Report From Freedonia

Guilford County is Foxx Country for a night

Along with my local JBS Chapter Leader, Les Creech, I enjoyed an evening in Greensboro last night with fellow supporters of Congresswoman Virginia Foxx.  Elected representatives in our Congress willing to give the time of day to average voters - and actually listen to them - are a rare breed.  We need more like her.

Keynote speaker for the fund raiser was former Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle operative, Rich Galen.  Galen (originally from Mt. Airy) has has been running a popular gig as proprietor of www.mullings.com. 

In a nod to full disclosure, Galen informed the guests at the gathering that he has taken a position as a senior adviser in the Fred Thompson (not yet quite but really close to being official) presidential campaign.  Galen said the War on Terror will be the pre-eminent issue voters elect their next president on, even without another terrorist attack that Hillary Clinton says Republicans are hoping for. 

Galen was on a tight schedule to get to Raleigh for an appearance on the Alan Colmes show so I missed out on being able to ask if rather than the War on Terror the operative phrase in the 2008 campaign might again become, "It's the economy stupid."

Photo Notes: Galen does not tower over people like his new boss, he just knows how to get a leg up on a Congresswoman on a stairway.  (No, Senator Craig jokes please)

GOP Senate leader Phil Berger and House Rep. John Blust appeared to be discussing the possibility having GOP members of the North Carolina Legislature start wearing pastel colored neckties as a silent protest over how our state is being like a fiefdom in the control of an evil cabal of Democrat oligarchs.  (Jim Black is finally where he should have been years ago, but the song remains the same in Raleigh folks.  A handful of Democrat elites really do run this state.  Damn the voters and their elected representatives.)

It was originally announced that Howard Coble's schedule precluded him from making an appearance during the evening.  Political trooper that he is though, he did manage to stop by before the night was out.  I couldn't get the right camera angle so you will have to take my word for it that the tennis sweatband on his right wrist makes him look ten years younger.

Regarding my most passionate issue, Howard said he would vote again for NAFTA if it was up for passage.  He did say he was not sure though whether it should be expanded.

Virginia Foxx along with fellow North Carolinian Walter Jones is one of the original co-sponsors of HCR 40, which calls on the President to stop all work on the expansion of NAFTA being conducted via the secretive SPP process.  Representative Foxx is also close to having her name added to the Repeal NAFTA resolution that Walter Jones, Virgil Goode and presidential candidate Ron Paul are all on.  We are hopeful that our own irascible Howard Coble will at least add his name to HCR 40.

Police as agent provocateurs

No Nazi-Klan shoot out in Montabello Quebec, but disturbing nonetheless to see undercover police caught red-handed trying to incite peaceful protestors to riot.

This story shows two things:

1) The Security and Prosperity Partnership is a big deal to governments of North America.

2) The John Birch Society might be talking conspiracy on the SPP but, we are not talking theory.

If you would like the DailyKos take on this go here.

Lincoln Memorial Porn

The temple dedicated to the memory of the Great Emancipator of Southern* slaves was the last place I expected to be confronted by kiddie porn.

On my first visit 35 years ago, like most 6th graders from across America, I must have been too distracted by the huge statue of Lincoln on his throne and the excitement of running up and down steps to have noticed the finer points of the big man's memorial.

Maybe it's something you only notice as a dirty old man but, certainly it is not hard to walk to the alcoves on either side of the giant Lincoln and look up towards the murals (.pdf) adorning the walls just below the cathedral ceilings.  Whoa!  That's an eyeful easier to spot than a flashing shot in a Super Bowl half-time show.  Don't the people down the street at the FCC ever visit this place?

Censorship added with deference to John Ashcroft's sensibilities (I'm not running a porn site here)

While I concede that an a well placed artistic bare breast can be used effectively to project a certain gravitas to a subject, the artist (with an obvious fetish for redheads) and his promoters went way over the top on this one.  Would Mary Todd approve?  I don't think so.  Seriously, this is a prime stop for elementary school kids not college art students. From 40 feet and 90 years closer imagine the original detail in these images.

We should add this to list of horrible choices made by our leaders in the second decade of the last century: Federal Reserve Act, income tax, direct election of Senators, senseless entry into WWI. 

Thankfully, this one only requires a little well placed paint to rectify.  No need to go Taliban.

*Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the "states in rebellion," that is in states not under control of his dictatorship.  Slaves held in territories that Lincoln actually held command over were not freed.  I know for some dear readers this sounds harsh but other than my choice of dictatorship to describe a country being operated under a suspended constitution by a unitary executive the rest of my wording is in sync with the National Archives web page on the EP.

Our Church and State Challenged County Seal

The motto of Guilford County is "Courage and Faith."   Judging from the official county seal at the top of my tax department bill I am going to guess that the hand clenched around a cross means our county fathers had a particular faith in mind.

I've been living in Guilford County for 10 years and even ran for county commissioner in 2004, but I confess that this occasion of reviewing my current tax bill is the first time I have looked closely at our separation of Church and State challenged county seal. 

Maybe the cross is being used to ward off paganism as exemplified by the dog(?) and elk?

Don't look for our insensitive seal to be modernized anytime soon though.  Its part of our certified historical preservation program that sucks in Federal tax dollars.

FedEx Greensboro - Your tax dollars at work in Japan

I missed the N&R line back in April:

That centerpiece building should be finished and turned over to FedEx by September, said David Dyer, a senior project manager for Kajima Construction Services of Atlanta.

But, when I happened to pass by the new FedEx facility last week and saw the sign put out there my first reaction was, "Well it just figures.  All our federal and state tax dollars poured into this mega project and the lead contractor is Kajima Construction of Japan." (That's via Atlanta for delicate N&R readers.)

The private, family-run Kajima Corporation is essentially the Bechtel of Japan.

No doubt it also helps in your negotiations to have your home government holding over $600 billion of US debt. 

I don't wish to be overly parochial, but you will have to look long and hard to find US contractors building anything in Japan that is not on a US military base. 

Enter Life - The Best Science has to Offer?

I took my family to Washington, DC last week.  We stopped in at the Smithsonian's popular Museum of Natural History.  Right off from the rotunda with the elephant centerpiece is the 1st floor room marked "Early Life".  Going through that arch and to the right is small amphitheater that hosts a looping six minute flick, Enter Life made in 1982 by animation film producer and fem-symp Faith Hubley. 

The cartoon was playing on our last visit five years ago, but this time I had a video camera with me.  The quality is not very good, but trust me the source material playing on the Smithsonian's 1980's vintage projector was not much to work with.  You may have to turn up the sound.  (Don't fret, the early interjection by a screaming child lasts only 2 seconds.)

Now you would think that the scientists in the most powerful nation in the history of mankind could do a little better than using a 25 year-old cartoon to explain to the visitors of the Smithsonian how life came to be on planet earth.  But, this apparently remains their best effort that public tax dollars and the donations of anti-creationists will buy.  (We should note that in a like manner the Federal Reserve System uses comic books to paper over with the public how they steal from us through the powers of fiat money and fractional reserve banking. We will also note that the supplied link to the New York Fed is .org not .gov.)

Seriously, if skeptics who scoff at Creationism were to apply their same powers of logic and reasoning to this "imaginative glimpse at how life on earth may have begun", would they not also have to laugh at what currently passes for a scientific explanation of life?

My two favorite parts of the cartoon: 

Broken down amino acids find themselves in a sphere that for an unexplained reason divides into two like units -- thus life begins...

The time clock spins through a few hundred million years, as if churning through a sufficient number of years will eventually cover enough time to allow for a momentary suspension of the known laws of physics and chemistry such that life could spontaneously develop out of inert matter.

I will give filmmaker Faith Hubley credit though for at least using one scientific advisor in the production of her film, a PhD geologist with an AB from Duke no less.  This is one more scientific advisor than Al Gore used to make An Inconvenient Truth.

(Endnote: Looking at Hubley's other film credits, I am going to guess she may not have gotten the memo before producing The Big Bang and other Creation Myths (1981).  I'll further guess that she was drinking the Kool-Aid of the day in her 1978 flick Whither Weather)

What Christians need to do about George W. Bush

Heed the appeal of Pastor Chuck Baldwin before it's too late.