Flag Day

Today is Flag Day in the U.S. Although not an official federal holiday, the occasion is marked in some cities with parades and celebrations.

One of the longest running Flag Day parade traditions is in Quincy, Massachusetts. This year marks the 58th consecutive Flag Day Parade. The largest parade is held each year in Troy, New York. This year an anticipated 50,000 people will watch the event.  Where parades are not staged, ordinary people make a point of flying or posting the flag outside their homes or places of business.

Flag Day commemorates the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official banner of the United States by the Second Continental Congress in 1777.  A midwestern dentist, Bernard Cigrand, is generally recognized as the "father of Flag Day," having staged the first known Flag Day celebration at a Wisconsin school in 1885.

In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation declaring June 14 to be Flag Day. In 1949 the day was firmly fixed through an Act of Congress. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the only state that has adopted Flag Day as a state holiday.

This year President Obama has doubled down and proclaimed the entire week of June 14 "Flag Week."

Despite the celebrations in places like Quincy and Troy, most people probably don't know that today is Flag Day. It seems to have taken on the aura of a bygone era-like straw boaters, big band music, or black-and-white TV. Much of that stems from the 1960s, when the Flag was downgraded to an instrument of fashion., embroidered on everything from shirts to underwear. It was also the time that young protesters rebelled against anything by burning the Flag.

But Flag Day remains important. The U.S. does not have a national culture like, say, France or England. We have no official language. We don't have thousands of years of history like other countries do. If someone is a Frenchman or an Englishman, he is the product of thousands of years history, culture, language and art-all of which he shares with his compatriots.

But in America we don't have thousands of years of common background. We, either directly or through our forebears, come from all over the earth. To some extent we share the gifts we bring here. Sometimes that doesn't work. You end up with O'Malley's Pizza or suburban white kids dressing like rappers. Most most of the time it does. It works because, while we may not have a common culture, we have a common set of beliefs. And those beliefs are symbolized and wrapped up in the Flag. That's why our enemies, who can't touch us economically or militarily do the worst thing to us they can think of: They burn the American Flag.

And that's what makes Flag Day still relevant, even though few people know it.

One of the greatest American presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, knew it. Near the end of his presidency, June 14, 1908, TR was taking a meal near Philadelphia, when he noticed a man apparently blowing his nose with the American flag. Incensed at the desecration, the president picked up a piece of wood and began beating the man with it. After hitting him about a half dozen times, TR noticed that the man hadn't been using a flag, but a piece of blue cloth decorated with stars.

The president apologized, but then turned and gave him one last Sonny Corleone whack  for good measure. He got my American pride riled up, said TR as he walked away.

Just thought you might like to know!

The Great I Am

   Near the end of Pres. Obama's first year in office, columnist Jeff Jacoby noted the president's decision not to attend the celebration in German marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The president, wrote Mr. Jacoby, was "too busy to attend the celebrations," opting instead to send a video of himself.

 

In the video, Mr. Jacoby writes, the president was careful not to offend any current or former enemy, blandly calling the wall   '' 'a painful barrier between family and friends' that symbolized 'a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.' He referred to 'tyranny,' but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words 'Soviet Union' or 'communism,' for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev."

 

Pres. Obama, however, was not too busy to talk about...well...Pres. Obama.

 In "Obama's Swelling Ego" Mr. Jacoby notices that "[a]s presidential rhetoric goes, [the video] was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat."

Recently, the president spoke at a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). According to The Weekly Standard, Mr. Obama gracelessly decried what he saw as the mess his predecessor had left him when he assumed office on Jan. 20, 2009. He then recited the litany of Democratic initiatives he was responsible for in his 14 months in office: the second stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, etc.

The president's self-congratulatory conclusion: "This has been the toughest year-and-a-half since the 1930s."

Oh, really?

Granted, the U.S. president has shown himself in that last year and a half to be shockingly ignorant of American history (for most leftists, American history started in the streets of Chicago in 1968). but has this president had a tougher go than:

• FDR in 1933-34 confronting not only an economic depression but the near collapse of a monetary system, as well as a natural disaster that left much of the nation's breadbasket a parched wasteland? 
• Harry Truman coming to grips with a devastated and vanquished Nazi Europe, a stubborn enemy in the Pacific that refused to yield, and the soul-wrenching decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan? 
• Jack Kennedy navigating by Braille through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, only to be taken to the nuclear woodshed the following year by the more experienced Soviet leaders? 
• Lyndon Johnson trying to bind the nation's wounds after JFK's assassination while trying to get his arms around that thing called Vietnam? 
• George W. Bush confronting a stateless, invisible enemy that  perpetrated the most significant attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor? 

Mr. Obama is much taken with his own accomplishments in the face of what he sees as adversity. But quite frankly, a lot of that adversity was of his own making. And while he views his legislative conquests as a lasting accomplishment, it may instead be a phyrric victory. Because if the president leaves any lasting accomplishments it appears that they will be the destruction of American initiative, the death of American exceptionalism, the end of America as a counterweight to the forces of tyranny in the world, and the permanent re-classification of the U.S. as a debtor nation.

You want to talk about a tough year and a half? That will be the first 18 months of whoever replaces him in the White House and has to untangle this mess.

Just thought you might like to know.

Persecution of Coptic Christians on the Rise

  Copts are Egyptian Christians descended from among the first Gentiles who embraced Christianity two thousand years ago. The religion of Jesus Christ was brought to Egypt by no less than St. Mark, the author of one of the four Christian Gospels.

   By the third century Coptic Christians were the majority in Egypt, and remained so until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. From then on, for the most part, Copts, along with Jews, were relegated to the status of dhimmi, or inferior, by their Arabic Muslim rulers. Today about 12% of Egypt is Coptic.

   Throughout history there have been many famous Copts ranging from Maria al-Qibtiyya, wife of the Prophet Mohammed to Boutros Boutros Ghali, the 6th secretrary-general of the United Nations.

   But today, Coptic Christians in Egypt are as persecuted a minority as the first Christians were at the hands of the Roman empire. Several weeks ago in Marsa Matrouh, a crowd of 3,000 Muslims, whooped into a war frenzy by an angry Imam, descended on the Christian community in order to "cleanse the city of its infidel Christians," democracy advocate Moheb Zaki wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.

   The result: 18 homes, 23 shops, and 16 cars destroyed while the Coptic community barracaded itself in its church for 10 hours until the Muslim fury died out.

   Over the last year there have been more than a dozen such instances of religious "cleansing" in Egypt. In Naga Hamadi a drive-by shooting at a Coptic church, following Christmas Eve mass, resulted in the massacre of seven Christians and the wounding of 26 more.

The following disturbing video was taken with a mobile phone shortly after the shooters did their work:



   Egyptian Copts have been forced to flee their homes by the thousands. Police, writes Mr. Zaki, arrive conveniently late to the scene after reported attacks on Copts. Often, he reports, the result is police pressure on Copt victims to "reconcile" with their Muslim attackers.

   Far from being the product of a few bad actors, this violence is being condoned and supported by a government that looks the other way, and a Muslim religious leadership that feeds the frenzy. One Sunni Islamic institution, according to Mr. Zaki, has declared the Bible to be corrupt and Christianity a pagan religion. And despite the dramatic rise in these attacks, no Muslim has yet been convicted of any crime.

   For all this talk, we continually hear that Islam is a religion of peace. Good luck finding many Egyptian Copts who agree with that. The plain fact is that if there are any peaceful Islamic leaders-religous or secular-now is the time for the big talkers to come forward and walk the walk: Unequivocally denounce this terrorism.

   Until that happens, most non-Muslims, rightly or wrongly, will continue to view Islam as a violent cult stuck in a time warp and a threat to civilized society the world over.

   Just thought you might like to know.

  

 

State-Run Media Applauds...Well, State-Run Media

   This blog has for some time decried the actions of the federal government in taking over commercial enterprises--nationalizing whole industries with the aplomb of a third world dictator. The mad dash to remake American society before anyone figures it out has been as breathtaking as it has been effective. A few examples:

• The nationalization of two-thirds of the domestic auto industry. This includes the dismantling of personal property rights engineered by the Obama administration when it rendered worthless the bonds of secured creditors and gave 55% of Chrysler to the administration's union masters.
• The federalization of the student loan industry. This has all but guaranteed that college tuitions will keep rising unchecked. As academia, which has its first member in the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson, keeps raising the price of its product, the federal government compliantly will keep shoveling more and more money into student loan furnace. There will be no market force to push back. Pres. Obama will be able to keep its friends in academia fat and happy behind their ivy-covered walls
• The nationalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy represented by the so-called healthcare reform bill. Should this law ever go into effect, and we pray it doesn't, the end game will be a single-payer--the government--system of healthcare

   Following on this impressive rush to socialism comes a just released a draft report by the Federal Trade Commission entitled "Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism." The purpose of the report is to float some ideas on how the federal government can "support" the newspaper business.

   This is a business with few exceptions (News Corp. properties like the Wall Street Journal or New York Post) that has, for the most part, been in the tank for Barack Obama since he began his improbable ascendancy to the White House. But newspapers are a dying technology. We need them to know what's going on about as much as we need buggy whips to get to the general store. Fewer and fewer people read newspapers on a daily basis, and those who do mostly focus on features and opinion content. And the number of people under the age of 30 who read a daily paper is miniscule.

What is not miniscule to the the 20 and 30-something crowd is the Internet--social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook; You Tube and the like. But the administration doesn't much like this social media stuff because they can't control it like they can the newspapers.

   A conservative president like George Bush fails to visit Louisiana during the Hurricane Katrina clean up and every major daily editorializes on how out of touch the Republican president is with the troubles facing Louisiana. Barack Obama waits weeks before visiting the same state to view the site of the worst oil spill in the nation's history and the papers bury the story.

But the story's not buried on the blogosphere. Neither was Scott Brown's improbably takeover of what mainstream media poobah David Gergen sonorously pronounced "the Kennedy seat" in Massachusetts. Nor the stories of how administration policy is being shaped by policy payoffs to Friends of Barack.

But administration wants to keep its journo friends employed and writing nice things about Barack. So the FTC, acting as an agent of the Democratic National Committee, decides to re-invent newspapering to prop it up against the market forces that are sending it the way of parchment scrolls and quill pens. How? In two ways: First by making it easier for newspapers to assert rights over its product and charge the "Internet freeloaders" (read: conservative bloggers) for content. And second (this is the really the sneaky part), by federalizing the newspaper business through direct financial support.

That's right: take from your opponents and give to your friends. Tony Soprano would be proud.  The FTC justifies confiscating your money through fees and taxes and giving it to the Friends of Barack this way: "The federal government has supported journalism through indirect means since the founding of the Republic."

   Some of its suggestions? For one, create a "journalism" branch of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is the federal boondoggle that provides payoffs to Obama supporters to train their youngsters to be community activists. Not exactly the Hitler Youth, but nevertheless a subsidy whose ultimate goal is to skew public opinion the president's way largely by registering people most likely to vote Democratic, or by informing the public debate from the left.

   For another, increase funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Of course, the crown jewel of the CPB is National Public Radio, the dependably left-leaning news organization favored by liberals.

   Other proposals include establishing a "federal fund for local news," and granting newspapers a tax credit for every journalist they employ. Is there a managing editor alive who would dare sic his journo-dogs on the Joe Sestak-take-an-election-dive allegation against the White House if his profit margin relied on the quarterly check from Uncle Sam?

   And as for tax-credits-for-journos, who gets to decide who is a journalist and who isn't? Sounds like a new federal bureaucracy needs to be created. Would a senile embarrassment like Helen Thomas get her J-card, but the world's most powerful blogger, Matt Drudge, not?

   The FTC goes on to cite what it calls precedents in having government support a private industry, as if that would be a justification. There is a difference between a fourth-class manuscript postage rate and the wholesale propping up of a superfluous industry about to fall.


   This may be the most insidious of the Obama plans to remake the U.S. as a European socialist system. It's one thing to nationalize Chrysler. They were third in a three-horse race when the feds took them over, and they're still third. Student loans only affect students. But by economically weakening his opposition, and showering your tax dollars on newspapers whose policy is to fawn over the president and look the other way when he stumbles, President Obama is using the reins of government to tighten the leftist grip on the U.S. and shape public opinion by restricting the flow of information.

And the historical precedents for that are found not in the Postal Service or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as the FTC maintains, but in Germany, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela.

Just thought you might like to know.