In the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shootings on June 18, 2015, Governor Nikki Haley called for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the State capital’s flagpole. Regrettably, even if her call for action is successful, it would do no more to change the reasons behind the hatred that drives one human to kill others than legislation to ban the “N” word would go towards closing the inaccurately named “racial” divide.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, Relativism is “The belief that different things are true, right, etc., for different people or at different times.” Another tenant of Relativism is the shifting meaning of words, in other words, words no longer hold meaning constant, they can mean one thing one day and another the next in the same context or statement. In such a world, not only is everything relative it is also meaningless, but when this standard is applied to the law, then the law also becomes lawless.
Thank you Rich, thank you Mayor Donaldson. Good citizens of Butler County and of the great State of Pennsylvania, thank you for coming out on a cold Saturday morning to support your right to bear arms.
I find it ironic that we have to come out to support our right to bear arms because firearms have been pervasive in our society since before we became a self governing, free, and independent nation. As a matter of fact, we would not have become the self governing, free, and independent nation when we did had it not been for a well armed population.
Over one-hundred and fifty years after the Thirteenth Amendment[1] abolished involuntary slavery and servitude in America; slavery is still a very sensitive subject, especially for “African” Americans. Much of this apprehension has its origins in an historical view that Africans and their descendants are somehow less civilized, less intelligent or preposterously less “evolved” from assumed animal ancestors than their white counterparts. Yet, instead of looks of derision or treatment as second class citizens, all Americans owe the men and women who were enslaved in America and their descendants a debt of gratitude equal to the gratitude bestowed upon patriots who fought to secede from England in America’s war for independence.
The following is a copy of a speech CDR Shipley gave at a Navy Ball in 2010 to an audience of mostly US Navy midshipmen and enlisted personnel:
[Short intro]…
…After being invited to speak on valor, I first thought about how to define it. As I do for most significant words, I referred to Webster’s 1828 dictionary, which defines it as:
“Strength of mind in regard to danger; that quality which enables a man to encounter danger with firmness; personal bravery; courage; intrepidity; prowess.”
Anyone who has ever driven in Washington DC during rush hour, especially when parkways take on a literal meaning, know they never want to drive there during rush hour again if they do not have to. Washington gridlock traffic, as bad as it is, is a metaphor for legislative bills trying to pass between the US House and Senate.
The youthful tidal wave plunging over America’s southern border has brought the immigration debate to a critical crescendo. While most Americans are struggling with what is the moral and ethical thing to do with the children, the two political parties are struggling with how they are going to out-maneuver the other in a political chess match that has the future control of America at stake. The debate centers on giving citizenship, with full voting privileges, to people who come to America illegally.
John Koskinen’s testimony before Congress on June 20, 2014, making no apologies for the loss of over two year’s worth of emails from Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner, who is at the center of the IRS scandal, was nothing short of appalling. It not only insulted the intelligence of millions of Americans who understand the difficulty of “losing” data in this age of technology, unless it is willfully destroyed, but the sheer arrogance in the way he sat there haughtily providing no answers and no apologies personified the very image of the IRS nearly every taxpayer experiences when we must provide detailed documentation about our personal affairs or face overbearing scrutiny from the IRS that seems to presume our guilt until we can prove our innocence.
Most all major news outlets in America, if they even cover it, have couched the disturbance between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy as one based on the Bundy Ranch refusing to pay for grazing rights on Federal property. Yet, a similar incident between the U.S. Forest Service and Kit Laney in New Mexico, in which the Forest Service claims part of the Laney Ranch is on Federal property, has the same basic principle at stake and it has nothing to do with grazing rights or boundary disputes. Those issues are moot points if we answer a more basic question; what legal authority and for what purpose does the Federal Government have to “own” property in the United States?
As Woody Guthrie’s ballad proclaims and in spite of his Communist beliefs,[1] the idea that public property is your land and is my land, is more in line with the original intent of the Constitution when understood in the context as being between the Federal government and citizens of the United States. In other words, public land belongs to the people, not the government and the national government’s authority over it is limited by the US Constitution.
As much as modern American labor unions would like to obscure their origins to imply they were part of the struggle for American independence, the facts are contrary to their rhetoric. Modern organized labor grew out of 
communist theory developed in the 1840s, which itself evolved from the bloody French Revolution of 1789.