The "Everything Confederate Must Go" Comes to Town

I listened with interest to the radio this morning for what I knew was sure to come, it has come before in just such similar situations as we have presently......

"Local NAACP President Lloyd Thompson says it’s time for the monument to go. He says it’s a symbol of hate and stirs emotions of divisiveness. He’s asking parish leaders to come up with the funding to tear the structure down. 

But the monument and the land it sits on are owned by the Daughters of the Confederacy and that group has issued this statement: 

"The monument belongs to the Shreveport Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is on the National Registry of Historical Sites and it will not be moved."

Parish Commissioners say it will cost $300,000 to take down the monument. Thompson is also asking that it be removed from the National Registry of Historic Sites."

This particular monument has special significance in Civil War History, and Southern Heritage. On the grounds of the Caddo Parish court house stands the monument erected in 1902 at the last Confederate Capital, near the spot the last Confederate flag was lowered over land after the end of the war.  

It has been a target of groups like the ACLU before, despite it's significance to American history, as well as a representation of a specific period of American Art history.

The Caddo Parish Confederate Monument is of statewide significance under Criterion A as one of four major Louisiana monuments representing what is known by historians as "the Cult of the Lost Cause." More specifically, these monuments are Louisiana's most important representations of the Memorial Period, or second phase (1883 to 1907), of the Civil War Commemorative Sculpture Movement. These monuments represent a significant physical reminder of the period: reflecting the introduction and presence of Civil War monument construction in Louisiana and the role women played in the memorial period. This is an example of Art as History. The Cult of the Lost Cause continued to dominate Southern cultural history in the early twentieth century, and is still alive and well today. - National Park Service - Registry of Historic Places

Regardless of what you views are of this chapter of American history, it is woven into our fabric. You can argue is was an unjust rebellion or justifiable uprising. But what remains as a reminder of it all is not to be destroyed because some opportunist fain offense at the images of America and it's past. If we start down roads such as this, some may not like where it leads..... 

New Democrat Voter Registration Application

You Knew It Was Coming: A PC Assault On the Classic Film "Gone With the Wind"

I've never had much respect for film critics, who are mostly failed writers, actors and directors, much  like the obnoxious late Roger Elbert. They are just flap-jawed flunkey's that produce nothing useful.  Film critics are like annoying barking dogs or someone who stands next to you in a art museum and insistently explains the meaning of a painting. 

So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that recent discussions of the Confederate Battle Flag and it's perceived racist connotations in today's modern world would also give the political correct film critic a wider opening to go after similar symbols of our traditions in their field of expertize. And Didn't take long at all....

NYP

"If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism, what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture?

I’m talking, of course, about “Gone with the Wind,’’ which won a then-record eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1939, and still ranks as the all-time North American box-office champ with $1.6 billion worth of tickets sold here when adjusted for inflation.

True, “Gone with the Wind’’ isn’t as blatantly and virulently racist as D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,’’ which was considered one of the greatest American movies as late as the early 1960s, but is now rarely screened, even in museums.

The more subtle racism of “Gone with the Wind’’ is in some ways more insidious, going to great lengths to enshrine the myth that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery — an institution the film unabashedly romanticizes.

But what does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the “GWTW’’ intermission...........

The studio sent “Gone with the Wind’’ back into theaters for its 75th anniversary in partnership with its sister company Turner Classic Movies in 2014, but I have a feeling the movie’s days as a cash cow are numbered. 

It’s showing on July 4 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the museum’s salute to the 100th anniversary of Technicolor — and maybe that’s where this much-loved but undeniably racist artifact really belongs." -  Read More

The film critic, Mr Lumenick, may be considered brilliant in the world of  flap-jawed flunkey's, but misses an important point about the movie. Anyone who's read Margaret Mitchell's book "Gone With the Wind" recognizes immediately this is not a story about the civil war, but a fictional story set during the time of the civil war. And it was also not the days of making movies with explicit violence as is the hallmark of today's cinema. 
  
Perhaps, Mr.  Lumenick.  you would better service society by pointing your critical views at some of the films littered with unnecessary gratuitous violence that permeates modern film making and sometime influences young unstable minds to kill instead of salivating over the possible shunning of a masterfully made fictional piece from three generation ago.   

Make yourself useful for a change,  Mr Lumenick.

United Nations First Annual Meeting of the International Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling" Conference

Hilton Tops List of Most Hated Hotels; Diogenes’ Social Media Influence Blamed

via The Blog of Monte Cristo

Fox News – Social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon decoded to take the biggest hotel brands in the U.S. to find out the most despised—and the most liked–hotel chain. Based on thousands of tweets over a nearly six-month period—Jan. 1 to June 14—the group analyzed posts about the hotel groups to determine if comments were positive, negative or neutral.

According to Business Insider, the chains were chosen based on size– focusing on ones that had a large number of rooms, employees, properties, and social media buzz.

The results may surprise some luxury hotel snobs. Radisson (62 percent) and Best Western (57 percent) got the highest overall percentages of positive feedback on Twitter. With just 4 percent negative feedback, Radisson also had the lowest negative feedback.

And when it came to the most hated, Hilton took the top spot, with 17 percent of all tweets reported as negative. By volume, Marriott is the most talked about hotel on social media with almost 90,000 mentions and was the second most hated place to stay, according to the study. 

Read more at FoxNews. Go Here for DMF-Hilton feud history.

 Cross Posted From The Blog of Monte Cristo

Barack Has a Few Friends Over For Dinner

Must Just Be Cold In There....

Historical Imagery in the Politics of the Moment

"I am quite cognizant of the appeal of “heritage not hate,” and I feel the power of it. It is too easy for liberals to exploit the crises and emotions related to them, and it is too easy to forget what was good about Southern values and to focus only on the bad......" 

"The states rights and tariffs arguments are entirely absent from Southern apologia until after the Civil War. In 1860 and before, no one in the South was using those topics to justify secession. Furthermore, in 1860 federal tariffs on Southern goods were lower than they had been since 1816." - Dr. Joel McDurmon via Donald Sensing

Wahoo

The Confederate battle flag, the ole "stars and bars," stands for all the things that a rebellion long ago asserted as its just cause. Yes, a few of those things -- particularly as they relate to resistance to urban, federal power, and to a "lost cause" literally memorialized over much of the country -- exert a certain gauzy and romantic attraction even today, even to me.

We are allowed a certain attachment to the traitors of the Confederacy -- who we dignify as "rebels" instead -- because in the binding of our national wounds we decided not demonize a people who, after all, were but a generation or two behind many northerners in their attitudes about slavery and racial supremacy. 

But there cannot be any doubt that today, in 2015, and for many decades now, most Americans perceive the Confederate battle flag to stand for white supremacy and slavery, without which there would have been no rebellion and no civil war.

This is an especially treacherous subject for politicians in the Republican Party, which has since 1970 or so tried to be both the "party of Lincoln" and the heir to the traditions of the Old South, some wonderful and worth preserving and, unfortunately, some deeply malign and simply unworthy. You see certain Republicans struggle with this when they point out that Democrats were the great segregationists back in the day. Loathe as I am to quote a tweet in the making of any argument, this from an apparently black conservative makes the point most eloquently:

"We can either be the party of Lincoln or the party of Confederacy.......But please don't insult my intelligence by acting as if we can be both." 

The Republican Party not only needs to end its support for the Confederate battle flag on those rare occasions when the controversy arises, but it must also stop justifying or defending any of the symbols and legacy of the Confederate States of America. There are far better ways to resist urban and federal power than by romanticizing a slave state, which conservatives have long understood when they correctly denounced liberals who defended the slavery of Communism as the mere failure of good intentions.

And if you need a lost cause, root for the Cubs........... 

(Conservative Wahoo)

Rasputin Jarrett and Her Red Family Legacy

Obama Puppet Master and Handler Valerie Jarrett

Judaical Watch ---

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.

According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file. 

Read More

Martin O’Malley Says He Knows How to Fix Our Cities, Just Didn't Bothered When He Was Mayor....

 Baltimore Sun

"Promising to “rebuild the heart of America’s cities,” former Gov. Martin O’Malley used an appearance at a meeting of the nation’s mayors on Sunday to call for a federal ban on assault weapons and stricter regulations on gun purchases.

O’Malley, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, told the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors that the massacre at a black church in South Carolina last week demanded action from Washington.

“I heard some elected officials say this week, ‘laws can’t change this,’” O’Malley told the group in San Francisco.

“Actually, they can,” he said. “How many senseless acts of violence do we have to endure as a people before we stand up to the congressional lobbyists of the NRA?”

The former Baltimore mayor also joined the chorus of elected officials who have called on officials in South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state house in Columbia. The battle flag flew above the capitol from 1962, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, until 2000, when it was removed to its current spot on the adjacent grounds.

“If the families of Charleston can forgive, can let go of their anger, is it really too much to ask the state government officials of South Carolina to retire the Confederate flag to a museum?” he said."

An obvious question: if former Governor O’Malley actually has the answers to “rebuild the heart of America’s cities,” why didn’t he get that done when he was Mayor of Baltimore, why didn’t he get that done as Governor of Maryland?

The Neighborhood Scout website notes that Baltimore has 438 crimes per square mile, while the state of Maryland as a whole has 64; the nationwide median is 37.9. Forbes ranks Baltimore as the seventh most dangerous city in America. 

What If Norman Rockwell Painted Obama's America?

It Would Probably Look Something Like This.....

Two Gay Dads Ready Their Daughters For School

Obama's "Intervention" on Behalf of American Public.

RCP

On MSNBC this morning, network contributor Michael Eric Dyson reacted to President Obama saying the n-word in an interview with comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. Dyson called Obama's comments an example of President Obama speaking "more articulately about race." Dyson called it a "payoff" for those pushing Obama to speak more explicitly.

"He chooses his words carefully, he chooses his point of entry carefully, but I think this was an incredibly important moment in intervention on behalf of the American public by our president, the president of the entire United States of America to talk specifically and particularly about using that n-word," Dyson said. 

"This is a man who knows so much more than he's been willing to or allowed to speak about in public spaces."  

Dyson called Obama's use of the n-word an "intervention" on behalf of American public.

A Good Monday Morning