~ “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.
Compliments of a friend and colleague, Kenny Solomon, TheAmericanSurvivalGuide.com:
On May 30, 1868, thousands gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for the first Decoration Day ceremony.
An address by James A. Garfield, then an Ohio congressman who had also served as a Major General in The Civil War. In this first of such annual addresses at Arlington National Cemetery, Garfield, who in 1881 would become the 20th president of the United States, sets the standard of ‘why’.
Quote
I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung.
With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot[…]
“I feel uncomfortable about the word ‘hero’ because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect the memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that…”
Chris Hayes, Progressive Moron
Ann Coulter remark aside, the commenter in the video above is dead on in his assessment of Chris Hayes.
According to an AlterNet puff piece on Chris Hayes (excerpted below),
…Today his parents both work for the City of New York: Geri, a former schoolteacher, works for the NYC Department of Education, and Roger, after many years of community organizing, does health advocacy work in East Harlem for the NYC Department of Health. His younger brother is the Nevada state director for Organizing For America, the grassroots group built from the lists of the 2008 Obama campaign.
‘My parents are totally amazing, heroic figures,’ Hayes says…
…Hayes found the path to political journalism by taking the long route (which he completed at a sprinter’s pace), studying neither journalism nor politics in college. He met his wife while attending Brown, where both sat on the board of a student-run black-box theater called the Production Workshop. They were 19 years old. Though a philosophy major, Hayes says, “I did a lot of theater. That’s mostly what I did. I directed in plays, I acted in plays, I wrote plays….
Two days after they were married in 2007, he and Shaw moved to Washington, D.C., where she commenced her clerkship with Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. (She’s now associate counsel in the White House Counsel’s office.)…
Not only is Chris Hayes a moron, shill and an elitist degenerate for MSNBC/Media Matters and the White House, Hayes like everyone else in the Progressive movement does not get it.
Without the valiant men and women who have given of themselves so selflessly, Hayes and his merry crew of Progressives would have choked long ago on the backfiring of that hammer and sickle to which they have declared allegiance.
Instead, this Marxist sob chokes on the word “hero”? I am appalled.
Even if Hayes butched up tenfold to one-third that of Rachel Maddow, he could never withstand more than ten seconds of what our HEROES endure daily on the battlefield and away from home.
One who gives so much, in my book, is not only courageous but the tallest of men and women, i.e., a hero.
As for Chris Hayes, MSNBC, Media Matters, Barack Obama and comrades, shove your test balloons where the sun does not shine.
Dear Father, I pray that You will protect the lives of the men and women of our armed forces….Command Your angels concerning them to guard them in all their ways. Surround them on all sides, and let no weapon formed against them prosper. Let no harm befall them, no disaster come near their tent. Satisfy them with long… life and show them Your salvation. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
“The Fourth of July was traditionally celebrated as America’s birthday, but the idea of an annual day specifically celebrating the Flag is believed to have first originated in 1885. BJ Cigrand, a schoolteacher, arranged for the pupils in the Fredonia, Wisconsin Public School, District 6, to observe June 14 (the 108th anniversary of the official adoption of The Stars and Stripes) as ‘Flag Birthday’. In numerous magazines and newspaper articles and public addresses over the following years, Cigrand continued to enthusiastically advocate the observance of June 14 as ‘Flag Birthday’, or ‘Flag Day’.
On June 14, 1889, George Balch, a kindergarten teacher in New York City, planned appropriate ceremonies for the children of his school, and his idea of observing Flag Day was later adopted by the State Board of Education of New York. On June 14, 1891, the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia held a Flag Day celebration, and on June 14 of the following year, the New York Society of the Sons of the Revolution, celebrated Flag Day.
Following the suggestion of Colonel J Granville Leach (at the time historian of the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the Revolution), the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames of America on April 25, 1893 adopted a resolution requesting the mayor of Philadelphia and all others in authority and all private citizens to display the Flag on June 14th. Leach went on to recommend that thereafter the day be known as ‘Flag Day’, and on that day, school children be assembled for appropriate exercises, with each child being given a small Flag.
Two weeks later on May 8th, the Board of Managers of the Pennsylvania Society of Sons of the Revolution unanimously endorsed the action of the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames. As a result of the resolution, Dr. Edward Brooks, then Superintendent of Public Schools of Philadelphia, directed that Flag Day exercises be held on June 14, 1893 in Independence Square. School children were assembled, each carrying a small Flag, and patriotic songs were sung and addresses delivered.
In 1894, the governor of New York directed that on June 14 the Flag be displayed on all public buildings. With BJ Cigrand and Leroy Van Horn as the moving spirits, the Illinois organization, known as the American Flag Day Association, was organized for the purpose of promoting the holding of Flag Day exercises. On June 14th, 1894, under the auspices of this association, the first general public school children’s celebration of Flag Day in Chicago was held in Douglas, Garfield, Humboldt, Lincoln, and Washington Parks, with more than 300,000 children participating.
Adults, too, participated in patriotic programs. Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, delivered a 1914 Flag Day address in which he repeated words he said the flag had spoken to him that morning: ‘I am what you make me; nothing more. I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself.’
Inspired by these three decades of state and local celebrations, Flag Day – the anniversary of the Flag Resolution of 1777 – was officially established by the Proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson on May 30th, 1916. While Flag Day was celebrated in various communities for years after Wilson’s proclamation, it was not until August 3rd, 1949, that President Truman signed an Act of Congress designating June 14th of each year as National Flag Day.”
“I believe in the United States of America as a Government of the people by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a Republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable; established upon those principls of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.
I therefore believe it is my duty to my Country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag, and to defend it againest all enemies.”
Historical Notes: The American’s Creed was a result of a nationwide contest for writing a National Creed, which would be a brief summary of the American political faith founded upon things fundamental in American history and tradition. The contest was the idea of Henry Sterling Chapin, Commissioner of Education of New York State. Over three thousand entries were received, and William Tyler Page was declared to be the winner. James H. Preston, the mayor of Baltimore, presented an award to Page in the House of Representatives Office Building on April 3, 1918. The Speaker of the House of Representatives and the commissioner of education of the state of New York accepted the Creed for the United States, and the proceedings relating to the award were printed in the Congressional Record of April 13, 1918. It was a time when patriotic sentiments were very much in vogue. The United States had been a participant in World War I only a little over a year at the time the Creed was adopted.
The author of the American’s Creed, William Tyler Page, was a descendant of John Page, who had come to America in1650 and had settled in Williamsburg, Virginia. Another ancestor, Carter Braxton , had signed the Declaration of Independence. Still another ancestor, John Tyler, was the tenth president of the United States. William Tyler Page had come to Washington at the age of thirteen to serve as a Capitol Page. Later he became an employee of the Capitol building and served in that capacity for almost sixty-one years. In 1919 he was elected clerk of the House. Thirteen years later, when the Democrats again became a majority party, they created for Page the office of minority clerk of the House of Representatives. He held this position for the remainder of his life.
Referring to the Creed, Page said: ‘It is the summary of the fundamental principles of the American political faith as set forth in its greatest documents, its worthiest traditions, and its greatest leaders.’ His wording of the Creed used passages and phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Y. Hayne in the Senate in 1830.”
PUMABydesign001's Blog 