Tag Archives: Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg Anniversary Lessons to Relearn

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The 150th Anniversary of one of the most important events in American history and arguably in world history slipped past the public consciousness July 3, without much attention or appreciation.

The event was the Battle of Gettysburg, actually a series of the most bloody battles of the Civil War that occurred just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, beginning with Picket’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, and ending with the retreat of the Confederate Army under the command of General Robert E. Lee in the early morning hours of Independence Day, July 4.

Continue reading →

President’s Day Books

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

When I was a kid, we got both Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday off of school. That made February a fun month for kids. Not so much for parents.

These days, we celebrate their birthday on the same day. It’s kind of like when my wife decided to combine our son’s birthday party with the birthday party of one of his classmates. Saved time and money, and hey, it was fun for the whole family.

So, now we have President’s Day, which give us a good excuse to read books on all of the Presidents. I am currently reading a biography of George Washington Continue reading →

President’s Day

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

My brother was born on February 22.  That’s why I know that February 22nd is actually George Washington’s birthday.

When I was growing up, we used to get both Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (February 12th) and President’s Day off.  I seem to remember that for a while we kept the President’s holiday on my brother’s birthday, but my memory might be a little hazy.

In typical Congressional fashion, we now celebrate Presidents Day on no one’s birthday in particular. Sometimes, it falls on Washington’s Birthday, but usually not. It is always the third Monday in February. There is some disagreement, actually, if the third Monday in February is done in honor of George Washington or in honor of all of the Presidents.

If we were to have a month to celebrate the most Presidents, it would be October. There were six Presidents born in October, and only four in February. The six born in October include some pretty good ones, like Dwight Eisenhower, John Adams and Teddy Roosevelt. But February had better trump cards, including Reagan with Lincoln and Washington (and don’t forget William Henry Harrison). Continue reading →

Broken System Authoritarian Temptation

 BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from Townhall.com

In the weeks during and since the debt-ceiling debate, the media, pushed by the Democratic Party, has peddled the propaganda that our government is broken — because the Republicans in the House of Representatives negotiated a better deal than the liberals wanted.

Continue reading →

Pubic Service Modern Day Fall Guy

BY FRANK HILL

 Reprinted from Telemachus.com

 “I refuse to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”

Groucho Marks

Don’t you sometimes wish this were true with our elected officials?

Continue reading →

Lincoln or Kagan on Our Rights

BY TONY BLANKLEY

 

Reprinted from Townhall.com

Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:

“That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty … to the people of this country … Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? … if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861: “The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ ”

Continue reading →

America Speaking Out

BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from Weekly Standard

 The day Abraham Lincoln delivered his electrifying speech at New York City’s Cooper Union in 1860, he sat for a now famous photograph by Mathew Brady. Lincoln’s stem-winding perorations that night won him high praise from political elites, but the picture – widely used and reproduced in the campaign that year — contributed as much, or more, to his presidential victory.

 Reprinted in newspapers in the days and weeks that followed, the photograph created many Americans’ first impression of the next president.  Instead of an awkward, gangly, thin-faced man with dark eyes, Brady’s photograph made the future president look learned, proportional, and statesman-like.

 Historian Harold Holzer, who wrote Lincoln at Cooper Union, notes that when the president-elect encountered the photographer in Washington a year later, he said, “Brady and Cooper Union made me President.”

Fashioning the “new Lincoln” constituted the first major use of photography in American politics. It was a triumph of that epoch’s new media.

 The pace and content of media use in governing and politics is always in flux. But the velocity of progress is escalating.

Today’s new media evolution progresses like Darwinism on steroids – change happens in weeks and months, not millennia.

  Continue reading →