce to 12,000, a level not seen since the mid-1980s.”