Books, movies, politics, and whatever I want

Happy Independence Day!

Monday, July 4th, 2011

I’ll be watching 1776 today, it’s a annual tradition.

Also on the watch list for today is An American Carol.  Funny, educational and a bit dangerous to make with the current blacklisting going on in Hollywood.

 

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Friday B-Movie Pick: 1776

Friday, July 1st, 2011

1776

This close to July 4th, I gotta go with the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical 1776. William Daniels is quite good as John Adams, but it is Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin who steals the show.

Friday B-Movie Pick Archive

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Dr. Rice gives an important history lesson

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Originally posted on my old blog back in May 2005, but certainly worth the repost.   This quote is from the Washington Times Inside Politics column from May 12, 2005.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recalled last night for CNN how her father took up arms to defend fellow blacks from racist whites in the segregated South and said the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is as important as free speech and religion.
In an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Miss Rice said that her minister father and his friends armed themselves to defend the black community in Birmingham, Ala., against nightriders in 1962 and 1963.
She said that if local authorities in segregated Birmingham, where Miss Rice was born in 1954, had lists of registered weapons, she did not think her father and other blacks would have been able to defend themselves.
Miss Rice said, “We have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that the Founding Fathers thought very important.”
She said they understood “there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Alabama, when, in fact, the police weren’t going to protect you.”
“I also don’t think we get to pick and choose from the Constitution,” she said in the interview, which was taped for airing last night. “The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment.”

This is history that most so called “liberals” don’t want taught in government run public schools. It gives the wrong message, i.e. that the government can’t solve every one of your problems and should.

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Time Epic Fail

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

In a recent article in the so-called “news weekly” Time about the Constitution of the United States of America, the author, who is also the Managing Editor, managed to make no less than thirteen (13) factual errors.

The Constitution is written in a fairly clear and straightforward manner, and has been the subject of much scholarly research. So for a ‘veteran’ reporter like Richard Stengel to make over one dozen errors in an article on the Constitution implies that he is either massively incompetent, or intentionally promoting an agenda that is not supported by the Constitution, which would require him to misrepresent the clear intent of the document.  The latter choice also implies that Mr. Stengel assumes that the majority of his readers have not read the Constitution, nor are they going to. A position also held by Rachel Maddow of the far left extremest “news” organization, MSNBC.

Aaron Worthing has an excellent article listing all thirteen (13) factual errors made by the Newsweek Managing Editor, Richard Stengel.  You should read the whole thing, which details exactly what is wrong in the article, and provides the correct facts.  I’m just going to list the thirteen (13) errors here.

  1. The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.
  2. The Constitution is not law.
  3. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment emancipated the slaves.
  4. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African Americans.
  5. The original Constitution declared that black people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.
  6. That the original, unamended Constitution prohibited women from voting.
  7. Inter arma enim silent leges translates as “in time of war, the Constitution is silent.”
  8. The War Powers Act allows the president to unilaterally wage war for sixty days.
  9. We have only declared war five times.
  10. Alexander Hamilton wanted a king for America.
  11. Social Security is a debt within the meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.
  12. Naturalization depends on your birth.
  13. The Obamacare mandate is a tax.

You should do what Mr. Stengel clearly doesn’t want you to do, read the US Constitution. It’s not that long, and is written in clear English, unlike most legislation written today.

Update: The error count is still rising.

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Yet another example of how Liberals are really, really bad at history

Monday, June 27th, 2011

The current case in point, the so-called “Top Cop” in democrat political machine controlled Chicago claims that current federal “gun control laws” are “racist.”

What makes this interesting is that his statement is actually correct, but his attempt at reasoning is completely and utterly wrong base on actual historical facts.

Yes, so-called “gun control” laws, especially the federal ones, are race based policies designed to deny black (and other minority) citizens their Second Amendment Rights, and the majority of them were passed by democrats.

For the whole story, read The Racist Roots of Gun Control, which was originally published in the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy back in 1995.

Here is the executive summary:

The first so-called “gun control” laws passed in the United States were in Southern states right after the end of the Civil War.  They were implemented to protect members of the KKK from being shot by citizens the Klan members still considered uppity property when the Klan showed up in the middle of night to string a few American Citizens up by the neck as a warning to other black Americans to ‘keep their place.”

Even before the Civil War, the Tennessee state constitution had the following line in it: ” “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense.”  Note that free ‘persons of color’ were denied the basic Human Right of effective self-defense.  They were to be at the mercy of ‘their betters.’   Yes, even then, those who today would be self-labeled “progressives” were closet aristocrats.

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Imagine the uproar if a Fox News anchor had said this

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

File under yet another example of how bad liberals are at history.  Perhaps that is because they tend to rewrite it in a blatantly Orwellian fashion to fit whatever they think will assist their next grab at the brass ring of power, but I digress slightly.  The topic at hand is in your face ignorance of the party that is constantly telling you how stupid anybody who dares disagree with them are.

Listen to this clip of a MSNBC talking head, i.e. a “News Anchor”, attempt to “educate” his listening audience and get a key historical fact about an elected democrat President completely and utterly wrong.  This isn’t a slip of the Talking Head’s tongue, he’s reading from a prepared script, in a produced segment, complete with background graphics. The fact that JFK was assassinated in November of 1963, requiring LBJ to have been elected in November 1964, in order to decide not to run in 1968, is completely lost not only by the “News Anchor”, but the also by: the person or persons who wrote the segment, the producer of the segment, as well as anybody in the entire production team that set the segment up for presentation on the air.

Given that MSNBC’s business plan is to “out fox Fox News, but from the extreme left”, it is doubtful that  there is a single Republican or conservative in that list of people involved in the production of the so-called “news segment” in question. One possible explanation is that the entire crew is so indoctrinated in the liberal “group think” or “herd mentality”, that none dared question the obvious and glaring error.  A large C Conservative or Libertarian would have stood up and pointed out the error.  The leftists have been conditioned not to question authority from “their betters.”

Then again, as one of the people commenting on the post I’m referencing there points out, it was a production team at MSNBC who let one of that network’s political “commentators”, Rachel Maddow, “mock Boehner for saying the Constitution has a Preamble.”

Perhaps MSNBC is betting that their audience is woefully ignorant about actual American history.

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Quote of the Day

Friday, June 10th, 2011

The US Constitution.  I read it for the Articles.”

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Do The Math

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Clearly our Dear Leader is hoping you don’t.  He claims that “Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes the American taxpayer from the investment we made during my watch.”

Conn Carrol has done the math for you just in case you are one of those who think that Obamacare will actually reduced health care costs.

Total loaned to Chrysler: $14 billion

Total paid back by Chrysler: $7.56 billion

Total taxpayer loss on the Obama bail out of Chrysler: $6.44 billion

While you can argue if math is not one of our Dear Leader‘s strong points, it is pretty clear that he is betting that it isn’t one of yours.

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NBC: A reality free zone

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell actually says that “Republicans are trying to “appropriate” Reagan to push conservatism.”

Reality to Moonbat, Ronald Reagan was a Conservative. His bipartisanship is mentioned, but note that when Reagan worked with congressional democrats, he got the better part of the deal. He was willing to give 20% in order to get 80% of what he wanted. Which is 20% more than our Dear Leader was, and is, willing to give congressional Republicans when he calls for “bipartisanship.”

Leftists are bad at history, because history is not on their side.

Ace brings a dose of reality, via history, to the table:

If Reagan Was Such a Moderate… on things like firing the striking PATCO union members, on taking an aggressive policy against the Soviet Union (Reagan’s view of detente: We win, they lose), on slashing tax rates, on greatly expanding the military and upgrading our nuclear deterrent, etc., etc., etc,. then what were liberals like Andrew Mitchell doing shrieking bloody murder and claiming Ronny Raygun was going to destroy the world in a nuclear war?

Boy… When the DNC puts out its talking points, Andrea Mitchell really takes them to the limit, doesn’t she?

This idea of Reagan as Great Compromiser was born recently as a DNC strategy to claim that today’s conservatives aren’t like the only good conservatives (dead ones, of course) and so draft Reagan into the odd role of Obama supporter.

It’s one thing for a political party to attempt this gambit. What the hell is a supposed journalist doing regurgitating such bullshit?

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan nails the truth that is so abhorrent to Mitchell and other leftists:

“Republicans are not, I think, trying to appropriate Ronald Reagan,” she said. “Ronald Reagan was a Republican. Conservatives aren’t trying to appropriate him. He was a conservative. Willie, he became a public figure in America two years before he was governor in 1964, and he laid out a speech as stern, if not sterner, in its conservatism in which he explained his views on taxes: ‘Cut them.’ His views on the size of government: ‘Too big, too bullying.’ His views on the Soviet Union: ‘Hold it back, it is expansionist.’ This was all very clear. As a president, as a governor, he was pragmatic in his operation.”

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Thoughts on the US Constitution

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Yesterday was Constitution Day, so here are some observations on that document.

First, Patrick Henry:

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

Ayn Rand:

“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.”

Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States of America:

“The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.”

The common theme here is that the goal of the Constitution is limit the power of government, and to put the power in hands of the people.

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