Cleveland Police Officer Acquitted of Manslaughter in 2012 Deaths

Roundabout via Jeffery

 

A Cleveland police officer who climbed onto the hood of a car after a chase and fired repeatedly at its unarmed occupants in 2012 was acquitted of manslaughter on Saturday by an Ohio judge.

The trial of the officer, Michael Brelo, played out amid broader questions about how the police interact with African-Americans and the use force, in Cleveland and across the country.

Officer Brelo was one of several officers who shot at Timothy Russell and his passenger, Malissa Williams, during a chase through the Cleveland area on Nov. 29, 2012. The chase, which started in downtown Cleveland, began after reports of gunfire from the car; prosecutors said the noise may have been the car backfiring. 

After the gunfire reports, over 100 officers pursued the car for more than 20 miles at speeds that reached 100 miles an hour. Police officers fired 137 rounds at the car after it was cornered, prosecutors have said, including 49 by Officer Brelo.

More @ The New York Times

Antebellum Southerners in Europe

Via SHNV

 Lucy Holcombe Pickens

 Queen of the Confederacy

I want to look at Southerners going back to Europe long after the roots were planted, especially in the period before the second War of Independence began in 1861. The reason for looking at this is what it tells us about Southerners. One of the things it tells us is that we Southerners were a people. Our relationship to Europe had not much in common with that of those other people, the troublesome ones building their City upon a Hill up in Massachusetts. More than one Southerner encountering Yankees in Europe first began to realize that we were not the same people.

 By the 1830s if not before Americans had perceived the eminence of the German universities and begun to frequent them. When Johnston Pettigrew arrived from Charleston to enter the University of Berlin in 1850, there were about 20 Americans there pursuing advanced studies of one sort or another. With only a few exceptions they were from Massachusetts and South Carolina, and in the unfamiliar environment it was obvious that there were two different national characters present under one citizenship. Their goals, motives, and habits, and especially their personal virtues were distinct. Pettigrew wrote that the Yankees were studious and stingy, the Southerners generous and sociable.

He added that the Yankees made themselves disagreeable by constant boasting about the superiority of the United States, except for the South, of course, which they relentlessly slandered to any foreigner who would listen.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Wolf Trap – Act I – Habeas Corpus – Scene 2 – Who is in Charge Now?

 

Setting the Stage: Ten years after the Ashwander Decision, an Act of Congress established a far more authoritative agency structure, creating a Fourth Branch of Government.

Though intended to affect less than 1% of the population, or so they said, it now affects nearly every one of us.

bu·reauc·ra·cy. noun

A system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.

Administrative Agencies Rule Our Lives

The “Administrative Procedures Act of 1946″ was submitted by Representative Pat McCarran, Democrat, Nevada, who gave us some insight into its purpose, when, in the Congressional Record, he said:

“We have set up a fourth order in the tripartite plan of government which was initiated by the founding fathers of our democracy. They set up the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches; but since that time we have set up fourth dimension, if I may so term it, which is now popularly known as administrative in nature. So we have the legislative, the executive, the judicial, and the administrative.”

 More @ Outpost Of Freedom

Matt Drudge Unleashes Against GOP in Rare Twitter Tirade: ‘It’s the Night of the Republican Suicide’

Via avordvet

 

The Drudge Report founder then set his sights on Speaker of the House John Boehner who expressed support for the trade bill after the Senate’s passage.

Calling it “the Night of the Republican Suicide,” Drudge said if the GOP loses in 2016 it can be “traced to tonight’s trade deception.”

More @ The Blaze

"For every Southern boy fourteen years old,

 

not once but whenever he wants it is the instant when it is still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen year old boy to think this time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago......"

--William Faulkner 

Why the South Fought

 

The Thirteen Colonies in their War of Independence had fought for freedom. But the French Revolution (a true revolution of an under­class) proclaimed not only liberty but equality: and that idea was loosened on the world. But liberty (freedom) and equality are natural allies only up to a point, and then enemies. They were opposed to a degree imperfectly understood by either side in the War for Southern Independence. Which principle was henceforth to limit the other? That question was at issue.

The North, fighting for a compelled union, won; but what also won was ever broadening equality, limiting freedom. More immedi­ately what won was—America. Henceforth Virginians and Carolini­ans were to be Americans and even, with a grim irony, Yankees.

The “United States” ceased to be a plural term: a nation supplanted the united nations.

Even the word “Union” disappeared, for the ghost of the old, dead, voluntary union of states clung about it and made it un-American. The Negro also won the war, almost incidentally, for the North did not fight for him but against his master: it was not a crusade, except for a few; and emancipation, limited to the Confeder­acy, was an act of war, not humanity. But the great, hidden victory was that of equality: the very words “freedom” and “equality” be­came confused and virtually synonymous. Now, said Karl Marx in 1866, the United States are “entering the revolutionary phase.”

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Rev. Graham: Boy Scouts President is ‘Bending to LGBT Activist Groups,’ Putting ‘Innocent Boys at Risk’

Via Cousin John

The president of the Boy Scouts of America, Robert Gates, yesterday essentially called for the organization to drop its ban against openly homosexual adult troop leaders, a move that evangelical leader Franklin Graham said would prove the group “is bending to LGBT activist groups” and which would put “young, innocent boys at risk.”

“Robert Gates, shame on you for not having the moral courage to do what is right,” said Rev. Graham in a May 22 post on Facebook.  “Yesterday Gates, the president of Boy Scouts of America, called for an end to the group’s ban on gay troop leaders. What are you thinking?”

More @ CNS

This n' That

Clickenzee to embiggen. :)

 

Homeschool Bowling

 

2nd Year Atlantic Beach Music Festival.  Impressive, free, 4 Shag/Beach bands, on the beach, coolers allowed, 11 to 6.

 

Dashrath Manjhi - The Man Who Broke A Mountain Alone In 22 Years

Memorial Day 2015: How About A New Meaning?

 Via Michael

 

(Editor’s Note: I wrote this for Memorial Day 2009, and this update is more true today than ever before.)

The Memorial Day 2015 weekend is upon us. Many will use this weekend as the first short vacation of summer. Picnics, boating, traveling, family gatherings, and dedication to enjoyable activities are the rule this weekend.

But Memorial Day is meant to honor the men and women who died in military service to the United States of America. Formerly known as “Decoration Day,” it was first established in 1868 to decorate the graves of the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression) dead.

This weekend, there will be memorial services and parades across America in town squares, churches and at cemeteries. Flowers will be strewn and American flags will be in grand display. Politicians will walk the route, and military veterans will don old uniforms and walk with them. Twenty-one gun salutes and taps will echo among the headstones.

Impassioned speeches will be delivered to patriotic crowds on the goodness of America and the honor and bravery of the fallen soldiers and sailors.

And Americans will be remembering all the wrong things.

How about a reality check?

More @ Dump DC