150 Years ago today: Antietam, the bloodiest single day in the American Civil War (Updated)

True, Gettysburg cost far more casualties, but was fought for three days. Antietam/ Sharpsburg was fought in 12 hours.

From the UK Mail; The lost document that changed the course of American history: How Robert E. Lee's secret Civil War battle plans were found wrapped around cigars under a locust tree - and ended up in Union hands

Animated map of the Battle of Antietam

Many Sharpsburg homes have Civil War history   "Walking through the rooms of the Piper House, Ray pointed out the bullet damage to doors and window frames. The nose of a lead bullet protrudes from a window frame and the end of another can be seen half buried in a door.
...."The Piper House drew Union fire — collateral damage, really — because the troops were aiming at Confederates in the steeple of a long-gone Lutheran church down the street, Ray said.
The Pipers fled town during the fighting. They returned to find two dead Confederate soldiers in the dining room, she said."   Video report on historic Sharpsburg homes

Confederate site, referring to the battle, naturally as the Battle of Sharpsburg
A virtual tour ,
The cornfield,  Carnage in a Cornfield 
Bloody Lane
From "Glory"; the opening scene depicting the Battle of Antietam

UPDATE: Antietam 360  Excellent virtual tour of the battlefield, Hat tip to Bill Newcomer in the Civil War Facebook page.Thank you, Bill. From Civil War Trust.

Antietam on Facebook.  Videos.

U.S. Government Supports Pussy Riot (But Not 'Innocence of Muslims')

American Thinker  "The U.S. government lectures the Russians about "freedom of expression" in defense of freaks who engage in public sex, public vandalism, and the denigration of a "great religion," the Russian Orthodox Church.

"But when Americans exercise First Amendment freedoms that Muslims dislike, the Secretary of State reproaches them, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs calls them to encourage them to cease and desist, and federal law enforcement officers haul them in for questioning.  
"Who's living in the police state now?"

Wikipedia has this to say about "Pussy Riot":  

The musical performance group was organized, in part, due to anger over what they perceived as government policies that discriminate against women, citing legislation that "placed restrictions on legal abortions". According to their co-founder, Pussy Riot is "part of the global anti-capitalist movement, which consists of anarchists, Trotskyists, feminists and autonomists."

TOP 10 LIBERAL RACE CARDS

Human Events   "Liberals are starting to hear the dog-whistles they say conservatives slip into their conversations as racial code words and have discovered an amazing array of such language relating to criticism of President Obama. Be prepared to cut down on your vocabulary after seeing the list of these liberal race cards."

So much for the election of Barack Obama being the great racial healing this country was waiting for. This past four years has caused racial polarization not seen since the days of Bull Connor, and it is coming not from white segregationists, but leftist Democrats. 
Come to think of it, weren't they the people who were the Jim Crow party originally?
(Left) Democrat party rally, 1922.
Wikipedia on the Klan:

Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans.

The Terrifying Line in Obama's Speech That Everyone Missed

Investor's Business Daily  "But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama's speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all. That was when Obama promised that he'd pursue "the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one."
"That promise might have made liberal hearts swoon. But as Amity Shlaes explained in her outstanding history of the era —"The Forgotten Man" 
 — it was precisely FDR's "bold, persistent experimentation" that was largely to blame for the length, depth and severity of the Great Depression."   
(Emphasis added)

Amity Schlaes

Related article by Schlaes: Obama Is a Loser Who Wins, Like FDR in 1936

The result is our “count me out” problem; businesses that could hire are not doing so; companies that invest would invest more if the market were predictable. A similar “count me out” culture prevailed in the late 1930s. A “capital strike” was what Roosevelt crossly labeled it. The third similarity is that both candidates are especially ready to assign blame somewhere else.

Reading list on the Obama Administration

 FRED BARNES; Why Obama Is Still Ahead  The economy alone won’t win the election for Romney.
"Swing voters and independents don’t believe Obama deserves reelection, Luntz says, but Romney “hasn’t made the case for himself.” There’s “no ‘not Obama’ lever. They’ll have to pull the Romney lever. At this point, they aren’t willing to do that. He hasn’t given them a reason why.” Were the election solely about Obama’s record, he wouldn’t need to."

WHY BARACK OBAMA SHOULD RESIGN  "Just for the record, this is what it looked like for a man who made a film that made the Obama Administration uncomfortable:"
....By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. .... It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

The things that REALLY anger our president  "Obama is not outraged.  If anything, he seems irritated that these people would interrupt what is, for him, the more important business of running a campaign."...."Obama is as capable of anger as anyone else.  It’s just that murderous attacks on sovereign American soil aren’t what get his blood boiling. Other things do, though."....Obama gets mad when things don’t go his way:"

Propaganda Update: TV Networks Will Be Asked to Boost ObamaCare In Plots of Their Top Shows  "The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots."
As we have seen in Law and Order" episodes among others, they will not hesitate to attack conservatives by name.

Just WHO are the people that give Obama high marks for foreign policy?

Who Needs Enemies?  "U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated “We’re watching very carefully to see what they do because it has always been more about their actions than their words.”
"Comments such as that prompted Netanyahu to ask, “How long must we wait?” How long indeed? And for what action would Clinton and the administration wait? For Iran to realize nuclear capability and take military action against Israel?"

Daily Kos published this in 2008 after Obama was elected:  "We will know there has been a sea change in American attitudes when we see the first US defendent(sp) charged with torture or war crimes before the International Court of Justice.  I will not be holding my breath.  Obama saw what happened to Carter when he appeared weak on the world stage." 

White House Fails at Home and Abroad  "Why are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the White House obsessed with apologizing for an amateur video that no-one had heard of, seen
 or cared about?  Why are they so obsessed with singing the praises of “a great religion” who’s leaders are the world’s leading proponent for mob violence and mass murder?"

Shawarma Mayor; Obama succeeded in his agenda: Burning embassies, dead ambassador to Libya

From The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; General Dempsey's Remarks Should Not Come as a Surprise  "Sanctions are important but only with absolute isolationism and a very credible military capability. If we stood firm, they may have blinked. Instead, we blinked and now they have very little reason to modify their plans."

Charles Krauthammer: American Power Receding: Obama Brought Our Irrelevance
"When you withdraw the power and the influence of the strongest country on earth from a region, the vacuum will be filled. The Salafists, the Islamists understand this is their opening. No one asks what the US thinks about Syria, they are focused on Russian and what Russia thinks and is doing about Syria. The US is irrelevant."

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Calls On Muslims Worldwide to Unite Against United States and 'The Evil Zionists' Behind Controversial Muhammed Video

"Hey, the Obama administration's appeasement policies are bearing fruit."

 Lux Libertas; Romney Gets It Right: It Was ‘Disgraceful’ "...in the days following the embassy attack, Secretary Clinton has described a stupid internet movie about Muhammad as “disgusting.”  Interestingly, Romney, along with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, used that same word, “disgusting” — to describe Ambassador Stevens’ murder.  This simple juxtaposition illustrates the difference between those who look at the world and see reality, and those who look at the world in desperate search of vindication for their irrational theories of moral equivalency and systemic injustice.  Those theories, if allowed to stand, will destroy Western civilization — assuming they haven’t already done so.

Barack Obama is sanctioning the motive behind the murderous Muslim riots by trying to silence the Muhammad filmmakers.

"You cannot ask me to sacrifice my freedom so as not to offend savages" 

From Regiment to President: The Structure and Command of Civil War Armies

National Park Service  via the Civil War Sesquicentennial network
"Trying to determine the structure and command of a Civil War army can be a daunting task. It is easy to confuse which designation is which and to discern which rank commands which entity. Battlefield promotions and deviations between different armies further muddy the waters. It isn't immediately clear what it means when you read that Major General A.P. Hill commanded a division in the Army of Northern Virginia while John Gibbon commanded a brigade in Major General Joseph Hooker's I Corps of the Army of the Potomac. In an effort to provide a bit of clarity into such matters, what follows traces the command structure from the colonel leading a regiment all the way to the office of the President as Commander in Chief."
Maryland Campaign Commemoration Events

Mr. Lincoln's Army by Bruce Catton; the book that made me a Civil War buff when I read it back in high school. Part of a trilogy that traces the history of  the Army of the Potomac from General McClelland's creation and molding of the army on through Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Beautifully written in Mr. Catton's unique style, the book covers the time from the inept Peninsula Campaign through Second Manassas on through the battle at Antietam (called Sharpsburg in the South), which led to the Emancipation Proclamation.

(Updated) Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy

Victor Davis Hanson  "The attacks on the US embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the US ambassador was murdered along with three staff members — and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem — are all reprehensible, each in their own way. Let us sort out this terrible chain of events."
....
"The attacks in Egypt come a little over three years after the embarrassing Obama Cairo speech, in which the president created an entire mythology about the history of Islam, in vain hopes of appeasing his Egyptian hosts. The violence also follows ongoing comical efforts of the administration to assure us that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not an extremist Islamic organization bent on turning Egypt into a theocratic state. And the attacks are simultaneous with President Obama’s ongoing and crude efforts to embarrass Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu."

Remember this cartoon from an earlier incident?

....
"At some point, someone in the administration is going to fathom that the more one seeks to appease radical Islam, the more the latter despises the appeaser."
Related.

Netanyahu: We Can’t Rely On Obama Admin To Take Part In Strike Against Iran. We Americans are too cowardly to defend OURSELVES from attack!

Weasel Zippers   Obviously.
From Jerusalem:

"Earlier this week Netanyahu issued a rebuke of the U.S. cautious stance, perceived as an indirect swipe at the Obama administration. He said that "those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel."

Flashback: Obama Predicts Hostilities With The Islamic World Will Cease The “Day I’m Inaugurated”…   How's that working out for you, Mr. Obama?

 

Posted by Ronbo at the Freedom Fighter's Journal

Israel Hayom; Iran’s politically inconvenient nuclear program "An Israeli attack would likely draw the U.S. into the conflict, and on the side of Israel, with negative implications for Obama’s Muslim outreach program, not to mention the risk of casualties and widespread destruction."

Jennifer Rubin; Mitt Romney gave one of his most cogent comments regarding Egypt on ABC News:   "[Middle East scholar] Bernard Lewis has said many times that people around the world should view America as the best friend you can have — and the most dangerous enemy. But at the least, it is vital that the opposite impression not be conveyed: That America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”  
"It is up to the Romney-Ryan campaign to spell this out, and it now has a unique moment when everyone is finally paying attention to national security."

Intellectual Conservative;  The General is Right, Terrorists Only Stand Down in Front of Power and Knowing Action Will Follow
"[The General] said all these terrorists know is to fear power and force. The best was to control them, he offered, was to tell the country in no uncertain terms that if it killed four of our people, we would respond by killing 400 of theirs. This brought shock and dismay from mainstream media commentators across both the electronic and print news services. But, I agree with the general. I have seen it in action." Read more...
Democrats do not do that, however. Democrats instead prosecute those who would make our enemies pay a price for killing Americans and our allies.

Blackfive; This is what happens when leaders don't do their jobs. "And word 'round the campfire is that the OinC is too busy to attend the daily intelligence briefing (not attended since September 5th).  Anyone who votes to keep an administration in office like this one needs to be involuntarily committed to an institution."

Wright Winger  "Although Barack Hussein Obama once declared that the Islamic call to prayer is "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth," it seems likely that he's now found one even more pleasing: the sound of rioting anti-American mobs across the Middle East.
"What we're seeing is more than the result of four years of appeasement by this president's administration...we're seeing the consequences of four years of his actually encouraging radical Islam while backing away from America's allies."

Charles Krauthammer on "The abandonment"

Charles Krauthammer;  "A policy so incoherent, so knowingly and obviously contradictory, is a declaration of weakness and passivity. And this, as Anthony Cordesman, James Phillips and others have argued, can increase the chance of war. It creates, writes Cordesman, “the same conditions that helped trigger World War II — years of negotiations and threats, where the threats failed to be taken seriously until war became all too real.” "

Warning Signs

The Obama Administration, the Mainstream Media and the Death of Journalism

DonkeyHotey

Conservative Daily News  "It’s nothing new to point out that the mainstream media has placed itself as the tool of the Obama Administration. However, over the past 24 hours, that contention has taken on a truly frightening meaning. Bluntly, it seems that there are countless examples of the media regurgitating whatever the Obama Administration spoon feeds it, and passing it off as journalism. It’s gone beyond the point of even considering fact-checking, and “news” has become almost purely opinions pieces – not “straight journalism.” "

Mainstream Media Will Spin Debates for Obama Like They Spun the Conventions
"Obama's tactics reflect a strategic understanding of how debates work that Republicans have not mastered yet. Obama does not come to debates to argue with his opponent, but to deliver a pre-packaged message. That technique is commonly taught to left-wing pundits by Media Matters for America, and is best exemplified in the appearances of such surrogates as Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz."

Franchisors warn Obamacare will halve profits

Washington Secrets  [Atlanta Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchiser David] "Barr has 23 stores with 421 employees, 109 of whom are full-time. Of those, he provides 30 with health insurance. Barr said he pays 81 percent of their Blue Cross Blue Shield policy, or $4,073 of $5,028 for individuals, more for families, for a total bill of $129,000 a year. Employees pay $995.

"Under Obamacare, however, he will have to provide health insurance for all 109 full-time workers, a cost of $444,000, or two and half times more than his current costs. That $315,000 increase is equal to just over half his annual profit, after expenses, or 1.5 percent of sales. As a result, he said, "I'm not paying $444,000."