Smoky Mountains Sunrise

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Tell the Imperial President: No More Wars!



By Patrick J. Buchanan

Barack Obama has asked Congress for $500 million to train and arm rebels of the Free Syrian Army who seek to overthrow the government.

Before Congress takes up his proposal, both houses should demand that Obama explain exactly where he gets the constitutional authority to plunge us into what the president himself calls “somebody else’s civil war.”

Syria has not attacked us. Syria does not threaten us.

Why are we joining a jihad to overthrow the Syrian government?

Saturday, June 28, 2014

WWI and the Second Fall of Man

From The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College
By Paul G. Kengor

On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. It was the shot-heard-round-the-world, unleashing a series of events that by August 1914 embroiled Europe in war. That deadly summer unfolded 100 years ago, and the world truly was never the same.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Hillsdale College - "Story-Killers: How the Common Core Destroys Minds and Souls"

The Common Core Standards control the testing and curriculum of public schools and a large number of private schools in over forty states in the nation.  Sold to the public as a needed reform, the Common Core nationalizes absurdity, superficiality, and political bias in the American classroom.  As a result, the great stories of a great nation are at risk, along with the minds and souls of our children.

Terrence O. Moore is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.  A former Marine with a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, he served as a founding principal of a top K-12 classical school in Colorado and advises Hillsdale's Charter School Initiative, providing assistance with the formation of classical charter schools across the country.  Dr. Moore is the author of The Perfect Game and The Story Killers: A Common Sense Case Against the Common Core.




Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Magna Carta is the Birthright of All English-Speakers

By Daniel Hannan
"The ground of my freedom, I build upon the Great Charter of England." John Lilburne

London in August 1647 was a tense and frightened city. The Civil War had exhausted the nation and coarsened its people. Parliament had emerged victorious, but it was becoming clear that the real power in the land was the military force that had defeated Charles I, the New Model Army, whose troopers were advancing on the capital, unpaid and angry.

In a gesture to the soldiers, Parliament appointed their commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Constable of the Tower of London. The first act of the Roundhead general on taking up his post was an encouraging one. He called for the greatest treasure in the Tower to be brought before him. Not a crown nor a sceptre, but a desiccated piece of parchment carrying barely legible Latin script.

“This is that which we have fought for,” he breathed reverently, “and by God’s help we must maintain.”

I feel a stab of patriotism whenever I recall that story as, I suspect, do most British people. I say “British” rather than “English”: the civil wars had touched every territory where our language was spoken, including the precarious North American colonies. The principles that had actuated Cromwell's Ironsides in England were closely allied to those that had stirred Scotland's Covenanters and, indeed, New England's Puritans: a majority of Harvard graduates in the 1640s crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside their cousins in the cause of parliamentary supremacy.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

A Populist Path to Power?



By Patrick J. Buchanan

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

If Thomas Jefferson’s benign reflection on Shays’ Rebellion, that uprising of farmers in 1786 and 1787, is not the first thought that comes to mind today for his fellow Virginian Eric Cantor, surely it is understandable.

For the rebellious subjects of the 7th Congressional District just voted to end Cantor’s career as House majority leader.

Many lessons are being read into and taken away from Cantor’s defeat. But that election has also revealed a populist path, both to the Republican nomination in 2016 and perhaps to the presidency.

For what were the elements of Randolph-Macon College professor Dave Brat’s victory and of Cantor’s defeat?