Today is the day we recognize the ultimate sacrifice that our Sons of Liberty have paid. From the greens of Lexington to the streets of Falujah, our citizen soldiers continue to lay down their lives for our liberty.

Freedom is never free, it can only be paid by willing blood. It must be purchased daily, and we miss a payment at the peril of our destruction.

The Navy has a habit of naming ships after battles so we never forget. Here is but a sample:

Lexington, Antiham, Belleau Wood. Iwo Jima, Chosin, Hue City. Coral Sea, Lake Erie, Vella Gulf. Vincennes, Bunker Hill, Normandy. Chancellorsville, Anzio, Yorktown.

If your American History did not cover these battles, please Google them to find out about these battles so that these men and women can continue to live on in our memories.

As I write this, tears stream down my cheeks for those who didn’t come home. An unabashed love for my brother and sister soldiers, sailors and Marines, I am not ashamed to admit to these tears. I shed these tokens of love for those who went before and after me because nothing else I could give would have as much meaning.

As you place flags on the graves of these fallen heroes, remember that there is no gravestone for those who died at sea, for that is where they are buried.

Let us never forget their sacrifice, their blood spilt so that, “…the government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Mike did some research and posted on Memphis Red Blogs No Air America For You!.

It seems that I will have to continue to listen to AA through the internet, as they are not coming to WMQM, in fact they never were.

Ah, well, you can’t have everything I guess.

This is truly disgusting. Media Yawn as Saddam’s Torture Victims Thank Bush shows you just how slanted the media is.

This was a meeting between seven Iraqis, all who had their right hand cut off in Abu Ghraib prison when it was run by Saddam, and President Bush.

The bias shows plainly when the President opens the floor to questions from the reporters:

But the only “torture” journalists wanted to discuss was that allegedly perpetrated by U.S. troops.

“Mr. President, can you say why General Sanchez is being replaced as the top commander in Iraq? Is that in any way related to the prisoner abuse scandal?” asked the first questioner.

Likewise, the second reporters question had nothing to do with the genuine torture victims sitting in front of him.

After two more off-topic questions, the president thanked the reporters and ended the session.

President Bush and these now disabled Iraqis deserved better, but I must say I’m not surprised by the actions of the reporters.

Yecch.

This is rather a sad story. Student Whose Hair Set Afire Told To Stay Home.

It relates the story of a physically deformed girl who is being harassed because of her deformity.

A 13-year-old Denver girl said she was threatened with a knife at her middle school and her hair was set on fire, yet she was the one who was told to stay home for the remainder of the school year while her alleged attacker wasn’t suspended or even investigated.

[...]

7NEWS discovered that while Glowczewski was sent home, her alleged attacker is still in school, even though administrators confirmed he had a knife.

[...]

Meanwhile, both Mark Stevens, the spokesman for Denver Public Schools, and the superintendent declined to discuss the case or DPS policy for dealing with such issues. That seems to be the same response Glowczewski’s parents got when they complained to the administration.

I can sympathize with this girl as my ADD/bipolar made me “weird” and I never fit into any social groups in school. I know what it’s like to be an outcast and be picked on and it’s not fun.

My heart goes out to Courtney and I hope she kicks the bullys and the schools ass.

In this article, Amnesty International Says U.S. Abuses Human Rights, I find this laughable.

AI is so hypocritical is isn’t funny. They don’t speak against the mass murder of 300,000 by Saddam. They are silent when 2,000,000 are hacked to death by machete. Not a word about Ethnic Cleansing that claims tens of thousands. They speak up only when the US stumbles and wounds someone’s feelings. Why? Because only the US has some people that will commiserate with such things. Everybody else doesn’t care and doesn’t listen to AI.

We shouldn’t either.

The article that I wrote about here is still resonating. Here’s the update, Cosby’s criticism still reverberates.

This really gets me:

“I think that the context of the situation, the Brown case was interesting,” said William Spriggs, executive director of the National Urban League’s Institute for Opportunity & Equality. “The key point of the efforts of Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston was that no matter how hard African Americans try, that discrimination was a permanent barrier to further advancement. I think [Mr. Cosby's] comments missed the point of how real those barriers are.”

Excuse me? Excuse me? Thurgood Marshall made it to the Supreme Court of the United States. Colin Powell is Secretary of State. Condi Rice is National Security Advisor. And those people ain’t tokens, people.

While there are more obstacles to black people, there are still ways to get through that glass ceiling that weren’t there even 10 years ago.

I mentioned this in my blog a while back (too bad there is no search function), there are three rules:

• Finish high school
• Don’t have a child until you are married
• Don’t have a child until you are 20.

If you follow these rules, you have a 90% chance of staying out of poverty. If you break ONE rule, you have an 80% chance of ending up in poverty. From what I see about the black population of Memphis (and it’s easy to see, blacks make up 50% of the population here) is thousands break all three rules. I see whole neighborhoods in such condition, unmarried women with 5 kids by 5 different boyfriends and so on. I wish there was something I could do, but it requires that these people do the effort to get themselves out of poverty. I am powerless, they have all of the power to get themselves out of poverty, they just don’t do anything about it.

It seems that former President Clinton is determined to kill Senator Kerry’s chance for election.

Clinton Book to Be Published by Knopf Next Month. With a release date of June 22, just about a month before the Democrat convention, this book will divert attention from Senator Kerry and further slim his chances for election. Which of course sets up Hillary for 2008.

The funny thing about the article is while it’s about Bill Clinton, it has a picture of Hillary. Things that make you go Hmmm…

This article sickens me. Children in Britain ‘choking on their own fat’, says obesity report.

Of course it is sickening to see a THREE year-old child die due to weight complications, but what really gets me is there is not ONE WORD about parental responsibility. It makes the assumption that the parents have no control over the situation, being totally at the mercy of food advertising.

I’m not a regular watcher of Maury Povich, but I did see one where the parents over fed young children to the point that they looked like miniature sumo wrestlers. There was one infant (less than one year old) that weighed over 60 pounds. The poor kid was so fat it couldn’t move. These parents fed their children at every little whimper, no matter what the kid was crying about. It showed a sickness within the parents that was disgusting to see.

It is the parents responsibility to provide diet and portion control. To have such drastically overweight children actually shows direct and intentional neglect by the parents. This should not happen. But short of taking the children away I don’t know what to do. You can only ‘educate’ so far, but there are people who just don’t care, as long as the kids aren’t screaming to be taken to Mickey’s.

This requires tough love and a balanced diet. It’s not the easy path, but like I’ve said before, the things worth having are never on the easy path.

Fellow Memphian Mick, who runs Fishkite, has invited me to be one of at least several co-bloggers of MemphisRedBlogs. There is only a placeholder page there right now, but look for my daily take on things there as well.

I stumbled across an Oprah show last week where she spent a weekend with a friend in 1628 on the set of the PBS show Colonial House. Mike of Half-Bakered has a good synopsis here.

What I saw about it was the harshness of colonial life. No toilets or outhouses, no running water, back breaking work from sunup to sundown. The kind of work that wears you out by the ripe old age of 35. Where mothers died in childbirth and 50% of children died in their first year of life.

There was no instant fix, premade food. No supermarkets. You ate what you grew or what the men dragged home from the wilds.

This, “pristine, natural” way of living is how wide-Left Liberals want everybody (but themselves) to live, “in tune with nature.”

Never forget how far they routinely go. Spikes in trees, burning down housing developments, you know. Protecting Mother Nature.

It seems my medication has been losing its effectiveness. I have been under a constant attack for several days now. While I do get up and do certain things (like the blog), they are few and far between. Most of the time I am hiding somewhere, like in the bed, in the closet or in the chair. I smell like a skunk and know it, but I can’t bring myself to take a shower. I shaved last night, for the first time in almost two weeks. I can’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth. Yecch.

I hate this debilitating illness. It takes so much away from my quality of life, and I know it. No matter how much I want to do it, to take care of myself, it just isn’t enough. I disgust myself because I am not strong enough to do what needs to be done.

This article, Teachers Urged to Ignore GLSEN’s Marriage Curriculum talks about how gay and lesbian lifestyles are being forced upon our children.

Throckmorton reserved his harshest criticism for what he views as GLSEN’s attempt to coerce students into supporting same-sex marriage on the grounds that it is a civil right. By equating same-sex marriage with the struggles of black Americans, the curriculum appears to be suggesting that students who oppose homosexual marriage are racist or oppressive, he said.

Do you see what is wrong here? It continues:

“When discussing this issue,” the GLSEN curriculum suggests, “help students to move past preoccupations with the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of same-sex coupling or homosexuality in general. Place the debate over marriage within the context of human rights, thereby expanding the dialogue beyond the realm of morality.”

Throckmorton’s reaction: “It is astonishing for the GLSEN curriculum to declare a student’s moral beliefs as irrelevant to any issue. For students who organize their lives around a moral code, this objective is coercive.”

Amen.

It is certainly within any persons purview to determine if a certain behavior is right or wrong according to their belief system. To neutralize such a thing is plain wrong.

Being able to have a belief system is part of the freedom that makes up the United States. To try and have it taken away from our children like this is the first step towards the Thought Police. When everything must be described in certain ways and no other, we have lost.

It seems the state assembly has come up with another reason on how to harass legal gun owners. No Thumbprint to Buy Bullets, Gun Group Says.

Yes, along with just about every personal piece of information short of your tax records, the state Senate wants you to surrender a thumbprint as well. Of course, this does nothing other than harass the gun owner, because these thumbprints are not checked against any databases, nor are they entered into any. So why oppose this? Simply because it is unnecessary to surrender a thumbprint. It serves no purpose, so why do it?

If the bullets were serialized, I could see something like this. But it is impossible because 4,000,000,000 (that’s 4 billion) rounds are fired in the US every year, and serialization, even by lot number is nigh impossible. Not to mention distortion or obliteration of the serial number when the round is fired. See what I mean?

Let’s hope this gets shot down in the house assembly.

UPDATE: I forgot to add this. If I lived there, I would not be affected since I made my own ammunition. I don’t think components are covered under this law. In the case of rifle ammunition, I would go through Cheaper Than Dirt.

This article, You’ve Got E-mail, but Will It Cost You a Job? talks about how unprofessional our youth has become.

The lack of proper English that is taught in our schools is appalling. And it is getting worse. Our kids are routinely communicating in IM (instant messaging) mode, even during normal message modes such as email and public forum messages.

I attend several message forums to discuss various aspects of the wargames I play and my other hobbies. In several of them, the lack of grammar, punctuation and other things make reading these messages equal to licking sandpaper.

The bad news is our kids are carrying this garbage over the real world. I tell the kids who can’t/won’t spell/capitalize/grammar properly that the best job they can hope for has pictures to explain what you are supposed to do.

And so it goes. It doesn’t take much to relegate your resume to the trash, and today’s kids are coming up with new reasons all the time.

If you are such a young adult, or you are the parent of such a young adult, straighten them out before it’s too late.