Friday, September 22, 2017

Palin: Alabama proves that the swamp is hijacking the presidency

Via Billy


Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says the outcome of the GOP Senate runoff between establishment favored Alabama Sen. Luther Strange and conservative stalwart Judge Roy Moore will determine whether the swamp he’s trying to drain will ultimately absorb President Donald Trump’s administration.

Palin told Alabamians gathered at a Moore campaign rally that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s GOP establishment is trying to “hijack” Trump’s presidency and turn it against the voters who turned out last November to express their desire for conservative change in Washington.

“The forgotten man and woman in this country, they stood up and we beat the swamp. But, alas, 10 months later, guys, the swamp, it’s trying to hijack this presidency,” Palin said, according to a Washington Post report.

What’s Happened to the Southern Heartland?

 

 DATED

With roots in urban America, the libertarian New Class, which staffs so many of today’s influential think tanks, is disinclined to view the troubles in rural America as a real crisis. This group tends to view a farm as simply another unit of production that, if inefficient, should wither away without public concern—indeed no more deserving of concern than the closing of an unprofitable convenience store or a failing fast-food outlet.

Traditional conservatives, especially Southern conservatives who have their personal and intellectual roots in America’s agrarian past, find the scope and severity of change in rural America to be profoundly alarming and very deserving of public concern. They fear that the winds of economic change that are blowing across rural America will alter the national character. Change has been taking place for some years, of course, and adjustments have been made to it. However, the collapse of world markets for American agricultural products—and the dim likelihood of these being regained any time soon—has accelerated change alarmingly. The visionary planners who promoted the “Green Revolution” succeeded to an extent they and others never imagined. American agricultural assistance to Third World countries has caused their food production to soar. As a result, America has lost major foreign markets, and the country’s domestic agricultural economy has been devastated.

“I support Assad because he's the defender of Middle Eastern Christianity"

Via Frank


The brutal leader at the center of Syria’s five-year-long war has found support in one of the least likely places — among the alt-right.

The white nationalists and trolls who identify with the alt-right have lifted up Bashar al-Assad as a hero in recent years. Support for the Syrian president means they can further tangled internet conspiracy theories, taps into a deep vein of anti-Semitism, anti-interventionism, and anti-globalism, and allows them to wind up their biggest enemy: liberals. (You got that right at least: liberals = commies)

More @ Buzz Feed

When I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself


Russia threatens to retaliate against US forces in Syria

 russian-special-forces-deir-ezzor-0.jpg

 War is good for us said ever President since .............

'Fire points in those areas will be immediately suppressed with all military means' says Major-General Igor Konashenkov

Russia has threatened to target areas in Syria where American special forces and US-backed militia are operating if its own forces came under fire from them - something it said had already happened twice.

The country's defence ministry said Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias fighting, had taken up positions on the eastern banks of the Euphrates alongside US special forces. 

The SDF had twice opened fire with mortars and artillery on Syrian troops who were working alongside Russian special forces, it claimed. 

Mueller team under fire for 'brass-knuckle' tactics in bid to squeeze Manafort

Via Billy

http://a57.foxnews.com/media2.foxnews.com/BrightCove/694940094001/2017/09/20/896/504/694940094001_5582224813001_5582214673001-vs.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

When a report surfaced that federal agents picked the lock on Paul Manafort’s front door for a surprise raid over the summer while the former Trump campaign chairman was in bed, it was also a wake-up call for prominent Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall.

“Here is a United States citizen where the FBI is coming in, picking his lock, and raiding his home in the early morning, over what? It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. It’s just crazy. We’re not the Soviet Union. It’s appalling,” said Kirkendall, who has worked on cases involving one of the special counsel’s key investigators, Andrew Weissmann.

The intensity of the focus on Manafort is widely seen as a potential effort by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to pressure him into providing information on others, possibly President Trump himself, in the Russia probe.

But the “brass-knuckle” tactics have raised eyebrows in the legal community.

More @ Fox

Nat Turner’s 1831 Brutal Massacre

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The following is a very graphic and long account Nat Turner’s massacre of innocents in Southampton County, Virginia in August 1831, during which he and his followers brutally murdered over sixty white citizens: women, children and old men. This tragic event led to severe restrictions on slaves, free blacks, and the ongoing emancipation of slaves that had been common in the South before 1831.  The South laid blame for the murders on Northern abolitionists who incited the slaves to such actions, and led to the South seriously reconsidering the value of political union with the North.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Nat Turner’s 1831 Brutal Massacre

“With no large plantations, there were no large slaveholders, and [Southampton] county typified older communities where slavery was passing by personal manumission; the slaves and freed Negroes outnumbered the whites to make a potentially dangerous problem. To 6500 whites, there were 7700 slaves and 1500 freed Negroes. Slave and free, all Negroes lived in intimate proximity to the whites, a situation which did not exist on large plantations where overseers came between the masters and field hands. Field hands in that sense scarcely existed in Southampton County.

The most successful plantations were operated avocationally by professional men, doctors and lawyers, since the plantation represented the aspiration of everyone. In the same way, many of the plantation-conscious farmers supplemented their agricultural incomes by working as artisans in small enterprises. Such a man was Joseph Travis, the honest coach-maker.

He had apprenticed to him a sixteen-year-old boy, who shared the bedroom of Mr. Travis’ foster son, Putnam Moore. Mrs. Travis, whose first husband had died, had a baby by Joseph Travis. This small family had no house servants as such. The few colored families of slaves lived in a single cluster of buildings around the farmyard and there was no distinction between house people and field hands. There the whites and blacks, working together and virtually living together, shared an hourly and constant companionship, and knew one another with the casual intimacy of members of the same family. Though everybody worked hard, the slaves were held to a fairly rigid schedule.

Working five days a week from roughly sunup until sundown, they had Saturday afternoons and Sundays off. They were encouraged to grow garden crops for themselves on allotted plots of ground, either to fill out their diets according to personal tastes or for use in trade or barter. Skills were taught them and, as in other families like the Travis’ who could not afford to free their lifetime investment, sometimes a Negro worked out his freedom at a trade.

Great attention was given to their religious education. They went to the whites’ churches, where the Methodist and Baptist preachers of the peoples’ religion evoked fiery and wondrous images, and they developed their own preachers, who supplanted the whites’. Such a Negro preacher acted as Joseph Travis’ “overseer.”

The overseer of this little family plantation, bearing not even unintentional similarity to Simon Legree, merely acted for the owner with the few Negroes who worked on the farm. With Joseph Travis busy at his coach-making, somebody had to be in charge of the work, though The Preacher extended his leadership over the total lives of the three families in the Travis farmyard, and exerted considerable influence over other Negroes in the scattered community.

He always said that Mr. Travis was a very kind man, maybe even too indulgent with his people, and Mr. Travis regarded The Preacher as something of a privileged character. He had been born in the county of an African mother and a slave father, who ran away when The Preacher was a child. He had been raised by his grandmother, who worked on his religious education, and by his mother, who was deeply impressed with the child’s gift of second sight.

When the owners’ attention was called to his precociousness, they encouraged him to read and gave him a Bible. He culled the Bible for predictions and prophesies which he used to impose his visions on his fellow slaves. He found portents in the sun and moon, portentous hieroglyphics in leaves and suchlike, and in general created of himself a mysterious figure of supernatural gifts.

The Preacher did not regard himself as a humbug in imposing on his fellows. He actually believed he could read signs in the sky. “Behold me in the heavens,” the Holy Spirit said to him, and he beheld and he knew. He knew the signs were directing him toward a holy mission. In the spring of 1828, he heard a loud noise in the heavens and, he said, “The spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it in and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be the last and the last should be free.”

The twenty-first of August was a Sunday, in the season when the white people spent the day away at camp meetings. In The Preacher’s cabin, his wife was fixing Sunday dinner for their child. In the woods below the fields, six of The Preacher’s disciples were gathered in the glen, where to a Sunday feast they added some of the apple brandy which was always handy to acquire. Only one of them belonged to Mr. Travis – Hark Travis, a magnificently and powerfully built black man. Two others, Sam and the ferocious Will Francis, belonged to one of Mrs. Travis’ brothers. As farms were relatively few in the sparsely settled and wooded country, all the Negroes were intimately acquainted.

The Preacher, after his custom of keeping himself aloof, joined the frolic in the middle of the afternoon, when several hours of feasting and drinking had his followers in receptive humor. From then until full night he coached them in the details of his predestined mission in which they were to be allowed to participate.

At ten o’clock they left the woods and silently approached the dark farmyard of the Travis house. All lights were out in the house where the family, tired from their trip to the camp-meeting, were asleep. In the farmyard stood a Negro named Austin, who joined them, and brought The Preacher’s band to eight.

The seven followers went to the unlocked cider press while The Preacher studied the situation. When the silent man returned, The Preacher directed Hark, the Apollo, to set a tall ladder against an upper story window sill. The Preacher climbed the ladder, stepped through the open window, and tiptoed through the familiar house down to the front door. When he opened it, his disciples crept in. The fearsome Will Francis held a broadax and one of the men gave The Preacher a hatchet. Without any other weapons, the eight men crept into the master bedroom, where Mr. & Mrs. Travis were asleep.

When The Preacher stood over them, he paused, looking on the face of the kindly man who had given him so many privileges. The other Negroes told him the leader must strike the first blow. After another pause, The Preacher struck suddenly and awkwardly down at the sleeping man.

The hatchet glanced off, giving a blow to the side of the head. Mr. Travis, startled into wakefulness, struggled out of bed, sleepily calling for his wife. When his bare feet touched the floor, Will Francis, with no confusion of purpose, brought the broadax down on his head in a single long stroke. Without another sound, Mr. Travis fell dead to the floor. Whirling, Will came down with the broadax again, and Mrs. Travis died in her bed without ever coming fully awake.

The sounds had not aroused the two sixteen-year-old boys – Mrs. Travis’ son, Putnam Moore, and the apprentice, Joel Westbrook – asleep in the same bed in a room in another part of the house. They were killed before they were awakened.

Last, The Preacher went into the baby’s room. He had often played with the child and fondled it, and the baby smiled at him when he woke up. The Preacher backed out, unable to touch the child, and sent in Will and another follower to knock the baby’s brains out against the brick fireplace.

With the house theirs, they took four shotguns, several muskets, powder and shot, and exchanged their clothes for garments of the dead men. To give a dash to their new costumes, they got some of the red cloth with which the top of the gig was lined and tore that into sashes to go around their waists and shoulders. The material gave out and they made other strips from sheets, which they dyed in the freely flowing blood. The Preacher felt that this unit was now ready to serve as the nucleus around which all the slaves of the county would rally.

With some of the force mounted on Travis’ horses, they went to the small farm owned by Mrs. Travis’ brother, who was also the brother of the owner of Sam and Will. This younger Mr. Francis, a bachelor who lived with his one slave in a single-room house, came to the door when Will and Sam called to him that they had a message from his brother.

When he opened the door they grabbed him. He was a strong man and he fought, calling to his loyal slave for his gun. One of The Preacher’s men shot Mr. Francis’s slave, Nelson, who managed to stagger to the back door and escape in the darkness to the woods. He started out to give the alarm to his master’s brother, the owner of Will and Sam, but he didn’t make it that far. Mr. Francis was finished off before Nelson had reached the woods, going down under repeated blows from the hatchet.

From there The Preacher’s band walked on through the night to the home of Mrs. Harris, a widow with several children and grandchildren. Unbeknownst to themselves as they slept, this family was spared through the agency of their slave, Joe, who joined The Preacher on the condition that his people be spared.

With their first recruit, the band descended on the home of the widow Reese, whose front door was unlocked. They killed her in her sleep, her son as he awakened, caught the white farm manager who tried to escape in the darkness. He got off with his life by feigning death, though he was forever after crippled.

By then other slaves, too frightened to defend the whites but unwilling to join the insurgents, had fled before the band, and nearby plantations were warned. Not willing to risk losing any of his eight followers, The Preacher changed his course.

At sunrise on Monday morning they reached the substantial home of the widow Turner…Mrs. Turner’s manager was already at work at the distillery beside the lane to the house. He was shot and stripped, his clothes going to the last recruit, the Joe who had saved his own people. Mrs. Turner and a kinswoman were awakened by the shot and came downstairs to bolt the door. The fearsome will battered the door down with several strokes of his ax, and the two women were grabbed in the hallway.

While they pleaded for their lives, Will went about his skillful work of execution on Mrs. Turner, and The Preacher pulled Mrs. Newsom, trembling violently, out of the door. He kept striking her over the head with a sword he had acquired. The edge was too blunt to kill the screaming woman and Will, turning from the corpse of Mrs. Turner, methodically finished off The Preacher’s victim with his ax.

They got silver there and more decoration for their costumes, and when they left the silent plantation at full daylight their number had spread to fifteen. They divided, those on foot under The Preacher swinging by the Bryant’s, where they paused to kill the couple, their child, and Mrs. Bryant’s mother, before joining the mounted force at the pleasant establishment of Mrs. Whitehead.

When The Preacher’s force got there, Mrs. Whitehead’s grown son had already been hacked to death in a cotton patch while his own slaves looked on. Inside the house three daughters and a child, being bathed by his grandmother were dead. Will was dragging the mother of the family out into the yard, where he decapitated her, and a young girl who had hidden was running for the woods. The Preacher caught her and, his sword failing him again, beat her to death with a fence rail. Another daughter, the only member of the family to survive, had made it to the woods where she was hidden by a house slave.

When they left the seven dead and mutilated bodies at the Whitehead’s, The Preacher’s band had grown and acquired more weapons and horses. They had also drunk more cider and brandy, and they moved boldly ahead to continue the massacre although they knew that the alarm was out by then. Several of the next small plantations in their line of march were deserted. The band divided again, with Will the executioner leading the mounted force toward the house of his own master, Nathaniel Francis, the brother of The Preacher’s Mrs. Travis and of the bachelor whose slave, Nelson, had been among the first to give the warning.

Though the warning had not reached the Francis plantation, a Negro boy had told Mr. Francis a wild tale of the slaughter of his sister’s family. Having heard nothing of The Preacher’s band, Mr. Francis and his mother were on their way to investigate the grisly scene awaiting them at the Travis household.

Two of Mr. Francis’ nephews, eight- and three year-old boys, were playing in the lane as the Negroes rode silently toward them. The three-year-old, seeing the familiar Will, asked for a ride as he had many times before. Will picked him up on the horse, cut off his head, and dropped the body in the lane. The other boy screamed and tried to hide, but they were too fast for him.

Henry Doyle, the overseer, seeing this, ran to warn Mrs. Francis. He was shot dead in the doorway of the house, but not before he had warned Mrs. Francis. A house slave hid her between the plastering and the roof in one of the “jump” rooms, and kept The Preacher’s band away from her hiding place by pretending to hunt for her. When the Negroes had gone on, the house slave of necessity among them, Mrs. Francis came down to find the other house women dividing her clothes, including her wedding dress. One attacked her with a dirk and another defended her. She escaped to join her husband and be taken to safety.

When the band left the Francis plantation, the alarm by then was general and the Negroes were beginning to get drunk. They headed for the road to the county seat. They found more deserted houses, where faithful slaves had left to hide their masters, and met other slaves who had waited to join the insurrectionists. At young Captain Barrow’s the warning had been received and the overseer had escaped, but Mrs. Barrow, a woman of beauty, had delayed to arrange her toilet before appearing abroad. She tarried so long that the Negroes reached the house before she left. Her husband called to her to run out the back door while he fought from the front.

In leaving, Mrs. Barrow had the same experience with her house slaves as had Mrs. Francis. A younger one tried to hold her for the mob, while an older one freed her and held the young Negro woman while her mistress escaped. In front, Captain Barrow emptied a pistol, a single-shot rifle, and a shotgun, and fought with the butt of the gun across the porch, through the hall, and into the front room. He was holding them off when a Negro on the outside reached through the window sill and, from behind, sliced his throat with a razor.

The Preacher’s men had great respect for Captain Barrow’s bravery. They drank his blood and spared his corpse mutilation. Instead, they laid him out in a bed quilt and placed a plug of tobacco on his breast.

It was ten o’clock Monday morning when they left there, and the two bands soon converged. They then numbered about fifty. The Preacher’s vision of a mass insurrection was coming true. White men were trying to form a force ahead of the band but some of the men, on seeing the bleeding and mutilated bodies of women, hurried back to their farms to hide their own wives and children. Hundreds of women and children were gathering in the county seat at Jerusalem, unaware that the band’s winding course was directed there.

On the way The Preacher’s formidable force passed more deserted places, but got its biggest haul at Walker’s country corner. A children’s boarding school was there and a large distillery, a blacksmith shop, and the wheelwright, and it had taken some time to gather all the people in the neighborhood. Before they could start for Jerusalem, the Negroes were on them. Some escaped to the screams of those being chased and butchered. More than ten were killed there, mostly children.

From the Walker massacre, the band headed directly for Jerusalem. By then eighteen white men had gathered with arms at some distance from the town, where four hundred unarmed people had collected. The Preacher’s band of sixty would have reached the town first except that his lieutenants overruled him when they passed the famous brandy cellar at Parker’s deserted plantation, three miles from town. They tarried there to quench their thirsts.

The eighteen white men came on them in Parker’s field and opened fire. In a short, pitched battle the boldest Negroes, leading a charge, fell, and most of the insurrectionists fled. The Preacher escaped with twenty of his most faithful followers, and headed for the Carolina border.

He was seeking new recruits then. They were slow coming in and victims were getting scarce. Late in the afternoon The Preacher, still supported by the Apollo-like Hark and Will with his broadax, allowed a single armed planter to hold off his band from a lady with two children. That planter’s family had already escaped to safety.

[After camping that night,] . . . at dawn, The Preacher started for the large and handsome home of Dr. Blunt, one of the county’s few plantations of the legend, and on the edge of the district of yesterday’s triumph. Not seeking victims then, The Preacher wanted fresh supplies and recruits to put heart and strength back into the insurrection.

He reached the Blunts’ yard fence just before daylight. A precautionary shot was fired to see if the darkened house was deserted, as expected. Then the powerful Hark broke down the gate, and the group advanced toward the house, looking for salves to join them. The band was within twenty yards of the house when firing broke out from the front porch. Hark Travis, one of the original conspirators . . . fell wounded in the first volley. When The Preacher, shaken but grown desperate, tried to rally his force for an attack, another volley dropped two more. His men broke. At that moment, Dr. Blunt’s slaves came swarming out of hiding places, armed with grub hoes, and rushed the insurrectionists. The Preacher fled with his men, Dr. Blunt’s slaves rounded up several prisoners, including the wounded Hark, crawling toward a cotton patch.

Dr. Blunt, his fifteen-year-old son, and his manager had done the firing, while the women loaded single-shot rifles and shotguns. Before The Preacher’s men arrived, Dr. Blunt had given his own slaves the choice of fighting with his family or leaving. They chose unanimously to fight.

More in desperation than purpose [The Preacher] led the dozen remaining followers to retrace their triumphant steps of the day before. At the first plantation the Greenville County cavalry militia rode them down. They killed will, the ax-executioner, and killed or captured all except The Preacher and two others. The insurrection was over then, though the alarmed neighbors did not know it.

Following the Greenville cavalry, other militia units poured into the county during the next two days, and US Marines from Norfolk. The two men who had escaped with The Preacher were captured. Many who had followed the leader during the successful stages of Monday had returned to their homes. They were hunted down, some killed and others taken to jail. But The Preacher eluded them until the beginning of October.

While changing hiding places on another Sunday, he encountered a poor farmer in some woods. Like his neighbors, this Mr. Phipps was carrying a gun when he came upon the ragged, emaciated, and wretched-looking Preacher, who immediately surrendered.

No demonstration was made against The Preacher when he was brought to jail or when he and fifty-two others were brought to trial. Of these, seventeen were hanged and twelve transported. Of five free Negroes among them, one was acquitted, the others went to Superior Court, where one more was acquitted and three convicted. The Preacher confessed fully to his leadership and to the details of the murder of more than fifty white people.

With The Preacher’s execution, the case was closed and entered the record books as Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

In history, the unelaborated reference to “Nat Turner’s Rebellion” has been made so casually for so long that the tag has no association with the terror and horror of mass murder. Also, to the population of the United States today the slave insurrection in Haiti is a remote thing, part of the inevitable and the just march of events. But to the South, where white refugees had fled – at least one to Southampton County – the Haiti massacre was the dread reminder of what could happen to them. With Nat Turner, it had happened. The deep fear of the blacks’ uprising against them had been implemented. It was never to leave.”

(The Land they Fought For, Clifford Dowdey, Doubleday & Company, 1955, excerpts, pp. 14-22)

Virginia Store Clerk Escapes Prosecution After Shooting Fleeing Thug in the Back

 

A clerk at a convenience store in Virginia will not be prosecuted for shooting and killing a man who had robbed the store at gunpoint, a grand jury decided this week.

After viewing multiple angles of surveillance video and hearing eyewitness testimony, the grand jury determined that the clerk acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Milton Terrell Gaithers, 35, at the Little B Convenience Store last June.

Video footage shows Gaithers enter the store wearing a black hoodie and a black mask, according to a report from the Southside Messenger. Gaithers struck the clerk in the face with the muzzle of his gun and demanded that the clerk empty the cash register.

More @ Guns America

The Uniparty, unmasked

Via Billy

https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/congressional-intelligence-gang-of-eight-2017-v2.jpg?w=640

It is hard to underestimate the furious rage of conservatives who, whether or not they supported Trump during the campaign, used to believe in the Republican Party.  No more.  The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress and a Republican in the White House.  Are they doing their job as members of the majority party?  Absolutely not.  Of course, some of them are trying, but to no avail; they are a righteous minority, too few in number to win.  The leadership, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, are intransigent to the point of being traitors to the constituents who put them in office. 

There are plenty of other traitors as well.  Clearly, they never meant to actually repeal the disastrous Obamacare.  They voted to repeal it all those times only because they knew that Obama would veto their bills.  So we conservatives have learned an important lesson: there is only one party in Congress, and it is the Establishment Party, and it is a swamp thing.

The Difference Between Ben Carson and Maxine Waters Perfectly Explained

 

The difference between two prominent African-American political leaders in the Republican and Democrat parties couldn’t be more stunning. Just listening to Republican Ben Carson and Democrat Maxine Waters for a few minutes exposes the deep divide between traditional American values and unhinged leftism. The chasm in intelligence between the pair is likewise vast.

Yet, while Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Doctor Ben Carson, largely ignores Mad Maxine, Waters has been mounting relentless attacks against him for the sole transgression of working in the Trump administration.

Black Confederate Soldiers Website

Via SHNV

 

Welcome to the Black Confederate Soldiers website which focuses on connecting families with their ancestor's genealogical records and citations. The purpose of this website is to provide a one-stop location of free genealogy records by state about 19th Century slaves and freedmen who served in various capacities with the Confederate States Army and Navy during the American Civil War.  

Primary and Secondary sources of information are made available to family historians researching ancestors who lived in the southern states during the American Civil War (1861-1865).  

DATA: Voter Registration Trends Favor Republicans Bigly


 
In short, Democrats saw the trend in their direction in only one state (DE) and even where they had a net gain (CO), it had fallen from previous months. While one or two states might be exceptions or quixotic, the same cannot be said for a sample of twelve battleground states. This represents a net gain by Republicans across these states of over 290,000 votes. As I have said in previous columns, these numbers suggest if the election were held today, Trump would win all the electoral votes he carried in 2016 and add New Hampshire, and probably Maine and New Mexico. But other states are rapidly coming in to play.

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

An ongoing analysis of voter registration trends since November 2016—the election of Donald Trump—continues to show significant trends toward Republicans almost across the board. A couple of notes on the data are necessary:
  1. In many cases—almost all except Arizona and Delaware—the total number of registered Democrats and Republicans both has fallen. This is normal. Secretaries of State purge voter rolls of those who have moved, died, or asked to be removed from the rolls. The baseline month is November 2016, but some states have not updated up to September. I used the most recent date in these cases. Pennsylvania’s data has still not been updated from May, but I’ll include it anyway.
  2. New Jersey was the only state to show one party declining (the Democrats) and the other gaining (the Republicans, though only by 287 voters).
  3. Unfortunately MI, WI, OH, MN, VA, GA, and TX do not register voters by party, so tracking these states is not possible. Once some of them—such as OH—have primaries, a comparison to previous primary turnout would be beneficial.
So here we go:

Sharyl Attkisson explains what we are up against

Via Billy


This is easily the read of the day.  Sharyl Attkisson is the bravest reporter of her generation, so much of a threat to people with access to the capabilities of our intel agencies that she was spied upon and worse.  Today she faces the ugly truth about what recent reports (if true) reveal:

Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.

She goes on to review a number of instances of us being lied to about spying, about spying on journalists, and then gets to her personal experience in fighting back against an actual hack she experienced while at CBS News:

The NYT on Sam Francis & Donald Trump

Via Peter

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vdare-live/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/23024416/Francis.jpg

The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face — in the Washington Times cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — I thought he was a crank, but it’s clear now that he was at that moment becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There’s very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn’t champion a quarter century ago.

In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights. The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. 

But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.

Poll finds Moore with eight-point lead on Strange in Alabama

Via Billy

Poll finds Moore with eight-point lead on Strange in Alabama

A new poll shows former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore (R) leading Sen. Luther Strange (R) by eight points just days before the Republican primary for the Alabama Senate.

Moore, the favorite on the right, took 54 percent support in a Fox10 News/Strategy Research survey, while the incumbent Strange got 46 percent.

The race has become a proxy war between the conservative grass roots and the establishment.

More @ The Hill

California’s Vietnam War: For Golden State Democrats, some Asians are more equal than others.

Via Billy


The Vietnam War, the ten-part, 18-hour documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is running on PBS. Thursday’s episode 5 showed the conflict on the brink of the Tet Offensive in 1968. Future episodes will deal with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973, which paved the way for the victory of the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese Communists in 1975. One California state senator has considerable experience on that front.

The Communists changed the name of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City and Janet Nguyen was born there in 1976. Her father was a South Vietnamese soldier and imprisoned when the family tried to escape. The Communists assassinated her uncle, a South Vietnamese Army officer, in front of his village and family.

More @ Front Page

NC: Gov. Cooper: Withdraw Unlawful Request to State Historical Commisson

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/ckt17s-sun.jpg/alternates/LANDSCAPE_1140/sun.jpg

 

Southern Baptists Back Confederate Monument Removal in Memphis

Via Billy

 Southern Baptists Back Confederate Monument Removal in Memphis
A NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll survey taken after the protests found that few white evangelicals agreed that statues honoring Confederate leaders should be taken down. Only 6 percent said they should be removed because they offend some people, far fewer than the 27 percent of Americans and 40 percent of African Americans who wanted to see them removed.

While a plurality of African Americans defended such statues as historical symbols, white evangelicals were more likely to do so; 85 percent believed they should remain, compared to 62 percent of Americans and 44 percent of African Americans.

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After Charlottesville, more Christians are aligning with efforts to remove Confederate names and landmarks. In the past week, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and about a dozen of its pastors called for the removal of a Confederate statue in Memphis, Tennessee, while members of a historic Episcopal church in Lexington, Virginia, voted to remove Robert E. Lee from its name.

The SBC’s Steve Gaines, senior pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church, joined more than 150 Memphis-area clergy in a letter requesting the state historical commission relocate a statue of Memphis native Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader is buried in a city park that bore his name until 2013.

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