Common Core Ties to Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia [+video]

B obama“Where did Common Core come from?” is a question I often hear from parents as I travel the country speaking about the Islamic infiltration of America.

Because in 2014-15 America, public school students via Common Core are:

• Participating in public school-sponsored trips to mosques via taxpayer expense, girls must wear head scarves (Colorado parents complain)

• Debating whether or not the Holocaust was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain,” (an eighth-grade assignment defended by the Rialto Unified School District, Los Angeles)

Pledging allegiance in Arabic (New York)

• Observing two “Muslim holy days,” (New York City)

• Being taught Islamic vocabulary lessons (North Carolina)

• Being taught Islamic culture (Tennessee)

• Being taught world history from Islamic perspective (Florida) that includes learning about the five pillars of Islam (Maryland father, a Marine Corps veteran, complains and is banned from school grounds)

• Told to proselytize by creating a pamphlet about Islam to “introduce Islam to 3rd graders” that introduces Allah to children as the same God of the Christians and Jews (Michigan)

Reciting in class the Shahada, “There is No God but Allah,” and the Muslim call to prayer (Massachusetts)

Parents in every state are outraged, protesting and asking, “Why is Islam being taught in public schools?” and “How did this happen?” “Where is the ACLU?” “Where are the people ‘protesting against’ religion being taught in public schools?”

Common Core origins

The short answer is that President Obama’s push for “hope and change” translates into completely transforming America — for the worse. Common Core is but one of many parts of an intricate plan to infiltrate every area of American society with Islam. Which is why, Common Core’s origin and funding came from Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia.

Globally, Common Core originated from the “One World Education” concept, a global goal orchestrated by the Connect All Schools program. Its origin is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna.

According to the WND website, in 2011, QFI “partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate matchmaking between classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through … the ‘Connect All Schools’ project.” QFI states on its website that the initiative was founded in response to Mr. Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, during which the Muslim Brotherhood was seated in the front row.

Mr. Obama’s mentor, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, received $49.2 million from Vartan Gregorian, a board member of the Qatar Foundation, who also is involved with Mr. Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission. Gregorian is an integral part of Connect All Schools, through which Qatar invested $5 million to teach Arabic in American public schools.

Domestically, in America, Common Core was “created by” the National Governor’s Association (NGA), Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Achieve Inc., ACT and the College Board. The Common Core State Standards are copyrighted by the NGA and CCSSO, a private company, which means they cannot be changed.

Many groups helped create these standards (chief among them, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations) but Pearson Education, an NGA donor and CCSSO’s listed business and industry partner, is integral to Common Core.

Pearson Education designs “education products and services to institutions, governments and direct to individual learners.” Listed on the London and New York Stock Exchange, of its numerous investors, the Libyan Investment Authority is its largest financial contributor, holding 26 million shares.

According to the Financial Times, the Libyan Investment Authority was founded by Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam; more than five Gaddafi family members own shares. The Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR, a recently designated terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates), Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood invested in Pearson Education through the Libyan Investment Authority.

Despite this connection, according to the Guardian, Pearson Education claims as a public company operating in a free market it has no control over its shareholders’ terrorist-related activities.

Common Core was implemented in states that accepted federal funds from the 2009 “Race to the Top” initiative, which encouraged states to receive federal money to adopt new standards that would improve their public school children’s test performance results.

In order for a state to participate, the state board of education and the state’s educational professional standards board would have voted to adopt Common Core standards. Each participating state has posted the Common Core Standards on its state department of education website.

Two years prior to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, in 2007, the FBI uncovered documents revealing the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its subsidiary organizations like CAIR, planned to indoctrinate American K-12 students by teaching Islam.

The seized documents were part of the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-funding trial in U.S. history. The FBI uncovered the Muslim Brotherhood’s manifesto “on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” (Exhibit 42945 and Exhibit 42946).

After states applied for “Race to the Top” federal funds in 2009, Pearson Education created Common Core curriculum and standards. Pearson Education is also the sole evaluator of teachers in some states. In order for New York State to continue receiving “Race to the Top” federal funds, it had to implement “reforms.” Pearson Education now solely administers the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA).

New York State no longer evaluates its teachers — a private company does — whose primary investors fund terrorism and propagate Islam.

Additionally, no state or federal oversight exists for university programs (under Title VI of the Higher Education Act) that train K-12 teachers to develop lesson plans and seminars on “Middle East Studies.” These programs and teacher training materials were developed by Pearson Education and largely funded by Saudi Arabia.

Parents must and can act

In order to end Common Core and eliminate the Islamic indoctrination being taught in public schools, parents must demand:

• Their state school board members be investigated and/or fired and replaced.

• Their state legislature and governor reject “Race to the top” federal funds and implement legislation or reverse its state education department’s implementation of Common Core in their state, and at a minimum, in the interim.

• Their child not participate in state testing.

Parents can also take their children out of public schools altogether.

Parental rights are guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that parents possess the “fundamental right” to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.” The court has declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the State: those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations” (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 534-35). The Supreme Court criticized the Nebraska state legislature for attempting to interfere “with the power of parents to control the education of their own” (Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 402). And ruled a parent’s right to raise his/her children means a parent is protected from unreasonable state interferences, one of the unwritten “liberties” protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment (Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 399).”

Parents must say no more: The $632 billion the federal government spends each year on public school “education” is being wasted on violating the First Amendment, by the federal government instituting a religion through the teaching of Islam in public schools. (See “Common Core Ties to Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Want to See Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War

DEA Agents at Murder Scene for a ColleagueThe NSA isn’t the only three-letter agency that’s been quietly collecting Americans’ data on a mind-boggling scale. The country learned this week that the Drug Enforcement Agency spied on all of us first, and with even fewer privacy protections by some measures. But if anyone is surprised that the DEA’s mass surveillance programs have been just as aggressive as the NSA’s, they shouldn’t be. The early targets that signal shifts in America’s domestic surveillance techniques aren’t activists and political dissidents, as some privacy advocates argue—or terrorists, as national security hawks would claim. They’re drug dealers.

The DEA’s newly revealed bulk collection of billions of American phone records on calls to 116 countries preceded the NSA’s similar program by years and may have even helped to inspire it, as reported in USA Today’s story Wednesday. And the program serves as a reminder that most of the legal battles between government surveillance efforts and the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections over the last decades have played out first on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs. Every surveillance test case in recent history, from beepers to cell phones to GPS tracking to drones—and now the feds’ attempts to puncture the bubble of cryptographic anonymity around Dark Web sites like the Silk Road—began with a narcotics investigation.

“If you asked me last week who was doing this [kind of mass surveillance] other than the NSA, the DEA would be my first guess,” says Chris Soghoian, the lead technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The War on Drugs and the surveillance state are joined at the hip.”

It’s no secret that drug cases overwhelmingly dominate American law enforcement’s use of surveillance techniques. The Department of Justice annually reports to the judiciary how many wiretaps it seeks warrants for, broken down by the type of crime being investigated. In 2013, the last such report, a staggering 88 percent of the 3,576 reported wiretaps were for narcotics. That’s compared to just 132 wiretaps for homicide and assault combined, for instance, and a mere eight for corruption cases. (Read more from “Want to See Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Shock Testimony: Va Officials Retaliate Against Whistleblowers by Illegally Accessing Their Medical Records

110818_veterans_affairs_clouds_ap_605An official at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said Monday that Department of Veterans Affairs officials are known to be retaliating against VA whistleblowers by illegally going through their medical records, in an apparent attempt to harass and discredit these whistleblowers.

This surprising testimony from Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner was delivered at a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee hearing, which was called to discuss the problems whistleblowers face when they try to expose the ongoing failure of the VA to provide medical care to veterans.

In Lerner’s prepared testimony, she explained that many VA officials who try to reveal these problems are veterans themselves who are also seeking care at the VA. She said in some cases, VA officials try to retaliate by examining the medical records of these officials, and said this still happens — she called it an “ongoing concern.”

“In several cases, the medical records of whistleblowers have been accessed and information in those records has apparently been used to attempt to discredit the whistleblowers,” she said.

“We will aggressively pursue relief for whistleblowers in these and other cases where the facts and circumstances support corrective action,” she said. (Read more from “Shock Testimony: Va Officials Retaliate Against Whistleblowers by Illegally Accessing Their Medical Records” HERE)

[Editor’s note: this case is reminiscent of the illegal disclosure of Joe Miller’s family’s medical records in the 2010 race against Lisa Murkowski]

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Navy and Marines Maintain Wartime Op Tempo Due to Russia and Mideast [+video]

greenert-gestures-600x400-ts300Emerging crises worldwide have kept the operations tempo of the Navy and the Marines on a wartime pace despite the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the leaders of the Navy and the Marine Corps said Monday.

“We need to continue to think about warfighting first” amid the turmoil in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert.

“The volume of activity has created difficulty” for the Marine Corps, said Marine Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford. As a result, “we’ve degraded readiness on the home station” to keep Marines deployed forward, he said.

Dunford said that Marines were deploying overseas for seven months, returning home for 14 months, and deploying again for seven months on rotations that were similar to those for the Marines at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Greenert and Dunford spoke, along with Coast Guard Commandant Paul Zukunft and Maritime Administrator Paul Jaenichen, at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference and exposition at National Harbor, Md. (Read more from “Navy and Marines Maintain Wartime Op Tempo Due to Russia and Mideast” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Tomahawk Cruise Missile Hits Moving Ship Target

Tomahawk_2-490x323The Navy is moving closer to having a sea-launched, anti-ship cruise missile able to change course in flight and hit moving ship targets from distances up to 1,000 miles, according to two recent Tomahawk Block IV tests at China Lake, California.

“The USS Kidd, one of our guided missile destroyers, launched a Tomahawk missile that changed course mid-flight and struck a moving ship after being queued by an aircraft,” Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said in a recent speech at the U.S. Naval Institute. “Now, this is potentially game-changing capability for not a lot of cost. It’s a 1,000 mile anti-ship cruise missile. It can be used from practically our entire surface and submarine fleet.

The two tests, which involved firing Tomahawk Block IV missiles against land and sea targets, were conducted by the Navy and Raytheon at Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake, Calif., in January of this year.

During the first test, a Tomahawk missile fired from the USS Kidd, a guided missile destroyer, and received real-time target information relayed from a surveillance aircraft to a weapons station at China Lake. Updated target information was related to the Tomahawk in flight before the missile then maneuvered and changed course from a pre-planned mission toward a new target, striking a moving ship on the water.

“This demonstration is the first step toward evolving Tomahawk with improved network capability and extends its reach from fixed and mobile to moving targets,” a statement from Raytheon said. (Read more from “Tomahawk Cruise Missile Hits Moving Ship Target” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Thanks Alot: Your Forgotten Change Gave TSA Another $675,000 Last Year

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

What, you people like the TSA grope sessions at the airport? Jeez, at least when that goes down at the “gentlemen’s club” you tip with a crumpled twenty.

Instead, at the airports, we are leaving behind enormous amounts of loose change at the security stations, and TSA gets to pocket it all. You know what happens. You strip off your shoes, pull out your laptop, take off your belt and watch, expose your little dangerous toiletries and feel pretty smart about yourself and then WHAM, or maybe, BUZZ. You trip the metal detector. The culprit is the 73 cents in your pocket from that watery twelve dollar coffee you just bought.

So what do you do? You throw the coins into the TSA wash bucket and sail through. In the process of putting on your shoes, you forget about the money. You plane gets called and you’re out of there. (Read more from “Thanks Alot: This Item You Left Behind Gave TSA Another $675,000 Last Year” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Iowa House Starts Day With Wiccan Invocation

iowaThe Iowa House began its work session on Thursday with a modern pagan blessing by a Wiccan faith leader as a group of Christians elsewhere in the state Capitol solemnly recited their own prayers.

Wiccan priestess Deborah Maynard of Cedar Rapids stood at the podium in the House chamber and issued a call to “God, Goddess, Universe, that which is greater than ourselves to be here today.” She spoke of the fire that “gives us light and passion” to help people be passionate about their work for the people of Iowa, and by the “water that flows through our blood and stirs our emotions,” to help see the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Maynard, who is also known as a “cabot witch,” is believed to be the first Wiccan leader to offer an invocation at the Iowa Legislature. After she spoke, House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, shook Maynard’s hand, but more than half of the 100 House members were not present for the opening prayer with some reportedly boycotting her remarks. Rep. Rob Taylor, R-West Des Moines, who is a Protestant, turned his back to the podium as Maynard spoke, saying it was a way for him to peacefully protest.

Wicca is a neopagan, witchcraft religion developed in the 20th century that is symbolized by a five-pointed star within a circle. It is considered a diverse religion with no central authority. Many Wiccans believe in magic. Maynard, 43, who works as a project manager for an eastern Iowa business, is the leader of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans in Cedar Rapids.

Rep. Liz Bennett, D-Cedar Rapids, who invited Maynard to offer the invocation, says she considers the House chamber to be a place that should be open to everyone. She says she’s known Maynard for years, adding that she has also invited two Christian pastors and a Jewish rabbi who have offered daily prayers in the House. (Read more from “Iowa House Starts Day With Wiccan Invocation” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Obama Administration Plotting Adult Vaccination Mandates

VACCINE In collaboration with Big Business and special interests, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is plotting a new program to track Americans’ vaccination records, wage a massive propaganda campaign to “encourage” more inoculations, and foist more controversial vaccines on adults against their will. Federal bureaucrats and crony capitalists set to profit from the proposal claim the goal is to improve “public health,” and establishment media outlets have largely parroted that line so far. However, critics of the unconstitutional scheme, formally dubbed the “National Adult Immunization Plan” (NAIP), say the ultimate goal is to forcibly vaccinate all Americans and move toward a radical new healthcare paradigm in which medical “treatment” is delivered at gunpoint.

The controversial plot was cooked up and unveiled by the Obama HHS National Vaccine Advisory Committee during its February meeting. If approved by federal bureaucrats, the executive-branch assault would, among other elements, enlist private businesses, churches, and non-profit organizations in a nationwide campaign to prod Americans into accepting the Obama administration’s perpetually expanding list of “recommended” vaccines. The scheme would also offer doctors and other vaccine providers “incentives” — read taxpayer-funded bribes — to shred patient privacy and feed private medical information into state and federal databases to track those who refuse to comply.

The summary of the “five-year national plan,” as official documents describe it, deliberately uses innocent-sounding language to promote the effort. “The NAIP is intended to facilitate coordinated action by federal and nonfederal partners to protect public health and achieve optimal prevention of infectious diseases and their consequences through vaccination of adults,” it states, adding that ObamaCare implementation offers a “unique opportunity” to be used as leverage. “As a national plan, it will require engagement from a wide range of stakeholders to achieve its full vision.” Those stakeholders include just about everybody except the target: You. As always with “national plans” dreamed up by Big Government and Big Business, though, the devil is really in the details.

Critics and medical professionals are already up in arms. After summarizing the growing torrent of recent Obama administration assaults on liberty, Dr. Lee Hieb, an orthopedic surgeon and past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said the NAIP scheme was an especially troubling attack on the liberties of Americans. Calling it “a proposal by the orchestrators of Obamacare to forcibly vaccinate all adult Americans,” Hieb also ridiculed the Soviet-sounding “five-year plan” language. But the implications of the latest Obama administration attack on medical liberty and privacy are no joking matter.

“If you Americans do not stand against this, it’s over,” continued Dr. Hieb, author of the new book Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare. “What liberty do you have if the federal government can force you to have a medical procedure, can force you to surrender your very body to their control? Answer: none. Because there is nothing that cannot be justified on the basis of ‘the good of society.’ The Jewish Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the killing of the Kulaks, American Eugenics, Tuskegee experimentation, the cold water experiments of Birkenau, Dachau and Auschwitz, all were justified at the time by their respective leaders as for the good of society.” (Read more from “Obama Administration Plotting Adult Vaccination Mandates” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Mystery “Warm Blob” in the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California’s Mega-Drought

BlobA mysterious “warm blob” in the Pacific Ocean could be the reason why US West coast states like California are experiencing their worst ever drought, a new study says.

The blob in the ocean was discovered last year, with temperatures one to four degrees Celsius (two to seven degrees Fahrenheit) above surrounding ‘normal’ water, causing havoc to West Coast marine ecosystem and led species to seek refuge elsewhere.

The blob extends about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) offshore, from Mexico up to Alaska, and was 300 feet (90 meters) deep.

A study by the University of Washington found that a high-pressure ridge could be causing the blob, by trapping heat in the water.

Dr. Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, coined the term ‘the blob’ in June. (Read more from “Mystery “Warm Blob” in the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California’s Mega-Drought” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

150 Years After America’s ‘New Birth of Freedom’: How the Civil War Changed America

civil warThis week, the nation commemorates the 150 anniversary of the end of the Civil War. The last major act on the battlefield happened on April 9, 1865, when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s forces cut off and surrounded Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army at Appomattox Courthouse.

The war, which raged from 1861 to 1865, defined the second half of the 19th century in the United States, in the same way World War II defined the latter half of the 20th. Civil War author Shelby Foote perhaps captured its significant in a single observation:

Before the war, it was said “the United States are.” Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always “the United States is,” as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an “is.”

In 1858, a few years before he became president, Abraham Lincoln gave one of the most famous speeches of his career. In it, he stated that he believed the controversy regarding the place of slavery in the United States would not cease until “a crisis is reached and passed.” Then, quoting the words of Jesus, he said, “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it to cease to be divided.”

That crisis came in April 1861, following Lincoln’s election as president. Seven of the southern states voted to secede from the Union, even before he was sworn in; and four more would join them in short order. Lincoln’s election as the first Republican president told many in the South all they needed to know. The Republican platform called for halting the growth of slavery in the western territories. Many in the party wanted to see the institution’s demise altogether. Lincoln, in his famous debates with Senator Stephen Douglas regarding the future of slavery before the war, had often quoted the Declaration of Independence and the rights it promises to all, regardless of race.

In a fiery moment during his U.S. Senate campaign in 1858 against Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said:

I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where it will stop. If one says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If the Declaration is not truth, let us get the statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold to do it? If it is not true let us tear it out!

Cries erupted from the crowd. “No! No!” When Lincoln implored, “Let us stick to it then. . . . “[L]et us stand firmly by it then,” the crowd erupted into applause.

With the first Confederate cannon shot over the federal installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began. It would not end until over 600,000 Americans laid dead on battlefields from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and North Carolina to New Mexico. For a population of just over 30 million, the toll of America’s most deadly war was devastating.

The total financial cost of the war to the federal government alone is estimated at $5.2 billion. The nation began the war with $65 million in national debt, and ended it with $2.7 billion.

President Abraham Lincoln, in his brief Second Inaugural Address in March of 1865, sought to bring meaning and perspective to the cataclysmic events through which the nation had just passed. He observed that one-eighth of the population was enslaved, and all knew that the institution’s existence in America was somehow responsible for the war. He continued:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Peace came a little over four weeks later. “Unconditional Surrender Grant” gave generous terms, only requiring the Confederate soldiers to surrender their arms and pledge not to re-enter the fight.

Less than a week later, Abraham Lincoln–the man who had guided the nation through one of its most tumultuous and defining times in its history–would be dead. On Good Friday, April 14, confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth stepped into the Lincolns’ box at Ford’s Theater and shot the president at point blank range.

Lincoln was one more sacrifice in America’s costliest war. Nonetheless, he died knowing the nation would be forever changed by what he and thousands upon thousands of other brave souls did. First came the Emancipation Declaration in 1863 freeing some of the slaves, followed by the 13th Amendment which passed the Congress shortly after Lincoln’s re-election in 1864, freeing all the slaves.

In the years immediately following the Civil War, the nation would also adopt the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all equal protection under the law, and the 15 Amendment granting African Americans the right to vote.

As Lincoln had envisioned when he spoke at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, the nation experienced “a new birth of freedom” rooted in the central proposition found in the heart of the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal. May we never forget what that Civil War generation did, especially those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Lincoln’s exhortation comes down through time:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

(See “150 Years After America’s ‘New Birth Of Freedom’: How The Civil War Changed America”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.