Democrats don't get democracy!

https://medium.com/@zachhaller/7-jaw-dropping-revelations-from-hearings-on-the-motion-to-dismiss-the-dnc-fraud-lawsuit-bee1723b713f

Islam exposed again. . .

Seriously, can the modern world discipline children?


https://heatst.com/life/australian-teacher-quits-after-islamic-students-threaten-to-behead-her/

The right to have rights

Column - The right to have rights - 700 words

© 2017 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.

“… that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson

            We have a national conversation going about our “rights” in society. In 1776, the three were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness which in earlier drafts read the pursuit of property. During the time of President Franklin Roosevelt there was a push to increase the rights.

            In 1941 Roosevelt spoke about the four freedoms considered four rights that should be available to all Americans. They are: the freedom of speech, freedom to worship God, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. The controversy was freedom from want and fear. Is it even possible to be free of wants and fears?

            Later Roosevelt proposed eight additional rights: the right to a useful and remunerative job. The right to earn enough money. The right of farmers to have a decent living.

            Also, the right of businessmen to have freedom from unfair competition. The right of every family to a decent home. The right to adequate medical care along with the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

            Finally, there is the right to a good education. Not any education, a good education.

            So, do you have a right to clean water and air? Do you have a right to transportation? Do you have a right to retire when you wish? Do you have a right to entertainment?

            The problem is that some rights come with a price tag. Someone must pay, whom will that be? If each of us has the right to a good education, do we have to pay for it? Is it a right and other Americans must provide this or medical care regardless of if we pay because it’s a right?

            That is a slippery slope when we start taking the productive ability of Americans and without compensation giving their productiveness to other Americans. It is like the notion of a one hundred percent tax on some people. Sounds like government would get lots of money but that is not true because if we were taxed at one hundred percent, taxed such that we received nothing for working, it is likely we would quit.

            It’s a convenient talking point that all Americans have a right to adequate medical care. Do they have that right without compensation to the people providing the care? Do care professionals have a right to be compensated? Where is the line?

            Usually at a traffic accident, each of us is obligated to help, but is it a right for injured people? By getting into an accident do they have the right to compel us to act? Perhaps, or is that an ordinance rather than a right? Different things when we call that a right.

            Years ago, I was working as a school photographer and that day set up at an elementary school in Tucumcari, New Mexico. During the morning, a rough looking hombre walked up to the seat and before sitting down said to me, “I’ve got a Constitutional Right not to smile.”

            I said, “You’ve got it Bud.” He was happy and looked happy as I took the picture. I understood that he didn’t want one of those cheesy pictures. He wanted dignity. I was glad to give it to him but I didn’t think it a Constitutional Right. It was professional.

How do we deal when two people with rights are in conflict? It is like the question: if one endangered species is eating another endangered species what should we do? It is tough to decide since if you do not let the first species eat that species will die. And if you do then the other species becomes more endangered. It is fundamentally the same issue with rights.

            The Income Tax which came about in 1913 takes part of your productivity. It is considered the right of society to take your productivity. How much of a right is there? Can you take most of someone’s wages because of the supposed right of redistribution? Very slippery slope. Maybe we should go back to only three rights.

Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is available at Amazon.com

Smell of death

Smell of death

Gus Raney

La Ultima

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Gus Raney was long part of our family verbal history.

He would arrive during those nighttime sessions when the thunder would rattle the windows, rattlesnakes would be a certain feature, memories were retold of crazy women in abandoned cabins sitting up in the rafters watching cowboys light fires to dry out and get warm, and lightning stories were in the offing. It was when television wasn’t even part of our culture. We kids would sit on the edge of our seats in great anticipation listening to the elders. The suspense was infectious and intense. We could have set off in full stampede with a simple “boo”.

            Gus stories were always spooky. He was the villain of villains. Most of us never laid eyes on him, but we were scared to death of him. He was gone from our area before those “kids” were born, but stories of his life would suggest such fears were warranted.

            Gus Raney

          

 The more finite details of Gus’ life will be left to writer Richard Melzer who is doing a series on the crusty legend. Only the verbal history that I know will be dealt with this morning, but perhaps it adds an interesting corollary to Melzer’s two part series.

            About 2000, I met a descendent of Gus who worked at the Physical Laboratory at NMSU. In our discussion, he suggested Gus actually came to Grant County with a contract by a mining operation to rid the country of claim jumpers. Whether true or not Gus’ demeanor was suggestive that he would have been good at such a mission.

            A common theme in all stories was that he had either succeeded in killing somebody or he was discussing the threat of same.

            The Raney family settled at Cliff, New Mexico and lived at or just above the potholes in Davis Canyon. Prevailing accounts had the family living in a tent and or a cave. The children of Gus and Sugarfoot Raney were known to the Cliff community as Ethel, Hale, Sleet, and Snow (contemporary children of Cliff knew Orville as Snow).

The story starts in a dispute over a horse. In the days of the Depression, there were still a number of wild horses that ran in the Davis Canyon country. From those mustangs, many local families acquired saddle horses. It was there the McMillans moved their ranch horses in the spring of either 1932 or 1933 to avoid a loco weed outbreak up the Mangus to the east.

            Immediately, they started having trouble with a stud horse that was running in the canyon and playing havoc with the remuda. He was known to be owned by Gus. Having dealt with that particular horse too many times without a response from the Raneys, Tom McCauley and my grandfather, Albert Wilmeth, roped the horse and castrated him.

            Gus was then in prison serving a sentence for murdering another man, but the news of the castration was relayed to him by Sugarfoot. Never one to worry about good behavior, he announced from his cell he was going to kill Tom and Albert upon his release from prison for the castration of his horse.

            Giving credence to the possibility he was employed on the sly by an influential mining operation, Gus was paroled in 1934 after serving only 22 months and 22 days for the killing. As it happened, the McMillans and the McCauleys were both shipping cattle at Silver City the day Gus rode the train back into town. Tom and Grampa were both there when Gus stepped off. Tom was driving a new Chevy and pulled over and asked Gus if he needed a ride home.

            One account of the incident suggested one of them mentioned that if there was going to be another killing they might as well get on with it.

            The other account suggested not a single word was mentioned of the castration (or the unfortunate and untimely death of horse in the aftermath) or the death threat from the jail cell. In this latter version, Gus was a subdued gentleman all the way home.

The trip to Cliff wasn’t without incident, though, by the account of Tom’s son, Freddie. Freddie was seated between his father and Gus and had been thinking about the death threat from the time he saw Gus at the rail station. He just knew when they started across the old steel bridge at Riverside Gus was going to grab him and throw him into the river!

He was crowding his father to the point Tom asked him, “What in the Sam Hill is wrong with you?”

            At five years old, all death threats were terrifying.

            Freddie also remembered Gus’ eyes and he spoke about them repeatedly through his life. As an old man, he told me he woke up many times in his childhood in the midst of a nightmare seeing Gus and those eyes were glaring at him. He thought it started from the time he and his dad had ridden up on Gus at the head of a canyon and he had confronted them with a gun. What had Gus on the prod was the statement Tom had made about the theft of a big roll of rope. Gus claimed that Tom had cussed him without cause and he was going to even the score. His eyes were glaring at them like a wild man, a savage, or an animal on a desperate hunt. They matched the muzzle of the gun pointing in their direction.

            The apparent score in the maniacal view of Gus Raney was to kill Tom McCauley for calling him a son-of-a-bitch. Tom suggested to Gus that is not what he had said, and, in fact, he had clearly restated what he did say.

“I said whoever stole that rope from me is a son-of-a-bitch,” Tom said coolly. “Furthermore, I don’t think this better go any further because there will be hell to pay.”

            What caught Gus’ attention was the six inch Stillson wrench that Tom always carried in his leggins’ pocket. When the confrontation reached crescendo pitch, Tom had poked the end of the wrench against his chap pocket making it appear that he had a loaded pistol in the pocket.

            “Now, Tom, you and I have no issue here at all,” Freddie remembers Gus saying in a tone change with all anger and threats gone.

            “I didn’t think so, Gus,” Tom concluded.

            As they turned and rode away, Tom told Freddie not to look back and to act like nothing happened. Freddie suggested they should “fly” and get out of there, but Tom reminded him that is exactly what they were not going to do.

            There was little doubt, though, who the culprit was in the rope theft.

            La Ultima

            The death of Hale and Snow was a deflowering ebb in the life of Gus Raney. People who knew those boys talked in awe of their toughness. Like too many families in the Depression, the needs and wants of children were not the highest priority. The Raney children were normally barefooted, but that didn’t stop them from astounding feats of physical endurance. The wild horses of the Davis country represented opportunities of income and they became mustangers. Their method of capture was to relay those horses on foot until they could trap them. They were known to do it in bare feet in the rough malpais of the Davis watershed. They were tough and they weren’t easily prone to take stupid chances much less put themselves into a situation that was life threatening.

            Their deaths, therefore, sparked questions. The prevailing story in the Cliff community was that one of them had drowned swimming in a tank and the other had drowned trying to save him. Those that knew Gus came to believe Gus had killed one of them and had to kill the other to keep him quiet. He had thrown them both in the tank to make it appear they had drowned.

            The bizarre only got more bizarre when Gus decided he needed to have a picture taken with the boys. He dressed up and stood between his dead sons propping them up for the photographer to take the picture.

            Gus spent the rest of his life near Grants, New Mexico spreading his own fame by continuing to polish his bad guy persona. He killed several more men before he died at an unknown age made more confusing by the various dates he claimed he was born.

            In the end, the only thing that was certain about Gus Raney was … the smell of death.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Two copies of the pictures of Gus and his two dead sons were rumored to exist in Cliff. One was supposed to be in the McCauley collection and the other from the collection of Lorena Terman Moss Lewis, my great grandmother. I saw neither.”

 Part 1 of Melzer's 2-part series can be viewed here.  Part 2 will be published on Sept. 8.

Posted by Frank DuBois at 7:25 AM No comments: Permalink  

Labels: New Mexico, Stephen Wilmeth, The West

Go to the movies... learn what they didn't teach you in school.



http://hillarysamericathemovie.com/#tickets

Time to leave the democrat party. Any other party is better. 
See if they line up with liberty and justice for all.




https://blog.frcaction.org/2016/07/comparison-democrat-and-republican-platforms/

Among their worst . . .

Philadelphia: The City of Motherly Love?

It looks like Hillary Clinton plans to run on the only economy this president has improved: Planned Parenthood's. Over the weekend, the campaign announced that abortion will be taking center stage at the Democratic National Convention this week in Philadelphia with confirmed speakers Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood (whose group enjoys at least a million dollars a day from taxpayers) and Ilsye Hogue, president of NARAL. Of course, highlighting these organizations is somewhat redundant, since the biggest cheerleader for abortion is the one running for election.

Despite the country's growing resistance, Clinton seems intent on following the president into some of the most radical terrain on abortion ever broached. From her shameless support of taxpayer-funded abortion to her elevation of groups that illegally sell baby body parts, the former First Lady is determined to make this election about an extreme social agenda that's increasingly out of touch with women. Meanwhile, not everyone is thrilled about the DNC's direction -- including the Democrats' own base. While Hillary shamelessly promotes abortion right up to the moment of birth, polling shows it's a far cry from voters' position on the issue. Almost eight in 10 Americans (78 percent) would limit abortion to the first trimester -- including 62 percent who call themselves "pro-choice."

Ignoring the growing gap, Clinton is rushing to embrace what more people are calling the "abortion-ization" of the Democratic Party without any regard to the political consequences. Just how big of a stranglehold does abortion have on the DNC? Politico reports this morning that the leading candidate for the DNC chairmanship is none other than Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily's List. And the Democrats' party platform tells a similar story. For the first time in history, Democrats have called for overturning the Hyde and Helms amendments, demanding that federal taxpayers fund abortion-on-demand at home and abroad. Not surprisingly, the Left's radical push for abortion coverage makes absolutely no exemptions for religious groups -- nor does it offer even the barest of conscience protections for anyone in the medical community.

The GOP's platform couldn't be more different. Under it, Republicans reiterate their support for the walls between taxpayers and the dark world of abortion, calling on Congress to make the Hyde amendment permanent in all walks of government funding -- including Obamacare. The Republicans, meanwhile, insisted on defending the First Amendment rights of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and organizations when it comes to issues like abortion funding, procedures, drugs, and health insurance. The Democrats support Planned Parenthood by name. The Republicans, for the first time, call for the defunding of Planned Parenthood for committing abortions, selling baby parts, and deceiving women with faulty consent forms.

Perhaps most tellingly, the Democrats pieced together their radical platform where they like doing most of their work: in secret. Unfortunately for them, it's no secret where the party is heading. The Left is running a campaign of "choice" -- and in this election, voters have a clear one.