Recent Comments
Re: “First Slice 2/14/13: City of Atlanta losing big on Underground lease”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Underground Atlanta revenue bond mature in 2016? Unless city leaders, planners, and developers can somehow turn it around in three years, isn't this little more than election year posturing?
Re: “How will you celebrate Confederate Memorial Day?”
313 American officers said the following words before deciding to turn their backs and take up arms against their government:
"I, _____, appointed a _____ in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the rules and articles for the government of the Armies of the United States."
I swore a similar oath, so I bear no sympathy for the exploits of dead Confederates.
The only remembrance that they and their government warrant is a reminder that brazenness can undo the ideals that are supposedly worth fighting and dying. Secession and war achieved something that decades of debate and compromise never could--the eradication of slavery and the establishment of a cohesive national government. Slaveholders got everything they could have possibly wanted out of the federal government in the years leading up to the Civil War. The 1850s began with a compromise that established of the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" in former Mexican territories and the unprecedented expansion of the capacity of slaveholders to retrieve "property" in free states and territories, and ended with the Taney Court's Dred Scot decision which established that blacks were not, and could never be, citizens, and that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories. Eight years later, that entire order was turned upside down as the South's collective freak out gave way to the eventual abolition of slavery and new constitutional protections for freedmen.
And that's something that people seem to forget. The South was responsible for its own undoing. Miss me with that "resistance from tyranny" nonsense. The South made an assumption and gambled. Seven states seceded before Lincoln even took office. So then who were the tyrants? The slavery-sympathizing expansionist Democrats that controlled the presidency and Congress almost every year in the decades prior to the the Civil War? Or was it earth-shattering radicalism like this (from Lincoln's first inaugural):
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
They freaked out, and they ultimately got what they deserved--the dissolution of an abhorrent, backwards, paternalistic social order that was incompatible with the ideals established when the republic was founded.
Georgia should abolish this holiday.
Re: “Forget that M.L. guy — Atlanta has a new King”
"Bitch I'm flowin' straight from the survivor scrolls..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H-X1RhltRs
Re: “New Falcons stadium deserves public cash? Prove it.”
@JoeInAtlanta, Arthur Blank didn't own the Falcons 20 years ago. He bought the team from the Smith family in late 2001.
Re: “Perception of (violent) Crime problem is a nationwide epidemic, Pew reports”
Mr. Carmichael, please be advised that the "Why Do So Many People Think Gun Violence is Getting Worse?" link is broken.