Posted on 06/14/2006 5:58:12 PM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Confederate flags flown aboard the international space station — and seemingly signed by a NASA astronaut — showed up last week on the online auction site eBay.
The original eBay listing indicated that the 4-by-6-inch flags were brought aboard the space station by Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov in 2004, and an accompanying photo showed a sample flag that seemed to bear Sharipov’s signature as well as that of Leroy Chiao, his NASA colleague on the station. Yet another photo showed several of the rebel flags floating in a space station module.
The item was pulled from the auction on Monday by the seller, Alex Panchenko of USSR-Russian Air-Space Collectibles Inc. in Los Angeles — and on Tuesday, Panchenko told MSNBC.com that he removed the items from sale because he had concluded the flag and the authentication documents were forgeries.
However, Robert Pearlman, editor and founder of CollectSpace, said he believes the flags are authentic.
“The picture taken of the flags aboard the station says a lot,” he said. “It would be difficult to fake, given the style and I couldn't see the motivation to do so.” The “onboard-the-ISS” stamp, added Pearlman, is not known to have been counterfeited anywhere."
The disappearance of the flags followed a round of criticism over the weekend from former space scientist Keith Cowing, publisher of NASA Watch, an independent Web log. He cited the Confederate flags as an example of “bad judgment on the ISS.”
“You'd think that someone on the U.S. side of the ISS program would have expressed some concern about flying a symbol on the ISS that many Americans associate with slavery,” Cowing wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Indeed it does. But I suspect Mr. Dees is far more interested in the financial rewards he reaped from that legal victory than any commendation. From Mr. Silverstein's article:
"In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse."
One should note that Mr. Dees is a professional fundraiser in addition to his calling as an attorney. In 1972 he was George McGovern's campaign finance director. In 1976 he served as Jimmy Carter's campaign finance director. He was national finance chairman for Ted Kennedy in 1980 during Kennedy's Democratic primary challenge to Carter.
A DICTATOR refuses to abide by the laws. The northern states agreed that slavery was legal, and many a yankee made a fortune peddling human flesh. Only a liberal like Al Gore would believe that the President is not subject to the Constitution, and can overthrow it at a whim. Face the facts, Lincoln was a DICTATOR. Only a liberal would believe his actions were legal - obviously you believe in that old liberal standard - a 'living' Constitution.
Why are you even posting on a conservative board, you certainly don't believe in the rule of law, you don't beleive that men have the right of self-goverment, you believe that SCOTUS is comprised of gods whose most infantile holdings are worthy of worship, and you believe everything the media has presented about Saint Abraham and the union cause. Face the facts, around here such are known as 'SHEEPLE".
Absolute bullsh*t. It was because he abided by the laws that Lincoln cancelled earlier manumission orders by men like Fremont and Butler. But by freeing southern slaves through the proclamation he made the law moot. Free people didn't have to be returned to their former owners.
Only a liberal like Al Gore would believe that the President is not subject to the Constitution, and can overthrow it at a whim.
Only a fool would classify the Emancipation Proclamation as such an action.
Why are you even posting on a conservative board...
Because it pisses liberals like you off so much.
...you certainly don't believe in the rule of law...
Totally false. What you mean to say is that I don't believe the law is what you say it is, preferring to go along with people who actually know what they are talking about. Like Chief Justice Marshall, Chief Justice Chase, Chief Justice Rehnquist, etc., etc.
...you don't beleive that men have the right of self-goverment...
While you do? Well, I guess the white part of the population anyway.
...you believe that SCOTUS is comprised of gods whose most infantile holdings are worthy of worship...
No I believe that the Supreme Court has been, for the most part, been comprised of men with a better understanding of the Constitution and the law, and who are better equipped for reasoned analysis and rational rulings than men, well, than men like yourself who don't seem to have any of those traits.
...and you believe everything the media has presented about Saint Abraham and the union cause...
No, but then again I have no doubt that you consider anyone who doesn't share your almost pathalogical hatred of Lincoln to be a Lincoln worshiper.
...around here such are known as 'SHEEPLE".
And around the rest of the world people like you are known as nutcases. Or stand waite.
Just how many millions would you sacrifice for 'union'? You insist that those seceding were still 'Americans', yet you laud those that slaughtered them by the thousands. I've only seen that kind of reaction from Islamics celebrating 9/11 . Are you Muslim? Just how many millions of Americans deserve death for wanting to be free?
Did our ancestors that fought Britain deserve death, to be dragged back under her despotism because they had the temerity to yearn to be free? And if they had failed, would that make their cause less noble? What about Iraqis - are they to be condemned for wanting to be free of Saddam Hussein? Should they continue to be subject to forced rape, mutilations, torture and death, or is freedom worth fighting for.
Personally, all your whining and posturing makes me sick, you sound like Al Shapton or Jesse Jackson. There's a reason the war never ends, and it's because folks like you ignore their ancestors culpability and attempt to condemn those that simply want nothing more than to honour their gallant Confederate dead - men that never owned a slave, men that left family and friends behind, men that gave everything in defense of their homes and their right to be free.
OK?
i'm just sure you are "well respected" by the "chicks" in your life, assuming you have any. (sarcasm button: ON!)
free dixie,sw
i'm just sick to death of LYING, arrogant, REVISIONIST statists, who try to excuse EVERY single "excess" of the WAR CRIMINALS in blue uniforms.
such "deniers" are, just like the scum that denies the Nazi HOLOCAUST, = beneath my contempt.
free dixie,sw
The double standard lies on your side, I've been consistent all along. Accusing Lincoln of racism and not Lee and Davis and Jackson, accusing Lincoln of violating the U.S. Constitution but not the confederate leaders of violating theirs. Double standards all along.
And by the way, the Constitution was not overthrown, unilaterally or otherwise merely because you said it was.
Just how many millions would you sacrifice for 'union'? You insist that those seceding were still 'Americans', yet you laud those that slaughtered them by the thousands.
Had the toll of the war been 600,000 but the confederacy had won their rebellion and achieved independence would you have said the cost was worth it? Some things are worth dying for, the country being one of them.
Did our ancestors that fought Britain deserve death, to be dragged back under her despotism because they had the temerity to yearn to be free? And if they had failed, would that make their cause less noble?
Despotism? Yearn to be free? Lame hyperbole aside, had our Founding Father's lost their rebellion I have no doubt that the penalties inflicted on them by the crown would have been much more severe than those imposed on the south. Necks would have been stretched, and it's doubtful that the colonies have been able to retain what little local control they had prior to the revolution, much less enjoy almost immediate inclusion in to the government that the southern states had following their rebellion.
What about Iraqis - are they to be condemned for wanting to be free of Saddam Hussein? Should they continue to be subject to forced rape, mutilations, torture and death, or is freedom worth fighting for.
Is this where you compare European intervention into your rebellion, had it happened, with the U.S. intervention into Iraq?
Personally, all your whining and posturing makes me sick, you sound like Al Shapton or Jesse Jackson.
Then take an Alka Seltzer or go elsewhere. Personally I would find your arm-waving, mouth-foaming, pathologically insane hatred of Abraham Lincoln to be funny if it weren't so sad.
There's a reason the war never ends, and it's because folks like you ignore their ancestors culpability and attempt to condemn those that simply want nothing more than to honour their gallant Confederate dead - men that never owned a slave, men that left family and friends behind, men that gave everything in defense of their homes and their right to be free.
If that's all it was then I wouldn't be here. But all to often men like you "honor" your ancestors through slander, myths, and out-and-out lies about my ancestors.
i wouldn't wish having to talk to a klansman off on my enemies.
as far as i'm concerned, the KKK-lunatics are "garbage in semi-human form".
free dixie,sw
What about the threat of the dreaded "slave insurrection" that the Dixie big shots used to excite the non-slaveowning rabble into their service? Doesn't the slave have as much to rebel over deprivation of freedom as the slave owner does over an election result he doesn't like? The morally bankrupt rebs talked a noble game but they were all for a heavy-handed state when they were the ones wielding the club of government upon their"property".
rotflmRao AT you.
free dixie,sw
Horace Greeley, upon learning of the results of the battle of Chancellorsville:
"My God, it is horrible. Horrible. And to think of it -- 130,000 magnificent soldiers so cut to pieces by less than 60,000 half-starved ragamuffins."*
Whether "rabble," or "ragamuffins," it is well for the Feds that there weren't more of them.
* Foote, Vol. 2, p.315
They got their comeuppance two months later at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
Because there weren't more of them.
Excuses, excuses. Chancellorsville was the high water mark, such as there was for the confederacy. At least in the east, in the west they had been stumbling from disaster to disaster for some time.
Yes, it was just a four-year picnic for the Feds, wasn't it? No, I don't make excuses. We got beat. It seems to me the excuse-making should be reserved for explanations of why it was so difficult for the most powerful, well-equipped army in the history of the world to defeat a makeshift army half its size, comprised mainly of barefoot rabble and ragamuffins.
It wasn't all that hard. In the first place the idea that the confederate army was makeshift or poorly equipped is absolute nonsense, at least for the first 3 plus years of the war. In terms of arms and munitions it was as well equipped as their opponents for the most part. In the second place, the confederacy spent almost the whole four years in the process of losing the war. Their territory was shrinking almost from the very beginning as the Union regained territory. And as I said the war in the west was an almost unbroken string of confederate losses. If there was a major reason why the rebellion lasted as long as it did, then it would have to be that the Union didn't turn to total war until the last year.
No? Maybe not, for armchair quarterbacks. I suspect Mr. Lincoln might have disagreed. Along with Generals McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Hooker, Burnsides, and probably even Meade and Grant.
In the first place the idea that the confederate army was makeshift or poorly equipped is absolute nonsense, at least for the first 3 plus years of the war.
Well, you got me there. It is absolutely true that for the first three years of the war the Union army generously kept those ragamuffins well-supplied with muskets and artillery.
If there was a major reason why the rebellion lasted as long as it did, then it would have to be that the Union didn't turn to total war until the last year.
There is a lot of truth to that. On the other hand, getting back to my original point, had there been an equivalent number of rabble, the Union would have had to resort to total war the first year, with doubtful results.
the ONLY reasons that the southland lost is that the north had over twice as many men and several times more "things" to wage war with. in contradiction to what you stated, Douglas Southall Freeman, as well as most other scholars, agrees with me on this one: that dixie's forces never had enough of anything, except HONOR & BRAVERY. (they had plenty of both of those for 2 armies!)
free dixie,sw
the ONLY reasons that the southland lost is that the north had over twice as many men and several times more "things" to wage war with. in contradiction to what you stated, Douglas Southhall Freeman agrees with me on this one.
free dixie,sw
No, they didn't do that at all.
the ONLY reasons that the southland lost is that the north had over twice as many men and several times more "things" to wage war with. in contradiction to what you stated, Douglas Southhall Freeman agrees with me on this one.
Freeman also confirms Lee was a slave owner, and not the poverty stricken wretch you portray him as. Are you picking and choosing what parts of Freeman you believe and what parts you don't?
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