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REQUIEM

Below are the two final essays to be posted on Allegiance and Duty Betrayed. The first one is written by a friend -- screen name 'Euro-American Scum' -- who, over the past four years, has been the most faithful essayist here. He has written about everything from his pilgrimage to Normandy in 2004 to take part in the 60th–year commemoration of the invasion, to his memories of his tour in Vietnam. His dedication to America’s founding principles ... and those who have sacrificed to preserve them over the past 200+ years ... is unequaled. Thank you, E-A-S. It has been a privilege to include your writing here, and it is a privilege to call you my friend.

The second essay is my own farewell. And with it I thank all of the many regular visitors, and those who may have only dropped in occasionally, for coming here. I hope you learned something. I hope a seed or two was planted. But, even if not, I thank you for stopping by ... 25 March, 2010

6/08/2007

The Unraveling of America

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It has little to do with the biased media. They are merely a tool, gripped powerfully by unseen hands with evil intent. It has much more to do with the behind-the-scenes puppetmasters, and their passively receptive audience.

During her two-century-plus history, America has faced many threats -- domestic, foreign, moral, military, economic …

The integrity, and unbridled courage, of the majority of her citizenry – whether they be in leadership positions, or ‘average Joes’ -- has always paved the way to victory over hardship and tragedy. And that same integrity and courage has always sought and succeeded in achieving the preservation of liberty.

I believe past historical precedent is no longer valid. I believe we have reached critical mass ...

... for four basic reasons:

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For what I believe is the first time in our history, the majority of our ‘leadership’ in Washington bears more allegiance to an agenda, or a cadre of special interest groups, than it does to the liberty, safety and sovereignty of our republic and its people.

Take a good look at our ‘leaders’ in Washington. Do you trust the majority of them? I mean trust them to make the weighty decisions about the direction in which our republic is moving, and the momentous, no-turning-back decisions that will determine how, when and where we will face our enemies?

Surely we have experienced corruption, and self-serving or agenda-driven policymaking, on the federal level before. But never to this degree. And never by as many people in power who hold both our proud national heritage and our Constitution in utter disdain.

I believe that the allegiance of the majority in power (both republicans and democrats) lies more in the amassing of personal or political power, the realization of left-leaning, globally-oriented political agendas, and the desire to please powerful special interest groups, than it does in honoring their oath of allegiance to this country and its people.

And the average American is simply too busy to pay much attention to the dangerously unprecedented erosion in the character, motives and allegiance of his leadership in Washington.

Just take a look at the past political and personal history of the current front-runner for the presidency in 2008. Hillary Clinton was an integral part of her husband’s eight-year administration. From all reliable accounts, she may as well have been co-president. She had intimate knowledge of all, and played a role in most, of the decisions made, and crimes committed, during her husband’s entire political career.

The accomplishments of William Jefferson Clinton’s two terms in office represented the most evil, treasonous, criminal era in American history. The repercussions of his (and her) criminality and treason have left permanent, potentially deadly, scars on this nation. They have sold our land and secrets to the highest bidder, armed our ideological enemies, and emboldened those who seek our annihilation.

A careful study of their crimes and their motives paints a picture of two megalomaniacal people who place no value on truth, who believe themselves to be above the law, and who disdain everything that America’s Founders held sacred.

I assume that most readers here are aware of at least the majority of the Clintons’ crimes/borderline crimes and treasonous activities. And yet the average American voter either (1) hasn’t cared enough to learn about them over the past decade, (2) knows about them and considers them irrelevant, or (3) has forgotten them.

As a result, the co-conspirator in all of the above may well become the leader of the free world in eighteen months.

I believe that the reason for this sorry state of affairs rests in the fact that character and integrity no longer sit at the top of the list of leadership prerequisites. The desire to be ‘taken care of’ does.

Enter elitist rule (which bears no allegiance to our republic), stage left.

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For what I believe is the first time in our history, our public education system is geared, more than it is not, toward indoctrination of America’s youth so as to raise succeeding generations who are (a) ignorant (and possibly even ashamed) of the glorious history of western civilization, (b) incapable of serious critical or analytical thought, (c) disdainful of earned prosperity and the pillars of capitalism, and (d) infused with beliefs about bogus environmental concerns, multicultural dogma, and phony ‘tolerance’ issues ... while at the same time virtually ignorant in the academic subjects upon which a free society must be based.

Our public education system has found itself incrementally hijacked by socialist/Marxist-leaning decision-makers over the past fifty-plus years. Children indoctrinated as mentioned above are much more likely to be submissive to government control, and much less likely to see America as historically unique, or deserving of pride …and defense.

The federal Department of Education (which conservative politicians have promised to abolish for decades), and the state education departments, continuously hand down more stringent left-leaning guidelines under which teachers must teach. America’s teachers are told, by leftist decision-makers who care little about the quality of local education, what and how to teach. And if the content of the what, or the method of the how, is something that a dedicated master teacher knows to be lies (as in the case of revisionist history and the politically-motivated theory of global warming, just to name two of dozens of bogus disciplines), that teacher risks the ruination of his career, should he refuse to teach his charges that which he knows to be untrue.

The NEA and the AFT are two of the most influential lobbying organizations in Washington, and, over the past five decades, their agenda has both eroded the quality of public education and the recognition and rewarding of teachers of merit, and increased the stranglehold that Washington has over decisions that should be made by American citizens at the local level. Children’s best interests, and their future as responsible, productive citizens, have taken a definite back seat to the promoting of a leftist agenda, and the entrenchment of lackluster teachers, bogus curricula, and mediocre teaching methods.

In addition to playing a primary role in the decline in public school education, the NEA (the association to which more than ninety percent of the teachers who teach our children belong) actively pursues non-educational leftist social agendas, and they financially support such groups as NOW, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and People for the American Way. Both directly and indirectly, financially and philosophically, the NEA supports abortion on demand, Planned Parenthood, federally-funded child care from birth through third grade, school-based healthcare and family planning services, gun control, environmentalism, the normalization of homosexuality, children’s access to all media and material including pornography, and an increased role of the UN in American affairs, especially as regards children.

Attend a local school board meeting someday and you will see just how concerned the average American parent is about this dangerous decline in the quality and direction of their child’s education. Unless an increase in taxes, or termination of a sports program, is on the agenda, you will be pretty safe in assuming that the number of parents in attendance is at or near zero.

And American colleges and universities, with few exceptions, have become nothing more than leftist indoctrination centers, with the study of the glorious history of western civilization now either banned or ‘revised’, and replaced by emphasis on neo-Marxist philosophy, reverence for ‘multiculturalism’, and a general disdain for anything American or capitalist – while, at the same time, ‘feel good’ courses have made large inroads in displacing in-depth study of the genuine arts and sciences.

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The American voting populace is reaching critical mass. The complexion of the electorate is changing so dramatically that the ‘average American’ as you and I know him – the honest, hard-working American who comprehends the roots of our republican form of government and wants to preserve it at all costs -- will soon become a minority participant in all elections.

The machinations of those in office who seek power over their countrymen have seen to it that three elements of our society are growing exponentially, and the combination of those three will eventually dictate the direction in which we head as a nation: (a) the ever-increasing number of illegals (thousands of them invading this country every day), whose ‘rights’ are championed by those who know that there is power in numbers, and who are refusing to stem those numbers so as to increase their political power, (b) the ever-increasing proportion of the citizenry that has been purposely diverted from the truth by bread and circuses, and purposefully ‘dumbed down’ by the aforementioned educational establishment, and (c) the ever-increasing number of people who are dependent on the burgeoning entitlement/nanny state for their very existence.

All three groups portend ever-increasing ballot-box power for the political elite, and a deeper sink into the quicksand of tyranny by a burgeoning majority that bears no resemblance to the former, and soon-to-be-overshadowed, ‘heartland of America’. We are about to be displaced by millions of voters who have no idea what made America great … nor do they care. They simply want to reap the benefits of more than two centuries of selfless sacrifice freely and courageously offered by those who must now be looking down upon us through tears of grief over what we have done with our precious inheritance.

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For the first time in our history, we are facing an external enemy with uniquely defined characteristics. It is not contained within a distinct border. It has many faces. It is far more vile, bloodthirsty, obsessed, and powerful than even the most educated and informed of us are able to comprehend.

And many of our leaders either do not recognize the historically (throughout the history of mankind) unprecedented threat that this enemy poses, or they choose to minimize that threat for reasons that can only be explained under the heading of ignorance or treason.

Our ‘leaders’ more often than not re-define or bury the truth, when it threatens to interfere with their agenda or decrease what they see as deserved power ... even when standing face-to-face with this malevolence.

I daresay that, in America 2007, the majority in congress consider the Constitutionally-granted liberties of their constituents, the lives of their countrymen, the sovereignty of this republic, and the sanctity of the Constitution they have sworn to uphold and defend, negotiable … under the right circumstances.

None of the above four circumstances has ever existed before in the history of our republic. Not to the degree that they exist now. All four of them are expanding. And any one of them can potentially bring America down.

The frog is starting to sweat ... and wondering why.

~ joanie

41 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant.

Anonymous said...

CW, you've covered all the bases so well as usual.

The only thing I would add somewhere in your thought process is the role of the activist judiciary. I don't know how you'd fit that in but I think it plays a big part.

Welcome back! {G}

Anonymous said...

Two years ago, what the JPFO had to add to your list:

http://www.jpfo.org/alert20050511.htm

Anonymous said...

All three groups portend ever-increasing ballot-box power for the political elite, and a deeper sink into the quicksand of tyranny by a burgeoning majority that bears no resemblance to the former, and soon-to-be-overshadowed, ‘heartland of America’. We are about to be displaced by millions of voters who have no idea what made America great … nor do they care. They simply want to reap the benefits of more than two centuries of selfless sacrifice freely and courageously offered by those who must now be looking down upon us through tears of grief over what we have done with our precious inheritance.

Your most important paragraph. They're trying to change the American culture so that it becomes a mishmash of people who don't understand what America really is.

Thank you for the sad but excellent analysis.

Anonymous said...

Any government that allows dozens or hundreds of Muslim jihadist cells to thrive all over our country is an enemy of mine.

GREAT article Joanie!

Anonymous said...

If you are not a professional writer you should be. If you do not hold office you should consider it. Do more than point out our problems, do something about them.

Anonymous said...

Dick Lamm, former governor of Colorado, is on the same page:

http://michellemalkin.com/immigration/2005/04/24/11:52.pm

The final paragraph:

Governor Lamm, walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.

Thanks for the notice to this KB, and good to see you back here CW.

joanie said...

Any government that allows dozens or hundreds of Muslim jihadist cells to thrive all over our country is an enemy of mine.

Rob, one of my three sisters works for a heating oil company in northern PA. The company is located near the town of Hancock, NY, which is near an area known as ‘Islamberg’.

My sister often calls me and tells me horror stories about the behaviors of the residents of Islamberg – behaviors that she observes when they do business with her company.

They regularly come into the heating oil business where she works. They are surly and arrogant, and their demeanor is very aggressive and unsettling. And, what makes it worse is that, almost to a person, they are getting their heating oil and propane free -- from LIHEAP, the NJ government program that provides assistance to low-income state residents ( http://www.state.nj.us/bpu/home/energyAssistance.shtml ). Many of them are also food stamp recipients. She tells me that her company alone dispensed over $25,000 in free heating oil and propane to these people last year alone.

Not only are they arrogant and demanding, but they make it a purposeful practice to come into her office five minutes before the office closes for the day, forcing her to stay later than she normally would in order to serve them.

On several occasions, a car or truck has pulled up, asked her to fill their propane tanks, and the person who has come into the office has claimed that he has a ‘bad back’ and requested that she carry the tank out to the car for him. The first and only time she did this, she discovered that there were two or three other able-bodied men sitting in the car. Needless to say, she never obliged again.

This link to a description of the ‘town’ is enough to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Not only are we allowing training camps for Islamic jihadists within our own borders, but, as my sister testifies, we are funding their existence with taxpayer dollars:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/paul-williams051107.htm

~ joanie

Anonymous said...

Joanie, it sounds like your sister is in a dangerous situation there. She needs to be very careful.

After reading that frightening link on Islamberg I couldn't help remembering how we had to bomb David Koresh and his Branch Davidians at Waco because they were a "danger" to the surrounding area, and a place like this encampment is allowed to exist for 20 years!

Anonymous said...

Great post. That's why we Americans need to start re-asserting our real sovereignty, which is at home. Like these folks:

http://conservativetimes.org/

http://leagueofthesouth.net/rebellion/index.php/site/comments/oklahomas_brand_of_immigration_reform_barely_makes_news_guess_why/

As you say, DC is hopeless. Big government, even if so-called "conservatives" are elected to run it, will always betray its people, whom it regards as subjects, not citizens. That's why there are so many self-determination movements around the world today.

Anonymous said...

One minute. You GOTTA watch. THIS says it all:

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=1471

Anonymous said...

You need to get this published where it can be read more widely.

Anonymous said...

Don't Let it Go

There's no arguing that American is headed down the Road to Serfdom, and has been for quite some time now. The question is, "What are we going to do about it?

America is not dead yet, and I see a few occasional glimmers of hope - the way the people rose up in defiance of the Kennedy/Bush shamnesty bill - the way the parents in San Diego are rising up against their school board.

Those of us who believe in individual freedom and limited government are outnumbered, but isn't that always the way it is? It's always a small minority of Thomas Paines who turn the tide.

I believe it's not to late to get America back on the right path, but many of us have become discouraged to the point of giving up. I humbly suggest that maybe we all need to educate ourselves on the nature of this battle. I think we already know the stakes.

Maybe this essay "DON'T LET IT GO" written by Ayn Rand in 1971 will help put the situation in perspective. (These are excerpts - typos are my own. Bold substituted for underlining in the original.)

------------

What is the specifically American sense of life?

A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.

The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European my disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve - but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.

A typical American can never fully grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against “being pushed around,” is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the Army and hears is called “service to his country,” his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.

“Isn’t my money as good as the next fellow’s?” used to be a popular American expression. It would not be popular in Europe: a fortune, to be good, must be old and derived by special favor from the State; to a European, money earned by personal effort is vulgar, crude or somehow disreputable.

Americans admire achievement; they know what it takes. Europeans regard achievement with cynical suspicion and envy. Envy is not a widespread emotion in America (not yet); it is an overwhelmingly dominant emotion in Europe.
[snip]
America has never had an original culture, i.e., a body of ideas derived from her philosophical (Aristotelian) base and expressing her profound difference from all other countries in history.

American intellectuals were Europe’s passive dependents and poor relatives almost from the beginning. They lived on Europe’s dying crumbs and discarded fashions, including even such hand-me-downs as Freud and Wittgenstein. America’s sole contribution to philosophy - Pragmatism - was a bad recycling of Kantian-Hegelian premises.

America’s best minds went into science, technology, industry - and reached incomparable heights of achievement. Why did they neglect the field of ideas? Because it represented Augean stables of a kind no joyously active man would care to enter. America’s childhood coincided with the rise of Kant’s influence in European philosophy and the consequent disintegration of European culture. America was in the position of an eager, precocious child left in the care of a scruffy, senile, decadent guardian. The child had a good reason to play hooky.

An adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But by the time ge grows up, he must translate it into conceptual knowledge and conscious convictions, or he will be in deep trouble. A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it. For close to a century, this has been America’s tragic predicament. Today, the American people is like a sleepwalking giant torn by profound conflicts.

Americans are the most reality-oriented people on earth. Their outstanding characteristic is the childhood form of reasoning: common sense. It is their only protection.
[snip]
If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost if (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.

This is prevalent among the two groups that are the main supporters of the statist trend: the very rich and the very poor - the first, because they want to rule; the second, because they want to be ruled. (The leaders of the trend are the intellectuals, who want to do both.)...

Can this country achieve a peaceful rebirth in the foreseeable future? By all precedents, it is not likely. But America is an unprecedented phenomenon. In the past, America perseverance became, on occasion, too long-bearing a patience. But when Americans turned, they turned. What may happen to the Welfare State is what happened to the Prohibition Amendment.

Is there enough of the American sense of life left in people - under the constant pressure of the cultural-political efforts to obliterate it? It is impossible to tell. But those of us who hold it, must fight for it. We have no alternative: we cannot surrender this country to a zero - to men whose battle cry is mindlessness.

We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something - and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.

These are philosophical issues. The philosophy we need is a conceptual equivalent of America’s sense of life. To propagate it, would require the hardest intellectual battle. But isn’t that a magnificent goal to fight for?

Anonymous said...

This is the best political commentary I've read in months! Thank you and I will be back regularly.

Anonymous said...

The real problem is that few seem to want to confront the inexorable logic and deal the implications of such a tragedy. Yet, history has many terrible lessons to teach us regarding the collapse of republics.

Anonymous said...

Too many would rather score their political points against Bush than honestly face the threats posed by Al Qaeda and Iran and others.

Anonymous said...

Agree completely.

Washington DC has been completely overrun with self serving backstabbers and grifters.

Gone are the patriots. In their place are prostitutes.

Anonymous said...

One of your very best essays ever Joanie. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

Cooper, I think you are insulting Joanie by insinuating that she has "given up." I don't know many people who have written about and given speeches and sermons and sunday school lessons and organized rallies and marches to Washington on the things that are wrong with America--- and actually gone door to door for many weeks in so many campaigns as she has. Probably 20 years worth or more. There's a difference between "giving up" and looking at the state of the country realistically.

Anonymous said...

God bless you and keep you safe.

Anonymous said...

Yes, sadly I am afraid there is nothing to disagree with in this essay, although I wish there were.

America is unique in history for preserving the freedoms of her citizens for such a long time. Two hundred and thirty years may not seem like a long time, but in fact there is not a single modern government anywhere in the west that has lasted as long, without revolutions and basic changes in their constitutions. There is not a single government with so many freedoms, for such a long time, although some of the other Anglosphere nations come close to it—partly by common inheritance of laws and culture, partly by imitation of America.

This may indeed be coming to an end. We are certainly at a critical juncture.

Anonymous said...

Joanie...as always, a masterpiece of an essay that hits the nail precisely on the head in so many ways.

It is so disheartening to see the state of our Republic...from the immigration travesty to so many other travesties. Here in Idaho, in the intermountain west where so large a percentage of the people still hold fast to the way of life and the values that made this nation what it is...even here in the last week we have witnessed the following:

1) Constant national and local coverage of a spoiled girl's experience with the law in Los Angeles. When Idaho's own sons and daughters are fighting for our freedom on distant shores, when so many other things are happening, yet we are bombarded with a very small case that should have been handled straight forwardly and without being deemed worthy of national news IMHO.

2) A Federal Judge overruled the Bureau of Land Management's agreement with local ranchers and removed cattle from 100,000s of thousands of acres of range land because in this Clinton appointee's opinion, the BLM did not do "enough" studies with Fish and Wildlife over the impact to any species that may eb endangered in the area. HWayne Hage and his wife Helen Chenowith-Hage are turning over in their graves.

3) In Ada County, the most populas in the state, the state government is going to shut off dozens and dozens of wells, ruining and idling productive farmland so that the Bull Trout can have more water in the River...a river that is not hurting for water in the least.

4)Boise Idaho held it's Gay Pride march today. It was a disgusting and sickening spectacle...and my heart aches and my ears hurt from the report of such behavior, so openly displayed, and so "offically" condined.

The poor people of this land have been lulled, they have been indoctrinated from early ages, and they have been beguiled into accepting a notion that diversity means strength, that diversity at almost any cost is somehow good. Well, coming from diverse backgrounds can and does add perspective for us all...but being UNITED is what is good, and being UNITED is what makes us strong, particularly when we are united upon fundamental, everlasting principle and truth.

The people who founded this nation and suffered, bled and died for its birth understood this. we should never forget it.

The same types of things...in spades,...are playing themselves out all across our nation.

I was talking to a co-worker when we were working at one of the regional dams for the federal government this last week. We were talking about just these issues. We both agreed, that we do not know when, but that at some point, such activities, such mass indoctrination, will one day cause us to fall over from our own weight.

He believed it will be sometime when our grandkids grow older...after we are gone.

I said it may be...and even could be longer. But I also said it could be sooner too...even much sooner. Events could overtake us within the space of a day or two that brought it crashing down. Bio-terror, nuclear terror, economic warfare, horrible natural disasters...there are many possibilities.

But this fellow...a good salt of the earth man...a local farmer who had to take an extra job to make ends meet, and who has done so and who, with his wife is raising a wonderful family...he remains optimistic about the ultimate outcome. As do I.

Despite the painful and distressing events of the day. Despite politicians who are blatantly leading our nation to destruction. Despite so many of our own people who have become hooked on entitlements, who are so eager to get what they can from their hard working neighbors and countrymen...despite so many who have been educated to hate our nation and what it stands for...still there is reason to hope.

In the 1980s, most thought that we were on the brink...and under Carter we were.

But then a miracle occurred. In the midst of the dominance of the democratic party in the political areana...in the midst of the push for cultural, sexualy, moral, and foreign policy malais...Ronald Regan came on the scene. And the people elected and chose him overwhelmingly...and time was purchased, a measure of our greatness was retained and we moved on.

Although he has failed in so many critical areas...in 2000 and in 2004, at a time when again the forces of abject betrayal and treachory are working from within to destroy us...this nation picked Bush over Gore and then over Kerry. it was a near thing...and with either of those two things would have gotten much worse, quicker. But the people came out in record numbers and voted...and it was based on most of the same issues we are hearing belabored this time around again.

Then we have this immigration bill fiasco. Clearly a quick and direct ticket to ending our soveriegnty and continuing the push for a borderless, stateless North American Union...and a stab in the heart at our culture and way of life. Again we see the American people rising up and making a difference. Make no mistake, the votes this week are a result of millions and millions of direct phone calls, in person visits, emails, letters, and faxes.

With these types of things going on at the same time we so much else depressing...I say there is reason to hope. There is a vast segment of our population that can and will act. They have proven it over and over again. Sometimes it takes longer than we hope...many times much ground is lost between. But the power is out there to make the difference.

Now, I blieve that there is a very difficulty and very wrenching coorrection coming. I do not know when...could be sooner than we all can imagine...could be decades. But it is coming. And it will be ugly.

But I still hold out hope, that with the blessings of Heaven for the sake of those who do hold fast to moral principle, that it might somehow, miraculously be avoided in favor of a tremndous revival spirit taking hold. But if it is not to be...I still have absolute faith that right will prevail and that God in Heaven will honor those who do hold faithfully to the blessings of liberty and their foundation that He has bequeathed upon this land.

Sorry to be so long winded...but I needed to vent all of this.

God bless you Joanie and God bless all Americans who love liberty and recognize and cherish, and with a pasion will defend at all costs all that it is based upon.

Anonymous said...

IMO, two very basic reforms would put a stop to most of the nonsense coming out of Washington these days:

1.) Repeal the 17th Amendment and and return the election of Senators to the state legislatures. The states have been without a voice since the passage of the 17th and the resulting horse race ends with senators being more beholden to major donors than to their states or their constituents.

Why should a senator from MA, for example, be more beholden to Barbra Streisand than to a citizen of East Boston?

2.) Drastically increase the size of the House. The number "435" is not chiseled in stone, it is a number arbitrarily picked by the congress itself!

The total number of representatives is currently fixed at 435 by Public Law 62-5 of 1911, though Congress has the authority to change that number. In 1911 the U.S. population was about 1/3 what it is now or about 92 million, which to my little carpenter's mind means we have 2/3 less representation than we had less than a century ago. Today the average congressional district is approaching 700,000!

It's ridiculous to believe that any congress critter can know the minds of 700,000 constituents and this in the body that is supposed to be "close to the people."

We are taxed and hounded more today with the mere "color" of representation than our forefathers ever were by the distant British king, but then today's citizen is practically a nonentity compared to our dynamic ancestors, so we sit and take it.

I would add a third reform: Move the capitol to Iowa or Nebraska and make Washington D.C. a museum. No explanation needed...

Anonymous said...

There is no force on this earth that can destroy America except America itself.

Anonymous said...

You need to get this site linked to by other bigger sites, it needs to be more widely read.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for a most excellent effort. I shall read it again and again.

Anonymous said...

"What America Owes Its Illegals" (keep your barf bowl handy):

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/ehrenreich

Anonymous said...

Excellent column, C.W.

Re: the post above, "What America Owes Its Illegals"---

Ask yourself what you owe that poor burglar who broke into your home last night. He had worked so conscientiously, going through three rooms from top to bottom, before you awoke to catch him in the act. SURELY he deserves at least that wide screen TV and that one piece of jewelry. Come on. That was hours of effort. Show some humanity.

Anonymous said...

Welcome back, CW! So glad to see you writing again.

The Bush family hae been terrible for the conservative movement. What the Democrats couldn't do to destroy us, Bush and his cronies are succeeding in doing from within. Especially on immigration. Reagan has to be turning in his grave.

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr. President:

We respectfully ask that your Administration enforce the border security laws that have already been authorized by Congress regardless of whether the Senate passes the immigration reform bill. The bill assumes that several critical border security benchmarks can be achieved within 18 months. These security triggers are already authorized under current law and can be completed without the immigration bill. We believe these enforcement measures are vital and should not wait until Congress passes additional immigration reforms.

Securing the border is the best way to restore trust with the American people and facilitate future improvements of our immigration policy.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senators Jim DeMint (R - South Carolina)
Tom Coburn (R - Oklahoma)
Mike Enzi (R - Wyoming)
David Vitter (R - Louisiana)
Jim Inhofe (R - Oklahoma)
Jim Bunning (R - Kentucky)
Charles Grassley (R - Iowa)
John Ensign (R - Nevada)
Jeff Sessions (R - Alabama)

Anonymous said...

I am printing out copies of this and sending them to my 2 congressmen and 2 senators. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad to hear you'll be sending this to your congressmen and senatos Bill. But if it doesn't go in the circular file upon receipt, it will go there after the first few sentences are read. These people aren't accountable to anyone anymore, least of all the people who put them in office.

Anonymous said...

To the poster who brought up the muslims getting free lunch here in the USA.

You can thank the US State Department for that.

They work for their muslims.

The US prison system is an active breeding and recruiting ground for muslims, especially the Hate-America black muslim kind.

When muslims were caught planning to blow up JFK airport in NY City,
the leftwing NY TIMES put the story on page A-37.

Anonymous said...

That isn't the worst crime of the U.S. State Department. Witness recent events on the West Bank and Gaza. Thanks to the U.S. State Department, Israel's days are numbered.

Anonymous said...

SO GLAD to see you back Joanie! I have sent this column to many people. Sadly, it's all so true. I hope you'll be writing much more now!

Anonymous said...

smithy,

You will like this:

U.S. to Lift PA Funding Freeze in Judea and Samaria--Europe Resumes Aid to Abbas, US Not Far Behind

(more insanity from the US State Department)

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/122785

Anonymous said...

Father of Climatology Throws Up at the Thought of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'

http://newsbusters.org/node/13541

by Noel Sheppard on June 18, 2007

Reid Bryson, the 87-year-old considered to be the father of scientific climatology, has once again spoken out strongly against anthropogenic global warming theories being regularly disseminated by alarmists in the media and the scientific community.
In an interview published by Wisconsin’s Capital Times Monday, Bryson spoke about the money involved in this "religion," and when asked about soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore's schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" responded, "Don't make me throw up...It is not science. It is not true."
But Bryson had loads more to say on this issue.
There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week.
"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.
Think Bryson will be interviewed any time soon by Katie, Charlie, or Brian?
The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.
Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.
"It's like there is an elephant charging in [sic, the room] and you worry about the fact that there is a fly sitting on its head. It's just a total misplacement of emphasis," he said. "It really isn't science because there's no really good scientific evidence."
Just because almost all of the scientific community believes in man-made global warming proves absolutely nothing, Bryson said. "Consensus doesn't prove anything, in science or anywhere else, except in democracy, maybe."
For the alarmists who love to depict every skeptic as being on the take of oil companies:
Bryson, 87, was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute for Environmental Studies, now known as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired in 1985, but has gone into the office almost every day since. He does it without pay.
"I have now worked for zero dollars since I retired, long enough that I have paid back the people of Wisconsin every cent they paid me to give me a wonderful, wonderful career. So we are even now. And I feel good about that," said Bryson.
. . .
"There is a lot of money to be made in this," he added. "If you want to be an eminent scientist you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"
Bryson then pointed out how the media work:
Reporters will often call the meteorology building seeking the opinion of a scientist and some beginning graduate student will pick up the phone and say he or she is a meteorologist, Bryson said. "And that goes in the paper as 'scientists say.'"
The word of this young graduate student then trumps the views of someone like Bryson, who has been working in the field for more than 50 years, he said. "It is sort of a smear."
Of course, then some ignoramus will copy the opinions of this graduate student and dissiminate them throughout the blogosphere as yet another example of the consensus. NewsBusters members should be very familiar with this:
Bryson said he recently wrote something on the subject and two graduate students told him he was wrong, citing research done by one of their professors. That professor, Bryson noted, is probably the student of one of his students.
"Well, that professor happened to be wrong," he said.
. . .

"There is very little truth to what is being said and an awful lot of religion. It's almost a religion. Where you have to believe in anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming or else you are nuts."


While Bryson doesn't think that global warming is man-made, he said there is some evidence of an effect from mankind, but not an effect of carbon dioxide.
For example, in Wisconsin in the last 100 years the biggest heating has been around Madison, Milwaukee and in the Southeast, where the cities are. There was a slight change in the Green Bay area, he said. The rest of the state shows no warming at all.
"The growth of cities makes it hotter, but that was true back in the 1930s, too," Bryson said. "Big cities were hotter than the surrounding countryside because you concentrate the traffic and you concentrate the home heating. And you modify the surface, you pave a lot of it."
. . .
Bryson didn't see Al Gore's movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."
"Don't make me throw up," he said. "It is not science. It is not true."

Anonymous said...

Courageous.

Anonymous said...

Joanie, the title of your blog was never more appropriate! What our leaders in Washington are doing with this immigration bill is disgusting! And it is allegiance and duty betrayed! Whenever I saw legislation that was horrible coming down the pike, I could always figure out what the motive was, but with this one I am still scratching my head. I can understand the crooked Democrats, but why in hell are the Republicans doing this? This is unprecedented and it is treason!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this excellent column and this excellent site. I haven't read all off the columns yet but I intend to.

Anonymous said...

Ban on war veterans handing out miniature US flags during July 4th parade

http://www.mdjonline.com/268/10264045.txt