American Flag Blog

As reported in a USA Today editorial in August, while Al Gore browbeats ordinary Americans about energy consumption, he does very little to curb his own voracious energy appetite. One thing Gore does claim to do is to pay “energy credits” to atone for his fondness for private jets, although according to the USA Today, his film distributor foots the bill. But do these energy credits actually do anything to reduce greenhouse emissions? Not likely.

The reality is that they are nothing more than a cleverly disguised way to squeeze more tax dollars out of consumers. The large industrial companies, wealthy jet-setters, and utility companies that spew pollution into the air have no incentive to change their ways. These scoundrels need only pay energy credits and they can continue polluting unabated while claiming to be helping the environment. Costs are passed along, as is always the case, until the final link in the chain - the consumer - ponies up.

Politicians in England are now considering extending their own program of “carbon credits” to encompass every facet of business including hotels and grocery stores. Of course, no one will do a thing to reduce energy consumption, but the cost of living will again rise for ordinary folks. The writing is on the wall, at least for those in the U.S., Great Britain, and other industrialized nations - governments have their sights set on exploiting the current global warming hysteria.

Tired of playing second fiddle to the U.S. and great Britain, the French are fighting back with their own 24-hour cable news channel. Scheduled to launch in December, “France 24″ is an attempt to counter the “Anglo-Saxon” bias of the BBC and CNN. Apparently Fox News, which enjoys a larger audience than CNN in the U.S., is a little too Anglo-Saxon for the French to even acknowledge its existence.

The purpose of the new venture, according to CEO Alain de Pouzilhac, is to counter the nearly intolerable Anglo-Saxon-ish funk of the BBC and CNN with “French values.” Considering that the BBC and CNN regularly disparage their own respective countries while falling all over themselves in a head-long rush to kiss up to middle-eastern “freedom fighters,” one has to wonder what exactly are the “French values” de Pouzilhac has in mind. After all, the traditional French values of cowardice, arrogance, and collaboration with the enemy are all in abundance at the BBC and CNN.

I’m often fond of making disparate associations, and today is no exception.

A study was recently conducted at Baylor University in Texas in which a team led by Dr. Wade Rowatt examined the very human trait of humility in 200 students. For purposes of the study, Rowatt defined humility as “a psychological quality characterized by being more modest, down-to-earth, and respectful.” What may be surprising to some is that the study found that the more humble the individual, the more successful that individual is likely to be.

Meanwhile, Englishman Sacha Baron Cohen has created a huge controversy with the release of his film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan.” If you haven’t heard about Borat yet, you will. Borat is a fictional citizen of Kazakhstan (a real country) who travels to America and pretty much makes light of everything he possibly can, and he is hilarious. Although I have only seen a few clips of the movie, it seems to me to be a sure bet that Borat will be nothing short of wildly successful.

And here comes the disparate association. I think that humility as a trait is much more prevalent in America than in many other parts of the world (for example, France) and it is a major factor in our success as a nation. Humility as defined by Rowatt is also the trait that will assure the success of the Borat character because we Americans love to laugh and we love to laugh at ourselves.

UK Ambassador for Kazakhstan, Erlan Idrissov, recently remarked, “Sacha Baron Cohen has developed a grotesque character who mocks many people in this society and my own… And also I felt sorry for the Americans he duped in his film, that was an utterly rude mocking of American society. I couldn’t get rid of a small feeling of being insulted by the film.”

Idrissov is evidently unfamiliar with America. Most Americans understand the difference between a joke and an insult. To people like Idrissov, and I would include those Americans who seem to dispise our uniqueness, it might have a more unifying effect if you would learn to laugh at yourselves.

Al Gore, the man who once, while visiting Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, gazed at busts of Founding Fathers the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson himself, and asked, “Who are those guys?” is still on the stump promoting himself. Gore travelled to New Mexico last week, spewing great volumes of greenhouse gases into the air as he went, to speak at the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit 2006 where he reverted to his trademark alarmist hyperbole, warning that “We face what I think should be described as a full-scale planetary emergency.”

He was unfortunately not referring to the possibility that the Dems will gain control of Congress, but instead, making more dire predictions about Earth’s demise at the hands of those nasty, SUV-driving Americans. But if only Gore were smart, he would recognize that there are forces far more immediate and deadly than global warming poised to wreak havoc all around the world.

France is again being rocked by Muslim violence, but this time, the perpetrators are more organized and sophisticated in their methods. They are now conducting commando like raids, targeting city buses, and have traded in rudimentary weapons such as hammers and baseball bats for guns and Molotov Cocktails. Recent Muslim violence in European countries like England, Spain, France, and the Netherlands is only the beginning of an increasingly more organized and determined assault on the west that is not likely to abate any time soon simply because European leaders are paralyzed with the fear of appearing to be racist.

The danger for America is that while Americans generally feel comfortably distant from events in Europe, we are also blissfully ignorant of policy in our own country that is leading us down the same path. Fear of the charge of racism has been institutionalized (i.e. racial profiling is bad) so that newly arrived miscreants are effectively above the law. Philly Cheesesteak entrepreneur Joseph Vento, owner of Geno’s in Philadelphia has been in the news recently because of the now famous sign he put in the window at Geno’s requesting that patrons please order in English. Last night he appeared on television and mentioned that Philadelphia police have told him that they have adopted a hands-off policy towards illegals. The truth is that law enforcement almost anywhere you go in the U.S. operates under the same policy.

Public policy that not only refuses to enforce immigration laws but will not enforce criminal statutes when illegals commit crimes is what threatens to tear Europe apart at the seams and we are not far behind.

Last week, our local paper reported that a car containing several illegal Mexicans was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy said he smelled marijuana and spotted a .22 caliber hand gun on a seat, but declined to actually perform a search of the car. And if that wasn’t enough, the driver had an expired driver’s license. It bears repeating that the driver and passengers were all in the United States illegally. The deputy simply let the driver go. No arrest, no ticket, no summons - nothing.

Last month, five Mexican high school students in Texas walked out of class, lowered the American flag from the school’s flagpole, and raised a Mexican flag in it’s place. Today, the Houston Chronicle reports that the five pleaded not guilty in court to the charges of disrupting class and “causing a disturbance by hanging the Mexican flag on the American flagpole.” Amazingly, Carlos Lopez claimed that he and his friends were simply overcome with an irresistable and immediate urge to demonstrate a little national pride. “Maybe we offended some people, but that wasn’t the intention. It was to show that we’re proud of who we are and where we came from.” But Lopez and friends are smugly lying. Everything about their actions suggest that they clearly intended to be as offensive as possible without actually killing any gringos.

At any rate, as illustrated by my first story, the five offensive high schoolers will no doubt get off with little or no punishment. And that’s why these two stories, though unrelated, illustrate that the so-called immigration debate we are engaged in is likely to get ugly. These are not isolated incidents. Americans across the country are hearing similar stories over and over again with different names and different circumstances, but always with the same outcome. When it comes to illegal immigrant offenders, law enforcement officials inexplicably fail to perform their duties.

When a society institutionally fails to enforce laws, and particularly when laws that are enforced rigorously for citizens are not enforced for those who have no vested interest in that society, citizens will eventually take up the mantle of law enforcement, and that will not be a good thing.

Velasco Elementary School in Texas is back in the news. You may remember that Velasco Elementary was the place where a student assembly was held at which the kids waved Mexican flags while adults led them in the Pledge of Allegiance - to Mexico! School Principle Sam Williams expressed shock that his little experiment in “diversity” ignited such a firestorm of controversy. Well, now videos have been released documenting the event: Students waving Mexican flags; and Adults lead the pledge.

While I find it disturbing to watch kids in an American school pledge their allegiance to a foreign country, the far more disturbing issue is that the people who make up our educational system are nearly monolithic in their lack of comprehension of what is wrong with this exercise. Dr. Stephen Klineberg, who teaches sociology at Rice University, is fairly representative of the education establishment mindset when he characterizes the United States as just a part of a “global community.”

Klineberg told KTRH, a Houston radio station, that “it seems entirely appropriate to raise the Mexican flag and hear the way Mexicans pledge allegiance to their flag comparable to how Americans pledge to our flag. It seems to me enormously important to help our young Anglo kids learn an appreciation for the various cultures with which they’ll be dealing in this global economy in the 21st Century.”

Well, either Dr. Klineberg is incredibly inept, or he’s purposely dishonest or perhaps, both. Words have specific meanings and the phrase, to “pledge allegiance” is no exception. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, “allegiance” means: (1) the fidelity owed by a subject or citizen to a sovereign or government (2) : the obligation of an alien to the government under which the alien resides.

The logical question is, in light of definition number two, why won’t these schools devote resources to teaching the Mexican kids to pledge allegiance to the American flag? Sadly, the standard for intellectual integrity has been so degraded that the act of encouraging impressionable American kids to pledge allegiance to a foreign government can be translated as teaching appreciation for other cultures.

It turns out that U2 front man, Bono, has remained true to form. For a liberal, that is.

Bono, the rock star who has used his fame as a bully-pulpit to extort huge sums of money from western governments, apparently considers himself and his band-mates exempt from the duties and responsibilities that more ordinary citizens of the free world are obliged to bear. In order to avoid Ireland’s approximately 12% tax rate, the band has relocated their publishing company to the Netherlands where they will pay only 5%.

While many view Bono’s efforts to relieve the scourge of third-world poverty as admirable, the effort he has made to avoid sharing in the financial burden with the rest of us exposes he and his fellow band members as nothing more than elitist leftists. Lead guitar player David Evans, more commonly known as “The Edge” told an Irish radio audience, “Our business is a very complex business. Of course we’re trying to be tax-efficient. Who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?” Millions of people have “very complex” businesses and lives, but don’t have the luxury of transplanting their money to a country with more favorable tax laws in the guise of tax effiency.

Ireland has one of the lowest tax rates in the free world, yet Bono and friends aren’t willing to pay it, all the while asking American and European taxpayers to pony up. Nevertheless, he is right in step with the western world’s arrogant elitist establishment, so it’s unlikely that any of this will have the slightest negative effect on his bid for a future Nobel Peace Prize.

In remarks before the National Press Club, Ted Turner recently took the American media to task for displaying American flags in the background while reporting on the war in Iraq. He was making the point that displaying an American flag is taking sides, something he believes American journalists shouldn’t do. Turner’s view that Islamic terrorism has a legitimate claim to the moral high ground over America’s involvement in the war is consistent with the money funding the Democrat Party but really has little to do with the upcoming election.

Recent polls show that while a majority of voters question the prosecution of the war, they don’t neccessarily believe we shouldn’t be there. In fact, a  slight majority actually agree that involvement in Iraq is an inevitable part of a larger war on terror. Turner is preaching to the choir and anti-war views in general don’t indicate what the real problem is for Republicans. Instead, Republican politicians up for re-election are facing a constituency that feels betrayed by Bush and congressional Republicans in two key areas - the economy and immigration.

Early on, Bush won a lot of support for pushing tax cuts through Congress, and those tax cuts have dramatically increased revenues, as they always do. But Bush squandered a huge opportunity to lower taxes even further and make the cuts permanent by refusing to lay down the law with congessional Republicans to put the brakes on spending. Instead, by refusing to veto all but one bill, he gave carte blanche to Congress to do what they do best - spend other people’s money.

As bad as the view is of the President’s lack of spending restraint, the view of his handling of illegal immigration is worse. Bush has notoriously been a vocal supporter of open borders for most of his political career, but those views didn’t matter much to voters who were largely unaware that a problem even existed until the Minuteman Project began to call attention to the huge numbers of illegals flooding across the border. Since the shock of last spring’s illegal immigration rallies, Bush’s half-hearted attempts to portray himself as tough on border control have come off as insincere and condescending to the Republican base. Republicans in Congress have further fanned the flames by refusing to take the issue seriously, adding to the perception by the Republican rank-and-file that their elected representatives have become arrogant and power-hungry.

The unfortunate result of disaffected Republican voters is that Congress will likely fall into the hands of a Democrat Party that is much farther to the left than it was in 1994 when they lost control of Congress.

For several weeks now, bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman has been cooling his heels in jail, along with Leland and Tim Chapman. Their “crime” was capturing Max Factor heir Andrew Luster who fled to Mexico after being convicted of rape. The trio were arrested last month by the U.S. Department of Justice at the request of the Mexican government and are awaiting extradition.

Now, 29 Congressmen have stepped in to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that extradition be blocked. After the illegal immigration rallies this past spring when millions of Americans were outraged to see illegals waving Mexican flags on American soil, the Bush administration has made efforts to move away from the open-border policies that Bush has favored in the past. Following the polls, Bush has recently come out in favor of some form of border control, but his support of real reform is half-hearted at best.

Border control advocates should be making a lot of noise over this case. Will the Bush administration honor the Mexican government’s wish to prosecute an American who has violated Mexican law while the Mexican government encourages it’s people to break U.S. laws? If it were not for “Dog,” Luster would still be lounging on a beach in Mexico and Mexican authorities would be guilty of harboring a convicted violent felon. If Bush allows these men to be extradited, he will be guilty of valuing the demands of a foreign government over the sovereignty of the United States, in clear disregard for his Oath of Office.

Comedian Dennis Miller, in an appearance on Hannity & Colmes last week, told Alan Colmes that when he was a liberal, he found the conservatives he encountered to be “a lot more cordial.” Let’s take it one step further by suggesting that the farther we move along the political continuum to toward the extreme left, the more hostile the environment becomes. In fact, it seems to be the sole province of the political left to replace reasoned argument with hate and vitriol.

A case in point comes from a comment we received today in response to our post of 9/18 about the shenanigans of a self-absorbed city council on Bainbridge Island, Washington. City Councilman Jim Llewellyn it seems, was so repulsed by the American flag that he conspired to dispense with the Pledge of Allegiance at future council meetings. While his skullduggery was exposed by incensed and patriotic townfolk, it’s evident that there is nasty leftism afoot on Bainbridge Island that extends well beyond Llewellyn and his personal aversion to American flags.

The following comment was sent to us by Largo_44 and provides a disturbing account that is unfortunately becoming more common in American culture.

“Funny thing about Bainbridge Island. Two years ago, they got caught harrassing and abusing a 23 year old wounded soldier during their ‘Grand Old Fourth of July Parade’ instigated by the master of ceremonies herself, one Deborah Cheadle.

“They did the typical retro-hippie/lib thing and with their booing and calling the poor kid ‘baby killer’. Some even spat on him.

“Of course, the Bainbridge Island city council and various important officials tried to cover it up and it almost didn’t get reported until a columnist with the Seattle PI reported it a couple days later. Needless to say, the backlash against Bainbridge went nationwide and they had to close their site and permanently disable their guestbook (and change phone numbers).

“In the two years since then, the People’s Republic of Bainbridge had been keeping a low profile, but it’s no surprise their government is still pushing their ‘Let’s destroy America’ agenda.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they start getting a bunch of Muslims moving into the neighborhood. Afterall, it would make a nice beachhead for the terrorists.”

Par for the course - the lefty flag haters of Bainbridge Island spit on American soldiers who risk life and limb to serve their country. The sulking left will get worked into a frothing fit of rage over the slightest perceived threat to freedom, yet they are utterly ignorant of the source of our freedoms. I tend to agree with Largo_44 - an Islamic Bainbridge Island would have Llewellyn and crew pining for some good old American flag waving in no time.