Battle Hymn of the Republic

Rep. Steve King: Reparations were Paid in Blood

Rep. Steve King wants the Pigford settlement (remember Shirley Sherrod) reviewed:

Memorial Day: Remembering Our Fallen Heroes

Like Lambs Being Led to the Slaughter…….

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE59E0Q920091015

U.S.reverses stance on treaty to regulate arms trade

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States reversed policy on Wednesday and Said it would back launching talks on a treaty to regulate arms sales as Long as the talks operated by consensus, a stance critics said gave every Nation a veto.

The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush ‘S Administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national Controls were better.

On Wednesday Obama Took the First Major Step in a Plan to Ban All Firearms In the United States . The Obama administration intends to force gun control And a complete ban on all weapons for US citizens through the signing of International treaties with foreign nations. By signing international Treaties on gun control, the Obama administration can use the US State Department to bypass the normal legislative process in Congress. Once the US Government signs these international treaties, all US citizens will be Subject to those gun laws created by foreign governments. These are laws That have been developed and promoted by organizations such as the United Nations and individuals such as George Soros and Michael Bloomberg . The Laws are designed and intended to lead to the complete ban and confiscation Of all firearms.

The Obama administration is attempting to use tactics and methods of gun Control that will inflict major damage to our 2nd Amendment before US Citizens even understand what has happened. Obama can appear before the Public and tell them that he does not intend to pursue any legislation (in The United States) that will lead to new gun control laws, while cloaked in Secrecy, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is committing the US to International treaties and foreign gun control laws. Does that mean Obama is Telling the truth? What it means is that there will be no publicized gun Control debates in the media or votes in Congress. We will wake up one Morning and find that the United States has signed a treaty that prohibits Firearm and ammunition manufacturers from selling to the public. We will wake up another morning and find that the US has signed a treaty that prohibits any transfer of firearm ownership. And then, we will wake up yet another morning and find that the US has signed a treaty that requires US citizens to deliver any firearm they own to the local government collection and destruction center or face imprisonment.

This is not a joke nor a false warning. As sure as government health care Will be forced on us by the Obama administration through whatever means Necessary,  so will gun control.

Please forward this message to others who may be concerned about the Direction in which our country is headed.

We are being led like a lamb to the slaughter (Socialism/Dictatorship).

The Words of Greatness: Would Lincoln Recognize this Country Today

The Gettysburg National Cemetery was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln a brief four months after the Battle. Lincoln’s speech lasted only two minutes, but it went into history as the immortal Gettysburg Address.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth. “

(Of special note: It is from the text of the Gettysberg Address that the words “one Nation, under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.)

 

“Heritage not Hate”

     “Heritage not Hate”, with the Confederate Flag next to the words were seen on a bumper sticker yesterday. Despite the attempts at the liberals rewriting our textbooks, particularly our history texts, the Civil War did happen, and there was a Confederate flag.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/florida/sfl-homestead-veterans-parade-bn090409,0,4471641.story

 

“ HOMESTEAD – Organizers will go ahead with the popular Veterans’ Day parade in Homestead despite the controversy over a group marching for the first time with the Confederate battle flag last November.”

”They decided at a meeting Thursday that they could not ban the flag as the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP had demanded.”

“That sparked an outcry by the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP and others.”

“Tensions over the flag boiled over in May, when the Miami-Dade chapter of the NAACP threatened to boycott chamber businesses and recruit candidates to run against the Homestead mayor and council members this fall.”

The Unknown Lincoln: Sound Familiar?

     Abraham Lincoln was very much treated by his opponents and the pundits of the day as George Bush is today, yet through it all, he energed as our greatest President. Lincoln is known by many names and facets of his life, and at the same time, much like our present President, he is an unknown as well.

     With Lincoln’s 200th birthday next week, there is much being written about Lincoln, and a great deal of comparison to Obama.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-henry-gates8-2009feb08,0,5051017.story

In search of the flesh-and-blood Abraham Lincoln

Henry Louis Gates’ documentary examines the 16th president from many angles.

By Reed Johnson
February 8, 2009

For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the challenge of making a documentary about Abraham Lincoln was daunting but ultimately too good to pass up.

The only question was, which Abraham Lincoln?

“I got this reading list, and every book I read had a different Lincoln in it,” says the Harvard University history professor by phone from Washington, D.C.

There was Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the White Supremacist, Lincoln the Martyr, Lincoln the Tyrant/War Criminal, Lincoln the Romantic Lover, the Melancholic, the Atheist, the Orator, the Opportunist, the Gay, the Hero of Fidel Castro. . . . “And ultimately Lincoln the Unknown,” Gates summarizes. “I thought it could be fun, without even using the word, to do a postmodern Lincoln.”

That’s the Honest Abe (or one of them) who emerges in “Looking for Lincoln,” the lively, intriguing two-hour PBS documentary that airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on KCET. Written and presented by Gates, “Looking for Lincoln” leaves no stovepipe hat unturned in its search for the prismatic 16th president. Although, or perhaps because, he is the most written-about of America’s chief executives, Lincoln remains something of an Rorschach blot. His Mt. Rushmore-sized legacy rests on the fault lines of the nation’s most painful and complex themes and leitmotifs: slavery, black-white relations and the sometimes precarious balance between states’ rights and federal unity. Gates, who grew up in Piedmont, W.Va., learning to rote-idolize Lincoln, was no exception. But as he dug deeper into his research, he unearthed a number of jarring insights. “All of a sudden I find out Lincoln used the ‘N’ word, Lincoln liked ‘darky’ jokes, Lincoln liked minstrel shows.”

In “Looking for Lincoln,” being shown to coincide with the bicentennial of its subject’s birth, Gates fittingly begins and ends his meditations at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In between, he attempts to carve through the monumental marble icon and discover the flawed, flesh-and-blood human within.

During his odyssey, he receives assistance from historians Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Herbert Donald, and Harold Holzer; former Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett; former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton; historical reenactors; and a number of ordinary Americans. “Lincoln is a composite of all these images that people see refracted and reflected inside themselves,” says Gates, who specializes in African American history and literature. “He is the mirror of the American soul.”

Gates acknowledges that looking for Lincoln required some soul-searching of his own, as a historian, an American and an African American. In the documentary, he quickly takes aim at what may be the most sensitive aspect of Lincoln: his attitudes about race.

In reality, Gates says, this discussion comprises three “sub-discussions”: one on race and slavery, a second on racial equality and a third on colonization. “My metaphor is like braiding hair.”

Although Lincoln found the institution of slavery morally abhorrent, he didn’t believe that blacks and whites were equal. He probably would’ve been appalled at the idea of an African American becoming president, an awkward twist considering that so many prominent politicians, civil rights leaders and other Americans regularly invoke his name as the patron saint of their righteous causes.

“He’s certainly my favorite president,” Gates says. “He’s George Bush’s favorite. And, my God, Barack Obama has adopted him as his father.”

Lincoln at various times advocated shipping blacks to Africa or Panama. “Whereas abolition was part of his moral compass, equality was not,” Gates says. It was pragmatism, more than dawning enlightenment, that finally drove him to write the Emancipation Proclamation. “The irony of Abraham Lincoln is that he changed,” Gates says. “He changed for two reasons. One is that he met Frederick Douglass [the venerable abolitionist, reformer and newspaper publisher]. And he decided that he needed black troops to win the war.”

But it was only with the adoption of the 13th Amendment several months after Lincoln’s assassination that slavery was formally abolished (in law, if not fully in practice). And despite the amendment’s passage and the mixed results of Reconstruction, three more generations of racial apartheid would persist in the South in the form of Jim Crow.

Gates also learned that Lincoln, like many whites in his day, apparently never sat down to a meal with a black person or spent an entire day in one’s company. Those facts typically were bowdlerized from the official hagiography that took shape practically from the instant that Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, 1865.

Pondering these revelations, Gates felt a bit disillusioned with his hero. Then his colleague Goodwin — whom he says played Yoda, the sagacious advisor, to his questing Luke Skywalker — snapped him out of it. “Get over it,” she told him. “It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of all the historians who’ve represented him this way.”

Gates began to reconsider Lincoln in this new light, recalling W.E.B. DuBois‘ adage that Lincoln was “big enough to be inconsistent.” “It was like a boil being lanced,” he says of being freed from the burden of his idealized views of Lincoln. “It was a relief.”

Gates says that the idealization of Lincoln served different agendas for white and black Americans. The myth of Lincoln the Saint salved white consciences by allowing America’s Anglo-European majority to tell itself that it had done its part to liberate blacks by fighting the Civil War, and any further social progress was up to African Americans themselves.

The same myth may have impeded blacks by creating a shining model of white behavior that bore scant resemblance to the attitudes of most white Americans from the 1870s through at least the 1930s, a period that Gates calls “the nadir of black-white relations.”

For the historian, researching the program “challenged me to be tolerant of diverse views at the extremes,” never more so than when he attended a convocation of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. On camera, Gates assiduously avoids making judgments about the perspective of the organization or its members. “It’s easy to be a professor at an Ivy League school where everybody’s a liberal,” he says. “But I had to put myself inside the heads” of SCV members.

If there’s a moral to the epic, multi-shaded story of Lincoln’s evolving racial attitudes, Gates believes it’s that his example demonstrates how any of us likewise can modify or put aside our prejudices.

“Race and racism haven’t gone anywhere. But I think the capacity to confront one’s limitations, stare them in the eyes and become a better person in the larger good is what I want people to take away from the film.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com