90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, January 31, 2019

In Rejecting the Pledge of Allegiance, the Left Is Rejecting Nationhood

Devotion to and love of flag and country is now considered hateful.

At least that was the message given by Santa Barbara City College Board of Trustees President Robert Miller when, according to a report by Campus Reform, he sent an email calling the Pledge of Allegiance “steeped in expressions of nativism and white nationalism” after the board announced it would stop saying it before meetings.

While a seemingly small matter at a small school in California, it is emblematic of a larger debate that rages in America today.

In a public comment by at the board of trustees’ Jan. 24 meeting, Celeste Barber, a proponent of keeping the pledge, was interrupted and shouted at by protesters while making her case.

In the video of the meeting, one can hear the protesters shout things like “racist” and “slavery” while she defends the pledge.

The school later announced on Facebook that it would restore the Pledge of Allegiance for the time being until “a future date when the matter can be considered by the board.”

The Daily Signal sought comment from Santa Barbara City College and was directed to a Facebook post about the pledge’s reinstatement.

The Pledge of Allegiance itself has a long and complicated history. The modern pledge is attributed to Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist who wrote it in 1892 for a celebration of the 400-year anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus.

Congress added the words “under God” in 1952, after a public campaign from the Knights of Columbus.

But the Pledge of Allegiance actually has an older antecedent.

Col. George Balch, a Union Army veteran, developed a pledge for the poor and immigrant schoolchildren he taught in New York, which became the basis for Bellamy’s pledge.

Balch, who, along with most of his generation, knew the value and price of freedom—and of his nation—crafted a pledge to the flag in the late 1880s.

He intended this simple declaration of patriotism to deliver a “sign” to the world that “every child and teacher under its roof is a true-hearted, earnest-minded, loyal-spirited...

Corrupt Obama Judge Preps Gag Order for Stone; No One Is Allowed to Expose Mueller Tyranny

Roger Stone has long feared he would be slapped with a gag order if he got indicted — and he’s readied a plan to make sure he won’t have to stay silent.

The federal judge in Stone’s case, Amy Berman Jackson, has already hushed a coterie of others caught in special counsel Robert Mueller’s dragnet, including Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and their attorneys. They were quieted after one of the lawyers told reporters that Mueller’s case was “ridiculous.”

Jackson will have a much longer record of public commentary from Stone to work with when the longtime Donald Trump associate appears Friday afternoon for his first status hearing tied to the special counsel’s charges that he lied to Congress and obstructed the House investigation into Russian election meddling.

If Stone is gagged, his contingency plan is already in place. He’s got a well-known First Amendment attorney on his legal team who represented the rap group 2 Live Crew against obscenity charges in the early 1990s. And Stone has designated a pair of close friends as spokesmen in the event he and his lawyers are told to stop talking.

Until then, Stone won’t stop chattering.

Since his arrest last Friday, Stone has been on a media blitz. He gave his first interview to the conspiracy theory website InfoWars and then addressed reporters outside the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. He’s discussed his legal defense plans during a series of interviews with the major television and cable networks, as well as inimpromptu press conferences outside his South Florida home. Anyone on Stone’s email list got a message Monday with the subject line “Let’s talk about my arrest” and a plea for “emergency” contributions to help pay his mounting legal bills.

On Instagram, Stone as of Tuesday night had posted 30 times about the indictment, including a mock-up photograph of the special counsel in a waiter outfit holding up a tray topped with an empty hamburger bun. “Here’s what Mueller has on me #nothingburger” Stone wrote.

“It’s always been Roger’s intention to maintain his First Amendment rights throughout the process,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime Stone associate and one of the people who is in position to step up as a spokesman if Stone gets gagged.

During Stone’s arraignment hearing on Tuesday, magistrate judge Deborah Robinson opened with a warning that he’d be wise to not speak about the charges in the indictment. “Any statements you make may be used against you,” she said.

But Grant Smith, one of Stone’s attorneys, said in an interview that Robinson’s comments appeared to him to be pro forma. And on social media, Stone acted as though he is still free to...

With the shutdown over (at least for now), the State of the Union address is back “on.” When President Donald Trump takes the House podium on Feb. 5, you can count on him to take the opportunity to celebrate one of his greatest achievements: the economy.

It is booming by nearly every meaningful measure, and the president has every right to take a large measure of credit for it.

In November, unemployment dropped to its lowest rate in a half-century. African-Americans, Latinos, and women are thriving. Black unemployment was at 5.9 percent in May, the lowest ever recorded. Women’s unemployment recently reached its lowest rate in 65 years.

And, no, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it is not because people are working two jobs and a zillion hours a week. Employment statistics don’t work that way. It’s because more people have jobs. And more people are encouraged about their prospects of finding a job.

Labor force participation continues to rise because strong wage growth is causing Americans who were once too hopeless to even look for work to pour back into the job market. In fact, unemployment ticked up slightly to 3.9 percent (still historically very low) in December despite adding 312,000 jobs because nearly 100,000 formerly “discouraged workers” decided to start looking for jobs.

For good reason. America has created more than 5 million jobs since Trump entered office. And for the first time there are more job openings in America than there are unemployed people.

Industries that some said were dead and never coming back—like manufacturing—are booming. Manufacturing added 284,000 jobs in 2018, the most in a year for more than a decade.

A large part of these successes can be traced to the Trump-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In addition to sparking business investment and expansion by reducing corporate taxes, it also included a big tax cut for middle-class American families.

The average individual saw a tax cut of $1,400 while the average family with two children saw their taxes reduced by $2,917. In fact, Americans in every congressional district got a tax cut.

While mega-millionaire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed a couple thousand extra dollars as mere “crumbs,” those tax cut tidbits have been a big deal for the average working American and the economy overall.

President Barack Obama—who presided over an average gross domestic product growth of 1.65 percent—proved himself no economic Nostradamus when he said: