Memorial Day is to honor and pay tribute to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Video from Youtube.com, posted by armyveteran101st, PROUD MEMBER OF “VETERANS FOR OBAMA” SINCE FEBRUARY OF 2007!
Black student group challenges practices of Washington Lee University
A small group of black students at Washington and Lee University took school administrators by surprise with a list of demands that included renouncing Robert E. Lee for his racism. The students, who do not represent all African American students at Washington and Lee, call themselves The Committee. The Committee has threated civil disobedience if W & L officials administrators do not meet their demands.
A group of black law students at Washington and Lee University is urging administrators to atone for its Confederate heritage and what they call the “dishonorable conduct” of namesake Robert E. Lee. The movement has struck a racial divide on the bucolic campus in Lexington, Va., where black students make up about 3.5 percent of the total student population. Third-year law student Dominik Taylor, a descendent of slaves on his father’s side, said he felt betrayed by admissions representatives who touted the school’s diversity. “They assured me it was a welcoming environment where everyone sticks together as a community,” Taylor said. “Then I came here and felt ostracized and alienated.” Read More
POW flag made of bedsheets finally unfurled after 69 years
The makeshift American flag, made 69 years ago from bedsheets, was a symbol of defiance, perseverance and patriotism to the American prisoners of war who were beaten, tortured and starved by their Japanese captors at the Omori POW Camp during World War II.
Richmond native James “Denny” Landrum, an electrician’s mate first class who had just turned 20 when captured, was among them.
He and his fellow submariners of the USS Grenadier were taken prisoner after their ship was attacked and eventually scuttled on April 22, 1943, off Penang, Malaysia.
Landrum eventually made it home. But the flag he helped to secretly create and later waved in an iconic photograph taken as he and his fellow POWs were liberated on Aug. 29, 1945, vanished over time.
More killing at Fort Hood
This video was recorded fairly soon after the incident. Much has been learned since then.
A shooting at the Fort Hood military installation in Texas has left at least four people dead, including the gunman, and more than a dozen were injured, according to authorities.
The gunman, identified by multiple government sources as Army Specialist Ivan Lopez, took his own life, officials said.
Lopez, 33, of Kileen, Tex., was wearing an Army uniform at the time of the shooting, Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told reporters.
Four people were taken to Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Tex., and another two are being brought there, said Glen Couchman, the facility’s chief medical officer. Their injuries that “range from stable to quite critical,” he said.
Are we destined to always fight the last war?
Today I got a weekly email from my congressman, Rob Wittman. He was paying tribute to the veterans. His email contained the following paragraph:
This past year, I had the pleasure of
visiting servicemembers deployed in
Afghanistan, and forward deployed in
Singapore, Australia, Germany, Italy and
Turkey. I recently spent a day in the woods
with some of our Marines training at
Quantico. On November 2, I met with veterans
who serve on my Veterans’ Advisory Council
and veterans of the Korean War. Our nation
has learned much from what happened at the
beginning of the Korean War. At that time,
our country was not prepared to go to war.
We did not ensure that our forces were ready
for combat and we sent under-trained and
under-equipped Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and
Marines into harm’s way. From that
experience, harsh lessons were learned that
should direct our current and future
decision makers about investing in our
service members.
I was dumbfounded. I was barely even on this earth when the Korean War started. However, I wondered to myself, how on earth could things have deteriorated so fast in less than 5 years. Weren’t we in tip top shape as a nation after WWII? Didn’t we emerge as the most powerful nation in the world? Well Hell, I didn’t know so I thought I’ll ask a vet. I emailed George Harris. For those of you who don’t know, he is a Korean War vet. He went in when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, right out of Oklahoma.
Why are we a nation “exhausted from war”?
Every time I turned on the TV last week, I heard how Americans are exhausted from a decade of war. What on earth are they exhausted from? I understand that military families are tired of the multiple deployments. I understand that any military family has got to be sick of war and especially tired of everything “middle east.”
Give me a break. Military families have absorbed the entire burden of war with little or no involvement of the American people. The general population has not had to inconvenience themselves one iota over our decade long wars. Any exhaustion the American people feel from war has to be from having a guilty conscience.
What sacrifices have the typical American family had to make because we were a nation at war? Have we had to give up goods and services and products? have we been asked to take heroic measures or grow victory gardens? Had anything been rationed? Have our sons and daughters been called up? Have we had to bury our spouses, siblings, sons, or daughters or parents?
Some Syrian Considerations: humanitarian crisis
It took two years of conflict in Syria for the refugee figure to reach one million, but only six more months to reach two million, Mr. Guterres noted. In addition, at least 4.5 million people have been driven from their homes inside Syria by the destruction and violence, meaning that close to one-third of the country’s population has been displaced by the civil war, and about half the population has needed humanitarian aid, Mr. Guterres said, putting Syria’s crisis at a level unseen in recent decades.
About 40,000 Syrians fled to Iraq in the last two weeks of August, and 13,000 arrived in Lebanon in the past week. Over all, close to 5,000 Syrians are leaving every day.
Imagine if this number of people flowed into the United States, unauthorized. What would we do with the people? Many Americans complain about illegal immigration. Hmmm…what’s the difference?
Sarah Palin: Let Allah sort it out
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) weighed in on the situation in Syria, attacking President Barack Obama and saying he should “let Allah sort it out.”
Palin said it’s “bull” to compare Obama to President George W. Bush
“Our Nobel Peace Prize winning President needs to seek Congressional approval before taking us to war. It’s nonsense to argue that, ‘Well, Bush did it.’ Bull,” Palin said in a Facebook post Friday night. “President Bush received support from both Congress and a coalition of our allies for ‘his wars,’ ironically the same wars Obama says he vehemently opposed because of lack of proof of America’s vital interests being at stake.”
Cup of Brandy: One Last Toast
An anonymous guest poster via email:
On Tuesday, in Fort Walton Beach , Florida , the surviving Doolittle Raiders gathered publicly for the last time.
They once were among the most universally admired and revered men in the United States . There were 80 of the Raiders in April 1942, when they carried out one of the most courageous and heart-stirring military operations in this nation’s history. The mere mention of their unit’s name, in those years, would bring tears to the eyes of grateful Americans.
Now only four survive.
After Japan ‘s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, with the United States reeling and wounded, something dramatic was needed to turn the war effort around.
Even though there were no friendly airfields close enough to Japan for the United States to launch a retaliation, a daring plan was devised. Sixteen B-25s were modified so that they could take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. This had never before been tried — sending such big, heavy bombers from a carrier.
No doubt about use of chemical weapons in Syria
So what do we do? Is this issue clear cut?
There are those who say we aren’t the world police. There are those who think we should mind our own business. Other people feel the use of chemical weapons violates the most basic of all international values.
Right now, depending on you listen to and on who you believe, it appears that the United States and its allies are preparing for a strike on Syria. The objective remains unclear to the public right now.
Read More
Yes, Nevada, there is an Area 51
For reasons unknown, the government finally has admitted that Area 51 — the Shangri-La of alien hunters and a sturdy trope of science-fiction movies — is a real place in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Las Vegas.
It presumably does not house hideous squidlike ETs, but at least you can see the place on a map. Area 51 is confirmed in declassified CIA documents posted online Thursday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. A dogged researcher pried from the CIA a report on the history of the U-2 spy plane, which was tested and operated at Area 51.
The military, which runs the base, always denied that Area 51 was called by its famous moniker, preferring a designation connected to the Groom Lake salt flat, a landing strip for the U-2 and other stealth aircraft.
“Your honor, there is no name,” an Air Force attorney told a federal judge in 1995. “There is no name for the operating location near Groom Lake.”
The hearing was part of an environmental poisoning case brought by Area 51 workers who said that they had been sickened by exposure to toxic chemicals — including anti-radar coatings and other classified materials — burned in open pits on the base.
Obama authorizes direct military support to Syrian rebels
The United States has concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in its fight against opposition forces, and President Obama has authorized direct U.S. military support to the rebels, the White House said Thursday.
“The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Rhodes said U.S. intelligence had determined with “high certainty” that Syrian government forces have “used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year.”
There are no details as to what expanded military support means. President Obama has not committed ground troops. According to one poll, 24% of Americans do not want American involvement.
Syria’s outgunned rebels have issued urgent appeals this week for antitank and antiaircraft weaponry to counter a government offensive that is backed by Hezbollah fighters and Iranian militia forces.
“Suffice it to say this is going to be different in both scope and scale,” Rhodes said of the new assistance. Obama said last year that confirmation of chemical weapons use would cross a “red line” for the United States.
Manassas, Virginia: The Sullivan Ballou Letter
Some of the pictures in this video will look very familiar. The Sullivan Ballou letter of Ken Burns fame is probably one of the most poignant of all the war letters home. Major Ballou was an educated man and he was able to speak of his longings for home in a way that perhaps wasn’t typical of the ordinary grunt. His poetic descriptions of his conflicted feelings for his wife, family and country and his premonitions still send a chill both up and down my spine, knowing that this man died just a few miles from my house in the First Battle of Manassas.
How many of those who died are in unmarked graves, mostly somewhere in the South? Most of those killed in the Civil War, both North and South, never made it home at all. Much has been made of how unprepared this country was to deal with its dead at the beginning of the Civil War. They had to learn quickly. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all of our other wars combined.
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Colonel Morris Davis to the Prez: Man UP!
Moe Davis was interviewed this week by Christiane Amanpour to discuss the prisoners still in Gitmo. Contrast the professional discussion with Christiane Amanpour and the rude way he was treated by Chris Matthews. What we can learn from Moe Davis, according to CNN.com:
Hearing Colonel Morris Davis speak, it’s easy to forget that he used to be the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay.
“We used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave; we’ve been the constrained and the cowardly,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.
President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo detention facility when he took office in 2009; four years later, it’s still open.
A majority of the detainees, over 100, have been on hunger strike for more than three months to protest their detention; the military has resorted to force feeding them.
Eighty six of the detainees, Davis said, have never been charged with a crime. Many of those who were convicted of crimes were sent back to their home countries, and many are now free.
“It’s a bizarre, perverted system of justice,” he said, “where being convicted of a war crime is your ticket home, and if you’re never charged, much less convicted, you spend the rest of your life sitting at Guantanamo.”
A scant six years ago, as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo under President Bush, Colonel Davis sounded like a true believer.
On Friday the Gitmo hunger strike will be 100 days old.
