The Tall Ships are returning to Cleveland, with the grand
parade coming into the harbor around 4pm tomorrow, Thurs., July 7. The Tall Ships website is here. And here are some images of past parades
taken by CTP roving photographer Pat Dooley.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure, and his recent
column at American Greatness begins:
For 120 days in summer 2020,
violent protesters destroyed some $2 billion in property and injured 1,500
police officers in riots that led to over 35 deaths.
Because blue-state mayors and
governors saw BLM and Antifa instigators as useful street soldiers, most of
those arrested were never tried in court. Street thugs paid no price for
declaring themselves de facto owners of downtown areas of Seattle,
which police themselves conceded were no-go zones. Why did public officials in
blue states ignore the violence? They were certain that it enjoyed majority
support among their leftwing constituencies.
Indeed, some leftist icons cheered
on the violence. Well after the failed attempt to storm the White House
grounds, in June 2020, the Democratic candidate for vice president Kamala
Harris warned us that protestors were “not going to let up, and they should
not.” What did Harris mean by “should not?”—when she knew numerous protests
that summer had ended in terrible violence? Was she reckless in the manner
Trump was said to be by encouraging a demonstration on January 6?
The architect of the “1619 Project”
Nikole Hannah-Jones assured the nation that vast destruction of (someone else’s
property) was not a real crime. CNN’s Chris Cuomo gushed that violent
demonstrations and riots were American traditions. Were these national voices
urging calm during weeks of violent rioting and looting?
There were no investigations, no
congressional committees, and no voices of outrage from the left-wing
establishment over months of such carnage. Indeed, much of the organization of
the violent protests was facilitated by social media that was apparently
unbothered that the medium under their stewardship was used to torch and
loot.
VDH chronicles the incitements to violence, the threats, and
actual violence, all coming from the progressive left. Full article is here.
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The great Mark Steyn has a regular feature on his website, Steyn's Song of the Week, and his column over this weekend offers the wonderful backstory to the song America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward. Here is most of the column:
. . . And to round out this
Glorious Fourth in not so glorious times, at a time when we dwell mostly on
what is ugly in our society, here is a hymn to beauty. This much requested essay
is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:
In 1893, a Massachusetts professor
called Katharine Lee Bates was giving a series of summer lectures on English
literature at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. "One day," she
recalled, "some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to
14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave
the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw
the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed
there."
Professor Bates had not previously
traveled in the Rockies or seen much of her country at all beyond New England,
and the unbounded beauty of the land awed her - and inspired her. It was
"the most glorious scenery I ever beheld, and I had seen the Alps and the
Pyrenees," she said.
"My memory of that supreme day
of our Colorado sojourn is fairly distinct even across the stretch of 35
crowded years," Miss Bates wrote a year before her death in 1929. "We
stood at last on that Gate-of-Heaven summit, hallowed by the worship of
perished races, and gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse."
Though she insisted "the
sublimity of the Rockies smote my pencil with despair", she was not
"wordless" for long. "It was then and there, as I was looking
out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under
those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my
mind":
Oh beautiful for
spacious skies
For amber waves of
grain
For purple mountain
majesties
Above the fruited plain!
She put them down on paper that
evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you'd be hard put to find a
quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it's Gary Larson's "Far
Side" cartoon of Columbus approaching land and saying, "Look! Purple
mountains! Spacious skies! ...Is someone writing this down?" or Rush
Limbaugh at noon eastern welcoming listeners "across the fruited
plain" to his daily radio show, every anchorman, cartoonist, comedian or
advertising copywriter who evokes those words is assured that they're as
instantly familiar to his audience as any lines ever written in American
English.
Though they were born that day on
Pikes Peak, they were not given to the world until the Fourth of July 1895,
when they appeared in a weekly church publication in Boston called The Congregationalist. Whether or not
Katharine Lee Bates could see actual amber waves or purple mountains in that
thin air, she captured precisely the scale of America as no-one had done
before: As the anonymous author of a long-ago booklet on patriotic music
published by the John Hancock Insurance Company wrote: "Among our American
songs, none surpasses in nationalistic idealism 'America, the Beautiful.' In it
Katharine Lee Bates has caught the beauty, majesty, and immensity of this
country of ours." The words have a humility before that beauty and majesty
and immensity, yet they rise to the task and do them justice. In The Congregationalist, the editor's
introductory note read:
Miss Bates's poem has the true patriotic ring pertinent to Fourth of
July.
And over 125 Fourths later, those words are not just the accompaniment
to the celebration but part of the fabric and foundation of it.
Mark’s full column is here.
Happy Independence Day to everyone across the fruited plain.
# # #
Gary Bauer at PatriotPost
has a message for all of us on this Fourth of July weekend:
Independence Day is one of my
favorite holidays – celebrating patriotism, our history and the tremendous
courage, faith and sacrifices of our Founding Fathers. As the 246th birthday of
America approaches, by all means, enjoy the day! Celebrate America and our
freedoms!
But please take a moment to remind
your children and grandchildren about America’s exceptionalism and the
significance of Independence Day.
Remind them about the sacrifices at
Bunker Hill and Concord Bridge that were necessary to create this nation and
secure our freedoms. Tell them about the courage of George Washington crossing
the Delaware River on Christmas night.
Most importantly, tell them about
America’s “mission statement.” It can be found in the second paragraph of the
Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed…
Yes, the right to life is a
God-given human right. It is the first right without which all others are
meaningless!
Those were radical ideas in 1776,
and they are still radical concepts in many parts of the world today.
Of course, we have struggled at
times to live up to that standard, but there is a reason millions of people
from all over the world want to come to America – and it’s not because we are a
“systemically racist nation.” We are not!
There is a reason that courageous
Chinese dissidents wave the American flag, and not the Canadian flag or the
Iranian flag or the Swedish flag.
Sadly, in 21st century America it seems
we are struggling with the concept of “truth” and the notion that our rights
come from God, not government. As Ronald Reagan famously warned, freedom is not
guaranteed. Reagan said:
Freedom is never more than one
generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the
bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the
same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our
children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were
free.
That warning has never seemed more
dire than today as radical Marxists are attacking our history and demanding a
“fundamental transformation of America.” Into what exactly?
They are not seeking to create “a
more perfect union.” They are seeking to divide us in order to impose their
will on us. The future of our liberty depends on whether folks like you and me
can muster the courage to overcome this radical impulse to rule or ruin.
. . .
God bless you, my friends, and may
God bless the United States of America!
Read the rest here. And Happy Independence Day.
# # #
Too bad for you, Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Citizen. According to our betters, your pain at the
pump is no big deal. It's just the price you must pay for The New
World Order. Jesse Martin at 100percentfedup is one of many bloggers reporting:
On Friday, Biden’s advisor and
director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, took things a step
further in a slap to the face of working America.
When asked what he would say to
families struggling to pay $4.85 or more at the pump for months or even years,
this was his response:
“This is about the future of the Liberal World Order, and we have to stand firm.” Whatever the “Liberal World Order” is, Deese clarifies that it is not about helping the working class. It is not about helping Americans. And it is not about affordability for either group.
This comes after Biden stated that
US drivers will pay a premium at the pump for “As long as it takes.” As long as
what takes, precisely? Killing fossil fuels to implement a green agenda, most
likely. . . .
Yes, well, that’s the plan.
And the progressive left is talking about it out loud.
“Whatever the ‘Liberal World Order’ is"? The “Liberal World Order” is the same as the
New World Order, a/k/a Great Reset, a/k/a Agenda 2030 (see the America First
Report here re: the interchangeable terminology.)
# # #
If you plan to travel by air over the Fourth of July weekend, you may want to have back-up plans. Air travel these days has been unreliable, with flight cancellations and endless delays. There is a pilot shortage, and Terry Paulding at American Thinker blames COVID and the jabs:
What’s going on? We’ve never had a
pilot shortage before. We may currently have more air travelers needing flights
than a year ago, but not more than before COVID—and yet, here we are, facing an
entirely new problem. It’s so bad that American Airlines is offering pilots on its regional carriers double and
triple pay for the month of July if they’ll take extra flights.
. . .
Let’s put the blame for this
shortage squarely where it belongs: On COVID “vaccination” policy. Many pilots
who got the jabs are suffering injuries and have been unable to pass their
required 6-month comprehensive physicals. None of us want a pilot who has a
heart attack mid-flight. If you search the net, you come up with reports
like this one from last week that pretty much says it all
but they’re not from mainstream sources, of course. Such reports are forbidden
fruit for widely heard reporters.
There’s also the flip side—if
pilots refuse to get the jab, they can no longer fly due to mandates. We have a
perfect storm: If pilots are vaccinated, many can’t fly because of vaccine
injury—a state far, far more common than our government would lead you to
believe. They are desperate to keep that fact hidden.
If you’re not vaccinated, you can’t
fly either. If you’re in the military (many pilots go commercial after their
service years), you have the same problem, so the routine feed of qualified
military pilots who transition to commercial piloting is effectively halted as
well. . . .
Full column is here. More deliberate destruction . . .
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