How the Worst President Ever Ended Up on a Controverisal New Coin (James Buchanan)

Today, the U.S. Treasury released a $1 coin commemorating former President James Buchanan. And people aren't happy about it.

To understand why, some background is helpful. In 2007, thanks to a bill promoted by then-Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, the Treasury began minting $1 coins with the likenesses of former Presidents, starting with George Washington.

The coins -- which have been appearing ever since, featuring a new President every three months -- are meant to improve use and circulation of America's dollar coins, which are often seen as an awkward misfit among currency, neither fish nor fowl.

Sununu's initiative drew inspiration from the 50 State Quarters Program, which launched in 1999. The runaway success of that effort, according to his legislation, "shows that a design on a U.S. circulating coin that is regularly changed... radically increases demand for the coin, rapidly pulling it through the economy."

The bill also suggested that a program wherein Presidents are featured on a succession of $1 coins, and First Spouses commemorated on gold $10 coins, could help correct a state of affairs where "many people cannot name all of the Presidents, and fewer can name the spouses, nor can many people accurately place each President in the proper time period of American history."

So the bill passed, and the Washington dollar coin appeared not long after. It was followed by Adams, Jefferson, et al., with the First Spouse coins minted alongside.

Now we're up to Buchanan, the fifteenth President, who took office in 1857 and turned things over to Abraham Lincoln in 1861, and whose coin (produced at the Philadelphia and Denver Mints and purchasable through the U.S. Mint website) has occasioned the aforementioned grousing. Here's where some feel the coin program is falling short:

Many Americans have never gotten into the habit of using $1 coins, and as a result, over a billion commemorative Presidential coins are sitting around in a stockpile at the Federal Reserve. As BBC News reports, if these coins were stacked up and laid on their side, they'd stretch for 1,367 miles, or the distance from Chicago to New Mexico.

In February 2008, a year after the first presidential coins were minted, The New York Times reported that a survey had found large numbers of American teens to be woefully ignorant of their country's history. It was far from the first time Americans had gotten a dismal grade in history, suggesting that Sununu's commemorative-coin campaign isn't having much of an effect in that arena, either.

In fairness, this is a grievance with a specific president, not the presidential coins program as a whole. Still, it seems to come up in all the coverage of the new coin: Buchanan wasn't very good at his job.

That's the consensus of historians, anyway, who have traditionally censured Buchanan for his failure to prevent the Civil War. Last year, a C-SPAN survey of historians granted Buchanan the dubious distinction of worst president ever.

Still, all of this isn't reason enough to declare the commemorative-coins program a total failure. If more coin collectors start avidly pursuing the presidential coins, it could have the effect of pushing down the national debt, thanks to the way the value of the coins fluctuates with their availability. And if the dollar coins were to catch on and replace paper $1 bills entirely, it could save the country between $500 and $700 million each year in printing costs.

Plus, if things stay on track, 2012 will see the release of the Chester A. Arthur dollar coin -- marking the first time that long non-commemorated president's face has ever appeared on any nation's currency. And who are we to deprive him of that?

Of course if you want to take Adolph Hitler's opinion

Tell me, what does Adolf say in that excerpt from Mein Kampf that YOU disagree with? I think you could have wrote it.

What is a Confederacy?

By a Confederacy we mean a union of sovereign states which of their own free will and in virtue of their sovereignty come together and create a collective unit, ceding to that unit as much of their own sovereign rights as will render the existence of the union possible and will guarantee it. But the theoretical formula is not wholly put into practice by any confederacy that exists today. And least of all by the American Union, where it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states. Therefore the sovereign rights, often very comprehensive, which were left, or rather granted, to the various territories correspond not only to the whole character of the Confederation but also to its vast space, which is equivalent to the size of a Continent. Consequently, in speaking of the United States of America one must not consider them as sovereign states but as enjoying rights or, better perhaps, autarchic powers, granted to them and guaranteed by the Constitution

The Mendacious Yankee Culture

By Al Benson Jr.

Last year about this time there was a great fuss over Obamacare. Our current Marxist-in-Chief was working mightily to ram it through Congress and the socialists in that august body lusted after its passage also. Then came the August vacation and congress people went back to their home states for the usual round of town meetings, supposedly to hear what their constituents wanted them to do.

The vast majority of their constituents wanted them to vote against Obamacare and they made their wishes very plain at town meetings all across the country. Not even the tooth fairy could have mistaken the wishes of the folks back home—they didn’t want Obamacare and that was that. Guess what? These same people all went back to Sodom on the Potomac and voted for it anyway. People were shocked. They just couldn’t believe their elected representatives would stiff them that way.

Folks, you need to learn a lesson from this. Those people in Washington don’t give a hoot for what you want. They are going to do what they (and their puppet masters) want. Your desires will be the very first thing ignored. You pay the fat salaries of those people in Washington but they do not represent you in any way, shape or form. They have a socialist agenda to enact and that is their first and only priority. They couldn’t care less what you and I want. Those people are prime examples of the mendacious Yankee/Marxist culture that has taken over the federal government and this kind of thing has been going on for over 150 years now. It’s not new—it’s just that it has never been so blatant before. Get used to it—it’s going to get worse.

The mendacity of Yankee culture (and I’m not talking about all Northern folks here) was obvious to some as early as 1860

. In his excellent book Blood Money: The Civil War and The Federal Reserve (Pelican Publishing Co, 2006), author John Remington Graham has made some very astute observations which most people in the Southern Heritage Movement probably never think about. I know I didn’t. He maintains that the War of Northern Aggression was promoted and then financed by the big banking houses on Wall Street because they knew it would be a big money maker for them. As far as the lives lost and ruined, both North and South, who cared? There was a profit to be made and everybody knows you gotta crack some eggs if you want to make an omelet. He noted, on page 49, that: “A new regime of taxation, including not only higher tariffs but income taxes, was enacted to sustain this enterprise profitable to the large banking houses…The institutions included central reserve banks on Wall Street, which insured and nourished the whole system of institutions growing up from financing the American Civil War. The cunning sophistication that planned, incited, and financed the brutal conquest of the Southern states was utterly beyond the comprehension of most people then living in the region. ” He observed the quiet, agrarian, traditional lifestyle of the average Southerner, writing that most Southern folks were “sober, plain and religious, even tending toward the mystical.” Their view of life was a simple one of chivalry and honor and that was how they planned to fight this war, with chivalry and honor, however, Mr. Graham noted “But such a war was not what had been engineered by high finance, and the Southern people were wholly unprepared to resist the juggernaut which has been ruthlessly bought to march against them.”

Southern folks, from Jefferson Davis on down, never really grasped the true mendacity of the Yankee culture, how false and devious it was. Southern delegations sent to Washington were always the victims of one-upsmanship because they tried to deal honestly with the questions at hand, while Lincoln and Seward and the rest had no intention of doing such. The Southerners could not grasp the idea of how honorable men could do what these Yankees did. They failed to comprehend the truth that they were not dealing with honorable men. By the time they learned this it was too late. There was truly a difference between Southern culture and Yankee (not all Northern) culture and for the most part, the Southerners never became “wise as serpents” while in the North, the Yankees had taught the serpents.

John B. Jones, author of A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary was a Southerner who had lived in the North and had observed the Yankee culture firsthand while there. Before the War started he fled back south and in conversation with Governor Wise of Virginia, he said:

The greatest statesmen of the South have no conception of the real purposes of the men now in power in the United States. They cannot be made to believe that the Government at Washington are going to wage war immediately.” The governor didn’t even believe him when he told him that Lincoln had called out 70,000 men. Jones continued: “Nevertheless, when I told him these 70,000 were designed to be merely the videttes and outposts of an army of 700,000, he was quite incredulous. He had not witnessed the Wide-Awake gatherings the preceding fall as I had done, and listened to the pledges they made to subjugate the South, free the Negroes and hang Gov. Wise. I next told him they would blockade our ports and endeavor to cut off our supplies…He said it would be contrary to the law of nations, as had been decided in the Courts of Admiralty and moreover would be a violation of the Constitution…Laws and courts and constitutions would not be impediments in the way of Yankees resolved upon our subjugation. Presuming upon their superior numbers, and under the pretext of saving the Union and annihilating slavery, they would invade us like the army-worm…The real object was to enjoy our soil and climate by means of confiscation. Jones said of the Governor “He had no idea that the Yankees would dare to enter upon such enterprises in the face of an enlightened world. But I know them better.” If we have studied history at all, we know what happened. The Yankees did indeed do all those uncivilized things that Southerners felt they would never do because the Southerners themselves would not have done them. And so, in the main, they misunderstood their enemy. They were honorable and they expected the Yankees would be also. They weren’t.

They won the war and pillaged the South with “reconstruction” and when they found out how well that worked they began incrementally to “reconstruct” the rest of the country. They’re still doing it. Cultural Marxism is a major part of it, as is political correctness. And still people don’t get it! They think because they oppose what the feds do the feds will back down. Don’t bet the farm on that anymore. In some instances they may appear to back down, temporarily, but all the while they are looking for a convenient back door through which to promote their socialism without you being fully aware of it.

Comrade Obama and the socialist thugs in Congress plan on giving us some brand of Marxism no matter how many of us don’t want it. We’d better start to realize where those people in Washington are really at and we’d better start working through our states to begin to nullify what they are trying to do to us because they are not about to quit just because we don’t like it. More people and state governments need to begin to think nullification and they need to do it now.

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Yankees Suck