The oldest baseball you have ever seen -

SBNation.com   

 "No other sport traverses American History like baseball and here is a perfect example of that - a baseball that was found in 1862 from the battlefield of Shiloh.

"The finder of this baseball was an African-American and orderly for the Union Army by the name of G.F. Hellum, who would go on to fight with the 69th Colored Infantry.

"The baseball like this one is referred to today as a "Lemon Peeler" and was softer than today's baseballs and more loosely made and not stitched in a universal pattern. It wouldn't be until later in the century with baseball becoming more competitive and organized did a consistent design known as the figure eight stitching took hold, the very same design still used today.

"The Battle of Shiloh was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, over 10,000 soldiers were killed for the Confederacy and 13,000 for the Union, so as you can imagine the game of baseball must have been a form of comfort for these soldiers during a time of great "bloodshed.

-Ron A. Bolton

Sources - Stephanie Grimes, KVL

Vintage Base Ball on the Battlefield: A Unique Sporting Event at Shiloh - National Park Magazine

Civil War Era: Did a Shiloh Battlefield Baseball Come From Nashville? Thought to be left by soldiers on the battlefield.

Bill Maher FINALLY EXPOSES Whoopi Goldberg & The Hosts From The View On Live TV

Agenda Insight

"Sunny has a really bad habit of talking over other people, but will not allow anyone to talk over her."

Forget the Autopen. The Question Is Forgery.

  The American Spectator  "Did persons in the White House use the autopen to forge President Biden’s signature?"

TeePublic

"Much ink has been spilled on the topic of whether use of the autopen to sign President Joe Biden’s name to pardons, executive orders, legislation, and other documents invalidates the actions. But these analyses overly complicate and miss the key point: Was the document a forgery?

"Many presidential acts, such as approving legislation, require a signed document to be effective. In 2005, the United States Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opined: “The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 [of the Constitution] by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

"Signing a piece of paper is not exercise of the power granted to the president; the signature is merely the manifestation and evidence that the president has exercised his power to take an action. No one would claim a president who broke his hand had to abdicate the presidency because he no longer could himself physically sign documents. The question, therefore, is not how the signature ended up on the page, but whether the president himself took the action evidenced by the signature and directed that the document be signed.

"The Constitution grants certain powers, including the pardon power, exclusively to the president. All would agree that if a White House staffer typed up a “pardon” without the president’s knowledge — or with the knowledge of a president who lacked the mental capacity to understand the nature and import of such a document — and then forged the president’s signature thereto, the pardon unquestionably would be invalid. Use of the autopen is simply the mechanism by which the document was signed. The question remains whether the president was aware of its use and had the mental capacity to agree to the challenged act. So, the simpler way to frame the issue is: “Was this a forgery?” . . . More...

John B. Daukas served as principal deputy and acting U.S. assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, 2020-21, and as Chief Counsel for Civil Issues on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.

The Clinton Legacy

 The Long Shadow of Hillary Clinton   

"If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election."

 

 

"While one cannot blame all of the world’s problems on the former first lady and senator, much of the trouble in Ukraine is related to her actions.

"Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. One of the hallmarks of great comedians is their ability to read the room. When my high school had a very ugly and contentious merger with its sister school (New Trier East and West), a traveling group from Second City came to perform. One of the comedians was asked about the merger, which had made its way into the local papers. He whipped out his Kipling and, without losing a beat, stated, “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” He was met with wild applause by the crowd.

"The president of Ukraine did not know how to read the Oval Office on Friday. Zelensky supposedly was coached by Obama retreads Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and others. If the story is true and they told Ukraine’s president to be tough with Trump, he got some bad advice. One of the strangest features of American governance is the potential for whiplash changes in policy. In dictatorships or even European-style coalition rule, things either remain unchanged or change at a glacial pace. The winner of Germany’s recent elections promised to deal with the problems of large-scale immigration. Once he saw that he could form a coalition without AfD, he said the status quo wasn’t so bad. But not in America. When you change parties, policies can spin around 180 degrees in a second. Somehow, the Obama brain trust tried to convince Zelensky that it was just like the days of Biden, though it was not.

If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election. Without evidence, Hilary Clinton and John Podesta claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge and that through Russian interference in the US election, he was elected president. If you could get the ex-secretary of state away from her glass of Chardonnay for a few minutes, she would no doubt repeat the same: the election was stolen from her, and Vladimir Putin was the culprit. These claims had profoundly negative repercussions in the world. The first was the “Russian Collusion” investigation that wasted two and a half years of the Trump administration." . . .  March 10, 2025

The Obama Legacy

 

AfterMath - Home

Skeleton Crawls From Obama’s Closet, Ruins What’s Left Of Barack’s Reputation (2019) "The American media has a disgraceful reputation, well-earned throughout our history. Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism lied us into one war and a hundred years later the New York Times helped Bush lie us into a war.

"Michael Avenatti made 254 cable appearances last year, including 147 on MSNBC and CNN - think about that - and was literally a front-runner for the highest office in the land - because the media chose him without doing any due diligence.

"Truth is the media is both easy to manipulate and is way too manipulative so it is normal for presidents to fight them.

"Trump does it with words, Obama, a new report shows, took a much more dangerous approach, though the media will never report it." . . .

We’re Living Barack Obama’s Racial Legacy In Real Time . . . "And that’s where we are today. Obama had the opportunity to go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. He not only didn’t take it, but he made it worse.

For longer than I can remember, we’ve been told that America needs to have a Conversation about Race™. We did, for generations, but it was always about whites abusing or keeping blacks down. That is, or at least is now, the wrong conversation. The conversation America needs to have today is pretty much the opposite. Far too many blacks see the system, the police, whites, and society at large as racist, with the corollary that they see themselves as victims...but victims with a pass from law enforcement. (And no, there’s no way to square that pass with “systemic racism.”) Therefore, they feel like they can do anything without consequences. That’s a recipe for disaster, both for blacks and for America. And that’s Barack Obama’s legacy.

There may be a tiny sliver of hope, however. There are a growing number of black personalities and potential leaders who are pushing back on that victimization narrative. Guys like Jason Whitlock, Byron Donalds, Charles Payne, Jason Riley and others are regularly telling their millions of followers how to succeed in life sans the victimization narrative, sort of a wider version of what Chris Rock did with his spectacular video How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

With Donald Trump at the helm, Barack Obama’s legacy has the potential to be reversed as more Americans of all hues decide that the ‘everything is racist’ shibboleth and, more broadly, the cancer of DEI get the derision they so badly deserve." . . .