Lost and Found – November 16th Edition

What to remember about November 16th…

• 1776  Fort Washington falls to Redcoats; deserter William Dermot had delivered defense details to the British
• 1907  Oklahoma enters Union as 46th state
• 1945  U.S. secretly brings 88 former Nazi rocket scientists to America to assist in military research and development
• 1973  President Nixon signs legislation allowing construction of Alaskan oil pipeline from North Slope to Valdez
• 2000  Bill Clinton becomes 1st U.S. President to visit Vietnam since end of hostilities there
• 2001  J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone opens in theaters across America
• 2006  American free market economist, author, and academic Milton Friedman dies in San Francisco, California (b. 1912)

Lost and Found – October 24th Edition

What to remember about October 24th…

• 1861  Western Union completes 1st transcontinental telegraph line
• 1901  Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel; it is her 63rd birthday
• 1929  “Black Thursday” begins a  stock market crash that starts the 12-year Great Depression
• 1944  American Navy sinks Japanese both an aircraft carrier and a battleship at the Battle of Leyte Gulf
• 1945  United Nations is formally established with the ratification of the United Nations Charter
• 1949  Cornerstone of the United Nations Headquarters in New York is lain; construction financed by $65 million loan from U.S.
• 1951  President Truman proclaims that the war with Germany is officially over
• 1992  Toronto Blue Jays become 1st team outside of the United States to win Major League Baseball’s World Series
• 2003  Supersonic Concorde passenger jet makes its last commercial flight
• 2005  Civil rights activist Rosa Louise McCauley Parks dies at home in Detroit, Michigan (b. 1913)

Lost and Found – October 22nd Edition

What to remember about October 22nd…

• 1734  American pioneer and explorer Daniel Boone born in Berks County, Pennsylvania (d. 1820)
• 1775  1st president of the Continental Congress Peyton Manning of Virginia dies in Philadelphia
• 1797  André-Jacques Garnerin is the first person to make a parachute jump; he descends from a hot air balloon 3200 feet above Paris
• 1907  A run on New York banks leads to financial crisis and a 50% decline in the New York Stock Exchange
• 1957  1st American casualties of the Vietnam War; 13 injured in terrorist bombing in Saigon
• 1962  President Kennedy addresses nation on television to announce a blockade of Cuba in response to the installation of nuclear weapons on the island by the Soviet Union
• 1968  Apollo 7 mission splashes down as the 1st successful manned mission of the Apollo series
• 1986  President Reagan signs the Tax Reform Act of 1986
• 2008  India launches their 1st unmanned lunar mission

Labor Day Lies

Labor Day marks the end of lots of things – summer is over, no more backyard barbeques, swimming pools close, and you have to put away your white shoes.  What the holiday also marks is a declining free market and fair labor practices in America.

“Labor Day is an occasion upon which highly paid union men have the day off to do some shopping at retail stores staffed almost exclusively by non-union workers (if you’re in retail, you’re working on Labor Day), to have cookouts in backyards maintained by non-union (and often illegal) workers, and to otherwise enjoy the delectable fruits of hypocrisy.”, Red Monday

Why we have this love affair with a Canadian-born, crypto-Communist holiday that would more appropriately be held on May 1st is beyond me.  Everyone likes a day off, but why should we honor union bosses that have betrayed their members by being bought off in Obama’s race for socialized medicine.  Why do we perpetuate the myth that Democrats care about the welfare of the American people when their agenda is all about maintaining control by buying off constituencies or enslaving them to the welfare plantation?  You mean to tell me that refusing black children vouchers that allow them to escape failed government schools and have a hope of a better life celebrates the spirit of hope and opportunity that this nation was founded on?

Bull!

Forget celebrating big labor and their union thugs.  Forget about celebrating the “failed everywhere it’s been tried” socialist ideas and programs of the Democrats.  Forget the politics of racial division and identity.

Instead, let’s celebrate freedom.  Let’s celebrate the courage of the American entrepreneur.  Let’s take a day and celebrate the hope of a better life for everyone through equal opportunity, equal access, and equal freedom.

For more on the history of Labor Day, what it celebrates, and it fails to represent the ideals and aspirations of a freedom loving American people, check out “Red Monday” By Kevin D. Williamson at National Review Online.

Picture credit to Tom Burns, illustrator / graphic designer.

The Genius Of Milton Friedman

Today marks the 104th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman.  Remember him?  He is the conservative economist that rescued the U.S. economy from President Carter’s stagflation [i.e. rising inflation and unemployment] and gave us Reagan’s recovery miracle.  He led the to disassemble the central planning nightmare that progressives and bureaucrats had inflicted upon this nation.  Many on Wall Street and in the business world believe he is the man who saved capitalism and therefore America.

Here are a few of his observations and ideas on government that should be dusted off and tossed at the left daily:

• “Governments never learn. Only people learn.”
• “If you put the Federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
• “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
• “I think the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”
• “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
• “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”

And then there are his ideas on freedom:

• “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”
• “Every friend of freedom… must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”
• “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
• “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.”
• “Life is unfair.”

The progressive left has made an idol of big governance.  They have infiltrated all levels of government and they control the indoctrination of our children.  When they toss the ideas and ideals of great men like Friedman into the dustbin, they add more links to the chains that bind our once-great nation in poverty, stagnation, and ignorance.

Lost and Found – July 31st Edition

What to remember about July 31st…

• 1777  Continental Congress commissions Marquis de Lafayette as an unpaid Major General in the Continental Army
• 1875  Former 17th President of the United States Andrew Johnson dies in Tennessee of a suspected stroke (b. 1808)
• 1912  American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman is born in Brooklyn, New York, the man that saved America from Jimmy Carter’s stagflation and saved capitalism
• 1941  Herman Goering sends order to Heydrich to create a plan for the “final solution of the Jewish situation”; Holocaust planning begins
• 1965  English author J.K. Rowling is born; creator of the Harry Potter books series
• 1971  Astronauts from Apollo 15 take first ride aboard the Lunar Rover on the surface of the Moon
• 2007  Operation Banner, the British occupation of Northern Ireland, ends after 38 years

Lost and Found – July 15th Edition

What to remember about July 15th…

• 1783 The first successful steamboat Pyroscaphe sails in France on the River Saône; built by Claude-François-Dorothée de Jouffroy
• 1799  The Rosetta Stone is found in an Egyptian village during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign; allows translation of hieroglyphics
• 1862  Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas attacks Admiral Farragut’s Union fleet damaging more than a dozen vessels
• 1870  Georgia is readmitted to the Union; it is that last state to rejoin after the end of the Civil War
• 1933  American Wiley Post begins first solo flight around the world
• 1964  Barry Goldwater nominated for President by Republican Party
• 1975  In simultaneous launches, Apollo 18 and Soyuz 19 are launched to begin joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
• 1979  President Jimmy Carter gives speech on television about our national “crisis of confidence”; misquoted as the “malaise” speech
• 1988  Movie “Die Hard” opens; actor Bruce Willis rises to stardom
• 2002  “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh accepts plea bargain of 20-years; he was captured fighting for the Afghan Taliban

 

Lost and Found – October 24th Edition

What to remember about October 24th…

• 1861  Western Union completes 1st transcontinental telegraph line
• 1901  Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel; it is her 63rd birthday
• 1929  “Black Thursday” begins a  stock market crash that starts the 12-year Great Depression
• 1944  American Navy sinks Japanese aircraft carrier and battleship at the Battle of Leyte Gulf
• 1945  United Nations is formally established with the ratification of the United Nations Charter
• 1949  Cornerstone of the United Nations Headquarters in New York is lain; construction financed by $65 million loan from U.S.
• 1951  President Truman proclaims that the war with Germany is officially over
• 1992  Toronto Blue Jays become 1st team outside of the United States to win Major League Baseball’s World Series
• 2003  Supersonic Concorde passenger jet makes its last commercial flight
• 2005  Civil rights activist Rosa Louise McCauley Parks dies at home in Detroit, Michigan (b. 1913)

Lost and Found – October 22nd Edition

What to remember about October 22nd…

• 1734  American pioneer and explorer Daniel Boone in Berks County, Pennsylvania (d. 1820)
• 1775  1st president of the Continental Congress Peyton Manning of Virginia dies in Philadelphia
• 1797  André-Jacques Garnerin is the first person to make a parachute jump; he descends from a hot air balloon 3200 feet above Paris
• 1907  A run on New York banks leads to financial crisis and a 50% decline in the New York Stock Exchange
• 1957  1st American casualties of the Vietnam War; 13 injured in terrorist bombing in Saigon
• 1962  President Kennedy addresses nation on television to announce a blockade of Cuba in response to the installation of nuclear weapons on the island by the Soviet Union
• 1968  Apollo 7 mission splashes down as the 1st successful manned mission of the Apollo series
• 1986  President Reagan signs the Tax Reform Act of 1986
• 2008  India launches their 1st unmanned lunar mission

Lost and Found – October 19th Edition

What to remember about October 19th…

• 1781  Formal British surrender at Yorktown; Cornwallis sends his second-in-command to surrender his sword
• 1789  John Jay is sworn in as the 1st Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
• 1864  Union forces avert disaster after surprise Confederate attack at Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia
• 1935  Fascist Italy invades Ethiopia; League of Nations votes for ineffective sanctions while hoping for peace
• 1950  Chinese Peoples Liberation Army invades Tibet to capture city of Chamdo and annex the nation
• 1965  Thousands of North Vietnamese troops attack Camp Plei Me; a dozen Green Berets and 400 Montagnards repel attacks for almost a week
• 1982  Automaker John DeLorean is arrested in $24 million cocaine deal
• 1983  Prime Minister of Grenada is assassinated in military coup; President Reagan will soon dispatch 6000 troops to liberate the island
• 1987  Black Monday; stock market loses 22% in one day; largest percentage loss in history
• 2005  Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein goes on trial for crimes against humanity