Catholic smiles are just smiles; MAGA hats don't turn them into smirks

Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann tries to suppress a smile after an Indian walks up and starts beating a drum in his face.

    The drumbeat heard around the world continues to reverberate, as social media and newspaper op-ed writers remain all atwitter over images of a smiling Catholic boy wearing a MAGA hat while some Indian pounds a drum an inch from his face.
    The Smiling Nick Sandmann has been declared a racist and every possible disparaging name imaginable; national figures have urged people to beat him up and he's received a massive number of death threats. His school, Covington Catholic in Covington, Ky., has been portrayed as in incubator of racism and evil. Many commenters retracted their defamatory comments about Sandmann after receiving additional information, but others continue to vilify both him and his school.
    I happen to believe the smiling Nick Sandmann is a good kid who simply stood in one place while approached by a crazy Indian beating a drum. Video of the event clearly shows Sandman just standing there with a silly grin on his face sort of taking in the surreal situation. When attacked by the Indian he can be seen trying without success to suppress a smile.
    Others, including a number of gay writers, have written very seriously that what Sandmann was doing was not smiling, but a demonstration of what they call the Catholic-schoolboy “smirk.” Apparently Catholic schoolboys, and only Catholic schoolboys, spend all of their spare time perfecting their smirks. Said Esquire writer Dave Holmes: “We’ve seen it in our own personal histories, if we have ever been that terrifying combination of young and different in any way.”
    Holmes, who is gay, was writing about his unhappy time in a Missouri Catholic school during the early 1990s, when homosexual activity was considered a crime in that state. The Catholic church still maintains, rightly or wrongly, that homosexual activity is a sin, so I don't doubt that Holmes may have had a difficult time. But that doesn't make every smiling Catholic schoolboy an evil smirker.
    The claim has repeatedly and falsely been made that Covington Catholic School is a “segregation academy,” which is quite impossible given that it is located in a virtually all-white county. The argument of leftists making this claim is that Cincinnati whites fleeing school integration moved to various almost-all-white suburban counties. By operating or expanding their existing schools Catholics were therefore operating “segregation academies.” By that definition the local public schools in these counties would be considered “segregation academies,” too. The thought process behind this way of thinking is beyond my ken: you cannot have white flight or a segregation academy unless there is some group to flee or segregate oneself from. In almost-all-white counties there is simply no racial group to flee.
    My personal experience and common sense tell me that the Catholic schools of Northern Kentucky were not created to promote segregation or avoid integrated local schools. Most of these Catholic schools were founded in the early 1900s with a few going back to before the war. Prior to the Brown v. Board of Education decision about a third of the region's schoolchildren attended parochial schools, one of the highest rates in the nation; obviously they weren't fleeing integration since there was no integration to flee.
    The Catholic Church essentially stands alone in trying to organize its churches so that people of all races and all social classes will worship together in the same church, while most Protestant churches are segregated on the basis of both economic status and race. It's common to see multiple Protestant churches of the same denomination in small towns, each serving a different racial or socio-economic group. The Catholic Church would never allow such a thing. Civil-rights activist Lawrence Guyot described how the Catholic church integrated its schools: “The Catholic Church in 1957 or '58 made a decision that they were going to desegregate the schools. They did it this way. The announcement was we have two programs. We have excommunication and we have integration. Make your choice by Friday.”
    Catholics often do bad things. They sin. So do Protestants, Jews, Mormons, atheists, and everyone else. Those wishing to criticize any Catholic school or its students will find no shortage of ammunition, but they aren't operating segregation academies.
    And as a general rule a Catholic smile is just that; it's a smile. There are a plentitude of types of smiles: nervous smiles, happy smiles, sad smiles, conspiratorial smiles, threatening smiles, this-is-ridiculous smiles, and yes, even smirks. Smiling isn't limited to Catholics; people of all faiths smile and sometimes they may even smirk. But those who see every Catholic smile as a smirk are just paranoid.
    In the end a Catholic school is just that and nothing more, without nefarious intent by those who operate or attend them. A schoolboy who smiles is just smiling. Being Catholic didn't make Nick Sandmann's nervous smile a “smirk,” nor did wearing a MAGA hat.
   Those who have criticized Sandmann, his school, or his schoolmates have displayed a malevolence of spirit that is frightening. For these evil people I have just one thing more to say: I smirk in your general direction.

We need legislation now to make air travel less hellish, airline employees less abusive

As Twisted Sister says, We don't have to take it from the airlines any more

     United Airlines called in the police to severely beat one of its already boarded passengers this week for refusing to give up his seat on an aircraft. And the nation took notice.
    The president of the company initially blamed the victim, claiming that United agents had followed established policy and that the 69-year-old doctor who was dragged off the plane was “belligerent.” Neither of these statements is true: Airlines have no right to “bump” passengers who have already boarded an aircraft, and in this case the doctor was quietly minding his own business until the the United agents unlawfully tried to take his seat; even then the doctor firmly refused, but there have been no reports of belligerence. So on top of a bloody face the poor man was defamed to a national audience by the president of the company.
    To make matters worse, United’s victim had a sordid sexual past involving the giving out of prescription pain pills to a lover and the suspension of his medical license almost two decades ago. At some point he was said to have “anger management” issues. Although there is no evidence that he was disruptive on the flight, various press outlets trumpeted this news, so that the whole world now knows of this poor bloody-faced man's tawdry conduct two decades ago. So what we have is a United Airlines passenger who has been beaten, defamed by the president of the company, and totally humiliated by the press for exercising his contractual right to not give up his seat on an airplane. This from an airline with the slogan: "Fly the Friendly Skies."
    This man isn’t alone. Most of the airlines treat all of us like crap; United just has the worst reputation of the lot. Shortly after this story went viral another disgruntled United passenger told about how he was ejected from his paid first class seat and forced to sit in a economy middle seat between a feuding couple because somebody “more important” arrived at the gate at the last minute. When he tried to stand his ground he was told to give up his first-class seat or he would be put in handcuffs.
    Most of us have no problem with the airlines bumping passengers; we know it’s part of the business. But there is a difference between bumping someone prior to boarding and yanking someone who has already boarded off a plane because someone the airline deems more important has arrived at the last minute. Once passengers board a plane their rights are governed by the Contract of Carriage, and airlines that bully passengers need to face government fines, civil actions, and criminal charges.
    But we need more. For the past several years the airlines have intentionally been making their coach product as wretched as possible to give passengers an incentive to pay a much higher  price for premium seats. For example, the 747 and the 777 flew for years with nine-across seating, with a relatively comfortable seat width of about 18.5 inches. A few years ago several airlines added a 10th seat, even though it meant reducing the seat width to an incredibly narrow 17 inches, which was unheard of on long-haul jets. The Boeing 787 was designed for comfortable eight-across seating, but the airlines crammed in an extra seat making this the most uncomfortable plane in the sky. Certainly there is no evidence that the American public is getting skinnier.
    Adding these seats adds very little net revenue. A tenth seat increases row gross revenue by 11 percent, but this increase also comes with substantial expenses, in that it does cost real money to fly people from here to there, and an increased passenger load requires increased staffing; the net revenue increase is probably less than five percent per row. Most of us would gladly pay five or six percent more to fly in comfort rather than absolute misery. But we aren't offered that option; instead we can pay double or more for a much larger Premium Economy seat. I don't want to pay double for something I don't need; I want to pay five or six percent more for the same width we've flown with for years.
    Airlines say that customers only shop for low fares, and they have to offer the most stripped-down product imaginable. Perhaps. But this is where government regulation has a role in protecting society. Congress needs to enact legislation protecting to protect the flying public.
    ● We need protection from heavy handed actions by the airlines. No one who has boarded an aircraft should ever be required to give up their seat to someone “more important.” Airline employees who bully innocent passengers with threats of arrest should themselves face criminal charges.
    ● We need regulations concerning minimum seat width and pitch (legroom). Planes with eight or more seats across should be required to have a minimum seat width of eighteen inches and most planes should be required to have a minimum seat pitch of 31 inches (As a practical matter, this means the 747 and 777 should be limited to nine seats across and the 787 to eight seats. This might result in slightly higher fares, but it will also reduce the number of air rage incidents, as well as health problems associated with being crammed into a small space for a long time. The best way to enforce this is by placing a small tax on airline tickets for nonconforming seats; airlines wishing to sell tickets for a mini-seat will have to add a tax to the ticket price, thus eliminating the incentive for these abominable seating arrangements.
    ● Young children should receive an assigned seat next to an adult at the time of booking. If the airline wants to charge extra for this assigned seat, fine, but families shouldn’t be forced or allowed to engage is desperate on-plane efforts to convert five middle seats into five seats together. It’s not fair to the family and it’s not fair to the other passengers.
    ● We need for the government to do a better job of explaining exactly what the rights of the airlines are and exactly what the rights of the passengers are. And then we need for those rights to be enforced by the courts, by the Department of Transportation, and of course by us, the flying public. And when airline employees use the police to violate customer rights, those employees should face criminal charges themselves.

_______________________________   

    Those who are tired of the airlines running roughshod over the citizenry should contact their congressman and ask for regulations to protect the flying public. You may do so by clicking on the links below:

To email Sen. Thad Cochran, click here.

To email Sen. Roger Wicker, click here.

To email Rep. Trent Kelly, click here.

Now we know why teen girl said 'I deserve it' when pepper sprayed at Trump rally

    Back in late March I got a kick out of a video of a Trump protester starting a fight at a rally in Janesville, Wisc. It ends up with the girl getting pepper sprayed, and as she runs away she can be heard to say, "I deserved that." There were a number of reports on this.
     Although the video shows nothing of the kind, the 15-year-old girl starts screaming that an older man has groped her in the chest. The man backs away and denies touching her and tries to deescalate the situation, but the protester was having none of that. She finally ends up punching the elderly man in the face, at which point a Trump supporter immediately shoots her in the face with pepper spray.
    Her statement that "I deserved that" makes sense now that we know that the Clinton campaign engaged in an organized campaign to start fights at Trump rallies, using both volunteers and homeless or mentally ill people hired off the street. Sometimes they would provoke someone to hit them, but failing that they would simply fake an assault, as this girl apparently did. This girl knew she had crossed the line and was admitting it to herself, without realizing that she was being captured by cell phone video.

Injured officer, Chicago rally

    Hillary Clinton's dirty tricks campaign has not been without costs. Many people have been injured, and it's lucky no one was killed. A number of police officers have been hurt dealing with fights  at these rallies deliberately started by Clinton employees or volunteers. Innocent people have been arrested on false charges brought by Clinton's goon squads; some may have even been forced to plead guilty rather than risk a more serious conviction.
    These types of dirty tricks are far beyond anything Richard Nixon engaged in. In fact, all of Hillary Clinton's crookedness is far beyond that of Nixon; and yet she has the audacity to run for president.
    The criminal thug caught in the undercover video admitting that he helped to organize this Brownshirt brigade said Hillary Clinton was fully aware of the project and that he was working closely with her campaign. If so, this is just one more crime for which Hillary Clinton should be tried, convicted, and locked up.
    Anyone who has been injured at one of these rallies because of one of these fights needs to sue not only the Clinton campaign, but Hillary Clinton herself. Ultimately she is responsible for all of this.

Confederate flag resolution, Gaines election proof Saddlebackers in control of Southern Baptists

    The Southern Baptist Convention, led by its Pope of Political Correctness Russell D. Moore, passed a resolution in June denouncing the display of the Confederate battle flag, being the same flag patterned on the cross on which Andrew, Disciple of Jesus Christ, was crucified. This was just one resolution among many that suggest the church leadership is completely out of step with the church membership.

   Anyone doing a Google search will find as many or more photos of Klansmen carrying American flags than Confederate ones. To single out the Confederate flag for this type of denunciation is pure anti-Confederate bigotry and politically correct posturing. It is un-Christian. We need to either keep both flags or ban them both.
    The Southern Baptist church has apologized for its role in slavery, which is laudable. As someone who considers the Confederate flag a part of my Southern heritage, I want to add my voice yet again to those who say slavery was wrong. We shouldn’t abolish the Baptist Church because it once supported slavery, or because of the misguided actions of a few idiots. But we shouldn’t stop displaying the Confederate flag on these grounds, either. The same rules which apply to the flag should apply to the Baptist church; either keep both or abolish both.  
    The fact is that today you will be hard-pressed to find a Baptist who supports slavery. You will have an equally hard time finding someone who displays the Confederate flag who supports slavery. To single out the Confederate flag in this manner is immoral.
    I don’t believe race-hustler Russell Moore -- a really nasty guy -- or the delegates to the Southern Baptist conclave represent the views of the majority of Southern Baptists, whether the issue is the Confederate flag, economic migrants and potential terrorists from Syria, amnesty for criminal illegal immigrants, Donald Trump, or what have you. I say this as a former Baptist who knows lots of very sensible and very outraged Southern Baptists. And I find Moore’s attempts to change the church to make it morre appealing to the Starbucks set and Third-Worlders, such as his recent insistence that Christ was “dark-skinned,” to be offensive and without Biblical or factual support.
    So how did these left-wingers come to be in charge of the Southern Baptist Church? Most are adherents to the Saddleback Purpose Driven Church Cult, and have secretly and systematically wormed their way into positions of authority. In other words, these people have intentionally stolen the Southern Baptist Church. Interestingly enough, no person is a better example of that cult’s techniques of mind and church control than the new Southern Baptist president, Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, but more on him later.
    The entire Purpose Driven Church Cult movement is based on the notion that church leaders should seize power, eliminate congregational control, and bend churches to their will, presumably to what they see as God’s will as well. In many cases God's first wish is that these pastors receive an incredibly large salary. This is what has happened to the Baptists, and why you see them passing resolutions that many rank-and-file members find to be outrageous.
    The methodology of the Saddlebackers is no secret, although they sometimes go back and erase their tracks. They have published their roadmap for pastors and people like Russell Moore to follow in an effort to subvert the Gospel and seize control of churches.
    How can you know if your church is being controlled by Saddlebackers or their ilk? Some of the main signs are the forced use of "praise choruses" over proper hymns, a "New Member's" Sunday School class, elimination of regular business meetings, tithing obsession, and use of words like "worship center," "campus," and "unchurched." The New Member classes are designed to isolate new members from the general church population so they can be indoctrinated by the seeker-sensitive leadership. (This blog post quotes quite a bit from various Saddleback and Willow Creek sources and is worth reading).
    To understand the techniques used by the Saddlebackers, I urge the reading of this post, which reprints a gloating (and infuriating) article written by a church "transitioner" who stole a church. Or this brochure. I also suggest this article, which describes the way Steve Gaines took control of the remnants of Bellevue Baptist Church, where attendance is down dramatically since his arrival.
    Now, a little about Steve Gaines. After arriving at Bellevue, Rev. Gaines was visited by a man in his late twenties, the son of Bellevue associate pastor. This man told Gaines that as a young teen his father had engaged in sexual intercourse with him on a regular basis over 12 to 18 months until the teen insisted that it stop. The man told Gaines that he did not allow his father to be around his own children unsupervised, and he did not believe his father should be counseling victims of sexual abuse, which was this pastor's role at Bellevue. Gaines spoke with the pastor and has said the man admitted to some type of improper conduct with his son, although Gaines did not specify exactly what that admission was.
   So what did Gaines do? Well, I'll give you three guesses:

Guess Number One: He fired the associate pastor.
Guess Number Two: He notified the police.
Guess Number Three: Not a blessed thing.

    The answer, of course, is absolutely nothing, although Gaines said he did launch an internal investigation, during which which the man continued to carry out his church duties of counseling victims of domestic and sexual abuse.
    When this outrage was finally discovered six months later, Gaines' excuse was that he had understood that his predecessor, Adrian Rodgers, had known of the problem and approved of the pastor staying on. I absolutely don't believe this, but let's play this out. Gaines' position is that if it's okay with Adrian Rodgers for pastors to have sex with their teenage sons then it's okay with him. It's as if Gaines held there is no higher moral authority than Adrian Rodgers, which is ridiculous.
     At Bellevue, Gaines has operated according to the Saddleback formula with zeal. He has declared from the pulpit that those who didn't fully support him should just leave any position of leadership, such as Sunday School teacher. His tithing obsession is such that he's suggested that God might strike members dead if they fail to tithe. He's refused to follow church bylaws or to provide copies of them to members, and made it clear that he doesn't believe in business meetings. And of course he's driven off those who don't agree with him, some of whom have created blogs to vent their discontent, such as the erased-but-remembered Saving Bellevue blog, and the inactive New BBC Open Forum. These are interesting reading, to say the least. These blogs are inactive today because these former members have moved on; Gaines was successful in seizing control and running off the opposition.
    I should note that there is nothing inherently wrong with some of the things the Saddlebackers are doing, and if people can be reached with rock bands and coffee-house services, great. The sin is that these changes are being made secretly. If church members vote during a Wednesday night business meeting that the music director should replace traditional hymns with insipid praise choruses, then the music director should do exactly that. But for a pastor or music director to engage in this type of secret transitioning without the express request of the congregation is a sin. It's church theft.
    For people like Russell Moore, Steve Gaines, and the Saddlebackers, it's all about money and market share. If traditional hymns aren't popular among certain demographic groups they believe are needed for growth, throw them out and replace them with mindless chanting (ignoring, of course, the needs of the current members). If the word "church" isn't trendy, call it a "campus." The Confederate flag has fallen out of favor, so they they got their properly indoctrinated chanters to pass a resolution denouncing it in hopes of gaining favor with the liberal media.
    The Southern Baptist Convention is now led by a man who knowingly kept a child-molesting pastor on his staff as a counselor to victims of abuse for six months, and only let him go after a public outcry. The morally bankrupt people who elected this man had the audacity to tell the world that it's wrong to honor the memory of our ancestors and that we have a duty to throw open our borders to economic migrants, some of whom are bound to be terrorists.
    I'll not take advice on morality from this depraved bunch.

Ol' Stompy Foot finally got up the nerve to say 'radical Islam,' but it upset him greatly

James O'Keefe, dressed as Osama bin Laden, crossing the Rio Grande

    President Stompy Foot finally got up the nerve to say Voldemort.
    Actually the words he dared to use are “Radical Islam,” which up until now he has avoided like a Hogwarts student afraid to say the name of “He Who Must Not Be Named.” Obama insisted that the use of the phrase doesn’t matter; but it does matter, a lot.
    Honesty from our elected officials is important. The Obama administration has repeatedly tried to declare that acts of terror committed by radical Islamists are in instead simply garden-variety crimes. So he told us, with a straight face, that our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered by citizens upset about a Youtube video, rather than admitting it was a planned terrorist attack. When a Muslim army major in regular contact with Islamist extremists murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood, Texas, while shouting "Allahu Akbar!,” the administration refused to label the attack terrorism, calling it instead “workplace violence.”
    And now we have the murder of 49 people in Orlando, murdered by a man who cheered the 9-11 attacks, who recently took two expensive trips to Saudi Arabia, and who pledged allegiance to ISIS during the murders. Obama blames the murders on a lack of gun control. And Obama insists that immigration wasn’t a factor in the Orlando shootings since the shooter was a native-born citizen. Of course, the man’s father, who has been known to support the Taliban, immigrated to this country from Afghanistan, and if he hadn't been allowed to do so his son would never have been a citizen; another reason to do away with Birthright Citizenship.
    The problem isn’t Youtube, an unfriendly workplace, or the administration’s inability to confiscate all of our weapons. The problem is that Obama and Hillary Clinton have done very little to stop terrorists, and in many instances have actively aided them. And we have no control whatsoever over our immigration process, as Obama simply refuses to enforce our laws. Our borders are so unguarded that filmmaker James O'Keefe was able to wade across the Rio Grande border wearing an Osama Bin Laden costume. He wasn't stopped, because we have virtually no border security.
    Libya was a success story of the Iraq war. When Muammar Gaddafi realized the United States meant business he agreed to give up that country’s weapons of mass destruction. While maintaining innocence, Gaddafi paid the family of each victim of the Pam Am Lockerbie bombing $10 million in compensation. Libya became a reliable ally of the United States in the war on terror.
    When the Arab Spring movement began, rebel groups with strong ties to al Qaeda began attacking government troops in eastern Libya. Obama immediately came to the aid of these terrorists, and used NATO to get the United Nations to authorize the use of force to create a no-fly-zone for eastern Libya; this was the only use of force the U.N. authorized. NATO immediately violated this order and began attacking the entire nation, as well as making assassination attempts on its leader. In one of these murder attempts NATO bombed the home of Gaddafi’s non-combatant son – killing several young children.
    The War Powers Act requires a president to seek Congressional approval for any military action lasting more than 30 days. Obama ignored this law, as he ignores most laws; it was more important to help terrorists than to obey the law. Obama won, Gaddafi was captured, sodomized, and murdered with his help, and eventually our ambassador to Libya would be murdered by some of the same terrorists that Obama supported. Libya is now and ungovernable mess and serves as a organizing point for ISIS. This was completely foreseeable, as I noted at the time.
    In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been one of our country’s strongest allies in the Mid-East. When the Arab Spring protests began, Obama rushed onto television to say that he must immediately be removed. With Obama’s support, the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood moved into action and was able to gain control of the government. When the military was able to remove the terrorists from office, Ol’ Stompy Foot really stomped his foot. He was furious that the terrorists that he had supported were no longer in charge of Egypt.
    Then there is Syria. I wrote five years ago that the Obama-Clinton team seemed determined to throw the entire Middle East into armed conflict. I pointed out the danger that Syria might descend into civil war. Everything I said would happen has happened. Obama and Saudi Arabia continue to support terrorists who are trying to topple Syria’s secular, elected government and replace it with a Sunni, Sharia-law regime.
    It is out of this huge power vacuum that ISIS was born. Even now the Obama administration continues to support Syrian terrorists; the result has a monumental disaster, as millions of refugees are trying to pour into Europe, or worse, the United States. There is no way to screen these refugees for ISIS agents or other extremists.
    Obama threw quite a tantrum over the fact that he was forced to say the words “Radical Islam.” But he finally said it! He told the truth, which for both he and Hillary Clinton is quite a difficult thing to do.
    To prevent future acts of terror we have to control our borders and limit immigration of those who might do us harm. We need a leader who will be honest and tell the truth. Clearly honesty and border control are beyond the Obama-Clinton pay grade. We need someone who can do the job.

Baptist leader Moore goes off the tracks with heretical attacks on Donald Trump, immigration

Yazidis give us a clue to the appearance of ancient Jews.

    Neo-liberation-theologist Russell Moore, who is doing his best to turn the Southern Baptist Church into a Communist-front organization, has declared that true Christians shouldn't support Donald Trump for president. Moore is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
    Oh, and in a New York Times article Moore declares of Trump supporters that, "A white American Christian who disregards nativist language is in for a shock. The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking 'foreigner' who is probably not all that impressed by chants of 'Make America great again.'"
    For the record I don't consider either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to be particularly Godly people. I was, and still am, a Ted Cruz supporter, but I vote for my candidates on the basis of their political positions, not on their religion. As a strong supporter of religious liberty, I certainly thought Cruz would have been a far better candidate than Trump. But it is apparently not to be. On a personal level, I don't like Trump, but I support some of his policies.
    If you Google Moore's statements over the past couple of years, what you'll find is there isn't a leftist cause he doesn't like; this blog post doesn't allow time to refute it all, so I'll limit myself to Moore's comments on Donald Trump.
    First, Moore blasts Trump's "Nativism." The first Google definition of "nativism" is "the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants." I think a more accurate definition, particularly to describe nativist thought in the current election, is "The policy of protecting the interests of citizens against those of non-citizens or illegal aliens." Given this definition, I am a proud nativist, and I would hope most American Christians would be as well.
    Jesus is recorded in Mark 12:27 instructing that we should show fealty to our earthly sovereign: "And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him."
    We American's don't have a Caesar; we have no king, no emperor, no ayatollah, no pope. We The People are sovereign, and our fealty is owed to our fellow citizens, pursuant to Christ's command. Moore's assertion that favoring citizens over non-citizens is somehow wrong is in direct conflict with the instructions of Jesus Christ. It is heresy.
    Moore has repeatedly criticized Trump for his statements concerning "immigrants." Of course, when Moore says Trump has made these statements he is bearing false witness, because Trump's comments have been directed almost entirely at illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants. There's a big difference.
    Let's look at some of Trump's "objectionable" statements concerning immigrants:

As has been stated continuously in the press, people are pouring across our borders unabated. Public reports routinely state great amounts of crime are being committed by illegal immigrants. This must be stopped and it must be stopped now.

We're going to bring people in, but we're going to bring people in legally.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. . .They're . . .sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they're telling us what we're getting.

    Here are the facts: Central America, the source of the bulk of illegal immigration, used to send us their best and brightest, who were often denounced as traitors for leaving their home country. No more. We now get far more people likely to end up on welfare.  Immigrant households use welfare at twice the rate of native-born citizens, and illegal aliens with children have an even higher welfare rate. If we were getting the best and brightest, as we used to get, the immigrant welfare rate would hover around zero.
    The crime rate of illegal immigrants is a major problem, as the left-leaning Atlantic pointed out in a July 29, 2015 article. As that article reports, in 2011, there were an estimated 42,000 robberies, 70,000 sex crimes, 81,000 auto thefts, 95,000 weapons offenses, and 213,000 assaults committed by illegal aliens in this country.
    So let's get this straight. Moore bore false witness against Trump by indicating that his comments were against all immigrants and not just illegal aliens. This is a direct violation of Exodus 20:16, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."
    Even worse, Moore has criticized Trump for telling the truth. And yet Jesus advocated the telling of the truth: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32). To attack trump for making a statement without first addressing the veracity of the statement is a direct, frontal assault on the teachings of Christ.
    When it comes to racial issues, Moore is no less obsessed than a Klan Kleagle in reverse. Thus we get Moore's claim that Christ "is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking 'foreigner'."
    I don't believe Christ is going to have a skin color in Heaven, but I do think it's important to address the poison that Moore is spreading. We really can't know what Christ looked like; but we can make educated guesses. In all likelihood he didn't have long hair as always shown in the paintings, as men didn't wear their hair long in that time.

Bashar al-Assad

    But the people of the Middle-East are not necessarily dark in complexion. Some have light skin and deep, blue eyes, such as Syria's Bashar al-Assad (A clue, a clue!). And many Jews have blond or red hair; their skin is not particularly dark (A clue, a clue!). It is quite possible that many people who now live in the Mid-East may have dark skin due to intermarriage with other groups. I visited with a  newscaster for Al-Arabya some years ago, and in conversation he described a "true Arab" as having blond hair (his hair was not blond).
    The most endogamous group in the Middle-East is quite possibly the Yazidis, an Aramaic(!) group that lived directly to the northeast and east of the Roman-recognized state of Israel. Yazidis only marry each other, and therefore give us a clue (A clue, a clue!) as to what Jesus might have looked like. Yazidis often have fairly light skin tone and blond or reddish hair; sometimes they are darker.

Another clue as to Christ's appearance!

    With all of this said, even if Christ should have had a darker skin tone (and given exposure to the sun, he would have had a very deep tan regardless of his genetic makeup), what does it matter? Does Russell Moore really think it matters to anyone? Most of us have friends who are Lebanese, Syrian, Greek, Italian, and Hispanic. Many members of these groups have the type of darker skin that Moore is insisting that Christ had. So? Jesus is Jesus, regardless of what He looked like, so Moore just needs to stop race-baiting.
    I do agree with Moore that Donald Trump is a pretty awful person morally. I feel the same way about Hillary Clinton. As much as I dislike Trump, his political views are the most consistent with my own of the two likely major-party candidates, and I intend to vote for him if he is the Republican nominee.
    The most Christian thing any American voter can do is to vote for the candidate who will show fealty to our earthly sovereign, the citizens of the United States. I'm going to vote to elect a president who will best serve the interests of my fellow citizens, not a Sunday School teacher.

With flag decision Oxford's unpatriotic aldermen show lack of respect for democratic process

    In a rather disgusting attempt to curry favor with liberal elites, the Oxford board of aldermen voted unanimously to refuse to display the Mississippi flag on city property Tuesday night.
    The aldermen weren’t acting in response to a groundswell of citizen demand. In fact, 15 years ago Lafayette County voters decided in favor of keeping the 1894 flag, in the election where an overwhelming majority of Mississippi voters said “Leave Our Flag Alone!” The leftists who sought to change the flag 15 years ago are the same ones seeking to change it today. They just won’t quit.
    A recent newspaper ad calling for a new flag was signed by a number of "notable"Mississippians. A campaign donor search found most were either Obama donors or flunkies of ousted Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones. In other words, the people we should listen to the least!
    What has happened is that the Oxford city board has been filled for the most part with extremely liberal aldermen. Usually this doesn’t matter; after all, these people are running a city, not establishing national policy. But give them a chance to jump off the George-McGovern deep end, and they will.
    I happen to think we should keep our state flag. We’ve already voted on it, and by an overwhelming majority Mississippi voters made it clear they did not want a change. But if we have to argue this again, then the issue should again be presented to the voters. The city of Oxford shouldn’t be taking a position one way or the other.
    Suppose the left-wing fringe is successful in ram-rodding a new flag through the legislature. I’m sure they will immediately insist that it is the duty of all Mississippians to accept the flag which has been adopted through the democratic process. And yet, by refusing to display our state’s flag, Oxford’s city board has made it clear that it doesn’t respect the democratic process very much. Is every city henceforth to just display the state flag of its own choosing?
    I am a former Oxford resident, in that I now live a few hundred yards outside the city limits. So although I voted in the last election I can’t vote in the next one. But I still have an interest in what goes on in a city where I consider myself a resident. And what the Oxford City board has done is disgraceful. A refusal to display our state flag is unpatriotic, and in making this decision Oxford’s aldermen are not very different from the hippie flag burner’s of the 1960s. The hippies were wrong and so are Oxford’s elected officials.
    Unfortunately, Mississippi doesn’t have recall elections, but these are clearly power-hungry aldermen; most will be seeking re-election. Hopefully the citizens will turn them out en masse. Alderman Jay Hughes is seeking to oust Republican Rep. Brad Mayo in this fall’s legislative election. I hope the voters will send him – and the whole sorry lot – a loud and clear message.

New washers save $19 a year and result in hundreds of dollars in extra work, ruined clothes

    Jinny and I went shopping for a washer and dryer the other day and discovered that the Obama administration had very quietly banned washing machines.
    Oh, there are still machines that you can put soap and water in that will wiggle your clothes around a little. But these machines are not washing machines in that they don't really wash clothes.
    Household appliances have been getting worse every few years for about 30 years, and the government issues new regulations constantly demanding that appliances use less and less energy. Yet if you study it, the energy savings are quite small, and the expense to the consumer is great.
    Toilets don't flush anymore. Dishwashers don't get the dishes clean. A three-minute shower now takes 15 minutes, saving no water but using up a lot of valuable time.
    And now liberals are going after our washing machines.
    The new washers are designed to use substantially less water. The consumer is no longer allowed to set the water level. The government mandates that cold water be mixed in with the hot, so clothes can no longer be washed in hot water. And of course phosphates, which do minimal harm if any to the environment, were removed from washing detergents years ago.
    The result is a highly complex washer that is subject to break. And even when it's working, it isn't working very well. In most models the agitator has been removed. The consumer no longer has the ability to set water levels, since they are set by weighing the laundry load. So a super-dirty set of laundry is just going to stay dirty and smelly.
    Front-load washers simply do not work; I've owned them. They become moldy and smelly, and the unclean clothes end up smelling really bad when they come out of the wash. The new high-efficiency top-loaders don't work either; the clothes remain dirty. And to provide these unimpressive results many of the new washers have a cycle time of almost two hours.
    Faced with the prospect of not being able to buy a decent washer Jinny and I started to do some research, and soon stumbled onto reviews of Speed Queen top-load washers, particularly the old mechanical model. Since these are commercial-grade washers they aren't subject to quite as many regulations as home models.
    The hot water is not diluted with cold. It uses plenty of water, and although it won't fill up more than 75 percent of the drum with water, there is a manual override that will allow you to have as much water as you wish. The lid doesn't lock during the wash cycle, so you can add items that might have dropped on the floor. Satisfied customers report that their clothes are much cleaner with a shorter cycle time of only 30 minutes. That's right, it does twice the job in much less than half the time.
    We could have ordered our Speed Queen from Amazon, but they are for sale at Rebel Appliance in Oxford. I try to make a point of shopping at businesses with "Rebel" in the name, so that's where we went. Our new washer and dryer arrive on Friday, and they are going to install and set them up for us.
    We ordered the mechanical model that hasn't changed much in the past 30 years. They do offer an electronic model, but that's just something else to break, and the electronic models apparently takes away some of the freedoms that we have with the old mechanical model.
    You might find it odd that I'm singing the praises of a product that hasn't arrived at my house yet. Well, I'm confident based on the experiences of many others that this washing machine will serve our needs. Just read the reviews on Amazon for yourself!
    It's not always easy, but we can fight back against liberal control freaks, and the Speed Queen mechanical washer is one way of doing so. Although it's a good washer, you should still add a big scoop of laundry phosphate with every load. Add a half-scoop of phosphate to every dishwasher load as well.
    While the leftists prattle on about how they saved $19 in operating costs with their "modern" washing machine, we can point out that we are happy to spend $19 in order to save dozens of hours of time and to prevent countless clothes from being ruined.
    If you are in the market for a washer, or think you may be in the future, now is the time to buy. Liberals can't stand for people to be happy, and soon the Eye of Sauron will latch onto the Speed Queen and find a way to make it as crappy as all of the other washers on the market right now.

I hope the voters send the race-baiters of 2014 a message from the ballot box

    This has been the season of the race-baiting advertisement, with candidates or their supporters running some pretty reprehensible ads equating conservatism with racism. Some candidates are so extreme that they even aligned some themselves with attempted-cop-killer Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo.
    Among the worst race-baiters of 2014 (or those who declined to denounce race-baiting on their behalf) are Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Michelle Nunn of Georgia, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. These types of racialist campaigns harm our democratic system, and I hope voters will send these candidates a message today.

When five supposedly good kids said to sodomize, injure a schoolmate, what lessons can we learn?

    In the Disturbing Beyond Belief department, five Hopkinsville, Ky., young adults and teens have been arrested and charged with sodomy and other crimes in relation to an attack on a passed-out 15-year-old boy at a party. The boy may or may not have been drugged.
    The boy was seriously injured. His intestines were punctured and he nearly died; he currently has a colostomy bag; I don't know if this is permanent. The sexual attack, committed with various objects -- one kicked into the boy's rectum -- was filmed and perhaps placed on social media.
    An attack of this kind is troubling in every case, but this boy was a family friend to two of his alleged attackers and a cousin to one. These kids knew each other well. They were supposedly friends, or at least associated with the same friends.
    And by the way, before you start thinking about Kentucky jokes, Hopkinsville is in Western Kentucky, between Nashville and Paducah. Demographically it's a bit like Tate County with slightly lower income and more college degrees.
    The five who were arrested weren't rough thugs -- just the opposite. They were mostly middle-class, college-track kids. One of the oldest, Dayton Ross Jones, was on the Arkansas State University golf team. Another has a Facebook page that says he attends or attended the University of Kentucky.
    The Facebook page for one of the juveniles, a high school senior, displays photos of a tall, athletic teen posing with lots of attractive girls and other attractive high school kids. In fact all of the kids had Facebook pages that made them appear to be well-liked, successful, decent guys. It's sad to look at these photos: a first deer, first turkey, first car, first prom date, and then realize the next photo in the series needs to be the first felony mug shot.
    These five guys didn't intend to seriously injure this boy; they wanted to humiliate him. What started off as fairly mild humiliation escalated as the attackers tried to outdo the others in viciousness. Oddly enough, many people apparently don't believe that it is a sexual assault if one's purpose is merely to humiliate someone they know.
    Whenever I read a story like this I bring it to the attention of my children, because there are so many life lessons to be learned from the mistakes and tragedies of others. Among them:
    ❑ Good people sometimes do terrible things. Try not to be one of them. Learn from the mistakes of others.
    ❑ If you get drunk or otherwise pass out there are people who will take advantage of you or try to humiliate you, often for no reason. Sometimes they will harm you. Sometimes these people will be those who are supposed to be your friends. Avoid drinking to the point of passing out. Be aware that there are those who get their jollies out of drugging drinks.
    ❑ When a group of guys get drunk enough they will do inexplicably stupid things, often urged on by a single instigator. Guys will often attempt to outdo each other in viciousness. Avoid associating with instigators; avoid associating with those who often do stupid things; avoid associating with those who act in a vicious manner; avoid drinking to the point of seriously impaired judgment.
    ❑ Recognize that it's not always easy to do what's right. If just one of these five boys had somehow found the courage to stand up to his friends he would have saved an entire community a world of sorrow. Doing the right thing often seems impossibly difficult at the moment, but if kids could just imagine themselves 24 hours in the future looking backward it would be easy.
    Under the right circumstances every child or young adult has the potential to be a victim or a victimizer. As a parent I hope I can educate my children to these dangers without sounding like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons.
 

I bet they would raise more money if they offered people a chance to have dinner with Chris McDaniel

Click to enlarge

    If you don't think a lot of people are still mad about the race-baiting and possible election fraud that occurred in the Republican runoff election between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel, just look at the response that a recent sponsored Facebook post offering dinner with Haley Barbour got. As always, you can click on the photo to enlarge it.
    Offering conservatives the chance to have dinner with Haley is like throwing gasoline on a fire. They just need to let this man keep a low profile and do his race-baiting behind the scenes. Are these people not aware of just how unpopular Barbour is right now, even among some Cochran supporters?
    Even worse, since it is a paid advertisement it keeps showing up again and again. And the response is uniformly negative. These ads are being targeted at conservatives, and conservatives are clearly not fond of Barbour.

At Wall's I found dishwashing detergent that works for half the price of modern stuff that doesn't

Four years old and full of
delightful, effective phosphate!

    Regular readers of this blog know that when I grocery shop I stock up on deeply discounted sales items -- in a big way. As a result I manage to save a good bit of money on groceries, and if the Earth is ever hit by an asteroid folks at my house will still eat for a few weeks.
    Yesterday Jinny and I went to Wall's down in Grenada. Going to Wall's is a crap shoot, and this trip was proving to be unproductive -- until I spotted the bags of Cascade Action Packs on the back wall (at Wall's).
    The packaging looked rather old, so I turned the bag over and found a disclaimer assuring the customer that the product contained no more than eight percent phosphate. I hit pay dirt!
    Phosphate -- usually in the form of Sodium Tripolyphosphate, or STPP -- is the magic ingredient that makes soap work. Liberals passed laws against phosphates in laundry detergent years ago even though they did little if any damage to the environment (almost all phosphates in rivers and streams came from and still comes from agricultural fertilizer, not laundry soap). But dishwashing detergent still contained some phosphate until 2010.
    A few states passed additional laws against phosphates and so the big corporations decided to punish all Americans by depriving us of phosphates. Most people didn't know about the changes until they noticed that their dishes were no longer getting clean.
    The "old" Cascade that was on sale at Wall's cost $1.99 per bag of 20 wash packs. The new-and-much-worse version of the same product was on sale for $3.99 at Kroger yesterday. So I was able to buy dishwasher detergent that is twice as good for half the price. I bought 35 bags, or enough for 700 dishwasher loads. We have about 10-12 dishwasher loads per week, so that's about an 18-month supply.
    For those of you who can't find any old detergent that works, The Chemistry Store online sells buckets of sodium tripolyphosphate. Just add a tablespoon to cheap dishwashing detergent and your dishes will get clean. Add two tablespoons as a laundry booster and your clothes will last longer and stay cleaner.
    Best of all, phosphates work as fertilizer. So if you have a septic tank like us, every time you do a load of laundry you'll fertilize your yard as well.
    Without phosphates Erma Bombeck never could have penned her best-seller, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank.

National media lend hand to race riots by portraying murderous thug as angelic college student

Liberal darling Michael Brown robs a convenience store just minutes
before his death while charging a policeman.

    It's interesting how the media works hard to portray violent criminals like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin as angelic victims of the excesses of white people.
    Here's how The New Yorker described the death of Michael Brown, of Ferguson, Mo., in a August 11, 2014, article entitled "Why Did Micheal Brown Die?":

Michael Brown didn’t die in the dark. He was eighteen years old, walking down a street in Ferguson, Missouri, from his apartment to his grandmother’s, at 2:15 on a bright Saturday afternoon. He was, for a young man, exactly where he should be—among other things, days away from his first college classes. A policeman stopped him; it’s not clear why. People in the neighborhood have told reporters that they remember what happened next as a series of movements: the officer, it seemed to them, trying to put Brown into a car; Brown running with his hands in the air; the policeman shooting; Brown falling. The next morning, Jon Belmar, the police chief of St. Louis County, which covers Ferguson, was asked, at a press conference, how many times Brown had been shot. Belmar said that he wasn’t sure: “more than just a couple of times, but not much more.” When counting bullets, “just” and “not much more” are odd words to choose.

    And then.....

How does the choreography of Michael Brown’s afternoon form a story that makes sense?  It cannot, or must not, be easier for the police to shoot at an eighteen-year-old who is running—away from the officer, not toward him—with his empty hands showing, than to chase him, drive after him, do anything other than kill him. Teen-agers may not always be prudent; there is no death penalty for that, or shouldn’t be.  

    Now let's look at the facts. Yes, Michael Brown was walking down the street -- the middle of the street -- in broad daylight. He looked to be high on drugs. He had just robbed a convenience store and beaten the owner in order to steal a box of Swisher Sweets cigars. A policeman told him to get out of the middle of the street, at which point Brown -- no doubt thinking he was about to be appreheded for his robbery -- attacked the policeman and attempted to get his gun and murder him. Brown then fled, but later turned and charged the policeman, again in what can only be presumed an effort to murder him. The policeman fired, and felled the thug as he was charging him, with Brown's body finally coming to rest a mere three feet from the policeman.
    In order to further the myth that blacks are somehow frequently mistreated at the hands of the police The New Yorker -- and many other media outlets -- printed things which simply were not true. For example, it said that Brown was shot while running from police. Yet three different autopsies have found that all of the bullet wounds entered Brown's body from the front, as Brown was charging and attempting to murder the policeman.
    In order to keep the false impression that Michael Brown was some type of victim, the racist Obama administration pressured the Ferguson Police Department not to release video showing Brown robbing the convenience store just minutes before he attacked the policeman. It was important to Obama and Eric Holder that the false sense of black grievance not be tamped down to ensure continued rioting and looting in the streets.
    Certainly there should be people in the streets, but these people should be celebrating the death of notorious thug Michael Brown, not blaming the police for his wrongful death. Since when is it wrong for a policeman to shoot a robber who is in the process of trying to murder him?
    A look at statistics shows that black-on-white violent crime is endemic; White-on-black crime is uncommon. If we're going to keep score of every racial wrong, then let's do it properly; let's keep score. Because a proper accounting shows that blacks aren't suffering at the hands of whites; it's the other way around.

Changing the name of Confederate Drive at Ole Miss is violation of state law

    There's a little glitch in Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones' plan to desecrate the memory of our Confederate War dead by changing the name of the spur road that serves to access the cemetery. He announced plans last Friday to change the name of the road from Confederate Drive to Chapel Lane.
    Such a name change is apparently against the law.
    Mississippi Code 55-15-81 provides that most streets named in honor of military units, organizations or events may not be renamed. This would certainly include a street serving a Confederate cemetery, named in memory of the men interred therein.
    Dan Jones has shown an unwillingness to adhere to the Ole Miss Creed regarding civil discourse. His hatred of Ole Miss and its history is so great that now he wants to break the law to erase memorials to the dead. Isn't it time we had a chancellor who would adhere to the Ole Miss Creed and obey the law?

    The relevant code section reads as follows:

(1) None of the following items, structures or areas may be relocated, removed, disturbed, altered, renamed or rededicated: Any Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican-American War, War Between the States, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, War in Iraq or Native American Wars statues, monuments, memorials or nameplates (plaques), which have been erected on public property of the state or any of its political subdivisions, such as local, municipal or county owned public areas, and any statues, monuments, memorials, nameplates (plaques), schools, streets, bridges, buildings, parks preserves, reserves or other public items, structure or areas of the state or any of its political subdivisions, such as, local, municipal or county owned public areas, which have been dedicated in memory of, or named for, any historical military figure, historical military event, military organization or military unit.

UPDATE AND ADDENDUM: In the space of 10 hours this has become the second-most-read post I've had on this blog, as determined by direct click-throughs. Of course, I do have a few regular readers who just type in the blog name (in fact, I think this is becoming more common).

I really did not come up with this idea on my own. Someone posted a comment on Facebook which cited a Senate or House bill, not the code section. I read this on my phone, and when I tried to find the post on my computer I couldn't. I wanted to give whoever it was credit. But to whoever it was, next time cite the code section! You made me do some work. Also, my good friend John Cofield said he was aware of this information for the past few days and was just waiting for someone to publish it.

Ole Miss desperately needs a change, but it's not the name that needs changing

    I was glad to read the news that Coliseum Drive on the Ole Miss campus would be named in honor of Roy Lee “Chucky” Mullins, who was paralyzed and died a few years later following a tackle-gone-wrong in the 1989 Homecoming game against Vanderbilt.
    But how sad that Ole Miss Chancellor – oops, University of Mississippi Chancellor – Dan Jones made the announcement as part of a press release on plans to increase campus diversity. In other words, Jones’ message is that Mullins isn’t being honored for his sacrifice on the playing field, but because he’s black.
    I don’t believe in diversity just for the sake of diversity, but Jones does. But would it have hurt to have announced the renaming of the street a couple of months ago? The renaming could have still been mentioned in Jones’ press release.
    That’s one of the many problems with the “diversity” industry. Once in place there is no way to know whether favored groups have received honors on their own merits or merely because of a special status granted to them through their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or whatever.
    Jones said the university now plans to create a new vice-chancellor position for diversity and inclusion. Such a post might as well be called Vice-chancellor for Grievances and Quota Demands. Throughout academia such posts invariably work to limit academic excellence, free speech, and just about everything that universities should strive to support.
    Once these diversity pot-stirrers become entrenched the list of grievances never ends. No complaint is too trivial, and no one is ever happy. Some people can’t be made to be happy: Give them buttermilk, they want sweet milk; give them sweet potato, they want white potato; give them white bread, they demand wheat bread.
    The University of Wisconsin faculty senate recently approved a diversity plan for that school which calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high-status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.” You read that right: the distribution of grades.
    The university has now denied that it is ordering professors to implement race-based grading, and says that the diversity plan is merely a long-term goal, But since the Supreme Court outlawed racial quotas in the 1978 Bakke decision, we all have been able to observe that goals operate as de facto quotas. If there is a goal in place people are expected to meet that goal or suffer consequences. Goodbye academic integrity.
    An organization called Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) repeatedly goes to bat for students and professors who are persecuted for exercising their right to free speech or denied their due process rights. Some of these cases would be funny were they not so sad, such as Indiana University’s 2007 finding of racial harassment against a student seen reading Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan, which celebrates the defeat of the Klan in a fight with Notre Dame students. But the cover featured a photo of a Klan rally, and thus reading it in public was considered an act of racial harassment. Goodbye freedom of inquiry.
    Jim Crow laws mandating legally enforced segregation came into being because people started voluntarily integrating when it served their interests, and lower-class whites felt threatened by this gradual integration. So they sought to prohibit it. Today it’s the reverse. Although there has been a progressive increase in racial integration based on shared interests, those who feel they have nothing to offer in the way of shared interests want to force diversity through law or regulation.
    Both forced segregation and forced “diversity” are wrong. If the university wants to increase social interaction among those from diverse backgrounds, the way to do it is to encourage or even require campus involvement in clubs, organizations, and committees having nothing to do with diversity. The wrong way is to create a Diversity Gestapo to try to micromanage student lives.
    Jones covered a lot of ground with his press release. He said he plans to change the name of the short lane leading to the Confederate cemetery from Confederate Drive to Chapel Lane. Apparently it’s not enough for Jones to irritate those of us who are living; he’s got to desecrate the memory of the dead as well. This would seem to be an area where the legislature should step in, as it has traditionally helped to ensure that our Confederate dead were properly memorialized.
    The university also plans to erect plaques at various locations around campus, such as next to the Confederate Statue on the Loop, explaining the complexities of Southern history. It’s great that the complexities of Southern history can be reduced to just a few sentences. Why not just create a plaque for each course offered by the university? People could get a degree in a day!
    I think it’s important to take a look back at Jones’ mis-administration over the past several years:
    ■ In the "From Dixie With Love" battle with the students over the shouting of the chant “The South Shall Rise Again,” Jones created a one-time showdown with the students to give himself the opportunity to demonstrate that he was the boss all at the expense of the school. He could have easily prevailed by working behind the scenes, yanking the song for one game, then two, then three, and so forth, until the chant simply would have gone away. But he has a character flaw that doesn’t allow him to behave rationally in this type of situation.
    ■ During the mass alumni protests seeking to have Pete Boone removed as athletic director, Jones shared a podium with two speakers who compared members of the Forward Rebels group to segregationists, Citizen Council members, and speech censors. Although Jones didn’t make these comments, he used their comments as talking points, thus ratifying their defamatory remarks. It was a stunning lack of civility and a violation of the Ole Miss Creed. Jones has not apologized.
    ■ Also during the Pete Boone protests Jones issued a letter to alumni in which he stated that there had been threats to expand the protests beyond the football program. The letter was so poorly worded that newspapers across the nation ran news stories based on the letter that Jones and Boone had been physically threatened, which apparently never happened. Jones never corrected the record, preferring to be known as a martyr than an incompetent communicator.
    ■ The poorly written letter cited above is not an isolated example. Jones seems to be unable to communicate effectively. When he sends a letter to alumni hoping to calm them down, he angers them. Despite months of preparation he was unable to effectively communicate exactly what the plans were for the use of the phrase “Ole Miss,” the delightful English phrase used to describe both our campus and the wife of a gentleman. We have an administrator who can neither communicate nor administrate effectively. But he certainly does a good job of sowing seeds of despair and dissension.
    Ole Miss doesn’t need a new name. It doesn’t need a Vice-Chancellor of Grievances and Quota Demands. It doesn’t need to rename the short road leading to the Confederate cemetery.
    What Ole Miss does need is a new chancellor. Soon.

Obama says amnesty will encourage 'best and brightest,' while new wards of the state pour in

Does this look like the very best and brightest
Latin America has to offer?

   Several years ago when our Idiot-in-Chief violated his oath of office and quit enforcing our immigration laws, virtually all conservatives pointed out that we could expect additional hordes of illegal aliens flooding across the border.
    And of course we were right; conservatives are rarely wrong. Now we have hundreds of thousands of children streaming into the country in search of free food, free housing, and free medical care, all to be paid for with additional taxes on those of us who are here legally.
    These are literally the dregs of Latin America society: unskilled, uneducated workers likely to burden our welfare system and jails for generations to come.
    Oh, and please my Left-Wing-Nut friends, spare me the argument our ancestors were illegal immigrants when they entered the country in the 1600s. Can anyone deny that the Indians would be far better off today if they had possessed the political will and police power to prevent European entry into North America? Open borders ruined the lives of American Indians and open borders will ruin our lives, too.
    Obama claims all we need to do is just grant legal status and amnesty to anyone who enters the country illegally and all of our problems will be solved. "If we want to keep attracting the best and the brightest from beyond our shores, we're going to have to fix our immigration system, which is broken," Obama said during a break between his frequent golf games.
    The problem is that most of the illegal immigrants coming from Latin America in recent years simply aren't the best and brightest. They are the uneducated, unskilled, and sometimes criminal, and the United States does not need them.
    There was a time when an immigrant coming to this country would either work hard or starve to death, and as a result we could allow virtually unlimited immigration; new entrants would succeed or starve. Today we have the welfare state, and no citizen or legal resident has to work. We cannot afford to allow even a single unskilled, uneducated, low-IQ immigrant to enter our country and become a burden on society.
    Nor can we allow unskilled immigrants to depress wages for our own citizens. We need to put the sorry, leaching fruit farmers on notice that they do not have a right to $15-an-hour illegal-immigrant labor, and they will need to start paying Americans $30- to $40-an-hour to do the job. There are no jobs that Americans won't do, just jobs that Americans won't do for relatively low wages in relation to the difficulty of the work.
    If the United States wants to attract the best and brightest we can do so by offering legal residency and citizenship to anyone making a minimum score on the SAT or ACT, perhaps a 1200 math/verbal on the SAT or a 27 on the ACT. These scores are low enough to be within reach of those who really work at it while high enough to ensure that those qualifying truly will be among the "best and brightest."
    A couple of years ago I met a young Chinese guy at a bar in Barcelona. He had attended graduate school at the University of Illinois but couldn't obtain legal residency in the United States. It's a shame, because he would have been a great addition to our nation. But since he couldn't get legal residency he left and now lives in Hong Kong, and he won't be back.
    And that's the problem with the Obama immigration plan. Potential immigrants with high IQs and a respect for the law have excluded themselves from residency while low-IQ criminals just keep pouring in.
    A rational immigration policy starts with a several layers of border fencing, border moats, and border minefields, along with immediately and permanent deportation of anyone in the country illegally. We must protect our borders first. Then we should let in immigrants, and lots of them, who demonstrate the ability to contribute more to our nation than they will consume in services.
    A rational immigration policy welcomes the best and brightest, but shuts the door on the worst and dullest. Sadly, our current policy does just the opposite.

Everything that's wrong with America in one headline

R.I. middle school cancels honors event due to ‘exclusive nature’

Reports the Washington Times.

Florida law dean candidate brings up dropping LSAT scores and promptly kicked off campus

    Ole Miss law school dean Richard Gershon is one of the editors of the Law Deans on Legal Education Blog. In a recent post he tells of a dean candidate at Florida Coastal School of Law being ordered off the campus for attempting to address the issue of declining LSAT scores and dropping bar passage rates at a faculty review luncheon.

    A portion of his post is below:

    The on-campus process involved dinner with the President of the school, and then a meeting with the staff and faculty during a series of small groups sessions the following day. Each candidate was to give a presentation on the candidate’s vision for the school to the full faculty at lunch the day of the interview.  That is fairly standard for dean searches nationwide.
    One oddity was that the faculty was told they could only exclude one of the seven candidates from consideration. In effect, that means that the faculty has very little role in selecting the dean from the six remaining candidates. That is odd, but not particularly alarming, provided that the faculty had a significant role in the selection of candidates.
    The disturbing part of the report involves a candidate who raised concerns about the school’s declining student credentials and bar pass rates. That candidate was asked to leave in the middle of the lunch presentation. The candidate resisted, but was told that security would be called to remove the candidate from campus. This all happened in the view of about 40 faculty and staff present at this presentation, which was being recorded so others who were teaching class could see it later.
    The concerns raised by the dean candidate are supported by publicly available information showing that the 2013 entering class at Coastal had the following 75/50/25 LSAT profile: (148/144/141). Reports indicate that the students who have placed seat deposits in 2014 have a virtually identical profile as the 2013 entering class.

    I am adding Dean Gershon's blog to the blog list which appears on the left side of this page.

h/t Above the Law

More than a million die each year due to DDT ban, and now Yellow Fever again threatens Americans

    For the first time in almost 50 years mosquitoes carrying the Yellow Fever virus have been found in California.
    I grew up in Holly Springs, so I am well aware of the dangers of Yellow Fever. Although the numbers vary depending on the source, in 1878 Holly Springs had a population of about 3,500. More than half fled the city in fear of the plague. Of those remaining, almost all contracted Yellow Fever. More than 300 died.

    Among the dead was the local newspaper editor, Col. Holland, who reported on the epidemic to the end. A priest and 13 nuns all contracted the disease while caring for the sick. The priest and six of the nuns died. Mississippi Secretary of State Kinloch Falconer, of Holly Springs, returned to his home town to assist and also contracted the disease and died. Supposedly he had asked Gov. Stone to appoint a fellow townsman in the event of his death, and indeed the governor appointed Henry Myers of Holly Springs to fill the post made vacant by Falconer's death.
    Now that we have had our little history lesson, let's talk about how to get rid of yellow fever. It's as simple as three little letters: D-D-T.
    Forget all the horror stories of fragile condor eggs and such that you've heard from back in the days when farmers used massive amounts of the pesticide on their crops. Those stories may be true. But limited DDT use causes little harm and does a great deal of good. The pesticide works.
    Used in small quantities indoors DDT works as a repellent. There is no need to even use enough to actually kill the mosquitoes.
    When discussing DDT we need to remember that it was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives and eradicating malaria in much of the developed world. By using economic pressure to force poor, mostly African countries not to use the pesticide today our nation is allowing millions to die needlessly.
    In fact, many liberals traditionally hated DDT precisely because it did save lives. Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a biographical essay in 1990: "My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem." Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said, "People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any."
    The position of the Sierra Club was stated by its director, Michael McCloskey: the "Sierra Club wants a ban on pesticides, even in countries where DDT has kept malaria under control...[because by] using DDT, we reduce mortality rates in underdeveloped countries without the consideration of how to support the increase in populations."
    In other words, these liberals hate DDT because it enables those pesky ol' poor people to keep on living!
    Roughly a million people die from malaria each year. Sometimes these deaths leave families destitute, resulting in further deaths. Most of these deaths could be prevented with the judicious use of DDT.
    Pol Pot killed around a million Cambodians directly and another million indirectly. Today liberals, through their absolute ban on DDT use do exactly the same thing to malaria victims around the undeveloped world -- each and every year!
    We have liberals we don't need. We have a DDT ban we don't need. We have the equivalent of a Pol Pot every year, which we certainly don't need.
    All we need is reasonable, limited use of DDT to eradicate and repel mosquitoes.
    You can side with me on this or side with the liberals and Pol Pot. It's your choice.

USAir's Choice Seats offer little more than a chance to give airline more money

    Delta Airlines offers a few rows of "Economy Comfort" seating on most of its planes. It's a coach seat with extra padding and about four extra inches of extra legroom. Sometimes it's only a few dollars more, and I've bought it before and found it well worth the money. On International flights Delta throws in free hard liquor.
    United Airlines has "Economy Plus" seating, which is the same thing as Delta's Economy Comfort, with a few inches of extra legroom.
    And then there's USAir, which offers "Choice Seats." The airline's website describes these seats as follows:

Be among the first to board (with Zone 2) and among the first to leave when you land. ChoiceSeats are mostly window and aisle seats toward the front of Coach and may include exit row seats. You'll find the same leg room as other seats, but you'll be closer to the front of the plane.

    So on USAir you pay a big premium for a Choice Seat with the only reward being getting on and off early. That's a pretty weak reward. Extra legroom and free whiskey I'll pay for, but I'm not paying a big premium just to get off the plane two minutes before everyone else.