Daily Beast photo
By Nancy Thorner -
In 480 B.C., the Persians demanded that the Spartans surrender their arms at Thermopylae. To which King Leonidas replied “Molon labe.” For those who have forgotten their high school Greek, that literally translates to “Having come, take,” but, in English, that would be the equivalent of “Come and take them, if you think you can.”
The colonials were always being told to surrender their arms to the Brits. Fortunately for all of us and for the world at large, they refused in no uncertain terms.
In 1835, the Mexicans were demanding the surrender of a cannon by the Texans. The Texans refused and, against superior numbers, managed to hang on to it. A few months later, the Mexicans, outnumbering the Texans by at least five-to-one, demanded that a handful of Texans surrender the Alamo. Once again the Texans refused. The ensuing battle was bloody. The aftermath was even worse, as the Mexicans continued shooting and bayoneting the bodies long after Sam Houston, Davy Crockett and the others were dead.
That was part of the reason why when the Texans attacked the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto a short time later, their rousing battle cry was “Remember the Alamo!” The battle was over in 18 minutes. As Trump might say: We won, they lost.
In 1944, it was the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge who delivered a surrender-or-else ultimatum to the acting division commander of the 101st Airborne Division. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word response lives on in the history books and in the hearts of red-white-and blue-blooded Americans: “Nuts!”
It was for an actor to carry forward the message, when Charlton Heston concluded his address at the 2000 NRA convention with: “You can have my guns when you pry them from my cold dead hands,” inspiring words spoken while hoisting a Kentucky rifle high above his head.
Why do liberals keep waging their pointless war on guns when they have to depend on spokesmen the likes of Michael Bloomberg, who like a chameleon has changed his party affiliation whenever it suits his political aspiration and a high school nerd like David Hogg, who is trying to build a political career on the bodies of his dead classmates at Parkland. Not very inspirational, to say the least, which suggests Hogg most likely has a bright future in the Democratic party.
Liberals seem to use every shooting as a club with which to attack the Second Amendment, but it’s an illusion. There are only certain shootings that fit their criteria. Best of all are those that involve cops killing blacks, no matter how righteous the shooting might be. Second best are those occasions when deranged people shoot up schools, movie theaters or country music concerts.
But what you didn’t hear much about except on Fox News was when a loony Bernie Sanders supporter named James Hodgkinson shot up a baseball diamond filled with Republican congressmen and their aides.
You likewise didn’t hear a loud clamor for guns being confiscated in gang-riddled Chicago after a recent weekend in which 11 people were killed and 70 others were wounded, which was then followed by a second consecutive weekend of gun mayhem. Might it be that the silence from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s contingent of black councilmen and congressmen know they’d never win another election if they went after the black and Latino drug-dealing thugs?
Almost two weeks have passed since the Chicago shooting and not a single arrest has been made. I believe it’s also safe to presume that the gun shooting punks didn’t register a single one of those gats, although Chicago’s gun laws, the strictest in the world, require it. Go figure.
Chicago Tribune's John Kass rebukes Mayor Emanuel
John Kass, a Chicago Tribune reporter who is perhaps the only conservative Republican member on the Tribune staff, had this to say following Chicago's first weekend of shooting in his commentary, Rahm can't spin his way out of the Chicago street gang wars – Chicago .
Kass pointed out how Mayor Emanuel had become emotional and began pointing fingers at others, even putting the focus on his cops and on the neighborhood for remaining silent. As Emanuel said:
“So, if you say enough is enough, you must come forward as a neighborhood where a moral center of gravity holds." ". . . If you know who did this, be a neighbor. Speak up. Neighbors, come together. The city will be with you shoulder to shoulder.”
To Mayor Emanuel's statement about the city being with you shoulder to shoulder, Kass responded accordingly:
“Seventeen percent homicide clearance rate isn’t a declaration that the city will be with you. It says quite the opposite. Years of allowing the Police Department to atrophy doesn’t promote confidence. And making a show of redeploying cops to high crime areas now is desperation. What parent would have their child testify against a neighborhood shooter when the city does such a poor job in clearing homicides? It ignores the real world, where the Police Department went fetal after Emanuel’s disastrous handling of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video. It ignores the real world of a Police Department allowed to grow so thin that detectives were put back in uniform to serve as scarecrows at lakefront festivals where they can be seen by taxpayers. All this has little to do with solving homicides.”
It's the Economy stupid
The US economy is a huge success story. You can have a debate about trade policy, but you can’t deny that the American boom has legs. Start with jobs, as reported on Saturday, June 2, 2018.
Unemployment in the US is now down to 3.8 per cent, the lowest since 2000 and equal to the lowest since the late 1960s. More remarkable still, the gap between white unemployment and black unemployment is the narrowest certainly since then, maybe longer. It is down to 2.1 percentage points (black unemployment is 5.9 per cent). Estimates for second quarter growth have been pushed up to an annual rate of 4.8 per cent by one of the Fed’s 12 constituent banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This may turn out to be too high, but if you look at all the other stuff – consumer sales, construction orders, car output and so on – there is no doubt that the economy is growing at around 4 per cent. Just one of the many things that is beyond the intellectual grasp of Democrats is the law of supply and demand. Another is that the overall economy always benefits when taxes are lowered.
For many years prior to Trump’s election, companies were bailing on the U.S., not because CEOs were traitors, but because our corporate taxes, along with union wages and pensions, made it impossible for our manufacturers to compete. That was especially the case when it came to China, where the government owns the businesses and controls wages.
It didn’t help that our other trading partners were treating us like dirt and that Clinton, Obama and the Bushes, allowed them to get away with it.
For those who would like to turn the clock back to the good old days when we essentially controlled the global economy, that is no longer the case. Try removing the U.S. from today’s reality and not only would you not get a lot of the essential parts and materials our industries require, but you’d be contracting your potential customers from seven billion down to 320 million.
So far as the Democrats are concerned, even going back to FDR, their only answer to a failing economy is to raise taxes and to holler that the wealthy among us aren’t paying their fair share. They choose to ignore the fact that, even with their tax experts on retainer, the super-rich such as the millionaires and billionaires of Hollywood, Wall Street and the Silicon Valley, still pay the lion’s share of income taxes in this country, while the bottom 50% pay little or nothing.
A fact that should be obvious, even to the balmy likes of Bernie Sanders and his protégé Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that raising taxes on corporations doesn’t work the same way as it does on all of us. The corporations handle such matters by lowering wages, raising prices and paying smaller dividends to their shareholders, who are often retired people.
Those individuals adversely affected do have an option, which is to pack up and move to a more welcoming environment, much like millions of Californians have done by leaving the once-golden state for places like Arizona, Nevada, Texas and Wyoming. Unfortunately, they often change their zip code without changing their politics, much the same as millions of illegal aliens who have flooded California.
It's Trump's economy, not fool's gold
Only a Democrat, although not exclusively related to Democrats, would be dumb enough to believe that raising taxes is a brilliant solution to a failing or stagnant economy. That’s because numbers confuse them to such an extent that they really believe that 100% of nothing is a lot more than 20% of something. They’re the sort who will trade you a dime for a nickel because nickels are so much larger.
But what is to be done with the tireless Obama loyalists and the mainstream media who insist the great economy is due the policies put in place by Obama which have finally started to work. Jonathan S. Tobin in the National Review on August 14, 2018 had this to say:
“At first they tried to deny its existence. Then they said it was fool’s gold. Now they want someone else to get the credit for it. That’s the short history of mainstream-media coverage of the good economic news we’ve had ever since Donald Trump won the November 2016 presidential election.”
