America Honors It’s Heroes At Arlington, Today.

ARLINGTON, Va. -(Army.mil)- A patriotic ceremony honoring the service and sacrifice of America’s military members is scheduled for May 26 at 11 a.m. in Arlington National Cemetery.

This year’s event, which marks the 140th observance of Memorial Day on these hallowed grounds, will be hosted by Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., Commanding General of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington and Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region.

A wreath-laying ceremony will take place at the Tomb of the Unknowns, followed by a remembrance ceremony in the Memorial Amphiteater. The event will commence with a prelude concert by the U.S. Army Band at 10:20 a.m. inside the amphiteater.

Both ceremonies are free and open to the military community and general public.  No tickets are needed to attend this event.

I gather that C-Span will be showing this live. If you don’t have C-span on your vid system at home, you can watch it all online, here. Feed starts at 10:55 eastern time.

I’ve never tripped a booby trap,
or stood upon a mine,
but I have seen what happens,
when you’re out there on the line.

Some men die real hard,
others not so bad,
but t really doesn’t matter,
when you’ve given all you had.

I was never wounded,
so I never felt the shock,
or felt the pain rip through my body,
while calling our for Doc.

Sometimes the pain is awful,
it can make you want to dry,
that pain can get so bad at times,
you might pray to God to die.

I know I was lucky,
that it never happened to me,
and that someone else’s blood,
was shed to keep me free.

-Ronald Murray

LOS ANGELES – (AP)- Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died. He was 86.

Let’s face it; there was nobody alive back in the day who didn’t see Rowan and Martin.

“[Mrs. Clinton] has a history of covering up her own mistakes behind sexism.”

Maureen Dowd, via Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters.

Glenn:

THE CNN FOLKS emailed this tidbit from Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources:

KURTZ: But Marie Cocco, are the media being tarred with a pretty broad brush here because of the out-of-bounds comments of a certain number of loudmouths?

COCCO: Well, this is amplified on the Internet, which, you know, may not be the broadcast media, but it is part of the media of this campaign. And if you went to the Internet — you know, we all know about the false Muslim e-mails that go around about Barack Obama. But if you ever saw the language, the vulgarity, the vitriol that is hauled at Hillary Clinton by liberal Democrats, by the liberal blogs, largely by, frankly, Obama supporters, you’d be appalled. I mean, you’d punish your children for this.

Glad somebody’s noticing.

Yeah, but look what it took to get them to notice… a liberal being the target. This stuff has been directed at Conservatives since the days of Reagan, and nobody batted an eyelash at it. Now that a liberal’s the target, it’s all of a sudden a BAD thing.

I’ve pretty much held silence on this FLDS thing, but Ive started to notice a pattern in the labeling of the thing which I find disturbing. Witness this write-up from Mary Flood in the Houston Chronicle:

Many lawyers for children and parents in a Texas polygamist sect are boiling mad about the growing number of legal errors they claim the state has made in seizing and holding more than 460 children.

From the way officials handled an April anonymous phone tip about a sexually abused girl allegedly at the sect’s ranch, the seizure of the children, the court hearings and the questioning of children and parents alike, many attorneys are crying foul.

Well of course those charged are crying foul. When does that NOT happen?  I’m sure if we do a study on the reactions of those charged with ANY crime, or subject to ANY governmental action that they’re going to be angry about it, and think themselves the wronged party, despite their having been guilty as charged. Ask anyone currently serving time if they deserved what they got in terms of punishment. If you find one who says yes, he’s well along the road to rehabilitation, and likely has a firmer handle than most on reality. From the rest, you’ll get “But we’re people too”, while ignoring the fact that most criminals are people.

We had news reports on this business last week, that included the phrase ‘Children being ripped away from their families’…   Reports clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings of readers. What they didn’t mention i those reports was that such a statement is only true when applying the broadest imaginable standard to the term ‘family’… even broader and more all-encompassing than Chuckles Manson and his followers used.  The parental relationships are in fact the largest part of the problem… we’re talking about kids who don’t know who their parents ARE, and whose DNA is the only clue to work with. Kids who are forced to become parents while they’re but kids themselves.

It interests me that the usually anti-religious left is loudest among the groups attacking the CPS just now. Usually, these are people who never met a religion they didn’t hate, save for the worship of Gaia. But because the religion invoked here runs afoul of the values of Mainstream America, these guys are all over it… and to hell with the rights of the children involved. That rather dramatic shift away from their traditional roles of attacking religion should be the first clue that not all is what it seems.

CPS may not be the best avenue to approach this situation. Governmental screwups are a given. Sorry, but that’s the fact. But if not government, what else, then?  I am by no means saying the Texas CPS is without error… Of course not. But these kind of cases are notorious for making bad case law. This one is proving no exception to that rule. On that basis whatever higher court ruling happens on this stuff, it can only be damaging to American life, and the values that we hold dear as a society. But can we as a society sit back and watch the kind of child abuse reported in this case and do nothing? Not if we intend to remain a society, no.

Therein, I think lies the real issue.   I’ve said repeatedly over the last 10 years that the purpose of government… any government that wants to survive long… is to nurture and reinforce the culture that gave it life, and operate in support of it’s values. Arguably, that’s what Texas was doing here, albeit arguably hamhandedly. (What else but hamhandedness can one expect from government of any sort?)

In the end, though some will cast it in that fashion, this has nothing to do with infringement on anyone’s freedom. At what point is there a right, a freedom,  to subject children to what these kids have gone through?

As I say, though, this stuff is always a source of bad case law, and represents the camels nose under the tent of polygamy, incest, etc. And from there, the path our society is doomed to is clear to see. There are, alas, no easy answers to the dilemma, but the problem is even more dangerous long term to our society than are most of the possible cures being floated.

Mrs. Clinton is not a smart woman, but the Clintons are creatures of habit.    Mrs. Clinton is the habit of repeating her lies.   As she did with the Tuzila lie.  the Clintons will lie until caught and then attribute to last incidence, the one that got caught, lie to something like fatigue.   Same pattern, this time with the RFK lie is caught by, Carol Platt Liebau, Townhall:

Then, on the other hand, there’s the position that what Hillary said was wrong.  Within that rubric, there’s a first position — that the comment was simply a gaffe, brought about by fatigue, etc.  But if that’s the case, how is it that she came to make almost exactly the same comment to TIME magazine back in March?  And looking at her remark yesterday — “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California” — it’s noteworthy that she doesn’t mention that he was killed after winning a contested primary . . . she simply notes that he was assassinated

Like Microsoft, Mrs. Clinton’s gaffes are not lies.  They are features.

OK, this one caught me off guard.

I’ve run data centers for years, and I admire a well-kept one, or at least one that uses space and hardware in a clever fashion. But I’ve never seen one this big that was fully mobile.

Yeah, I know. That’s what I said, too.

We learned a few days ago that the daughter of singer Steven Curtis Chapman was accidentally run over in the driveway by her brother in the driveway of their home.

I’ve been out of pocket for a while, and lost track of the story. In a way, I’m glad I was. By way of Michelle, we now learn that Maria has died. Michelle really has a touching post on this. Go and see.

(Shake of the head) Ouch.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

I note David’s post on the Hillary Clinton comment on the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy. I note also, a good amount of traffic on the web about it.

Unlike some of the traffic that I’ve been seeing, I’m actually willing to give Mrs. Clinton the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not there was any malice involved with the comment. I mean, look, I could be wrong, but the situation seemed less a genuine threat and far more a simple loose brain connection.  I recognize that this is a little unusual, that I’m giving Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt on much of anything, but there it is; in my assessment, the woman simply screwed up.

I think her trouble is, her reputation; She’s got far too much history for most folks to see this as anything but a threat.

What is interesting to me, is the number of Democrats who are no longer willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, as regards that reputation. Where is the vehement protest, the charges of a vast right wing conspiracy smearing a woman and a Democrat, from the usual suspectsthat we got for so many years, every time the subject came up?  Why is it that these usual suspects are screaming now, when we been screaming about the woman since the 90s, while dealing with their defense of her?  There’s no argument, here…. The Democrats over last several years have been very defensive of Mrs. Clinton and her reputation, claiming it to be undeserved.  Every time I bring up Vince Foster within the context of Mrs. Clinton, it’s a surefire bet that I’m going to get feedback from Democrats offended that I even brought up the relationship. Which is why they were able to ignore a dead Vince Foster holding a gun in his hand that wouldn’t fire, and accept that Foster committed suicide, for example.

When The Clintons were in the White House and for years afterward, theirs was a reputation the Democrats would seldom acknowledge, much less base a response on.  With this incident, they seem to be arguing that they’ve known all along the woman’s had a reputation, and is clearly dangerous.

So the question becomes, at that point; Why do they now take for granted a reputation that they defended against less than a year… hell, as short a time as three months… ago?

The answer to these questions seems fairly simple; The Democrats saw judging Mrs Clinton on her reputation as a threat to Democrat Party power, back in the 90’s, and these days they see Mrs Clinton’s reputation as a threat to Democrat party power. They’re willing to acknowledge, now, the reputation they so loudly denied back in the day.

I am forced to conclude that these Democrats knew full well what Mrs. Clinton and her politics represented all through the 90s.  They also suspected Mrs. Clinton and her involvement in the deaths of so many people as we pointed out, all through the 90s.  It wasn’t that they didn’t believe the rest of us when we told them. They knew we were right. They knew the Clintons were dangerous. Yet, they defended her. Why? Because they held the Democrat party power to be of greater value than the lives that got lost. In the end, that’s the only explanation for their difference in attitude between then and now. It’s clear to my mind that the source of corruption is not the Clintons, but the Democrats themselves, who hold party power above all else.

And I’ve gotta tell ya… John McCain, warts and all, is looking better all the time.

James Joyner:

Something really strange is going on with the Libertarian Party. I mean, more so than usual — I wouldn’t bother to point out the obvious.

Their annual convention is going on as I write. Some highlights:

• Bob Barr, most famous for opposing medical marijuana and for his role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is running to be its presidential nominee.

• So, possibly, is Tucker Carlson, the bowtied guy who filled the Pat Buchanan chair on Crossfire.

• Richard Viguerie, who has sent me approximately 6,000 emails since railing that Rudy McRomney wasn’t conservative enough at CPAC 2007, has just delivered the Keynote Address. The text is available at Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ.com.

What in the world is going on here? These people aren’t even from the libertarian wing of the GOP, let alone honest-to-goodness, according to Hoyle big-L Libertarians.

Yeah, no kidding.

The supposed party of principle, though, does get something out of all of this. Think on it;
They get:

• People. What little start power these fools have, brings in more people then the LP has gotten in years, on their own.
• Money. Such influx of people always brings in money for any party, and the LP is not unique here, nor are they unique in claiming that’s not what they’re about.
• Power. With added money and people parties invariably get more power from that combo.  Which, apparently, is their biggest motivation, when you get down to it.

So much for principle.

Ask me again why I’ve never taken the Libertarian Party seriously.

Is that a kaffiyeh around Rachel’s neck?.   Charles Johnson, Little Green Footbals,  thinks it is.   Michelle is not sure.   Cassy is  bothered.   I am not sure.  However, I give the final word to, Rusty, Jawa Report.

Michelle doesn’t have to find another donut shop.   Cassy can go back to cooking and me and Bit can continue to eat donuts.

Edit:  Corrected date.  High powered editors don’t work with low powered brains.  This was driving me bonkers.

It is not everyday I dedicate a post to a bridge, but not every bridge is the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Brooklyn Brdige turns 125 today.  A celebration is in order, Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

BROOKLYN — In 1883, New Yorkers and Brooklynites took the first step toward uniting their two cities when the Brooklyn Bridge, then called the East River Bridge, opened to the public, bringing to life the dreams and plans of John and Washington Roebling.

At the time, the bridge was for walkers, cable cars and horse-drawn vehicles, to be joined in time by an elevated line that some people still remember and, of course, by cars.

Hat tip photo: New York Observer

?

Mrs. Clinton’s last campaign gaffe, Geoff Earl, New York Post:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Taylor Marsh:

Is this thing over yet? That’s what many are feeling today, as everyone is as close to the breaking point with fatigue as it comes. We need a long weekend. Clinton’s statement today reveals our collective fatigue and was unbelievably unfortunate. Looking at her make her statement of regret you can see her pain and that she is devastated by what she said, which is clear in the statement below from the Clinton camp.

But anyone believing Clinton was suggesting that an assassination could vault her into… never mind, I can’t even finish the statement. It’s just too ludicrous. But that’s where we are

Statememt from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign:

“Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968 and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That’s a historic fact. The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that, whatsoever. My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to, and I’m honored to hold Senator Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is over.    Mrs. Clinton is no lady and I don’t take the liar at her word.   The Clintons are not the type to apologize, or sympathize.  Any regret Mrs. Clinton may or may not feel is over her blown campaign.   The Clinton simply do not have regard for the feelings of others.

?

WRT to Bit’s post about John Hawkins of the morning.

We have seen eight years of presidential leaahrship without a moral compass, the Clinton adminstration.  I do not, and will not agree, with John McCain on all issues.  However McCain does have a moral compass and is willing to take leadership positions.

Two recent examples, McCain was one of the few senators who opposed the bloated farm bill.  With farm profits up, food prices soaring, and BO campaigning a promise of national hunger, he still supported the farm bill.  BO put pandering to Iowa ahead of the national interst.

McCain also was one fo the few senators to oppose Jim Webb’s new G.I bill.  This is what BO had to say about the bill on the floor of the Senate:

I respect sen. John McCain’s service to our country. He is one of those heroes of which I speak. But I can’t understand why he would line up behind the President in his opposition to this GI bill.

I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the President more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.

McCain in part:

“I know that my friend and fellow veteran, Senator Jim Webb, an honorable man who takes his responsibility to veterans very seriously, has offered legislation with very generous benefits. I respect and admire his position, and I would never suggest that he has anything other than the best of intentions to honor the service of deserving veterans. Both Senator Webb and I are united in our deep appreciation for the men and women who risk their lives so that the rest of us may be secure in our freedom. And I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did.

“The most important difference between our two approaches is that Senator Webb offers veterans who served one enlistment the same benefits as those offered veterans who have re-enlisted several times. Our bill has a sliding scale that offers generous benefits to all veterans, but increases those benefits according to the veteran’s length of service. I think it is important to do that because, otherwise, we will encourage more people to leave the military after they have completed one enlistment. At a time when the United States military is fighting in two wars, and as we finally are beginning the long overdue and very urgent necessity of increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, one study estimates that Senator Webb’s bill will reduce retention rates by 16%.

Courtesy, Marc Ambinder, Atlantic.

McCain clearly demonstrates that he understands the issue of the. G.I. Bill in the context of military personnel policy, which is twofold: to prepare for war and to prevail in war.  BO only see the G.I. in context of political pandering.

McCain has some clues and the political courage to take a stand.  BO has neither clues nor courage.  Show but one issue where McCain is wrong but BO right.  We need a leader as president.  McCain is a leader, albeit imperfect.  BO is not.

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