Views

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Details

Tuesday, 16 July 2024

Written by Jimmy Jones

Jimmy Jones is a retired Special Forces soldier, a former Fayetteville resident, and American patriot. His perspective on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the overall state of our nation is frightfully compelling. There's no denying, God has provided us a not-so-subtle wake-up call to get our country in order. I doubt we will get another.
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly.
— Bill Bowman Publisher

Any political assassination can be a significant tipping point in history. WWI started with a series of events following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, resulting in the deaths of 40 million people.
Will Saturday, July 13, 2024, go down as a two minute tipping point in history?
For many, January 6th, 2021, was a tipping point when President Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Since the beginning of the Trump era, Trump supporters have been labeled extremists, terrorists, deplorables, racists, ignorant, bigoted, dumber than hammers, a nihilistic death cult, anti-immigrant, and collectively enablers of harmful politics. Yet, short of a few bad actors on that day, there was no protest, burning of buildings, or significant “extremist” activity of any note by these people.
Since Biden took office, we have discovered that the Biden Administration worked to control free speech during Covid. Hunter Biden’s laptop story was real, and the Steel Dossier story about Trump and Russia collusion was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and Hunter Biden made $6 million for his involvement in Ukraine.
In contrast, Trump was impeached in 2019, for allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. We have approved aid amounts to $175 billion to support Ukraine's war with Russia.
More recently, concerns of both parties (and the world) is President Biden's struggles to form words, which clearly manifested during the Presidential Debate on June 22nd. In the aftermath, his own party has talked about him stepping down. It is reported that during a private call with donors on July 8th, President Biden reportedly said, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”.
I believe that the “bullseye” comment was a metaphor in the context of a political statement, but as Senator Mitch McConnell said about Trump’s speech on January 6th, “words matter,” and Saturday, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto a rooftop and pulled the trigger five times killing one and injuring two (including Trump) before being killed by a Secret Service sniper team.
The powers that be will call the Secret Service agents heroes. Their director and that detail had only one job: to protect the person they are to protect. It is reported that the Trump campaign requested additional security, but Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly denied the request.
Does that matter? No. Witnesses at the event spotted the shooter with his rifle going up the building and on the roof and notified the police and Secret Service. The NY Post reported that a policeman did climb the building, and Crooks pointed his gun at him, and he retreated. The Secret Service snipers shot Crooks seconds after he first pulled the trigger, which means they already had eyes on him. At either point, radios should have been screaming to get Trump out of there.
In the coming days, we are going to hear that the shooter had mental health issues, he was bullied, weird, and guns are bad. Poppycock. When a man picks a weapon, gets ammo, drives to a location, climbs to a vantage point, sets up a gun, waits, and shoots someone in the head, that takes thought, preparation, training, and determination.
I just described what a Secret Service sniper does each day. What we will not hear about the shooter is how much time he spent on violent video games, where he got his news, who else knew, how he knew where to go, where Trump would be, where he learned to shoot, or why the Secret Service failed to respond.
Presidential fitness (mental and physical) has been a topic for both candidates, but we all know that President Biden is now handicapped and is often escorted off the stage, dazed and confused.
This I can tell you, after being shot, the Secret Service must have walloped Trump so hard that his shoes came off because Trump said, “Come on, let me get my shoes. Let me get my shoes.”
With those 12 words, he put together more cohesive words than Biden did during the debate with a week's worth of prep. Trump came up and raised his hand and said, “Fight, Fight, Fight!” With blood on his face, he was proud to be on that stage in front of people who love him, he proudly walked to his SUV, holding his fist high.
For Trump, his will is strong and vital reminding me more of Muhammad Ali than Lia Thomas. His “will” and “willpower” were not about him but about America. We all saw Trump being Trump as the crowd responded with roars of, “USA! USA! USA!”
Pray for America.

(Photo: Former President and current Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

This fall, citizens should clarify voting rights

Details

Tuesday, 09 July 2024

Written by John Hood

North Carolina voters will be asked this fall to remove a troubling ambiguity in the state constitution. An overwhelming, bipartisan majority of state legislators — 40 of 50 senators, 104 of 120 representatives — voted to place the amendment on the ballot.
Nevertheless, say some left-leaning critics, the measure is at best an unnecessary distraction — and at worst a conspiracy to get conservative North Carolinians to the polls.
It is neither. Voters should, and almost certainly will, ignore these objections and approve the amendment, which clarifies that “only a citizen of the United States who is 18 years of age and otherwise possessing the qualifications for voting shall be entitled to vote at any election in this State.”
Resident aliens are not currently allowed to vote in North Carolina, that’s true. And minors can vote in primaries only if they turn 18 by the date of general election. But other jurisdictions allow noncitizens or minors to vote in local elections. And many activists explicitly advocate extending the franchise still further.
We can’t know what future lawmakers or even judges may attempt. Here’s what we do know: only adult citizens should be able to participate in elections. Drawing bright lines here is essential to preserving what it means to be a citizen of a republic.
Here’s what the North Carolina Constitution currently states, Article VI, Section 1: “Every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized, 18 years of age, and possessing the qualifications set out in this Article, shall be entitled to vote at any election by the people of the State, except as herein otherwise provided.”
At first glance, that language may sound sufficient. It is not, however, as my John Locke Foundation colleague Andy Jackson argued in a recent paper.
The current provision (properly) requires equal treatment. If you are an adult citizen who is not currently serving out a sentence for a felony — that’s what the “except as herein otherwise provided” clause is about — you are guaranteed the right to vote. You can’t be excluded on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, or other extraneous criteria.
Look more closely at the language, however. It states that every natural-born or naturalized citizen shall be entitled to vote, but it “is silent on whether noncitizens can vote,” Jackson pointed out. “That silence can be exploited by legislators or judges into allowing noncitizen voting.”
There’s another problem with the current provision: it specifies only natural-born and naturalized citizens. That leaves out a small but equally worthy class of citizens. If you are born overseas but your parents are American citizens, you are, generally speaking, a citizen yourself. As Jackson observed, the ranks of such foreign-born citizens include U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (born in Thailand), U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (born in Canada), and Raleigh Dreamville music festival organizer J. Cole (born in Germany).
No one has tried to exclude such citizens from voting in the past, but why should North Carolinians cross their fingers and ignore the ambiguity? The proposed constitutional amendment would eliminate it. Rather than focusing only on who “shall be entitled to vote” — which doesn’t truly preclude additional grants of voting rights — the new language specifies that “only” adult citizens, regardless of how they became citizens, shall be entitled to vote.
We live in highly polarized times, to be sure. Trust, confidence, and mutual respect are diminishing. Too often, we assume that the ranks of the “other side” are populated by liars, ignoramuses, or villains rather than accepting the possibility of honest disagreement among people of good faith.
In that spirit, let me stipulate that I don’t think all critics of the citizen-voting amendment are secretly plotting to extend the franchise to noncitizens or minors. Some surely find the “belt and suspenders” argument I’m advancing here unpersuasive. They think revising the Constitution’s ambiguous language is a waste of time.
They are mistaken. An important principle is at stake. Let’s button those suspenders securely.

Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

Election time: Knowing when to step down

Details

Tuesday, 09 July 2024

Written by D.G. Martin

My father had been president of Davidson College for almost 10 years when at age 58 he learned that he was afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
He was popular with students, who often tossed frisbees with him as he walked across campus from his office to the president’s home. He was friendly, likable, and beloved by staff and townspeople.
Davidson’s campus escaped most of the turmoil that disrupted some other campuses. My father hired Lefty Driesell and Homer Smith who brought successful football and basketball teams to the campus.
The college continued to gain recognition as a premier liberal arts college.
There were problems, of course, but most people at Davidson looked forward to his service continuing for many years. The college’s trustees respected and supported him.
Some few noticed his forgetfulness about minor matters and a waning of his enthusiasm for new projects and new thinking. But he was widely popular and most assumed that they would not need a new president anytime soon.
But my mother noticed and insisted that he seek medical attention. At first, my father’s confidence in his own strengths kept him from believing he was compromised. But the doctors recognized early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
My mother pushed him to bring his illness to the attention of the chair of the college trustees who quickly and sensitively worked out my father’s retirement. Without her recognition of the seriousness of my father’s illness and her acceptance of her and my father’s duty to the college, my father’s departure would have been a serious problem for Davidson.
Ultimately, my father understood, accepted the necessity of his withdrawal, and enjoyed his friendship with the new president, Sam Spencer.
What does my family’s and Davidson’s situation with my compromised father have to do with President Joe Biden?
Of course, they are different situations.
My father, with prodding from my mother, accepted the need to step aside.
The Bidens resist any talk of change, notwithstanding the president’s poor showing in the June 27 debate with Donald Trump.
The Economist, a respected British magazine, commented, “The mission for Joe Biden in the presidential debate held in Atlanta on June 27th was clear: to prove his critics wrong, by showing that he was mentally fit and thereby reverse the polling deficit that makes Donald Trump the favourite to win the American election in 2024.
“Unfortunately, his performance was an unmitigated disaster—perhaps the worst of any presidential candidate in modern history. The president, who is 81 (and would be 86 by the end of a second term in office), stammered indecipherably, struggled to complete his lines of attack and proved his doubters completely correct.
“Although Mr Trump was in his typical form—meandering, mendacious, vindictive—he somehow appeared the more coherent and lucid of the pair. Mr Biden’s decision to seek re-election rather than standing aside for a younger standard-bearer now looks like a reckless endangerment of the democracy he claims to want to protect.
“Merely quoting Mr Biden’s rhetorical bumblings does not do them justice, but they do give a sense of the shambles.
“Consider one of his lines at the very start of the debate, the first indicator that the president was in poor form: ‘Making sure that we continue to strengthen our health-care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single, solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the…uh, covid…excuse me, dealing with everyone we had to do with… look, if we finally beat Medicare...’
“The moderator interrupted before further damage could be done, one of several coups de grâce graciously administered.”
Like my father, Joe Biden has served well. He should be recognized and remembered for what he accomplished for our country. He can serve best now by stepping aside and helping find and elect someone who can win and serve as president beginning January 20, 2025.

Ding! Dong! School is in Session—or Maybe Not

Details

Tuesday, 09 July 2024

Written by Margaret Dickson

The idea of public education has been around about as long as our nation has, but it really took root around the 1830s. That education might be good for most people and that an educated workforce is a plus for everyone prompted the North Carolina General Assembly to begin funding public schools with tax dollars in 1901. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
Our traditional school calendar, generally thought of as 9 months on and 3 months off, also dates from the early days of public education. Children, even little ones, were needed to work on America’s farms, so schools operated fall, winter, and spring, with summers off for tending fields and harvesting crops. Other nations use similar schedules for the same reason.
But how many kiddos do you know who work the fields in this era of computer driven tractors? I cannot think of a single one.
That reality, however, has not deterred the tourism industry in North Carolina. Two decades ago, tourism interests including various summer camps, strong-armed the General Assembly into codifying the public school year to start no earlier than the Monday closest to August 26th and end no later than the Friday closest to June 11th.
Tourism officials understandably wanted as much family vacation time as possible. They got legislators to buy into the notion that a long summer without school trumps the need for North Carolina’s public school students to have more classroom time to be competitive with students from other nations, many of them up and coming and outpacing the United States’ educational achievement levels.
The legislatively mandated school calendar has not worked.
One size fits all remains a failure as more and more school districts opt out, largely because they cannot make its constraints work for their systems. Year round schools, charters, early colleges, and private institutions are exempt from the calendar law, but traditional public schools, the majority of schools in our state, have struggled to schedule classes, work days, holidays, and other educational obligations within the narrow time frame imposed by the General Assembly.
Now, one quarter of our state’s 115 public school systems are in open revolt. A Superior Court Judge has weighed in, saying that Carteret County has illegally set its own calendar. It remains to be seen how Carteret or the other 28 systems that have set their own schedules will react.
Thus far Cumberland County Schools have maintained the traditional, legislatively mandated calendar with some schedule juggling, but some of our neighbors no longer comply. Harnett, Lee and Sampson County schools have adopted their own calendars, as have Clinton City Schools.
The General Assembly is nearing adjournment, at least theoretically, and will return to Raleigh early next year for its long session, which will take up much new legislation. Near the top of the list should be the failed and “bailed” school calendar bill. It has not worked for many counties.
The rationale for it, child labor, is no longer operative, and it is not a good look for a growing percentage of the state’s school systems to flaunt state law openly.
As Don Phipps, Superintendent of the Caldwell County Schools recently told the State Board of Education, “Local boards of education should be allowed to choose the best start dates for the school systems they represent.”
Hear! Hear!