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Today in Dimondale Michigan Donald Trump gave what was not only the best speech of his campaign but a speech that will one day be seen as a landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party – a party finally returning to its roots as the party of Lincoln. If this sounds like hyperbole ask yourself what other Republican leader in recent memory has addressed America’s African American communities in this voice: The African-American community has given so much to this country. They’ve fought and died in every war since the Revolution. They’ve lifted up the conscience of our...

The Constitution gives absolutely no authority, none, to the federal government to dictate marriage policy to the states. *** *** When the Obergefell case was decided by the Supreme Court, its ruling legally applied only to the plaintiffs before it, as is true in any case before any court. The concept of “judicial review” - in which the Court, and not Congress, gets to decide what the law is - is not found in the Constitution anywhere. It was invented out of the ether by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803 as a way for the Court to grant dictatorial...

Want some inspiration? Read Lincoln's 1858 speech on the meaning of Independence Day: "Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it then." More excellent speeches from Coolidge (1926) and Reagan (1986). When in the course of human events... here's the full text of the Declaration of Independence. The 7 most bad-ass founding fathers, 5 forgotten founding fathers, and 4 more. Journal of the American Revolutions' 10 Myths for the Fourth of July and Breaking News From 1776: First News Reports of Independence. Lots more.

On this day in 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation giving the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort and recreation.” Championed by Sen. John Conness (R-Calif.), the so-called Yosemite Grant included the first parkland the federal government ever set aside for preservation and public use. It set a precedent for the creation of Yellowstone as the nation’s first national park in 1872. The legislation to bar commercial development in the park was drafted with the aid of the...

Cops shut down a lane in the Lincoln Tunnel so a visiting businessman could be escorted through it at the behest of a major de Blasio fundraiser, federal prosecutors charged Monday. Modal Trigger Jeremy ReichbergPhoto: Reuters The outrageous move was revealed as part of damning criminal indictments unveiled Monday against four NYPD officers and the shady “fixer’’ who allegedly arranged it. The stunning arrests marked the first time cops have been charged in the sweeping 3½-year corruption investigation rocking the department and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, which is being probed for its fundraising. Federal prosecutors allege that the civilian...

St. Gregory the Great Catholic Seminary in Seward is expanding to prepare more students for priesthood. The seminary held a ground-breaking ceremony April 24 to mark the beginning of a construction project that will add 11 student rooms, two priest suites, two classrooms and a science lab onto the existing building, located at 800 Fletcher Road in Seward. “We’ve seen the steady growth the Lord has granted us. We’ve seen our faculty and staff grow,” St. Gregory Rector the Very Rev. Jeffrey R. Eickhoff said during the ceremony. In its 18 years of existence, the seminary has housed and taught...

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Donald Trump's use of vocabulary and grammar is more elementary than that of other candidates, according to a new study that compared the candidates' English language skills. The New York businessman's grammar was comparable to a 5th grader's, lower than the average 6th to 8th grade levels used by Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, according to a newly released Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute study. Sanders scored highest in vocabulary, and was ranked at the level of an 11th grader. Trump was most comparable to a 7th...

Words are important. Any good leader knows this. That is why one of the true marks of a good leader is the ability to communicate ideas and intentions to the people, to motivate them and guide them toward a common goal. In American history, our presidents have used the power of words to guide the people and the nation. Of the millions of words that have been spoken by these 44 men over the past 200-plus years, there are only a handful of times that those words have been used to their maximum effect. These speeches are prime examples of...

"I am much indebted to the good christian people of the country for their constant prayers and consolations; and to no one of them, more than to yourself. The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise.

Abraham Lincoln told an 1864 audience that "the world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.'" Different people can define liberty in different, even contradictory ways, so that both sides in a conflict can claim to the mantle of liberty. That was exactly the situation in the Civil War: Slaveholders defined liberty in such a way as to make themselves the guardians of liberty... The South's liberty was the liberty to hold other people as chattel slaves. What the slaveholders called liberty, the North quite rightly called tyranny; namely, the systematic deprivation of the natural rights of...

Every once in a while a scholar will write an absolutely pathbreaking article . . . then disappear. No books. No other articles. Sometimes they fail to get tenure, sometimes it's a health problem, sometimes they change research direction. One of the most fascinating people I have come across is a historian named Lynn Marshall, who in 1967 wrote what I thought was one of the most profound articles ever---in the prestigious American Historical Review. He briefly taught at my school, the U. of California, Santa Barbara and word was (unverified) that he failed to get tenure. Marshall produced no...

It’s hard to determine which is more surprising: the British aching to send troops and materiel to aid the Confederacy during the Civil War or that the first “Special Relationship” was between the U.S. and Russia against the British. Both of these facts are true and for the latter negating the former, we can thank one Cassius Marcellus Clay. Clay was more than just a namesake for the greatest boxer of all time. He was also a politician, representative, officer in the Mexican War and Civil War, abolitionist, and ambassador with a pedigree in badassery. This man once frightened an...

During World War I, the thousands to American soldiers heading to France and Belgium were given pocket Bibles with the forward written by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917: “The Bible is the Word of Life. I beg that you will read it and find this out for yourselves, -read, not little snatches here and there, but long passages that will really be the road to the heart of it. You will find it full of real men and women not only, but also of the things you have wondered about and been troubled about all your life, as men have...

As Barack Obama’s Presidential run comes to an end Michelle has plans to gut, remodel and rename the historical Lincoln Bedroom to “The Obama Suite” in a bid to create a lasting legacy for her husbands Presidential Tenure.Future Obama Suite that will replace the Lincoln Bedroom Three contractors Have placed a bid on Michelle Obama’s plan. One is from Chicago, another is from the District of Columbia, and the third is from Mexico. All three have gone to the White House to examine the room and blue prints.The D.C. contractor took out a tape measure and did some measuring, then worked some figures...

One Jacques Abbadie made a very familiar statement in French, which loosely translated, comes to: "You can fool all of the people some of the time and you can fool some of the people all of the time. However, you can not fool ALL of the people all of the time." This statement has been mistakenly attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps we are finally experiencing an awakening where almost all of the people can no longer be fooled. The elites and leftists have deliberately destroyed the educational system in order to leave the populace unable to process thought and determine...

Most Americans tend to agree that Abraham Lincoln was one of this country’s better presidents, having saved the nation from imploding on itself with the Civil War. Former IRS chief Lois Lerner, however, does not apparently have the same thoughts about keeping the South in the union. “Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in 2014. “He should (have) let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.” The Senate Finance Committee released a report yesterday that examined 1.5 million pages of IRS emails. A significant focus...

Social engineers have a knack for destroying history, then self-servingly reshaping it to align with political agendas for consumption by the masses.  The results of their skill are no better exemplified than we are currently witnessing.  Confederate history is quite literally being destroyed, as monuments to Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes are being defaced by ignorant vandals who know nothing more than the legend of how Abraham Lincoln and his brave Union army crushed Jefferson Davis’ and Robert E. Lee’s Southern hordes in the name of liberating enslaved blacks.  That this is legend is in no way...

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery? Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his...

"I do not forget the position assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case, upon the parties to a suit; as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that...