Sunday, December 7, 2014

An Impassioned Defense of Law Enforcement Officers


Legal Insurrection   "San Bernardino DA Takes Jon Stewart and the Daily Show to task."
"San Bernardino County district attorney Mike Ramos was recently watching television when he noticed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show reporting incorrect information about an incident in his county.
"Ramos took to YouTube and created a video in which he scolds Stewart and offers a powerful defense of law enforcement officers everywhere.

"Carman Tse of the LAist reported:
Video: San Bernardino D.A. Calls Out ‘The Daily Show’, Show Apologizes For ‘Sloppy’ Mistake
Comedy Central’s news commentary show The Daily Show tweeted an apology to the San Bernardino district attorney after host Jon Stewart listed a Victorville man, who had previously died in an incident with a sheriff’s deputy, as another victim of police shootings in the United States.
On the Monday, December 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart opened the show with a bit about the nationwide response to the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Stewart ran through a list of black men killed in police shootings across the country, listing Dante Parker, who was killed in a controversial incident with a San Bernardino Sheriff’s Deputy in Victorville in August. Unlike the other victims Stewart listed, including 12-year old Tamir
BrownRice of Cleveland, Parker was not shot by police but actually died after being Tased.
"Watch the video. Ramos singles out the Daily Show but his message applies to the media at large.


"For his part, Jon Stewart said in a tweet Friday that he will apologize on Monday.  

Last of Senate's Deep South Democrats defeated


AP   " 'This victory happened because people in Louisiana voted for a government that serves us, that does not tell us what to do," Cassidy said in Baton Rouge, the state capital.

 
With Landrieu’s Loss, the End of an Epoch   "Now if only we could get rid of the myth, too."
 ... "A few obvious questions: If white Southerners were really so enraged about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and if they switched to the Republican party to express their displeasure, then why did they wait 30 years before making that preference felt in House elections? Why did Dwight D. Eisenhower — a supporter of civil-rights legislation who insisted on the actual desegregation of the armed forces (as opposed to President Truman’s hypothetical desegregation) and federal agencies under his control — win a larger share of the Southern vote in 1956 than Barry Goldwater, the most important Republican critic of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, did two cycles later?"

 
 
Rick Moran: Cassidy crushes Landrieu in Louisiana Senate runoff  ... "An observation born of studying and writing about politics for 40 years: Democrats will be back. It may take them a while. They will resist the changes that have to make for them to become competitive again. But massive defeat for a political party is a big motivator. The deadwood has been cleared away by the GOP wave and new, younger Democrats will rise, and one day be successful - if they can adapt to the political realities that Democrats failed to understand these last few election cycles" ...

 NY Times: Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete  ..."It remains to be seen whether Republicans will continue to fare so well after Mr. Obama leaves the White House. Yet a Democratic rebound seems unlikely anytime soon. With Republicans now holding the advantage of incumbency, unless the region’s religiosity dims or the Democrats relent on their full-throated embrace of cultural liberalism, it may be theirs for a generation."

The Benghazi Report; An ongoing intelligence failure


Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn  ... "But Boehner’s visit was not a social call. He was there to see three CIA officers who had fought in Benghazi, Libya. Their identities were unknown to all but a small group of U.S. government officials with high-level security clearances, and the details of their harrowing stories were unknown to virtually everyone who was not a colleague or relative.
 
"And the fact that the meeting was taking place at all was unknown to the man who, under different circumstances, might have been expected to host it. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was not invited.
 

Rogers was sick of Benghazi. Some of his Republican colleagues had spun themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theorizing, publicly making wild claims that had no basis in fact or hinting at dark conspiracies that had the president of the United States willfully and eagerly arming its enemies. Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, long the Republican face of Benghazi investigations, accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving a “stand-down” order to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Representative Louie Gohmert claimed that Senator John McCain deserved some of the blame for Benghazi because McCain, like Barack Obama, had supported opposition forces in Libya. Normally responsible Republicans pretended that Hillary Clinton’s famous “what difference at this point does it make” line was not so much a tone-deaf question about how the attacks happened, which deserved the criticism it earned, but a declaration of indifference that the attacks happened, which was absurd. Rogers complained about these excesses regularly to his staff and colleagues.
 
"This frustration, however, wasn’t the reason Boehner and Nunes cut him out of the meeting with CIA officers. They shared his frustration, as it happened."   Full article here.
 

Chuck Schumer Bails on ObamaCare

Bokbluster
141206-chuck-schumer
 
"Chuck Schumer, the third ranking Senate Democrat, gave a speech trashing ObamaCare. He said it was a mistake to ram through health care reform when the main concern of voters was the economy. The uninsured were a small percentage of the electorate and most of them didn’t vote. ObamaCare meant middle class working people had to pay more for their insurance to subsidize the non-voting beneficiaries of ObamaCare. Schemer said that was politically stupid. As a result Democrats are now getting shellacked at the polls.

"The speech came as a shock to Progressives and the press but it’s something Schumer must have given a lot of thought to. As Dan Henninger said in the WSJ, “Let us count the times Sen. Chuck Schumer has blown himself up politically.

"That was a short count, wasn’t it?”

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Hillary Clinton’s History as First Lady: Powerful, but Not Always Deft

NY Times

 Bringing impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon
 in Washington in 1974.
  ... "She talks about championing women’s rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks.
 
"What Mrs. Clinton leaves out about her time as first lady is her messy, sometimes explosive and often politically clumsy dealings with congressional Republicans and White House aides. Now, the release of roughly 6,000 pages of extraordinarily candid interviews with more than 60 veterans of the Clinton administration paints a more nuanced portrait of a first lady who was at once formidable and not always politically deft." ...
http://comicallyincorrect.com/2014/06/27/hillary-book-tour/

The End of Feminism

Bruce S. Thornton
Image credit: Duke University
 
"California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of “affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement.” Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent.
...
"But the main problem with the California law is the corruption of feminism that it represents. When it comes to sex, the old feminist claim to equal treatment based on a woman’s equal capacity to control her sexual choices has been transformed into an old-fashioned Victorian notion of women as weak creatures who need to be protected from sexually feral males, and who lack agency and thus should not be held accountable for their choices.
...
"But as the years passed, many women began to discover that there are indeed differences between men and women and their experiences of sex. Liberation did not lead to the sexual utopia of carefree and cost-free pleasure, but to the guilt, regret, and humiliation that follow being used as an object for somebody else’s transient enjoyment.

"The response to these ill effects was to create rules and codes designed to eliminate the negative consequences of sexual freedom.
...
"The demand for personal freedom without accountability contradicts the foundational philosophy of our republic. The right to liberty is not the right be absolved from the consequences of one’s actions. Taking that responsibility is what makes one worthy of freedom and equal to others who likewise must be accountable for their actions."

A Civil War In The Olive Garden Parking Lot

NPR: Daily Picture Show  "Think about where you are, this very moment — and imagine all that has happened there before now.

"When I was in college in Tennessee, for example, my neighborhood was nicknamed "The Fort," because that's exactly what it was during the Civil War. How weird to think that where soldiers once fired cannons, students today are doing keg stands. And actually, I wouldn't have been shocked to see Civil War soldiers milling around the neighborhood; re-enactments were — and are — huge in the area.


"That interests photographer Gregg Segal. "I travel a lot on assignment for magazines and had been increasingly disturbed by the growing sameness of America," he writes in an email. "Wherever I traveled, I'd see the same strip malls with the same Olive Gardens and Jamba Juices and Panera Breads, etc., and I wanted to say something about the erasure of the past and the homogenization of the landscape.' "
...
"Through Hodge, Segal met his cast of characters and, over the course of five trips to the South and Gettysburg, created this series of, for instance, soldiers camped out in front of Domino's."

Below: The Massaponax Baptist Church was used as Grant's HQ in 1864

Massaponax Church, Virginia "Council of War": General Ulysses S. Grant examining map held by General George
 G. Meade. LOC Summary: Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, Grant's Wilderness Campaign,
May-June 1864. Date Created/Published: 1864 May 21
 
Massaponax Baptist Church in 1864. Below: the church location today thanks to Google Earth
 

This may stress the importance of historic preservation.

Report: No ‘Global Warming’ For 215 Months, plus: Caruba on the climate change mafia


Freedom Outpost   "The numbers are in and the verdict is that there has been no global warming for 17 years and 11 months, according to satellite data.

"Satellite data prepared by Lord Christopher Monckton shows there has been no warming trend from October of 1996 to August of 2014 — 215 months. To put this in perspective, kids graduating from high school this year have not lived through any global warming in their lifetimes."...
...
 "But meteorologists have been predicting a weak el Niño this fall and winter, which would warm ocean waters and potentially put an end to the "pause" in global warming.

" 'The Great Pause may well come to an end by this winter," said Monckton. "An el Niño event is underway and would normally peak during the northern-hemisphere winter. There is too little information to say how much temporary warming it will cause, but a new wave of warm water has emerged in recent days, so one should not yet write off this el Niño as a non-event.' "...

 
... "The lies being inflicted on Americans include Obama’s “war on coal” that is shutting down coal-fired plants that affordably and efficiently produce the electricity the nation needs, along with the six-year delay of the Keystone XL pipeline. Add in the thousands of Environmental Protection Agency regulations affecting our manufacturing, business and agricultural sectors and the price we are paying is huge.
"At its heart, environmentalism hates capitalism." ...
 

Candy Crowley, Who Propped Up Obama at 2012 Debate, Out at CNN

Newsbusters 
"Candy Crowley, who aided Barack Obama in a 2012 debate with Mitt Romney, will be leaving CNN, according to the network. In a memo, network President Jeff Zucker announced, "...Candy has let us know that she has made the decision to move on..."

"On October 16, 2012, Crowley famously moderated a debate between the President and Mitt Romney. After Obama insisted that he quickly labeled the attacks in Benghazi terrorism, the journalist interjected, "He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror." No, Obama did not. Even the Washington Post's liberal fact checker noted this.

"A Media Research analysis noted that Crowley knew Obama's statement to be false" ...

 See more...

 

73 years ago: the death of the battleship Arizona (UPDATED)


USS Arizona: Before Pearl Harbor, the mightiest ship at sea
Tomorrow marks the 73rd anniversary of the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. The two most famous Battle Ships in our history lie there today, the Arizona which at one time was hailed the mightiest battleship in the world and the Missouri where the final surrender of Japan occurred. Here is some history on the Arizona which was never decommissioned and is the final resting place of the 1,177 crew members that perished when her main magazine exploded as a result of a direct bomb hit. As a result of this attack and another earlier one on an Italian Battleship in Taranto, Italy, it was determined that the Battleship was no longer the ultimate Naval Capital ship and the Aircraft Carrier became the ultimate capital ship during WWII. Today, nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines are the ultimate capital ships of a nations navies.
Esther Ross, of Prescott, was 17 when she traveled to New York City to
 christen the USS Arizona on June 19, 1915. In the weeks leading up to
 her trip, every night after school she would practice christening by breaking
 syrup bottles filled with water against a fence in the back of her house.
She and her parents stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. 
 

WHITE CHRISTMAS SONG IS ‘RACIST': Black Singer Slammed by Liberal Xenophobes for Singing Christmas Song

Clash Daily  "Posted on December 5, 2014
"I joked the other day via Facebook that White Christmas would soon be considered a racist song.
"Well … here it is. Check it out you creepy a** crackers!
TPNN – These Christmas bashing progressives have taken their hate-filled paranoia to a new level with their attacks against country singer Darius Rucker, who happens to be black. What did Rucker do that drew the hate of the liberals? He sang White Christmas at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Liberals immediately took to Twitter to display their idiocy and attack Rucker.

 
And here of course is Liberal Chick‘s reaction:
 
Liberal Chick  Public Figure · 3,864 Likes

 
 
Update: Dare we even discuss this business?
There have been several postings mentioning White Front, but never any pics of it, until now!!
Hat tip to Al Thompson, Torrance, CA

Friday, December 5, 2014

December 1864 in the American Civil War















 Pictured: Union entrenchments before Nashville awaiting Hood's attack. General Pap Thomas beat him to the punch, routing the Confederate forces and destroying Hood's army and his career. Dec, 1864

Civil War December 1864: Attempt to burn Springfield Armory, Soldiers' Fair, Battles of Nashville, Fort Fisher and Sherman's March to the Sea
...
General Sherman sent President Lincoln the following telegram on December 22:
“To his Excellency, President Lincoln,
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
W. T. Sherman
Maj-Genl”
Sherman’s latest victory followed that of Maj. Gen George H. Thomas who, by December 16th, had routed the Confederate Army of Tennessee, effectively ending the war in the Western Theater.

Marching Through Georgia - Historic Images and Song  "Musicians (unconfirmed): Byron G. Harlan and Frank C. Stanley, 1904"


American Civil War December 1864

Dec 1864 US Civil War timeline

December 4, 1864Battle of WaynesboroughGeorgia
 March to the Sea
December 6, 1864Salmon P. Chase named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
 Salmon P. Chase
December 6, 1864Battle of Stoney CreekVirginia
 Siege of Petersburg
December 13, 1864Union army captures Ft. McAllisterGeorgia
 William Tecumseh Sherman
 March to the Sea
 Fort McAllister
 Fort McAllister
December 15, 1864
December 16, 1864
Battle of NashvilleTennessee
 John Bell Hood
 George Thomas
 Nashville Campaign
December 21, 1864Sherman occupies SavannahGeorgia
 March to the Sea
 William Tecumseh Sherman

"Battle of Nashville" painted by Howard Pyle in 1907