In a Better World

Via NC Renegade

The Incredible Shrinking President

Via Daily Timewaster

In 1981 Lily Tomlin starred in a film, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”, and it seems to me that Barack Obama is starring in the 2013 sequel, “The Incredible Shrinking President.”

A half hour late to his Rose Garden announcement on Saturday, President Obama put the best possible spin he could on his badly timed threat to lob a half-billion dollars’ worth of Tomahawk missiles into Syria as retaliation for the gas attack; one whose perpetrator is not as yet known with any certainty.

This is a President who could not put together a coalition of nations to support his proposed action. His predecessor (“It’s all Bush’s fault”) had some forty nations on board for his attack on Iraq.

Obama could not get a United Nations’ resolution. His predecessor had some sixteen UN resolutions. He has been told that Congress would have to authorize covering the cost of the action and of replacing the missiles because his administration has cut the Defense Department budget to the bone.

There’s a word to describe someone who would get himself into such a fix: JERK.

 More @ Canada Free Press

Obama: Sex Ed for Kindergartners ‘Is the Right Thing to Do’

Via Angry Mike

 

How far we have fallen.

The Chicago Public Schools this year are mandating that the district’s kindergarten classes include sex education, fulfilling a proposal President Barack Obama supported in 2003 when he served in the Illinois state senate and later defended when he ran for president in the 2008 election cycle.

At a Planned Parenthood convention at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2007, a teenage girl who said she worked as a sex-education “peer educator” in the D.C. public schools asked then-U.S. Sen. Obama what he would do to encourage the teaching of “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education.”

Obama first noted that he had worked with Planned Parenthood to push a sex education bill when he served in the Illinois state legislature.

Then he said: “I remember Alan Keyes—I ran against Alan Keyes—but I remember him using this in his campaign against me, saying, ‘Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergartners.
“And you know,” said Obama, “I didn’t know what to tell him. But it is the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools.”

ABCNews.com published a story about what Obama told Planned Parenthood. It carried the headline: “Sex Ed for Kindergartners ‘Right Thing to Do,’ Says Obama.”

More @ CNS

Intervening

Via TSP 

Real Causes

 I can't recommend Dr. Clyde or Chronicles too much.

Widely acclaimed as the world’s foremost scholar of John C. Calhoun, Dr. Clyde N. Wilson is an eminent authority on America’s War Between the States and its fundamental causes.  His introduction to the North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial website is required reading for any honest student of history, and for anyone with a serious interest in understanding that conflict.  The following article was published in July 2009 issue of Chronicles, the Magazine of American Culture.  This fine periodical can be subscribed to via www.chroniclesmagazine.org.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"

www.ncwbts150.com

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Real Causes

“Ask any trendy student of history today and he will tell you that, without question, the cause of the great American bloodletting of 1861-65 was slavery.  Slavery, and nothing but slavery.  The unstated and usually unconscious assumption is that only people warped by a vicious institution could possibly fight against being part of “the greatest nation on earth.”

This is an older corollary of the present national dictum that everybody in the world really wants to be an American if they could only be cured of delusions and bad motives – by aerial bombardment if necessary.

There is an even deeper and less conscious assumption here: malicious, unprovoked hatred of Southern people that is endemic in many American circles.  Thus, according to the wisdom of current “scholars,” no credit is to be given to anything that Southerners might say about their own reasons and motives. They are all merely repeating “Lost Cause myths” to cover up their evil deeds. (Of course, no one points out that “Father Abraham,” the Glorious Union,” and “dying to make men free” might partake of some myth-making too.)

Set aside the question of causation in history is a complex one, to say the least. Still, it is true that historians of other generations, of vastly greater breadth of learning than most of today’s ascribed other “causes” to the most critical event in American history: a clash of economic interests and cultures, blundering politicians, irresponsible agitators. 

There is a bit of sleight of hand along with today’s fashionable assumptions. Even if slavery may have in some simplistic and abstract sense “caused” the secession of the first seven Southern States, that does not establish that it “caused” the war.  The war was caused by the determination of Lincoln and his party to conquer the Southern States and destroy their legal governments. 

Caused, one might say, by Northern nationalism – nationalism being a combination of romantic identification with a centralized state and interest in a unitary economic market.  The war, after all, consisted of the invasion and conquest of the South by the US government – a very simple fact that most Americans are unable to process, along with the plain fact that Northern soldiers did not make war for the purpose of freeing black people.

One of Lincoln’s main deceptions was the claim that the Founding Fathers had intended to abolish slavery but had not quite got around to it.  Thus the Southerners of this time were rebelling against the true founding by insisting on noninterference, while he and his party were upholding the settled understanding of the Founders. James McPherson, perhaps the “leading” historian of today in regard to the Great Unpleasantness and no Southern apologist, along with many others points out that it was the North that had changed by 1860, while the South had remained attached to the original concept of the Union. 

Now one may be glad, as McPherson is, that the North changed and triumphed with a new version of America, but to deny which side was revolutionary is simply dishonest.

Historians have devoted vast attention to the South, feeling it was necessary to explain where the South went wrong and find the source of the perversion that led it to a doomed attempt to escape the greatest country on earth.  For, after all, “American” is the norm of the universe, and any divergence from it is a pathology. But if it was the North that changed, ought not our primary focus in understanding American history to be on how and why the North changed during the pre-war period?

I pointed out on these pages 20 years ago or more that Northern history was the future cutting-edge of American historical study. A large number of solid works have since proved that my prediction has some merit: Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South; Harlow W. Scheidley, Sectional Nationalism; Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; Anne Farrow et al, Complicity; Richard H. Abbott, Cotton and Capital; Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America; two excellent books on Lincoln by William Marvel; and others.  Clash of Extremes may be counted among the works on the War that pay serious attention to the North.  Writes [author Mark] Egnal:

“In sum, the current emphasis on slavery as the cause of the Civil War is fraught with problems. It does not clarify the sequence of events, the divisions within the sections, or the politics and actions of the Republican party.  It is these problems that a new interpretation must address.”

The author does not neglect the sins of the South, real and alleged, but his most important contribution is his description of a truly critical new development of the late antebellum period, which he calls “the Lake Economy.” 

The Midwest was first settled by Southerners farming the north side of the Ohio Valley. In the late antebellum period, the Upper Midwest was settled by New Englanders and Europeans who developed a new economic regime along with a militant agenda of their own self-interest and vision of the national future. 

It was this culture that Lincoln and his party represented and out of which, by military conquest, they created a new America that superseded the old Union of the fathers and put us on the course that the follow today.  It was certainly American, but it was a new version that essentially repudiated the founding.” 

(Real Causes, Clyde N. Wilson, Chronicles, July 2009, pp. 33-34) 

NC: Fear of lawsuit doesn’t stop pre-game prayer

Via NC Links

For years, popular public address announcer and Randolph County Board of Education chair Tommy McDonald has led fans in a brief prayer before football games at Randleman High School.

Friday night, he had to pause for reflection.

Someone — McDonald doesn’t know who — sent him an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) publication that defines the American judicial system’s attitude toward religious observations in public settings, including prayer before school sporting events.

McDonald said he spoke with county school attorney, Jill Wilson, earlier in the week about the pre-game prayer. He said Wilson advised him to seriously consider the consequences.

“She said these people (ACLU members) are pretty serious about what they do,” he said, adding Wilson pointed out the ACLU might sue both him and the county school system if he prayed.

McDonald said he spoke with Coach Shane Handy, who coaches RHS football. He said he struggled to decide what he should do since receiving the booklet on Tuesday when the county school board held an all-day work session and regular meeting at Pinewood Country Club. He didn’t know Friday if any other school board member had received a copy of the ACLU publication.

At 6:45 p.m. Friday, before the game between the Randleman Tigers and the Southwestern Randolph Cougars was scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m., McDonald said he still wasn’t sure what he would do.

More @ Courier-Tribune

12 Black Teens Brutally Gang Rape 2 Women In Delaware Park

The PD asks for help identifying the culprits, but doesn't mention their description, so how in the hell does that help?  I guess we are supposed to look for all colors......... 

 

 Shhh! Teen mob that raped 2 women ... was black '

 

Tennessee to roll out “No Refusal” blood-draw DUI checkpoints for Labor Day

Via Hype And Fail

 

  Labor Day: another holiday, another excuse to push the limits of the police power over citizens.  All across the state, Tennessee police will be performing another round of highly-publicized “no refusal” blood-draw DUI checkpoints this weekend.  With police armed with a 2012 law that allows them to forcibly extract blood from drivers, its a bad time to be a citizen who does not consent to searches.

Forcible blood draws began in Tennessee in 2009, being used only for cases of vehicular assault.  In all other circumstances, the blood draws were not forcible.  They could be declined, with the understanding the DUI suspect’s driver’s license would be suspended.  Tennessee calls it the Implied Consent Statute.

That changed January 1, 2012, with the enactment of a new law that took away that choice for suspects to decline with a license suspension.  Ever since the law took effect, police can obtain rubber-stamped warrants to forcibly extract blood from any driver they decide is a DUI suspect.

More @ Police State USA

Texas official preparing for independence

 

Barry Smitherman, head of the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, is making waves for his comments about economic collapse, energy policy and the future.

But don’t a lot of officials address those same issues?

Yes, but not the same way Smitherman does.

He talks about economic collapse as what will happen to the rest of the United States, not Texas. And he talks about energy policy as a way to make sure Texas commerce will continue, without the rest of the United States. And when he talks about the future, he focuses on Texas, because he believes there might not be the rest of the United States.

See a pattern?

“One of the things I’ve focused on in the last 10 years of my public sector life is preparing Texas to be a prosperous and safe place to work, regardless of what happens outside our borders,” he said.

“We are uniquely situated because we have energy resources, fossil and otherwise, and our own independent electrical grid. Generally speaking, we have made great progress in becoming an independent nation, an ‘island nation’ if you will, and I think we want to continue down that path so that if the rest of the country falls apart, Texas can operate as a stand-alone entity with energy, food, water and roads as if we were a closed-loop system.”

Smitherman said he feels Texas officials must do what they can to prepare the state.

 More @ WND

SEAL Team 6 families' suspicions of gov't grow

 

More than two years after President Obama reassured the father of a member of SEAL Team 6 that the government would look into the death of his son, the father is still waiting for a response, and his suspicions are growing.

On Aug. 9, 2011, Taliban forces were waiting for a Chinook helicopter carrying members of the elite unit SEAL Team 6 to approach its landing site. The helicopter was attacked from three sides in a coordinated ambush.

Although it was known Taliban forces were in the area, the SEALs did not have the air cover that was a standard procedure for missions of that type. During the ambush, the Chinook was reportedly shot down by a shoulder-fired missile, killing all 38 people on board, including 25 American special operations personnel, five U.S. Army National Guard and Army Reserve crewmen, a U.S. military dog, seven Afghan commandos and an Afghan interpreter.

Charles Strange, whose son Michael was killed in the ambush, said in a meeting with President Obama after the attack he whispered in the president’s ear to ask him if there would be a congressional investigation into the death of his son. Obama whispered back, “We will look very, very, very, deep into this.”

However, more than two years after the attack, the families are still waiting for answers, and they now have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to find out what happened. The lawsuit is being handled by Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and now Freedom Watch, who is also a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor.

More @ WND