The American Standard Bearer

Someone should send Florida State Senator Frederica Wilson, D-Miami, a dictionary. Better yet, she ought to enroll in a continuing education class that would teach her how to use a dictionary.

Wilson has introduced a bill that aims to put an end to the use of the term “illegal alien,” at least within the halls of government. The bill states simply that “A state agency or official may not use the term ‘illegal alien’ in an official document of the state.”

Surprisingly, the word “illegal” is not the problem – “‘Illegal,’ I can live with,” says Wilson. Rather, it’s the word “alien” that she takes issue with, “An alien to me is someone from out of space,” she told the news-press.com.

Regrettably, the words, “from out of space,” or even “from outer space,” don’t generally appear in dictionary definitions of the word “alien.” Instead, the most common definition is something similar to what can be found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “relating, belonging, or owing allegiance to another country or government.”

For the socially insecure, there’s a never ending supply of “experts” ready to give advice. Ron Geraci, author of “The Bachelor Chronicles” (which I have not read and have no interest in reading), is now offering advice about a condition he is evidently unfamiliar with – fatherhood.

Geraci lent his lack of expertise to an article appearing in insideBayArea.com entitled “Guys: The biological bell tolls on thee too” that attempts to discourage men from becoming fathers past the age of 40. Geraci definitively says, “It’s too late to have a kid when you cannot guarantee that you’re going to be in the game as a father when that kid is 18 years old.” How does one go about guaranteeing survival until a child reaches 18? Is there a place I can go to sign up for that?

Geraci’s own father was 56 when he was born and lived until Geraci was 27. Does he think his own conception was a bad idea? Coming from a guy who appears to be a real-life George Costanza from “Seinfeld,” why would anyone take his advice seriously anyway?

James Cameron is about as main-stream Hollywood as you can get. He is the man behind some of the biggest blockbusters of all time, like Titanic and The Terminator series, and now he has made a television documentary, “The Lost Tomb of Christ,” claiming that he has “discovered” the coffins of Jesus, his mother Mary, his “wife” Mary Magdalene, and his “son” Judah.

What’s interesting about this is that the subject of the film, ten ossuaries with various names inscribed on them, are not a recent discovery. They have been around for twenty-seven years, unearthed in Jerusalem in 1980, and the notion that they may have been the final resting place for a married Jesus and his family has been debunked by most archaeologists.

The timing has little to do, it seems to me, with the freshness of Cameron’s “discovery” and everything to do with the growing traction of the anti-Christian movement in Hollywood.

Yesterday marked the sixty-second anniversary of the epic raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. That morning, the 28th Marine Regiment bravely fought their way to the summit and raised first one American flag, and later, a larger one that is depicted in the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal.

In the age of cell phone cameras, almost every public action becomes a potential photo-op. But there were no cell phone cameras and no reasonable expectation that there would even be a photographer with any sort of camera on the scene when those soldiers raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. Their brave act was utterly selfless in nature and embodied a willingness to sacrifice for love of country that so many Americans today can’t fathom.

As Congress bickers over whether to continue funding our troops, it’s encouraging to consider that that noble and humble love of country forever enshrined in Rosenthal’s photograph is alive and well in thousands of U.S. soldiers serving today on foreign soil.

Bank of America, the company that has stylistically distorted the image of the American flag in their logo to avoid violating U.S. flag code prohibiting the use of the American flag for commercial promotion, is proving to be shamelessly dishonest.

Last week, Bank of America announced a pilot program in the Los Angeles area offering credit cards without the usual Social Security documentation or any other proof of citizenship. Proponents of the move claim that credit cards transcend national boundaries and critics point out that U.S. banks are backed by the government in the form of deposit insurance and are therefore subject to government oversight.

Some say the program amounts to government endorsement of illegal immigration, and see it as selective enforcement of our nation’s laws by the U.S. Department of Justice. In any case, Bank of America is clearly soliciting new customers from Los Angeles’ large illegal immigrant population.

And that’s where the dishonesty comes in. Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal this week in which he denies that the bank is targeting illegals, “Bank of America does not deliberately market financial products and services to illegal immigrants from any country.”

Forget the bank’s brand new marketing slogan, “Bank of Opportunity.” Ignore the fact that the bank chose Los Angeles, a city with a huge Hispanic population, to test the program or the fact that all legal U.S. citizens who earn an income must be registered with Social Security. Instead, let’s revisit the words of Lewis’ colleagues just a week ago.
According to an article that appeared in the Reno Gazette-Journal, Bank of America officials directly involved in the program told quite a different story last week than CEO Lewis is trying to sell the public this week.

“Company executives say that the initiative isn’t about politics, but rather about meeting the needs of an untapped group of potential customers. ‘These people are coming here for quality of life, and they deserve somebody to give them a chance to achieve that quality of life,’ says Brian Tuite, the bank’s director of Latin America card operations and one of the architects of the program.” And, “‘If we don’t disproportionately grow in the Hispanic (market) … we aren’t going to grow as a bank,’ says Liam McGee, Bank of America’s consumer and small-business banking chief.”

The truth is that the “Opportunity” Bank of America is referring to is really just the opportunity the bank sees to exploit an enormous segment of the population that other banks have yet to exploit. Banks make huge usurious profits from high interest credit cards which raises the question, is Bank of America helping illegal immigrants or hurting them?

Global warming seems to be quickly becoming a sort of catch-all villain for whatever natural disaster currently befalls us.

The latest is news out of France as reported by the Telegraph.co.uk that giant hornets have inundated the French countryside and threaten to cross the English Channel to wreak havoc on an unprepared Britain. Writing for the Telegraph, Peter Allen tells us that “global warming has largely been blamed” for the fast spread of the hornet population.

According to Allen, the hornets first arrived in France hidden in a shipment of pottery from China in 2004. This, of course, has nothing at all to do with global warming and everything to do with globalization. But that’s another subject entirely.

The fear is that the already struggling beekeeping industry in France may be obliterated by the hornets, who love nothing more than a meal of honeybee larvae. Allen says “the French beekeeping industry has already been decimated by pesticides and long, hot summers,” but then goes on to blame cold winters for the plunge in the honeybee population:

“Honey production from the 1.3 million hives run by 80,000 beekeepers has been decreasing annually — down by 60 per cent in south-western France during the past decade. A spokesman for the French National Been (sic) Surveillance Unit said the bee death rate during winter was now up to six in ten.”

The headline at the Drudge Report, where we found this story, said, France Invaded by Swarms of Giant Hornets – Global Warming Blamed. The facts as presented by Allen really say nothing about global warming as a cause of the problem yet, with insertion of a single line attributed to no one – “global warming has largely been blamed” – the impression that millions of Drudge Report and Telegraph readers will take away is that somehow, global warming is at the root of the French hornet invasion.

Not much has changed since the years immediately folowing the Civil War. The Deep South is still being brazenly exploited by nothern carpetbaggers for self-serving political gain.

Joining Delaware Senator Joe Biden, New York Senator Hilary Clinton has called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse. According to Breitbart.com, Clinton told a crowd of around 1,500 at Allen University yesterday that “we should have one flag that we all pay honor to, as I know that most people in South Carolina do every single day.” In 2000, the South Carolina Legislature voted to move the flag from the Capitol dome to a stand-alone pole on the Statehouse grounds.

In a heavily Republican state, Clinton is expecting to squeeze out every single Democrat vote she can and her campaign has proved to be willing to pay for them. The Clinton campaign has paid a $10,000 consulting fee to South Carolina State Senator Darrell Jackson’s “media company.” Jackson was credited with delivering the black vote to John Edwards in 2004.

Speaking on the radio today, Former San Diego Mayor Roger Hitchcock pointed out that for millions of Americans, it is currently more advantageous to be in America illegally than legally. There is virtually no end to the government subsidies being showered on people who “break into” our country, as Hitchcock puts it. He predicts that the California legislature will soon pass a bill making it illegal for a U.S. citizen to impersonate an illegal alien in order to receive the many benefits only available to illegals.

Perhaps more importantly, Hitchcock correctly paints a portrait of a Bush administration that is not an idle spectator to these policies but rather, the very architect of a system that is eager to dole out rewards to people who break U.S. law while punishing those who were hired to enforce our laws if they attempt to enforce them.

Although not widely reported in the mainstream media, a good number of blogs have made the connection between the Bush administration and U.S. Attorney John Sutton, the man behind the prosecution of U.S. Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos. In light of the revelations that Sutton is an old friend and colleague of Bush from Texas coupled with the fact that the Justice Department serves the President, it is doubtful in the extreme that a U.S. Attorney would prosecute such a politically charged case of his own accord. It reflects sober judgement to assume that Sutton was almost surely acting on direct orders from the White House.

That leaves the President squarely in violation of his oath of office – “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He is determined to confer constutional rights on foreign nationals who break U.S. law while denying constitutional rights to U.S. citizens who enforce U.S. laws and history, if not Congress, will judge him accordingly.

Walter E Williams, syndicated columnist and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, was on the radio today discussing some of the hype surrounding the global warming hysteria. He mentioned two very interesting facts about carbon dioxide emissions – one being that there have been three volcanic eruptions in the last two hundred years that together have spewed more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activity put together, and the second being that termites add twice the amount of CO2 to the atmosphere annually that people do.

He then made the excellent point that it is the height of arrogance on the part of the global warming crowd to believe that the activities of humans even approach a scale large enough to do real damage to a chunk of rock as large as the Earth. I prefer to view it no so much as arrogance, but more just sub-par intelligence (i.e. Al Gore) and a heathy dose of ignorance. What else can explain the headlong rush by media types to sign on to the scare tactics being touted by the U.N.’s panel on climate change. After all, this is the same U.N. that has been hijacked by the world’s worst thugs for the purpose of extorting money from American taxpayers, and suddenly, they have achieved authority status.

Yet, real scientists who are actually doing scientific investigation of the subject are popping up every day to refute the U.N. claims, and they’re ignored! Instead, Washington politicians like Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman are manipulating the issue for personal gain. Take for example these recent developments:

David Bromwich, professor of atmospheric sciences with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, spoke at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco revealing that research on Antarctic weather patterns don’t match global warming predictions. In an article released this week, Bromwich notes that “…temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted,” and that research “showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.”

A panel of meteorologists in Cleveland this week took issue with the dire warnings from the U.N. panel. Meteorologists Mark Johnson, Dick Goddard, Mark Nolan, Jon Laufman and Don Webster told the assemblage that there is insufficient data to support the U.N. claims. According to The Plain Dealer, Johnson told attendees, “We have maybe 100 years of data on a rock that’s 6 billion years old. Mother Nature tends to even herself out, and the fact is, the Earth is cyclical.” Nolan added, “I’m not sure which is more arrogant for humans: to say we caused it or to say we’re going to fix it.”

According to the Hindustan Times, the most notable experts on Himalayan glaciers are contradicting the claim of an increase in glacier retreat as reported by the U.N. Inter-Governmental Panel of Climatic Change. Prominent glaciologist V.K. Raina who is a former head of the Geological Society of India says, “Claims of global warming causing glacial melt in the Himalayas are based on wrong assumptions.” Raina also told the Times that “Nearly 200 years (of) data has shown that nothing abnormal has occurred in any of these glaciers.” Other leading geologists studying Himalayan glaciers such as Dr. R.K. Ganjoo who holds the title of Director, Regional Centre for Field Operations and Research on Himalayan Glaciology as well as M.N. Koul of Jammu University support Raina’s contention that Himalayan glaciers are not retreating.

In an article appearing in last Sunday’s British newspaper, The Times, prominent science writer Nigel Calder took issue with the U.N. panel’s findings. Calder contends that the whole global warming issue has become so politicized that research from dissenting scientists has been severly stifled. He says that “The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999,” and therefore, “That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do.” Calder charges that evidence for solar influence on our climate is routinely ignored saying, “Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate.”

Calder points to experiments done by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark clearly demonstrating that an increase in cosmic rays penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere increase cloud formation which leads to a cooler climate. During periods of weak solar activity, more cosmic rays hit our atmosphere and conversely, during periods of strong solar activity, like what we are now experiencing, less cosmic rays reach us. Less cosmic rays equals less cloud cover and hence, a warmer planet. Calder concludes that “humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.”

Apparently even the spectre of prosecution for intentionally violating federal law won’t stop serious leftists from strong-arming patriotic Americans. Or maybe it’s just that they can’t help themselves – the desire to intimidate others who don’t agree is part of what makes them leftists in the first place.

According to the Hartford Courant, The Stoughton Ridge Condominium Association in East Windsor, Connecticut has been threatening association member Teresa Richard with a twenty-five-dollar-a-day fine if she doesn’t remove the American flag she planted in front of her condo while her son serves in Afghanistan. The problem is, Congress passed a bill that was signed into law last year that prohibits homeowner associations from enforcing rules that “would restrict or prevent a member of the association from displaying the flag of the United States on residential property within the association.”

After unintentionally drawing media attention (leftists prefer to operate under the cover of darkness), the association has tried to backpedal, working towards a “compromise” that entails moving the flag from her lawn area in towards the building. Of course, the “compromise” still runs afoul of federal law, which makes no stipulation about the location of an American flag on the property.

Fortunately for the forces of liberty, comedian Jackie Mason has stepped in, hiring a lawyer to do battle with Richard’s anti-American association.