Posts Tagged → america
The original Thanksgiving Day proclamation
[New York, 3 October 1789]
By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.
Go: Washington
Sen. Bob Casey’s record vs. his YouTube ads
If you are a registered Pennsylvania voter getting on to YouTube, you will probably be presented with several advertisements for and about US senator Bob Casey, Jr., who is running for re-re-re-re-election.
In these ads everyday people are happily, even cheerfully talking to the camera about how bi-partisan Bob Casey is. How helpful he is. He sits down with them and smiles into the camera, and says “We can work together!”
Contrast this sunny image with Casey’s do-nothing, radical left-wing record. Do-nothing in the sense that Harrisburg City officials cannot get Casey to even write a letter of support for basic project funding. Go ahead and call one of his offices yourself; see if you get a human being on the phone. Typically no one answers the phone, and no one answers your letters. This is a man who has completely checked out and simply occupies a space.
Radical in the sense that Casey has sided with the crazed, violent, obstructionist mob in Congress and in the streets of America over and over and over, publicly vowing to oppose every single Trump nominee, every single Republican – passed law.
This is not bipartisan behavior. It is the opposite of positive can-do attitude for American citizens. This is Casey being as starkly partisan and as difficult as he possibly can be.
And most important, what this means is that he is not representing the interests of the citizens he was elected to serve. Rather, Casey is just another Nancy Pelosi radical, serving some weird anti-America agenda that leaves behind every loyal, taxpaying citizen in favor of some law-breaking, border-jumping, illegal foreigner. All for his party’s quest for absolute power through registering illegal aliens as new voters.
Vote Casey out.
Send him a message that we want to be represented in Washington, DC. If he wants to represent the illegal aliens of other nations, then he can go move there, to those countries, and help them right there, where they live. Those of us who keep writing his paychecks are tired of Casey’s lies.
The Democrat Party left me, I did not leave the Democrat Party
Following the ancient dictum of “If you are conservative when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are liberal when you are old, you have no brain,” I was once a registered Democrat.
Long ago, in my early twenties.
True, I was from central Pennsylvania, where the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans (and everyone else) were barely noticeable. The Democrats were the union guys who worked in the coal mines, and a lot of farmers who depended on government crop insurance programs; the Republicans were the mine owners and managers, the small business owners.
But everyone drove the same pickup trucks with an American flag and an NRA sticker. Everyone was full-throated do-or-die patriotic over America. No question. Everyone owned guns. It was the odd home out there that did not have any guns, and in fact, I cannot think of any homes where I grew up that did not have at least a handful of firearms. At least one was a .410 shotgun kept by the back door for starlings, groundhogs, and crows in the garden. Guns were as practical as any other tool in the home.
So in 1988, I was the Al Gore for President campaign’s central Pennsylvania coordinator. Way way back in 1988, you know, before the last Ice Age, Al Gore was an NRA-endorsed, pro-life conservative. His party affiliation was almost irrelevant. He was my kind of guy. And he cared about the environment, in which I like to hunt and fish.
And then the creeping, seeping radical anti-America 1960s politics caught up with even the rural areas, including Tennessee, which then-Senator Al Gore, Jr., lost, after running for president as a kook-Left Democrat. Gore even lost his senate seat.
That is because by the early 1990s, most of America’s rural Democrats started becoming former Democrats, and abandoning the political party that had so suddenly abandoned them.
Fast forward to today, and the Democrat Party is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party. Gone is the patriotism, the pride in America. Hell, even the loyalty to America is gone.
Instead, the Democrat Party has now become a witch’s brew of treason, sedition, anarchy, political violence, lawless political opportunism, and blame-America-for-everything Marxism.
That political party now stands for illegal alien invaders over American citizen taxpayers; for illegal alien invaders over secure borders and secure families inside the borders; for sanctuary cities over the rule of law; for bureaucracy over freedom; for vague feelings of supposedly aggrieved groups over the Constitution’s guarantee of individual rights and liberties for everyone. And so on. There is very little to nothing that the Democrat Party stands for today that is good for America. Pretty much everything the party stands for today is anti-America.
I am pro-America. It is the best nation on the face of the planet, bar none. It has created the greatest amount of opportunity for the greatest variety and number of people of any nation in history. If this is not good enough for you, then America is probably not the right place for you. On the other hand, America is more than good enough for me; I worship America. I am staying here, and I will defend her.
I did not leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me. Hell, the Democrat Party abandoned America, completely.
A few local signs that the economy is smokin’ hot
Me: “Hi. I would like to have Cleon make me log arch, one that I can hook to my ATV, that is stronger than the Chinese junk being sold everywhere, and that is less expensive than the crazy-priced LogRite arches.”
Lynette: “Josh, what is your time frame?”
Me: “Well, I can use it in a week, but two or three weeks is no problem.”
Lynette: “Here’s the thing about timing. Back in June, we were about to lay off one of the welders, but we put out bids on ten jobs, any one or two of which would have carried us through the year. And between last week and this Monday we heard back that we won every single one of them. So we will not only be retaining that junior welder, but we are now looking for about five more to help us meet our commitments. We might not be able to get to your log arch for a while, but one of the men will call you back later today.”
And then one of the men did call me back, with terms and a price that more or less said “If we are going to make this for you, then you are going to pay big for taking us away from our real work.”
Another sign that our local and regional economy is smokin’ hot: The log trucks, the pallet trucks, the lumber trucks on the roads EVERYWHERE and at all times of day.
Never before have I seen so much activity in just one business sector, as I am seeing now in the timber industry, except maybe in 2008 when the Marcellus Shale boom was indeed booming across Pennsylvania.
Log trucks are especially visible. How can you miss a log truck? It dwarfs every other vehicle around it, and looks incredibly incongruous. Log trucks have these huge wide open bays or bunks to hold the logs, and a boom arm with a claw for lifting up 6,000 to 10,000-pound logs. A log truck has about 5,000 board feet or more of medium to high grade logs of all types on it, heading from someone’s private forest to someone else’s mill. From there the logs will be carefully analyzed for grade, and either sold-on or sawn up on site. Hardwood lumber is used in flooring, cabinetry, and furniture, all of which when active indicate a strong consumer and home building economy. Even tulip poplar, once sold for pennies per board foot, is now used for couch frames and cabinetry frames.
At every timber job there are expensive machines at work, with drivers who earn enough money to support a family. And the loggers, guys born with a chainsaw in one hand and a rifle in the other, they cut down a dangerous tree every ten minutes, then lop it and move on to the next before choking up the logs and skidding them to a landing.
Then there is the landowner, who gets good money for something they did absolutely nothing to create.
The sawmills, whether small Amish mills or huge international mills selling hundreds of thousands of board feet per week, are beehives of activity. Every person working there is earning money, and spending money, and contributing toward the larger economic activity around them.
Say nothing of the new homes and kitchen cabinets being built, or of the beautiful hardwood flooring and furniture being made for those new homes. All from someone’s private forest.
The point is, these are just two small examples of how the economy is exploding, and how after many years of stagnation we finally get to do more than scratch out a living, but actually do well and pay for our kids’ questionable college “education,” buy new cars, take nice vacations, and set something aside for our later years, when we are no longer able to work so hard.
It really is a new day in America, and boy does it feel good. One gets the impression that this good feeling is widespread across America, with the sad exception of places in North Carolina and Florida, recently hit hard by hurricanes, and our hearts go out to the victims there. The one thing they can rest assured about is that the materials needed to rebuild their lives are on their way as I write these words, and they are America-made, and America-grown.
Remembering 9/11
It is tough to square up the religiously-inspired terror attack on America 17 years ago with our national policies since then.
America went through a ridiculous bout of Political Correctness, instead of rational, logical approaches to minimize the risk of something similar to 9/11 happening again. The PC policies placed American at even greater risk. Our porous borders are a symbol that we are still asleep.
Today, political commentator Jamie Glazov was tossed from Twitter, on 9/11, for posting simple ideas about how to protect America.
FakeBook deleted people’s accounts for simply mentioning 9/11.
PC is alive and well and it will only invite more terror attacks like 9/11 on America if we do not adopt a survival attitude.
God bless America and the brave Americans who put up such a fierce fight on Flight 93, and who showed us all how to deal with this scourge.
A culture of protest, a culture of animosity
If you desire to see the raw underbelly of an overly tolerant democracy, then watch or listen to today’s US Senate hearings on Judge Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is a smart, friendly, humble, kind of nerdy, bookish federal judge who had the audacity to be nominated to the US Supreme Court.
Why audacity? Because he is not super liberal. Because he does not walk in lock-step with the media arm of the Democrat Party. Because he has a judicial philosophy that is directly connected to how America was founded. He does not run around making legal judgments that are contrary to the US Constitution.
All this makes him audacious in the eyes of people who would use the US Supreme Court to achieve de facto legislative results they cannot get in the US Congress. Kavanaugh is audacious in some people’s eyes because he dares to fill a vacant seat on the Court, and play a constructive role in administering US law and jurisprudence.
To me, it looks like the most boring job in the world. Though at one time, in the heat of my youth, I aspired to be a constitutional scholar and actually studied a lot of constitutional law at Penn State and in graduate school (Vanderbilt) in preparation for it. My uncle has argued twice in front of the US Supreme Court, and on his second trip I was honored to help draft an Amicus brief and sit in the audience while the justices grilled both sides.
But now, look at how even Kavanaugh, The Most Boring Man In The World, is attacked and dragged through the mud by opponents of a lawful society. A shameless howling mob greeted him and the entire world today in one of the world’s most hallowed democratic chambers, the US Senate. To watch and listen to Kavanaugh’s opponents today in The People’s chamber, you would not know that we live in the most civilized nation.
From the 1960s to present, a culture of protest has developed to the point where the ends justify the means. That is, if someone opposes a political issue or a political person, they can go batshit crazy in front of everyone and put on the most foolish antics, with the craziest accusations, and the most violent and destructive behavior, because they are simply protesting.
And because they are protesting, they must be correct, is how they think. And if people oppose them, or have a majority in a legislative chamber or on a court, then every possible brick must be thrown in order to stop them…is how they think.
Where protest has its healthy roots in the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceable assembly and petitioning the government, today’s protests are anything but constitutional. They are violent and hate filled, lawless and vile, cruel and destructive of people and property.
A very real culture of animosity has resulted out of the 1960s, and it is a bad thing, a toxic thing, corrosive and uncivilized. Its practitioners do not wish to live and let live; they desire control above all, and the use of angry mobs and threats to intimidate their opponents into acquiescence.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hungary fell the same way. Slowly but surely the Communists there used a combination of violent mobs and corrupted police and courts to eliminate their political opponents. The Hungarian Communists used democratic processes and institutions to achieve non-democratic, tyrannical ends. Hungary went from one of Europe’s great nations to completely oppressed under the Communist boot. Only through uprising and great sacrifice were the Hungarian people freed once again, long after many horrible repressive crimes had been committed.
That same thing is now happening today with the national Democrat Party, whose hatred for the common person, the working person, the taxpayer and citizen, America’s “normal” and boring people, like Judge Kavanaugh, is so overwhelming that it can no longer be controlled.
If you love America, if you enjoy your simple pleasures and the basic freedoms we have here, then tell your US senators you support Kavanaugh, and do not vote for Democrats. The national Democrats do not have your interests at heart. Democrats care much more for illegal aliens (purported “victims”) who murder and rape our children than they care for you or me, taxpaying citizens who have worked hard to build this nation.
A good, decent man, a Justice Kavanaugh will restore some semblance of lawful and constitutional behavior to America, and the howling mob opposes that. Don’t let them win. They are not “protestors,” they are angry, lawless destroyers who pretend they are under the protection of the First Amendment.
You are damn right I still support President Trump
Despite a howling mob’s best effort to obfuscate, harangue, punish, slow down and hamstring the president of the United States, I still strongly support him.
What broken third-world country do we live in where otherwise normal everyday Americans boast about being in “the resistance” against their own president?! Are they running a guerilla civil war against the country?
Can you imagine if these were conservative militia members saying this about a president in the other political party? The uproar that would follow!
This shameful notion that liberal activists as well as average Democrats have about “resisting” a legally elected president of their own nation is incredibly harmful to our nation. All the foolish talk about our electoral system being compromised by “Russia” hurts the integrity of our electoral system, because it undermines people’s trust in it.
And yet none of these liberals wants voter ID, none want the local voter rolls to be purged and verified. Oh no no no, that would remove too many fake voters from the rolls!
One of the reasons I support President Trump is that, by and large, I agree with his choices and policies. Certainly not all of them, but definitely the preponderance. There are some policies and actions I think his administration could do better, like in the environmental and resource conservation fields. More nuance, more refined distinctions, more sophisticated analysis. But like with any other elected official, you learn to take the good with the bad, and with this particular elected official I believe we have much more good than bad. This president is running a net Positive. America is booming!
Another reason I support President Trump is that he is standing strong amid a withering personal crusade against him, his children, his grandchildren, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his business associates, his business partners, his employees, his friends, his neighbors, and everyone else who has any sort of association with him. It is meant to punish him and everyone he cares about. Just for him being him.
This ridiculous attack is way outside the normal scope of American politics. It is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is evil and disgusting. If it were Obama, or Clinton getting this same treatment, you couldn’t get away with it for ten seconds.
For me and I think a lot of Americans like me, this very personal and destructive assault on President Trump is an attack on basic American decency and on our system of government. No one in public service should be subjected to this. Certainly that is what some people argued about president Bill Clinton, when he was caught having sex with women in the White House and then lying to cover it up.
People who win elections should get to carry on with their work. That is the way our system works. Is supposed to work.
That the media have been corrupted into this crusade only cements my view that this treatment of our American President is simply unjustified and wrong, enabled by the corruption of the First Amendment.
That Hollywood actors feel free to use the most vulgar language against the person who was elected to represent our country means that they, the Hollywood people, are that low vulgar quality. It does not mean anything about the person they are aiming at. Hollywood and its actors are really in the smelly gutter. Makes you wonder why you went to see their stupid movies in the past. Why should we enable such infantile jerks?
All of this mistreatment has only hardened my resolve for President Trump to stay in office and succeed.
So when people ask me “Josh, do you still support President Trump?,” I say “You are damned right I support President Trump!”
To Hell and back.
Mafia Mueller’s Illegal Inquisition
Newly made Mafia “don” Robert Mueller continues his Grand Inquisition into innocent Americans in his quest to deflect attention from his own crimes.
Robert Mueller has zero credibility, zero integrity. He belongs in jail.
Mueller is documented to have used his official positions to steer enormous Lockheed-Martin contracts to his friends (James Comey) and himself.
A raft of FBI agent whistleblowers are poised to testify against Mueller. One of their chief complaints is that as FBI chief, he threatened to actually arrest FBI agents who objected to his self-enrichment behavior.
Mueller is one of the biggest criminals in America. And his role as an appointed special prosecutor was made by one of his fellow criminals.
His entire Inquisition is designed to deflect attention from his crimes and the criminal enterprise of his enablers, like the Clintons.
His prosecution of Manafort was political, not legal. The warrant enabling Mueller to investigate people is based on some fake Russia collusion thing, and has nothing to do with any other crimes people may have committed. The US Constitution is clear, as is case law, that a person cannot be convicted with illegal evidence. The government cannot breaak the law to enforce the law; that is official lawlessness. And yet that is all Mueller has against Manafort.
Making predictions is risky, but I am confident that Manafort’s legal appeal will be successful, and he will go free. For the simple reason that the evidence arrayed against him for crimes unrelated to Russia collusion was illegally obtained.
The same stands for Flynn, and Cohen and a bunch of other people who were coerced by arch Mafia criminal Robert Mueller into confessing to things they did not do. So that Mueller can move forward with his political persecution.
The historic Grand Inquisition was famous for torturing people into making false confessions. There is no real difference between what Mueller is doing and what the Inquisitors did to their victims five hundred years ago.
One would like to think that humans have evolved past such naked power grabs, but the Mueller witch hunt disproves that. Greed, ambition, and a lust for power and control over other humans has always driven people to do terrible things, and we are witnessing this happen right before our eyes right now.
Folks, if you like you democracy, then you will have to fight for your democracy. And do not make the mistake of pooh-poohing this, you are indeed in a fight. You did not pick this fight, you do not want this fight, you would rather be peaceful and not fight. But if you do not fight (vote, march, protest, write letters to the editor, post news reports on social media, attend political rallies, and go door-to-door for good candidates), then everything you take for granted is up in the air, up for grabs. Your good economy, your cheap food, your freedoms, your free speech. Everything is in play.
And behind it all is Mafia don Robert Mueller and his friends. If you want America to be run by criminals like Robert Mueller, then sit back, grill hotdogs, drink beer, go to your job, go out to dinner and watch movies, and pretend that you can’t make a difference.