Bad, Press

Via Joe

The greatest service that Donald Trump has rendered these United States is to have exposed the many ailments of which he is a symptom but not a cause. We had political division and cultural alienation before him. We had overbearing government and an imperial executive branch before him. We had media that were arrogant, parochial, and impenitent before him, too. Alas, they have grown yet worse since he arrived.

How the media fail

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

More @ NRO

3-year-old boy lost in NC woods tells his family he ‘hung out with a bear for 2 days’

 

  The Raleigh News & Observer 

The 3-year-old boy who spent two days lost in the woods of eastern North Carolina tells his family he “hung out with a bear” for companionship while hundreds of people searched frantically in cold and rainy weather to find him. His aunt, Breanna Hathaway, shared that revelation on Facebook Friday morning, adding that Casey “is healthy, smiling, and talking” after being found late Thursday night. The post has gotten more than 500 comments and 2,100 shares through the day. Said he hung out with a bear for two days,” she posted. “God sent him a friend to keep him safe. God is (a) good God. Miracles do happen.”

Comment on "How the Shutdown Shows Us Exactly Where to Start Cutting Government":

•                                      How the Shutdown Shows Us Exactly Where to Start C...

The other thing ignored here and possibly on the authors elephant in the room list, its that all these government dept's are not government but subcontracted out roles to the private sector through agencies/quangos, they are corporatons and not the goverment which would make them civil servants - not employees. It is a huge fundemental difference like oil and water. Most of the staff at congress or the white house or the military are civil servants so this idea that they are furloghed government workers has to go, they are not entitiled to a role, they are contracted out roles which as shown are largely unnecessary, i.e. the coast guard has taken away a role better done by the US navy, or the state one level down the pyramid of power is already operating a similar function. What is thier real role, well it is to concentrate power and authroity under one federal body in Washington DC so as to run an empire planned just before US independence by the sons of Liberty, it is not to serve, it is to rule. And the US has always been a corporation beginning with the General Land Office which took over roles done by the department of the treasury. This concentration of power was what sparked off the US civil war.

--DK

North Carolina congressman Walter Jones, a Ron Paul Republican, in hospice care

 

Longtime Republican U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, who hasn’t voted in Congress since September, is in hospice care, his office reported Saturday.

 In a statement, the office said Jones’ health has declined since he broke his hip last week. Jones was sworn in for his 13th term this month by Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a Wilson Democrat, at Jones’ home in Farmville.

 More @ Raleigh News & Observer

The anti-gun male

Via hbbill

LET'S be honest. He's scared of the thing. That's understandable--so am I. But as a girl I have the luxury of being able to admit it. I don't have to masquerade squeamishness as grand principle-in the interest of mankind, no less.

A man does. He has to say things like "One Taniqua Hall is one too many," as a New York radio talk show host did in referring to the 9-year old New York girl who was accidentally shot last year by her 12-year old cousin playing with his uncle's gun. But the truth is he desperately needs Taniqua Hall, just like he needs as many Columbines and Santees as can be mustered, until they spell an end to the Second Amendment. And not for the benefit of the masses, but for the benefit of his self-esteem.

He often accuses men with guns of "compensating for something."

More @ JWR

Ride with the Devil - William Quantrill

Via The Feral Irishman

“Thou Wicked Servant”

Though opposed to Lincoln’s violations of the Constitution in his war against the American South, Northern Democrats saw the need to crush secession, which was a manifestation of the Tenth Amendment and inherent right of the people of a State to withdraw from a federal compact to which they conditionally assented. Those Northern Democrats did not see that due to the vast differences between the sections by 1861, peaceful separation was the only logical solution for the Southern people to pursue free, representative government. Connecticut Senator William C. Fowler (below) was born in 1793, during Washington’s presidency – living long enough to see the end of Washington’s Union.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

“Thou Wicked Servant”

“Expressing opposition to secession, [Northerners Clement] Vallandigham, [Samuel S.] Cox, [Stephen D.] Carpenter, and Fowler maintained that they desired not an independent Confederacy but simply a restoration of the “Constitution as it is” and the “Union as it was.” They declared they were in favor of a constitutional war to crush secession, but they charged that Lincoln was waging a battle for the conquest and subjugation of the South and that he was conducting it in a despotic fashion, subverting the constitutional liberties of individuals and the rights of States.

Opposing military conscription, they also criticized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and declared that freedom of speech had been abolished in the Union.

In particular, they attacked Lincoln’s policy of emancipation. Spurning the argument that emancipation was a legitimate measure adopted to aid the prosecution of the war, they pictured it as an unconstitutional act by which the President had changed the war aims of the North from the preservation of the Union to abolition of slavery.

“If,” said Fowler in the Connecticut State Senate in 1864, “the President should avow the fact that he has violated the Constitution, in order to save the Union, as the President did in a letter to Mr. Hodge, let us say to him “out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.”

The peace advocates placed special blame for war upon the abolitionists of the North, stating repeatedly that it was not the institution of slavery but the agitation of the slavery question by the abolitionists that had caused hostilities.

For the immediate outbreak of fighting, the three Midwesterners placed responsibility upon Lincoln and the Republicans because of their refusal to compromise with Southerners in the crisis of 1860-1861.”

(Americans Interpret Their Civil War, Thomas J. Pressly, 1954, Princeton University Press, excerpts pp. 131-133)

Acton and Lee: A Conversation on Liberty

Via Cousin John

Editor’s Note: It is interesting to note that Lord Acton corresponded with General Robert E. Lee after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Lord Acton considered America’s Constitution as imperfect and “saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will.” In his letter of November 4, 1866, Lord Acton told General Lee that “secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy,” and expressed his belief that General Lee had been “fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization.”

General Lee, who had taken a loyalty oath to the United States in October of 1865 (his pardon would not be granted for more than a century), and who had been an opponent of secession prior to the war, responded in a letter a few weeks later that he “considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad.” But General Lee added he believed “the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government.”

The two men—the English, Catholic historian and champion of political liberty, and the American, Episcopal warrior and opponent of the dangers of political “consolidation”—indeed shared much in common in terms of their views on liberty. Their full correspondence is reproduced below.

More @ The Imaginative Conservative