Thanksgiving – What You Never Heard In School

On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.

“But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness,” destined to become the home of the Kennedy family. “There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford’s own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.

“When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.” Yes, it was Indians that taught the white man how to skin beasts. “Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. “Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part [of Thanksgiving] that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way. Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

“That’s right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.
“‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote. ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense…that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?

“Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ Bradford doesn’t sound like much of a…” I wrote “Clintonite” then. He doesn’t sound much like a liberal Democrat, “does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes.

“Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ’seven years of plenty’ and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps.’ (Gen. 41:47) In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves…. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’” Now, other than on this program every year, have you heard this story before? Is this lesson being taught to your kids today — and if it isn’t, why not?

Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the pilgrim experience? So in essence there was, thanks to the Indians, because they taught us how to skin beavers and how to plant corn when we arrived, but the real Thanksgiving was thanking the Lord for guidance and plenty — and once they reformed their system and got rid of the communal bottle and started what was essentially free market capitalism, they produced more than they could possibly consume, and they invited the Indians to dinner, and voila, we got Thanksgiving, and that’s what it was: inviting the Indians to dinner and giving thanks for all the plenty is the true story of Thanksgiving. The last two-thirds of this story simply are not told.

Now, I was just talking about the plenty of this country and how I’m awed by it. You can go to places where there are famines, and we usually get the story, “Well, look it, there are deserts, well, look it, Africa, I mean there’s no water and nothing but sand and so forth.” It’s not the answer, folks. Those people don’t have a prayer because they have no incentive. They live under tyrannical dictatorships and governments. The problem with the world is not too few resources. The problem with the world is an insufficient distribution of capitalism.

Thanks Rush!

Iraq Had Nuclear Program

Times Article

The Times upset about documents on the internet, well I guess the Times has the monopoly on publishing secrets on the net and elsewhere? So Sadam was one year away from having the bomb. That’s not the story though. The story is how could the Republicans be so blind and publish this stuff. Well out of tons of documents, it got published. Remember the reason: in order to help translate the massive amount of material which otherwise would take years, of course the Times did not pick that up at all till now, months after it was approved.

What’s clear is the left is conflicted. They never give up, Kudos, if they just did not make themselves fools over it, then there might be some sanity instead of hate.

World War III

Mideast: Hezbollah has long been Iran’s proxy warrior against Israel and the West, and its recent attack may be the opening salvo in a much wider conflict. Was it in fact Iran’s declaration of war?

Back in April we (IBD) wrote of the possibility that Lebanon’s 70-mile frontier with Israel could be one place that Iran, through its surrogate, Hezbollah, retaliates if the U.S. or Israel takes military action against Iran’s nuclear sites.
We were reflecting an observation made earlier by Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party. “Lebanon,” he said, “is being used by the Iranians as a front which could be used if the Americans retaliate against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
Jumblatt’s statement came after a report that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were deployed at posts along the Israeli border. A senior Israeli Defense Forces commander told the London Daily Telegraph that these posts are “now Iran’s frontline with Israel.”
No military action has been taken against Iran. But Tehran has anticipated that Israel and/or the U.S. might someday launch a preemptive strike again its nuclear facilities, as Israel did in 1981 against Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor.
Were Hezbollah’s attacks last week a pre-emptive strike prompted by its patron, Iran, and a warning to the West of the havoc it could create by proxy?
Americans should be familiar with Hezbollah. In April 1983, Hezbollah terrorists, operating from Syrian-controlled territory, bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 49 and wounding 120. Six months later, Hezbollah terrorists drove two trucks carrying explosives into the U.S. Marine and French military barracks near Beirut, killing 241 American and 56 French soldiers.
Lebanon should have disarmed Hezbollah in accordance with U.N. Resolution 1559, a 2004 measure that called on all Lebanese militias to disband. But the West, and especially Europe, could have done more to help.
Despite Hezbollah’s history, the European Union, led by the French, incredibly doesn’t consider it a terrorist organization. Branding it as such would end its fundraising activities in Europe.
Hezbollah has been used by Iran and Syria to funnel money to finance Palestinian terror against Israel. Terrorist wannabes train in Hezbollah’s camps in the Bekaa Valley, with trainees coming from al-Qaida, Chechnya, Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel, Hamas, Japan, the Balkans and Northern Ireland.
Hezbollah is an Iranian creation supported financially and militarily by Tehran. When not waving Lebanese flags for a gullible Western media, Hezbollah sports a yellow and green flag depicting a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov rifle, posed against a globe and advocating “an Islamic Revolution in Lebanon.”
It’s worth noting that Israel’s third largest city, Haifa, was hit by two long-range Iranian-made rockets, probably the Fajr-5, with a range of 45 miles, a step up from the customary barrage of Katyushas with a range five to 12 miles.
Iran’s maniacal leader, and Hezbollah’s patron, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has pledged to wipe Israel off the map. Few took note that when North Korea tested its long-range Taepodong-2C missile on July 4, 10 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were in attendance.
We suspect the Israelis noticed.

When Superman Shrugs

Use the link below to go to the complete article.

If you were Superman, you’d flee the earth, too.

Everyone knows that power tends to corrupt. We forget that power also tends to exhaust.When a senior Congressman suggests that we re-deploy our troops from the Middle East to Okinawa, and when the rest of America fails to laugh him out of public credibility consequently, we know that we have arrived at that unique moment when a widely shared mental pathology reveals itself with shocking clarity. It’s not that most liberals (and
despairing conservatives) want America to lose the war. They just want the war to go away — to Okinawa, perhaps, or to outer space, or to anywhere but where it is now. They want an end to morally unsatisfying decisions about prisoners and torture and what soldiers may do to defend themselves; an end to vast expenses devoted to uncertain strategic goals; an end to agonizing choices about which corrupt regimes should be allowed to commit genocide and which should not. They want to flee to Krypton; they want to explore the ruins of old, comfortable, peacetime political arguments. The burden of power has exhausted them past their endurance.

If the Democratic response to the war on terror has seemed strangely disjointed, it is because many Democrats do not feel free to say what they truly believe: that America would be a kinder, richer, and safer nation if it relinquished a significant portion of its economic, military, and cultural might. Such a position isn’t contemptible, but it is wrong and contrary to the beliefs of most Americans.

TCS Daily – When Superman Shrugs

U.S. Recorded a Budget Surplus in April

Is this possible with tax cut's in place???  

The Federal government ran a monthly budget surplus of $118.85 billion in April as tax receipts came in stronger than the same period last year." In fact… (AP) "A flood of income tax payments pushed up government receipts to the second-highest level in history in April, giving the country a sizable surplus for the month.
In its monthly accounting of the government's books, the Treasury Department said Wednesday that revenue for the month totaled $315.1 billion as Americans filed their tax returns by the April deadline. The gusher of tax revenue pushed total receipts up by 13.4% from April 2005."

LIBERAL WAR ON TERRORISM HEATS UP: DELAY FINALLY CAPTURED

by Ann Coulter 

If only liberals were half as angry at the people who flew planes into our skyscrapers as they are with Tom DeLay, we might have two patriotic parties in this country.

Any Republicans who didn't ferociously defend Tom DeLay — which is to say, almost all Republicans in Congress, the president, and alleged conservative writers trying to impress the editorial board of The New York Times — better hope liberals never come after them. The only proven method for a Republican to avoid having his name turned into a liberal malediction is to be completely ineffective. You'll notice there's no "Stop Lamar Alexander Before It's Too Late" Web site.

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ed Meese, Oliver North, Clarence Pendleton, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay — all these men saw their names used as curse words.

Only one of them was ever indicted. To wit, the comical indictment of DeLay recently brought by political hack Ronnie Earle. To finally get some grand jury to hand up an indictment, Earle had to empanel six grand juries in Austin, Texas, which is like the Upper West Side with more attractive people. In addition, DeLay knows Republican and gambling lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates, who have recently pleaded guilty to various other incomprehensible charges.

Liberals spit out all these names with more venom than they've ever been able to muster for names like "Saddam Hussein" and "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

Even proud American corporations find their names being turned into curse words by liberals, such as "Halliburton," which is currently losing money in Iraq in order to supply food to our troops — you know, the same troops liberals pretend to love (but don't lose money feeding).

I spent a couple of hours listening to liberal hate radio this week to try to figure out what crime against God and man Tom DeLay is even alleged to have committed. But all I heard was the name "Tom DeLay" and "PRISON!" mentioned in the same sentence over and over again.

Back when Newt Gingrich still scared liberals, the House Ethics Committee spent years probing various charges against him, focusing on the charge that a college class he taught was … partisan! Meanwhile, they're teaching Marxism in comp lit classes, Islamic terrorism in Indian experience classes, and Druidism in divinity classes. As we speak, freshmen in English 101 classes all over the country are rushing to complete their term papers on how all heterosexual sex is rape. Over a million dollars later, the committee realized: Wait a second. This is a college class!

But at the urging of the Democrats, the Internal Revenue Service spent 3 1/2 years investigating Gingrich's college course. After all the hullabaloo, the result was: No crime. The classes "were not biased toward particular politicians or a particular party" — thus distinguishing Gingrich's class from every other college course in America.

To the contrary, Gingrich's college class spent more time praising FDR and JFK than praising Reagan. (Did you know that FDR's radio broadcast after Pearl Harbor included an eight-minute prayer? You would have learned that in Newt's course.)

But the mere mention of the name "Newt Gingrich" was proof of criminal conduct in the '90s.

When Democrats are accused of wrongdoing, it's usually something more like what most people think of as a crime, say, punching a Capitol Hill policeman.

Or perhaps by being captured on tape in hotel rooms stuffing wads of cash into their pockets from Arab sheiks — as Democrats were during the Abscam investigation. This was back when Democrats controlled Congress. Consequently, Congress responded to this shocking proof of criminality by their colleagues by … investigating the FBI for investigating members of Congress.

The "rule of law" means something entirely different for Republicans and Democrats. Consider the case of a prosecutor faced with the same possible wrongdoing by a Republican office-holder and a Democrat office-holder at the same time.

In the midst of Ronnie Earle's witch hunt of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for allegedly using her office for campaign purposes — begun days after she was elected to the U.S. Senate by a 2-1 margin — employees in former Democratic Gov. Ann Richards' office admitted that they destroyed almost three years' worth of long-distance billing records that were supposed to be preserved — to ensure the office wasn't being used for campaign purposes, among other things.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Earle promptly "cleared (Richards) and her staff of wrongdoing, saying there was no evidence of criminal intent."

Conservatives live under a jurisprudence of laws, but they get prosecuted under liberals' jurisprudence of epithets.

COPYRIGHT 2006 ANN COULTER

Why The Rush To War If Bush Didn’t Want It? RICHARD COHEN (IBD)

From the Left 

It is my firm belief that if, say, a few dozen people simultaneously did an Internet search for the words “Bush lied,” computers all over the country would crash and the energy grid would buckle, producing a rolling blackout that would begin somewhere around Terre Haute, Ind., and end in Barnstable, Mass.
   So common is the statement “Bush lied” that it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed all that with a single question.
   She asked George Bush why he wanted “to go to war” from the moment he “stepped into the White House,” and the president said, “You know, I didn’t want war.” With that, the last blue-state skeptic folded.
   I would not go so far as to say that Bush wanted war from Day One in the White House, but there was plenty of evidence he had Saddam on his mind and in his sights from the very moment he got the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
   We have it from Richard Clarke, formerly the White House’s chief anti-terrorism official, that within a day of the attacks Bush was inquiring if Saddam might have had a hand in them. When told no — “But, Mr. President, al-Qaida did this,” Clarke told him — it became instantly clear that this was not the answer Bush wanted.

Three Years in Iraq

During these three years, the last three years of the Iraq war, when we have lost 2,300 soldiers, America lost 120,000 of its citizens in automobile deaths, an average of 40,000 a year. These deaths included women and children and minorities, who were of course hardest hit by these auto accidents. One-hundred-and-twenty thousand. So we've lost 120,000 citizens in car crashes the last three years versus 2,300 in a ground war in Iraq. Forty-five thousand Americans died when they fell. This happens frequently. Americans fall down. Sometimes they fall down and injure themselves and sometimes when they injure themselves, the injuries result in death. (Again, women and minorities hardest hit.) Twenty-seven-thousand people in these past three years died from poisons. Twenty-seven thousand!

Twelve thousand Americans over the last three years drowned. So water and the wheel have killed more Americans than insurgent armor and fire in Iraq. We lost 2,400 in the war. We've lost 12,000 by drowning. It seems to me that on the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, we might want to take a moment to congratulate all of the generals and the battle planners for one hell of an effective land battle when it comes to American casualties. This never seems to be put into perspective. We've had the eager count-up, the eager run-up to one thousand deaths, the media salivating. They couldn't wait to report that, then it was 1,500, then it was 2,000, and then the rate began to slow, and so now we have to focus on another action line, which is civil war.

"Civil war has broken out! We've lost control! The Iraqis can't handle it! This war is an utter disaster," and it's not, in so many ways. Plus we can't leave anyway and we're not going to leave.

Abortion Stops a Bleeding Heart – Ann Coulter

Worth noting:

Democrats are trying to “reframe” their message to make people think they believe abortion is wrong. I think this is going to be a hard sell if they plan to continue ferociously defending abortion-on-demand right up until the moment the baby’s head is through the birth canal.

But both The New York Times and The Washington Post have recently run op-eds by liberals calling for Democrats to abandon their single-minded devotion to Roe v. Wade.

Even Jimmy Carter, the Democrats’ idea of an Evangelical Christian, has allowed that “I don’t believe that Christ would approve of abortions.” (Though Carter added that Christ would approve of abortion if “the mother’s life or health was seriously endangered or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest” — or if Jesus really, really needed the feminists to vote for him.)

It’s been a long time coming, but the Democrats are finally throwing the NARAL ladies off the boat.

Not one Democrat resigned from the Clinton administration when Clinton turned out to be molesting the help and committing lots of felonies. But a whole slew of them resigned to protest Clinton’s signing the Republicans’ welfare reform bill.

You never hear a peep out of Democrats anymore about restoring government welfare programs to their former glory.

Now it’s the abortion ladies’ turn.

It’s finally happened: Abortion stopped a bleeding heart.

As Abraham Lincoln said of another moral blight on the nation supported by Democrats: You can “repeal the Declaration of Independence — repeal all past history — you still cannot repeal human nature. It will still be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.”

Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, the court’s refusal to overrule the lawless Roe decision would not stand because of “the twin facts that the American people love democracy and the American people are not fools.”

With even liberals backing away from Roe, apparently the last group of people on Earth to realize the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence is a catastrophe is going to be the Supreme Court.

Perspicacious Observation

The proof is never in the pudding, the rice and raisins are in the pudding, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.