These colors don't run!

“What is an American?”

“An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan. An American may also be a Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

“An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses. An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

“An American is from the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God given right of each person the pursuit of happiness.

“An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need. When Afghanistan was overrun by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country. As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

“Americans welcome the best, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes. But they also welcome the least.

“The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America. Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001 earning a better life for their families. I've been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 other countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

“So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in the history of the world. But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.”

Fly the Flag today, and every day. God Bless our Country.

for those with kids in school age: do they still start the school day with the pledge? how about private/public schools?

My son goes to parochial school. They not only say the Pledge of Allegiance, they sing God Bless America or the National Anthem.

In public schools they probably sing an oath to the multi-cultural, diverse society, sing a 60s protest song, and open their lesson books for the day: The History of America the Evil by Howard Zinn, Art for Fun and Profit by Ward Churchill, and Heather has two mommies.

It's amazing how OUR flag and those words can bring such a swelling in your chest...a sense of pride...a sense of freedom...and sense of wholeness. Thank you for the reminder.

yo geoge, my moms a teacher at a public highschool, and now they cant use red pens to mark answers wrong because its offensive, ie: the kid with few red marks on the paper feels good while the kid with lots of red marks feels slighted..

Public schools start out with the Pledge of Allegiance, then a moment of meditation or reflection, I forget exactly what they call it. Calling it "prayer" is too offensive to some so it was changed several years ago.

George...LOL on that reading material!

What a sad, pathetic society the left has created in this great country.

I should post a humor warning on my comments that say,

"WARNING: MATERIAL MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR LEFTIES WITH NO SENSE OF IRONY OR SARCASM."

God Bless the U.S.A. I'm so proud to be a citizen of this country, and also proud of my parent's native country of Cuba.

As you should be Ed,as you should be.

How nieve!!! This country has historically shit on all the groups listed above, especially indians or african americans. I'm just a guy who happens to live here. Lets not be nieve about this. This country is racist and unfair. If it wasn't for the fact that our governement hates fidel even more, trust me you would be feeling the burn too. I'm not a liberal or a leftist, i'm just a realists. All the people posting in support should read your history and understand how the historical implications ring true today. I'm a black man who lives here....Period!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Huh? Is your name Bob by any chance?

"Lets not be nieve about this" --Angry Black Man

Yes, well, let's also learn how to spell, okay? Then maybe people will not laugh at you.

And, having pointed that out (and oh, there were more) let me say: you are an ass. I'll bet your whole life is built around thinking that this country is racist and therefore you might as well not even try to work or excel. Convenient. Very convenient.

Angry Black Man,
Go live in Cuba as a black man for a week. You will come back a changed man, and I guarantee that you will kiss the ground of this country frantically upon arrival.
Please check the photos of the conditions under which the black population lives in Cuba and ask yourself how in a country where more or less 50 percent of the population is not black 90 percent of the penal population is black, there are no black ministers (of the government I mean) no blacks in the higher echelons of military command and no blacks whatsoever are involved in the day today decision making of the group that runs the country. Then ask yourself why the opposition to cagastro has so many visible blacks. Why cagastro called "lil niggers" the blacks that he executed after a mock trial (no long appeals there) for hijacking a ferry with no bloodshed? Because he is a bigot and a racist. Apartheid? Cuba can tell you what apartheid is. As a blackman you cannot even dream of living in dignity in that island. And you will be discriminated against in every hotel and strip searched by the police in PUBLIC.
Look at your brothers and sisters in Cuba. Feel bad for them. And do something to rid them from the slave master supreme.
All said.

CB-- I hear you and i know this. Cuba..Brazil...Mexico, alot of latin american countries. But to be singing the virtues of the united states to black americans is comical. Anybody that has experienced the real U.S. outside of Miami will tell you that this can be a ugly country as well.

Dear Grace--- My life is built around reality. I'm curious, how does my work ethic have anything to do with this country being racists? If your black you have no choice but to work hard to make it or you won't survive, its that simple. But if you want to live in a world of make believe go ahead. Deny history and the facts. Pretend that this country is so good and righteous. Maybe we can swing by Gitmo or Abu Ghraib (grace check my spelling your better than i am). How about swinging by Pat Tillman's house. Lets ask their parents how great this country is. Lets swing by the Native American reservations and ask them how great this nation is, maybe pop our heads into the ghettos of black america too. Its one thing to avoid the truth, its another to be blatanly ignorant of it.

Angry Black Man - There was a former Black Panther Party member named Anthony "Tony Bryant who spent many years in prison in Cuba after hijacking a commercial airliner in 1969 and having it land on the island expecting to be welcomed with open arms by Castro as a fellow commard. Instead imprisoned. When he was released from prison and permitted to return to the U.S. he kissed the ground and became a staunch anti Castro and anti Communist advocate ( Hijacker Is Glad He's Back in U.S., Rails Against Reds). In 1984 a book was published about his ordeal titled ">http://www.biblio.com/books/36167.html"> Hijack. He died in December 1999 at age 60 of leukemia (19">http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/bryantgone.html">19 December 1999 Sun-Sentinel article).

What a difference a day makes.

Zippy,
I am a native of Havana, lived ALL OVER THE US and abroad. This is much better than you can imagine Zippy... I don't live in Miami, for the record. And yes, if you don't like it you can go live in Cuba, let's see for how long. If this country were that bad, as you say, the rafters would be paddling in the opposite direction, to Cuba. But that's not the case.

Zippy, I can understand, as someone born in Cuba and brought up here, what racism is like. I know what you feel, I've experienced it. I have, by virtue of the fact that I do not look hispanic, been called everything from "fucking kike" to "americano hijo de la chingada." I've also been called "fucking Cuban" -- to my face! You know what, I don't dwell on it. There will always be idiots who do that.

The issue I see from your post and ABM's post is that you cannot let it go. How do you think the Cubans that arrived here without a cent to their name succeeded? We let go the unimportant, irrelevancies that did not put food on the table, and held on to those that mattered: God, family, friendship, work. And what kept our gut going was the never-fading hope for the defeat and death of fidel, and freedom for the country of our birth.

The poet Carl Sandburg once wrote that "the past is a bucket of ashes" and he was right. Forget the idiots that slight you; go forward knowing who you are. None of us are ignorant of what you have detailed; but bringing up Abu Ghraib is getting old. Bringing up Gitmo is getting old. The native Americans may have beefs about the past, but now they're swimming in cash because of laws in place that allow them to do what others can't!

Here is the testimony of an ex prisoner of Saddam I read today. Tell me if this is not worse than Abu Ghraib or the worse thing the idiot press says we have done at Gitmo:

Like many educated Shia in southern Iraq, Ali is pro-American, although he doesn’t advertise that sentiment. (He’s not alone: “Believe me, many people will tell you they hate America,” he once told me, “but they are usually lying.”) And like many Shia, Ali’s gratitude for liberation is a deeply personal matter.

“Twenty five years ago,” he begins, checking his mobile, as if in the last five minutes he’d somehow missed someone calling in a news flash, “my brother Samir was playing football in a field here in Basra. On the highway nearby passed a convoy of Baath-party officials. Someone shot at the Baathi — or perhaps simply fired a weapon in the air, who knows? Unsure who was responsible or why, the Baathists arrested everyone playing football and took them to prison.”

Months went by, and the government refused to say what happened to Samir. With his family growing increasingly distraught, Ali took the hazardous step of visiting the party’s Basra headquarters to ask about his brother’s whereabouts. In response to his query, the Baathists arrested Ali, accusing him of belong to the Shia opposition group, Dawa Islamiyya — as had, so they claimed, Samir. (Accusing someone of membership in Dawa was an all-purpose charge the regime used to “disappear” its citizens.) “I was sent to prison for trying to find out if my brother was alive or dead,” Ali says.

At one point in his imprisonment, the Baathists took Ali to a “special” interrogation room, and ordered him to strip off his clothing. The interrogator then offered Ali a choice — either he allowed torturers to shove a large bottle up his rectum, or hammer a nail into his back. “I chose the nail,” Ali recounts in a flat tone. Twisting in his chair, he lifts up his t-shirt to exhibit a quarter-sized lump in his shoulder blade. “Believe me, sir, you have not felt such pain.”

Nine months later, the Baathists released Ali from prison — without, however, disclosing Samir’s whereabouts. Not until the collapse of Saddam nearly a quarter century later did information about missing Iraqis began to filter out to the public. “I met a man who was imprisoned with Samir,” Ali relates. “He said that my brother had gone crazy and began shouting — excuse my language, sir — ‘Fuck, Saddam! Fuck him! Why is he fucking us like this?’ Because of that, the regime sentenced him to death in a ‘slicing machine.’”

“Do you know what that is, sir? It is machine with five sharp blades. They stood Samir in front of the blades, pressed a button and in an instant my brother was in five pieces. Believe me, sir. This happened under Saddam.” --National Review Online, June 14, 2005 (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/vincent200506140801.asp)

There are real enemies for us to fight out there. We got Saddam, fidel is another one that needs to be stopped. He is a racist. He hates Blacks like poison. Why do you think there are so few of them (if any) at the top levels of his regime? It amazes me that American Blacks idolize this man, this monster that holds the record for incarcerating the longest serving Black political prisoner, ever:

Eusebio Peñalver is the stuff of which movie heroes are made. Eusebio was the world’s longest-serving black political prisoner of the last century, and in the history of the world. He is a black Cuban, holed up and tortured in Castro's jails longer than Nelson Mandela languished in South Africa's. He was bloodied in his fight with Castro-style Communism but unbowed after 30 years in its dungeons. He scorned any "re-education" by his jailers. He knew it was his jailers who needed the education. He refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal. He knew who should wear this too. He stood defiant through almost 30 years of hell in Castro's prisons.

Oscar Elias Biscet, a prisoner at Combinado del Este, who is Black and a Christian, is kept in conditions so horrifying that his wife fears for his life on a daily basis. Imagine being in a four-foot by six-foot cell and you do not even have the solace of your Bible because they took that, too.

So dude, chill out. There are worse monsters active today that need your attention. The past is gone. It's over. It's time to go forward. Join us in the fight against one of the real evils in this world.

LMBAO---I will go on the record and say that CUBA sucks. I know this. I will also go on the record and say America sucks as well. If you don't believe that this country is as dispacable and sinister then you haven't been outside of your house. I am not disagreeing with you guys, just saying all this pledge of allegiance and this is a great country is straight comedy. Its all good in little havanna but you boys come up to pacific northwest or the segregated south (alabama, mississippi, texas, tennessee) and quoute that. These people will spit in your face and tell you to go back. Having the right to speak is great. So is having the right to be respected.

I give up.

Who has disrespected you? I wrote what I wrote without caring one whit whether you were Black, orange, green or purple. I wrote it because you are a human being, who deserves better than the self-hatred you display.

George Man----Hugs Bro-- Total Miscommunication-- I'm talking about respect in general *NOT YOU BRO*. I hear what your saying. I am not applauding Fidel, i know about the racism in Cuba. But NObody should ever forget the MILLIONS of Blacks who perished in this country. I don't have hate bro, i have reality. You need to come up north and visit other cities. See the segreation and economic disparity. The squalor, the poverty that took generations to build. The crime, that trash that is depression. That is a by product of racism. You talk about cubans making something of themselves. So true, you know why cuz you get support from the governement thru loans. They want you to succeed to throw it in fidels face. But you know what, that same access to capital has been denied for GENERATIONS. My father and uncle couldn't go to college because they were black. This was the 60's and 70's. They struggled to get loans for a house and they had perfect credit. Denied access to generate wealth for there own families. So when i hear people say get over it, i laff. How can i when its all around me everyday. Generation after gerneration was subjected to it.

I put myself thru college and i will put myself thru graduate school, but i can't tell you how i want to ring the neck of the white kid sporting mom and dads lexus, who are the son of doctors. Because that could of been me and my brothers and we wouldn't have to go thru this bullshit of 50 hr workweek with a full class schedule and no transportation. We wouldn't be tempted with joining the army to pay for school. Trust me bro, i'm moving on, but i will NEVER forget.

FYI - In case anyone is interested. The link I posted to Anthony Bryants book is offering it for $45.00 USD (I linked it mainly for the description).

The same book is available on ebay for $2.00 - $3.00 USD (not including shipping which ranges $3.50 - 4.50 according to the avilable offerings at ebay).

ANGRY BLACK MAN...BAAA, BAAA
Sir, with all due respect, if you put yourself through College, what happened to your spelling? What happened to your grammar? "I" is always capitalized, and it is "you're" not your, a common error in the comments I often find in the letters on Blog sites.

What's wrong with you? You say it yourself, as an "Angry Black Man" you've hamstrung yourself already. What does a Doctor's son driving a Lexus have to do with you (or me, for that matter)? The most repulsive and obscene form of discrimination goes on in Africa every week of the year, from slavery to torture, to hacking off limbs and on to murder, and let's not forget rape and slaughter of children? It's Black against Black. Does that have anything to do with us? Of course not, but then again, why not send some of your anger in that direction? Or, what about gang killings here in the U.S., over the color of your shoelaces? Black against Black. Vicious. Youngsters gunned down, good families have to live through it when their "straight A" children are killed by chicken-livered young killers.

Get over your anger. Everyone faces discrimination in one way or the other almost every day. Women at work, Mexicans living in a Salavadorean neighborhood, fat people, skinny people, it is all over. Get over your anger. If this country had a 100% Black population, you'd still have reason to be angry, because then it would be how dark or light in skin color you were, which tribe you belonged to, which party line you followed. Get over your anger. Muslims are not safe from other Muslims. Get over your anger.

You have the highest level of safety in this country of any you can name. You have the best opportunities in this country of any you can name. All you have to do is to pick up some books at the Library and sit down and study the English language. I learned ALL of mine in High School, and you're a man who worked his way through college? Then, what in the hell did you learn there? You cannot write worth a damn (or a shit) and on a job application, you'd rate a big Zero and into the wastebasket. Get over your anger. Study. Learn. College? What in the hell did you take for a Major, Black Studies, a sleigh-ride to a job in the basement or at McDonald's? Angry Black Man, become a Happy Black Man and you'll find yourself a success in all ways possible.