Tag Archives: responsibilities

The Sons of the American Legion is a Gang?

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This happened in a Dave & Buster’s restaurant last Saturday in Kentwood, MI, but corporate headquarters in Dallas has confirmed the thing and said it’s corporate-wide policy.  Two members of the Sons of The American Legion, wearing their SAL vests, and their wives entered the restaurant hoping for a nice dinner.  Management stopped them and told the men to turn their vests inside out.  The men and their wives chose to leave, instead of suffering the insult.  Victor Murdock, Assistant Director of American Legion Post 179 in Grandville, MI, and one of the men, told 24 Hour News 8,

It’s just a good group of guys that want to raise awareness for PTSD, fallen veterans, for the ones that didn’t come back, even for those who did come back and are dealing with situations they never got over.

And

The vest is one way Murdock and other members convey their message. After all, they say, there are few things that define American pride more than the flag and the eagle featured on the vest.

“It says we believe in America. We believe in our troops. We support our veterans,” Murdock said.

The full statement, from April Spearman, Dave & Buster’s Vice corporate President for Marketing:

We are extremely grateful to all of our active military members and veterans and are honored to have them as valued guests in any of our locations.

Our dress code, which prohibits evidence of gang affiliation, is in place to ensure that everyone is able to enjoy themselves in a fun and safe environment. Though we understand that the American Legion promotes a positive mission, for consistency reasons we cannot allow motorcycle jackets displaying patches or rockers. Our policies are in no way meant to be disrespectful and we apologize for any frustration this may have caused.

In addition, please know that this group was not asked to leave, but to simply turn their jackets inside out. Again, we apologize for any misunderstanding.

Because this affiliate of the American Legion is equivalent to a gang.  Notice, too, that last bit of disingenuousity.  No, the four were not asked to leave.  They were just told to disrespect everything they stood for.

Absent a turnover in management, Dave & Buster’s has lost my business.

The Left Gives the Game Away

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Again.  Buried at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal piece on the auto industry’s effort to get the Obama administration’s last-minute (almost literally) attempt to make permanent fuel standards (also last minute because the underlying research wasn’t even going to be complete until 2018) is this rationale from Roland Hwang, at the National Resources Defense Council’s Director, Energy & Transportation Program, as paraphrased by the WSJ.

relaxing standards could hurt Americans depending on clean-car technology jobs.

Because EPA regulations are all about creating jobs and not about mitigating pollution.

Media Bias

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Here’re another couple of examples, this time by (not reported by, but by) media “critic” Howard Kurtz, writing for Fox News.

What President Donald Trump tweeted:

What Kurtz said—right after he presented the above tweet:

The media are not the enemy.

Notice that cynical strawman: carefully censored from the tweet by Kurtz was the modifier—there in all caps—FAKE NEWS.  Just to drive the point home so that maybe even Kurtz will recognize it, what Trump said was the enemy was fake news media, not media generally.

Here’s Kurtz again:

Trump was able to change the subject from the firing of Michael Flynn, the withdrawal of his Labor nominee and the fact that he still hasn’t appealed the travel ban ruling to, well, himself.

Here’s Kurtz attempting to change the subject away from illegal, potentially criminal, intelligence leaks; SecDef’s trip to Iraq as the Mosul campaign picks up; and tax reform and Obamacare repeal and replace to, well, his media.

How biased is that, if not outright dishonest?

Confidence in the Press

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“Aren’t you concerned, Sir, that you are undermining the people’s faith in the First Amendment freedom of the press and the press in this country when you call stories you don’t like fake news…?”

That’s what CNN’s White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, asked President Donald Trump during last Thursday’s mid-day press conference.

No, the NLMSM is doing a fine job all by itself in undermining the people’s faith in the press—the shot about the First Amendment is disingenuously irrelevant and an illustration of the NLMSM’s performance—the undermining needs no help, and is getting none, from Trump.

See, for instance, CNN’s own bruiting about the fake news of a “dossier” of salacious behaviors allegedly engaged in by Trump in Russia and The New York Times‘ carefully misleading headline last Tuesday, Trump Campaign Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence while the body of the piece said, “Well, nothing was ever found.”

This is how automatic the NLMSM’s dishonesty is; it no longer can tell right from wrong, truth from fiction.  It has needed no assistance from outside the press to earn its sorry condition.

Federal Funds and Sanctuary Cities

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Within days of President Trump’s executive order to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, San Francisco had filed a lawsuit opposing the order [to block federal funding for them]….

We also have this regarding…coercion…by the Federal government.

Last year, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Department of Homeland Security to force local jails to detain suspected undocumented immigrants without a warrant. And in a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Printz v US, a 5-4 majority held that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

OK.  And with our republican form of democracy, articulated most clearly in our 9th and 10th Amendments, those probably aren’t bad court rulings.

However, if things like Printz v US or South Dakota v Dole [another Supreme Court coercion case] really are going to be players in this, it’s a game easily settled: stop sending Federal dollars—taxpayer dollars—to all cities altogether.  The cities have no inherent right to Federal money, and the cessation of that particular spending would be good for the Federal budget in its own right.