Posted on 07/18/2006 12:49:14 PM PDT by aomagrat
A Confederate heritage group says its free-speech rights were violated when a landowner removed a billboard promoting Southern history near the famed Darlington Raceway.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans plans to demonstrate at the State House next month and buy radio advertisements to complain about losing its billboard on U.S. 52, about two miles from the racetrack.
“This is the most chilling thing I’ve seen against freedom of speech,” spokesman Don Gordon said.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans bought the billboard this spring in response to remarks by a NASCAR executive about the rebel flag.
The billboard featured a Confederate flag and a checkered race flag. The message said, “Victory is Great, but Honor is Greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”
The billboard, taken down briefly in May, also listed the group’s phone number and name.
Officials of the S.C. Central Railroad, which owns the land where the billboard stood, said the message was “controversial” and needed to come down.
“It is not in our commercial interests to have billboards on our property displaying messages that might be controversial in the local community, whatever the substance of the messages,” a company spokeswoman said in a prepared statement.
“We made no judgment as to the content of the billboard, but we did understand it to be controversial and therefore asked that it be removed.”
An outdoor advertising company, hired by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, installed the sign just before Darlington’s annual Mother’s Day race. It was removed permanently June 16, according to a July 11 letter from the S.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans commander, Randall Burbage, to fellow members.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans says it is an international, nonprofit historical society. The group, which says it has 30,000 members nationally, has taken positions in defense of the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
‘NOT ... ANYTHING FAVORABLE’
In October, NASCAR’s chief executive, Brian France, told the CBS television show “60 Minutes” the Confederate flag was “not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure.”
As it branches away from its traditional Southern fan base, NASCAR has tried to shed its rebel-flag-waving image. The nation’s largest stock car racing organization has started diversity programs and tried to appeal to black and Hispanic fans. The Darlington Raceway, in business for more than 50 years, has served as a pillar of NASCAR.
“A member of the France family said some uncomplimentary things, so we put that billboard up to make a statement and to stimulate new members,” the confederate veterans’ Gordon said. “We really didn’t expect anything like this to occur.”
Attempts to reach NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter were unsuccessful. However, Hunter said last spring that NASCAR did not seek to have the sign removed.
“If we find out NASCAR is involved, you can expect airplanes towing Confederate banners over every NASCAR race anywhere in this nation — forever,” Gordon said.
Mac Josey, vice president at the Darlington Raceway, said he knew nothing about the billboard and did not ask that it be removed. He said the track does not fly Confederate flags, although some fans do.
Wesley Blackwell, chairman of the Darlington County Council, said he heard about the billboard during a social gathering at the Darlington speedway in May. Blackwell said the county did not ask that the sign be removed.
‘NOT A WORD WOULD BE SAID’
The Confederate veterans group paid Palmetto Outdoor Media more than $5,000 to put up the advertisement, Gordon said. Most of the money was refunded when the sign was removed.
However, Gordon is not satisfied.
“What if it was a sign trying to bring new members to the NAACP? We all know not a word would be said,” Gordon said.
Palmetto Outdoor Media co-owner Rodney Monroe said his company’s land-lease agreement with S.C. Central Railroad has a section that called for the removal of offensive advertisements.
“We lease the property from the company and we, obviously, crossed the line as far as what was acceptable to them ... and were asked to remove the sign,” Monroe said. “We are not in the business to cause or create controversy.”
Gordon said his group had a contract with Palmetto Outdoor for the sign to stay up through part of next year.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to free speech. However, the sign was on private property, and the property’s owner ordered it down.
Bill Rogers, director of the S.C. Press Association, said that removal violated the principle of free speech, if nothing else. The sign did not appear to be inflammatory, he said.
“I can see why they would feel their rights are violated, that if someone doesn’t like the message, they take it down,” Rogers said.
bttt
Excellent description.
It is worthwhile to debate him though. For one thing, I learn some history gathering the information to refute his posts. For another, posting the correct facts means that the lurkers are not left with his false picture of history. Finally, it is fun to show him to be wrong -- it's kind of like a cat playing with a mouse though.
He's a better opponent than those who make nothing but "evil slavers" comments to any WBTS issue.
He's probably putting a trash can on his head as we speak.
So your position is that it's impossible for a rebellion to occur in the United States? Then why does the Constitution tell how to suppress them? Clearly the Founding Fathers thought them possible.
They were within their rights to terminate by force the exercise of alien power on their soil.
So if the Cubans started shelling Guantanamo, you'd accept that as within their rights?
The laws of war, and not the Constitution, would have governed, if the United States decided on waging war against its new neighbor.
They didn't start shooting first.
You know very well what reexports are. They are well defined by the US Treasury, and they are available for all the years you refer to. Their inclusion in the data you quote makes all of your contentions false
My understanding of the definition of re-export is the export of an item from the U.S. which originated in another foreign country. If that is the case then I don't see where those factor into the equation since tariffs were not levied on items brought into the country for future export, so long as those items remained under bond in an approved warehouse. That's seems to be the definintion that the Warehousing Act of 1846 used. So if an item isn't taxed then how can it be included in tariff data?
Not at all hard. The US Treasury kept that data, and it also gives the per cent increase by category.
Then by all means, and for the edification of the forum, please produce them.
Your self contradiction is standing here like an elephant, and you talk around it to try to divert attention to your massive errors. You are shown what you do not know, and you show no curiosity to correct yourself. I do not think you are worth debate.
And yet here you are once again.
Sir, the question is how would it?
If one accepts the claim made by the southeron camp that the south consumed upwards of 90% of allimports then it would stand to reason from a business standpoint that those goods would go to the customers in the quickest, safest, most cost effective manner would it not? So if the south is consuming the overwhelming majority of imports then it would stand to reason that those imports would go directly to southern ports. Yet they did not. It would also stand to reason that if you are sending a ship to a port to pick up cargo then it's most cost effective to send imports destined for that port on the inbound leg and fill up with exports for the trip home. Again, in the case of the South this did not happen. Three million plus bales of cotton exported from the U.S. in 1859, over 90% of it leaving from Southern ports. Yet for the same period is seems that over 90% of all imports entered Northern ports. So please tell me, if Southron claims are true, where does that make sense?
Unless, of course, that now you really, really mean that I'm not worthy of debate. Then I suppose I'll never hear from you again.
Nothing quite like being damned by faint praise is there?
The case against me. Once again, LOL.
Each State is its People. There is no other candidate in sight for the People. You know perfectly well what I am saying and you understand it. You are simply refusing to accept the truth of what I'm telling you, because so to do impeaches the Unionist propaganda and casus belli, and it furthermore makes Lincoln a mass murderer, for having started an internecine civil war.
And actually, you wouldn't leave it to "the people of the United States". Knowing full well that unity in a community so broad as a mass polity is well-nigh impossible to attain, as Webster knew when he proposed his mischief and Lincoln knew when he followed Webster (both of them being aware of the North's gains in population vis-a-vis the South), you are intent on playing the lumpen majoritarian game on this proto-vanguardist principle, the old Federalist one, that, the People being divided in most things, you can do pretty much what you want if only you have control of the levers of federal power. Which is why, as Madison explained in Federalist 39 quoted above, the Framers, Hamilton excepted, would have no truck with a fully nationalized, centralized, amalgamated State and People.
Your impulse is therefore just the opposite of what you claim it is: you are an anti-populist, and you have made yourself the enemy of the People by trying to tie their expression of their will in knots and suppress it, just as Webster wanted to do in his day. Webster wanted the Federal Government as a vehicle for imposing his views on the South, and so did Lincoln, and so do you. That is a regionalist, factional political agenda most of the old Federalists, and all of the Antifederalists or Democratic Republicans, would have abhorred.
The Constitution simply doesn't support you, that's all, and you can't reword it or Goreify it to make it do your bidding.
I liked the rest of your response a lot -- misdirection, and nonresponsiveness, all wrapped around a quote from George Washington, which is responsive, and one from John Marshall, which is nonresponsive (I didn't address Marshall and neither did you), and in any case is unsupportive of your argument. Excellent.
Let's review.
I said,
[Quoting you]
Everyone, except people like Washington and Madison and Lincoln. I'll go with them over you.Yeah? Quote them. (Oh, wait -- that's a "homework assignment"! LOL!)
What you can't stomach, is that I won't buy your lumpenproletariat definition of the People, which was a political fairy tale expressly whipped up by Webster to deny the People of a State their rights. Webster lied, Lincoln lied, and you lie.
The Philadelphia Convention considered your Websterite formula of a mass People considering the Constitution in a mass convention -- for about two minutes. It couldn't even get a second. The motion failed because the idea was rejected.
Your and Lincoln's theory of the People is bogus, counterfeit, false -- a political lie.
And you reply by quoting Washington agreeing with Hamilton, talking precisely about a lumpen People, which is exactly what the People are not, as I showed above by quoting Madison in the Federalist, refuting to elenchus your claim of support from Madison. Washington was simply wrong. Whatever he thought the People had ratified, they did not ratify a dissolution of their own identities as the Peoples of the States.
You claim that I stand alone against the Framers of the Constitution. That is a lie. I stand with them, against you and your propagandist friends.
Now let's look at your Marshall quote, from McCullough vs. Maryland 1819, and supply the part of the first paragraph which you omitted. The omitted lines are important to understanding Marshall's argument:
In discussing this question, the counsel for the State of Maryland have deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the Constitution, to consider that instrument not as emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent States. The powers of the General Government, it has been said, are delegated by the States, who alone are truly sovereign, and must be exercised in subordination to the States, who alone possess supreme dominion. [Emphasis added.]
The point here is that the State of Maryland tried to introduce the idea that the State sovereignty and the People were two separate entities, and that the state governments could, in the name of that sovereignty, claim some authority not granted by the People in convention assembled, over the authority conveyed to the Union by the Supremacy Clause. Maryland was wrong, and Marshall is correcting the error.
But it is incorrect to say that the People are not the People of the States.
This mode of proceeding was adopted, and by the convention, by Congress, and by the State legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively and wisely, on such a subject -- by assembling in convention. It is true, they assembled in their several States -- and where else should they have assembled? No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments. [Emphasis added.]
Marshall is putting down the idea that state governments retain a residue of ultimate sovereignty, rather than the People of the state. The Maryland lawyers were trying to justify an act of the Maryland legislature and dress it up in the sovereignty of the State, when in fact it was an ordinary municipal law whose application, by the previous grant of the People, was restricted by the Supremacy Clause -- as long as Maryland remained in the Union.
Maryland's lawyers tried to put lipstick on a pig, and Marshall wiped it off. But he didn't attack the fundamental and ultimate sovereignty of the People, or deny that the People of a State are the State, and that a State is its People, but only the Maryland lawyers' contention that state governments could act as the People.
As a corollary issue, the Maryland lawyers were also incorporating nullification doctrine into their argument, which, as some Southerners have quoted to you, even Jefferson Davis repudiated in his inaugural speech as provisional president of the Confederacy.
Of course you would. Screw the People.
The case, by the way, was styled "SUSETTE KELO, et al., PETITIONERS v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, et al."
Links:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=04-108
[You, wriggling] So your position is that it's impossible for a rebellion to occur in the United States?
Answering a question with a question isn't kosher and you know it. I asked first. Answer my question -- against whom would the People "rebel"?
And of course it's possible to have a rebellion -- but a "rebellion" by the whole People of a State is not a "rebellion" but a sovereign act of the People, if the People as a whole concur with it.
The People have the right and power to kick over the table and shoot out the lights, if they think their dealer is a crook, a card mechanic, or playing with a marked deck.
Then why does the Constitution tell how to suppress them? Clearly the Founding Fathers thought them possible.
Sure. Correct. Right. But you're trying to answer a question with other questions which are off-topic.
[You quoting me again] They were within their rights to terminate by force the exercise of alien power on their soil.
[You] So if the Cubans started shelling Guantanamo, you'd accept that as within their rights?
Depends on whether they abrogated the treaty first. If they did, we'd have a problem staying there.
They didn't start shooting first.
Lincoln made warlike moves that would be understood in every capital of Europe and Asia. He attempted to reinforce fortifications whose rightful ownership was in dispute.
Yankees complain that Southerners didn't offer to discuss taking part of the federal debt (in fact they did, but Lincoln wouldn't receive the Southern commissioners), but they never complain about the fact that Lincoln asserted powers he no longer rightfully had in territory he no longer rightfully administered, and in so doing despised publicly the right of the People to change their government.
If the United States Congress voted unanimously to turn Maine into a parking lot and send its people to Alaska just to get them out of the way, I'd expect Maine to leave the Union -- because in those circumstances, they ought to.
It's a fixture, and a weak one, of Unionist argument, that no State can ever leave the Union without the permission of the other States that are determined to abuse her. That's like the old saw about two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. But you try to brazen it out every time.
Why I thought all you rebels believed in states rights over big, intrusive government. Guess only where slavery is involve, huh?
Absolute lie.
[You] Absolute lie.
Where do you get off, saying something like that?!
Jefferson Davis appointed commissioners briefed to discuss all open matters between the South and the United States. Said commissioners pressed for over a month, from March 6th to April 11th, 1861, for meetings with the new Republican administration. Lincoln instructed Seward to have nothing to do with them or with any other Confederate commissioner, in order to refuse any recognition that the Southern States had, in fact, exercised their right to leave the Union.
What the hell do you mean, "absolute lie"?
I didn't "breeze by" anything. I guess you didn't like the answer, is all.
[You, quoting Marshall again] ".....The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states, who alone possess supreme dominion. It would be difficult to sustain this proposition."
Marshall is making it clear that it was the people of the United States who ratified it, and not the states. [Emphasis yours.]
You're being deliberately obtuse.
I made the point, far from "breezing by" the issue, that Marshall was commenting on the claim of the Maryland attorneys, that the States' sovereignties were separate from the People of those States who ratified the Constitution in their conventions. The Maryland argument was bogus, but you and Marshall both do the same thing Maryland did, which is to try to separate the People from the State they compose.
So to believe, is never to have heard of the concept of a polity, which is what the States are. Polities are composed of people, not alternative abstractions such as those dragged in by Maryland's pleaders, and they are not to be confounded with the lawmaking and administrative apparatuses of archons, praetors, legislators and governors erected by those polities to serve the People and their needs, which is what state governments are.
But now you'll want to argle-bargle about what a polity is, and claim that I don't know what I'm talking about, because I can't be allowed to claim a point, or ever be right about anything, having laid hands on Lincoln's legend as a Buddha-like political atman, and having said, rudely, that he was instead a railroad lawyer and a machine politician.
The fact of the matter is, the States did ratify the Constitution, convention by convention. The People of each State are the State. Here is Madison in Federalist 39 again, just in case you indolently skipped over the part I carefully underlined for you in my post above, talking about the identity of the States, as polities, with the People of same, as they ratified the Constitution:
That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a MAJORITY of the people of the Union, nor from that of a MAJORITY of the States. It must result from the UNANIMOUS assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. [Emphasis in original.]
Context is important, as you demonstrate time after time.
Yes, and I've just demonstrated it again, to your embarrassment. So is quoting the right guy.
I mean completely untrue. Absolutely false. A total canard. Davis appointed a commission with the expressed purpose of establishing relations between nations. In short, an ultimatum to accept the legitimacy of the southern actions. No other outcome was open for discussion. An end to secession was not on the table. And if Lincoln had surrendered to southern demands then there was a vague offer to settle "all questions of disagreement". Nothing specific, nothing concrete, no offer to take care of the south's portion of the debt or guarantee access down the Mississippi. If the Union had accepted the Southern demands and recognized the legitimacy of the Southern secession then what leverage did they have to get the south to do anything? None, at all. The time to settle "questions of dsagreement" was before secession and not as an afterthought.
No, it isn't. The topic was debt. Debt was on the menu. It's wrong of you to say I lied, unless debt was never up for consideration.
And it's really rich of you so to say, considering that Lincoln wouldn't even talk to those people, not even the Virginia commissioners who came to talk to him before Sumter. They finally got to see him, but by then he had his war, and he was no longer interested in peace, but in beating down the South. Which I tend to believe was his entire (secret) platform.
An end to secession was not on the table.
Should it have been? And anyway, we were talking about the national debt.
And if Lincoln had surrendered to southern demands then there was a vague offer to settle "all questions of disagreement".
Pretty damn vague, because Lincoln wouldn't talk to them, period.
Nothing specific, nothing concrete, no offer to take care of the south's portion of the debt or guarantee access down the Mississippi. If the Union had accepted the Southern demands and recognized the legitimacy of the Southern secession then what leverage did they have to get the south to do anything?
Lincoln was starting a war, and you're complaining about "leverage"? You need to get over yourself.
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