This is a video of two dear friends and their marriage proposal. Angelo just completed one year serving as a missionary in Thessaloniki, Greece as a part of a mission project that our church helped sponsor (my wife spent two weeks there as part of that project). He and Crystal had gotten to know each other during his visits here … and … well … things sort of blossomed from there. Crystal had flown from Florida to Sydney, Australia to meet Angelo’s family. Watch what happens when she arrives.

I hope you’ll join me in wishing this couple – my brother and sister in Christ – all the best as they start their new life with the goal of serving our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and spreading The Gospel.

…Obama may well be God’s man! God called Nebuchadnessar, the King of Babylon, who dashed Jewish babies to death in the streets “my servant” (Jer. 25:9 and 43:10). He was God’s “anointed” instrument to carry out His judgement on a people who had become “worse than the heathen.” We are an arrogant, unrepentant people. Barak Obama may well be the man God has chosen to punish this nation. If he is, then there is no fighting against him.

Is Obama really sent by God to punish America for her arrogance, the slaughter of innocents, the acceptance and glorification of homosexuality, the slash-and-burn attacks on any public display of Christianity? I certainly don’t have the answer to that one, but from a Biblical view, I can see nothing that says he is not. God says of His chosen people, “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee” (Genesis 12:3). America has not only turned her back on Israel and promoted her enemies, America has elected and re-elected a man who at the very least is highly sympathetic to Islam – the sworn enemy of the Hebrew People.

While it would clearly be a matter of conjecture, I see nothing to indicate that Obama is NOT sent to punish America and preside over her downfall. What does that mean to those of us who identify more closely with our Southern heritage than with what American society is today? Again, I have no real answer; however, a good start would be to make sure that our families are shielded from the wickedness that surrounds us and instill in them an appreciation for classical Southern culture.

Officers from the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office display their unmanned aerial vehicle in Spring, Texas. Photo: Vanguard Defense Industries

Restaging a well-known painting by Norman Rockwell. Photo: (unknown artist)

Enforcing the rule of law is, of course, one of the main requirements of a free and civilized society. We understand that society includes those who have no respect for others or for the rule of law, and there must be a system in place to deal with them. The question is – where do we draw the line between the legitimate need for civilian law enforcement and the heavily-armed paramilitary forces that have now become routine in much of what used to be “the Land of The Free”?

There is a huge difference between the mission of the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan and a local police department, but you wouldn’t know it from the way many police departments are now being outfitted. The military essentially exists to kill people and break things. Their mission is to take and hold territory with violence or the threat of violence. A civilian police force, on the other hand, should have as its mission the enforcement of laws as an integral part of the community. There is no way that men outfitted as the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Officers shown above could possibly be considered “part of the community”. Everything about their appearance and their equipment is designed to set them apart from those they are assigned to protect.

We are left with only two choices to explain this trend:

1. We have truly become a Police State and the role of the police is no longer enforcing the rule of law in a civilized society, but serving as enforcers for an out-of-control government of tyrants.
2. There are elements of our society that no longer meet the working definition of civilized human beings and must be dealt with as animals or an invading army of barbarians.

Neither choice is a pleasant one to consider.

In an ironic follow-up to this post, The Examiner reported on March 4, 2012, that the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office staged a photo-op to showcase their new high-tech paramilitary equipment. We’ll quote directly from the Examiner article:

As the sheriff’s SWAT team suited up with lots of firepower and their armored vehicle known as the “Bearcat,” a prototype drone from Vanguard Defense Industries took off for pictures of all the police action. It was basically a photo opportunity, according to those in attendance.

Vanguard CEO Michael Buscher said his company’s prototype drone was flying about 18-feet off the ground when it started having trouble. It’s designed to go into an auto shutdown mode, according to Buscher, but when it was coming down the drone crashed into the SWAT team’s armored vehicle.

Fortunately for the heavily armed “Officer Friendlies”, they were safe inside their armored personnel carrier. Had this happened in “real life”, I suspect that persons in the area would likely not be so well protected.

Judge Joseph G. Will
Seventh Judicial Circuit Court of Florida

Every once in a while, I take advantage of my role as chief scribe at Confederate Colonel to post something quite unrelated to our main topic. This is one of those posts.

After my previous post in which I pointed to “power-hungry judges wanting to write law rather than interpret law”, it is only fair to point to a judge who does indeed fulfill his intended role. He also does so with a great deal of common sense – and a sense of humor. The attached Mandate, issued by Judge Joseph G. Will here in my home of Volusia County, Florida, clearly spells out the law and stops a law enforcement officer from twisting the law to suit his own purposes – while still taking a poke at the defendant where appropriate.

Here are a few quotes from this ruling:

The court finds that any person who did not fall off the pumpkin truck last night would understand the charge as described on the face of the ticket.

… the officer would wait in the weeds to bring hapless drivers to justice for speeding or other reprehensible conduct.

One wonders in passing if the driver would have been ticketed if he had been signaling other drivers to be cautious because of the presence of a warm puppy or a kindly grandmother using a walker to cross the street.

Thank you, sir, for faithfully fulfilling your duty to interpret the law and administer justice – with common sense and without losing your sense of humor. If only more men like you sat in courtrooms across America.

To view a PDF of the original document, please click here.

While there is no doubt that the London riots began as yet another race riot triggered by the police shooting of a known criminal and gang member, it quickly morphed into something much more sinister – a crime spree with no pretense of “social issues”. The looters included a large number of the English (the English are, by definition, White). Racial conflict was the spark, but a massive cultural change over the last 60 years is at the heart of the problem.

The remnant of civilized culture is seen in the second photo – hundreds, if not thousands, of English men and women armed with brooms, preparing to clean up yet another mess made by the spoiled brats created by a far-left socialist system.

These rioters had absolutely no claim to any sort of political injustice. Their only claim to legitimacy was one that they would never admit to – that they were told by society that they deserved a high standard of consumption without the need for any effort on their part. They were taught by society and by government that they were entitled to everything and required to do nothing.

Entitlement is dependence, and dependence means power for those who control the distribution of those “entitlements”. We have allowed a political system to evolve that combines the characteristics of a dictatorship with the illusion of freedom. How so? We have elected leaders who promise to “give” us goodies (always paid for by “someone else”) as long as we continue to vote them into office – just as the tyrant rewards his cronies with that which was forcibly taken from the productive people. We have knowingly voted those people into office, so we fool ourselves into thinking that we are free.

This same fuse has already been lit here in America, and I fear it is too late to stop it. If we are to have any hope of extinguishing that fuse before it detonates, then we must take action now. No one is entitled to anything more than the basic God-given freedoms that are enumerated in our Bill of Rights – as originally written, not as amplified and expanded by power-hungry judges wanting to write law rather than interpret law.

Stephen Clay McGehee at a TEA Party event holding By What Constitutional Authority sign.

The mid-term election is over and just about everyone with even a bit of sanity is praising the snubbing of the Democratic agenda, so I may as well add my two cents. I would sum it up by saying, “not so fast on the celebrating” – here’s why:

1) The Republican party is the same party that has been in power until quite recently, and what do we have to show for it? If the Republicans are the “conservatives”, then what exactly are they trying to conserve?

2) Even if this truly is a new group of principled leaders who really want to put those principles into action, they are dealing with a deeply entrenched bureaucracy that has every incentive to see them fail.

3) A good case can be made that America has already passed the tipping point, and no matter who is in power and no matter what they do, it is too late to change the final outcome. The end might be delayed and it might be made a bit gentler, but the American Empire will still end.

4) The TEA party movement has been a powerful force in this election, but what happens when the Republicans cannot or will not deliver? To whom will they then turn? Can they maintain their independence in the face of a failure of what they helped bring about?

5) The tax structure and the voting population have heavily stacked the odds against any real change ¹.

• the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of federal income taxes
• the top 5% pay over 60%
• the bottom 50% pay less than 3%
• the bottom 47% pay no federal income taxes

With a tax structure like that, what possible chance does real reform have? Nearly half the population is just fine with living off the labor of those who are paying the federal bills. No, despite the good results of this mid-term election, I am not optimistic for the long term.

6) Demographics play a huge role in what group gets in power and stays in power. The demographic group that built this nation – Western European Whites – is becoming an increasingly small part of America. Heavy Black voter turnout, fueled by Obama, put the liberal Democrats in power. Despite Obama’s appeals, Blacks largely stayed home for this election. That is a powder keg waiting for a match to push this country even deeper into Socialism.

So what might the near future hold? My guess is that we may see a constant shifting back and forth as people with short memories get disillusioned and hope that change – any change – will be good. If things hold together long enough, people may become disillusioned enough to make “minor parties” such as the Constitution Party or the Southern Party a viable alternative.

It all comes down to who has the right to vote. America has, almost since the beginning, moved to include ever growing numbers and classes of people as voters. That has a very real effect on the direction this nation has taken, and (in my judgment) it has not been for the better. The real death of State’s Rights came with the election of U.S. Senators by popular vote – in the name of “democracy” and “fairness”. Before that, they were elected by the state legislatures, which assured that they would be guarding the power of the states.

What does this have to do with the objectives of Confederate Colonel? Next to nothing, but I just wanted to add my own opinion to the discussion.