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ews reports from the Pacific reveal that the Kana Nam, Li’l Kim’s mystery ship that many thought was on its way to Myanmar Burma with lots of tools of repression, has turned around and is headed back to the Glorious People’s Paradise.

The 7th Fleet continues to follow the Kang Nam and is likely now to provide it with a hostile escort all the way back to the edge of NoKo waters.  The ship’s cargo remains a mystery, especially now that it appears it may not visit any foreign ports.  Were it to tie up somewhere, we could request that nation search the vessel, and they likely would.  As long as the Kang Nam is at sea, it’s not likely to be searched.

One troubling thought:  Li’l Kim has learned that every time he sends the Kang Nam out, some 7th Fleet assets will be tasked with following it.  That’s something he might use to tactical advantage at some time.

Whatever.  Any fleeting tactical edge NoKo might gain is readily crushable … so long as we have a president who understands “big stick,” and not just “speak softly.”

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espite the never-ending whining of the race victimhood lobby and the shrill bitching from the feminists, America is no longer a country that needs to cut special deals with minorities and women because of our racist, sexist ways.  (As Sonia Sotomayor may soon find out.)

The case-closer to the unhappy era of affirmative action in America is, without a doubt, Rear Admiral Michelle Howard.  “Michelle Howard who?” I thought when I first heard the name via Huffpo this a.m., after which I quickly clicked through to a lengthy profile on Essence. (Can’t leave HuffPo fast enough!)

Rear Admiral Michelle Howard is, to dispense with the blather quickly, the U.S. Navy’s first black woman admiral. Yay.  Now we won’t have to ever use that discriptor again; she’s euthanized it.  Here’s the more important part, from the Essence piece:

Rear Admiral Michelle Howard awoke on April 8 to sunshine, the rolling swells of the Indian Ocean, and the beginning of another day looking for pirates. No one could have predicted just a few days later she would be embroiled in a major international crisis, and saving a man’s life from the deadly forces of Somali pirates.

Howard, 49, had just officially transitioned from a desk job in Washington, D.C., where she was senior military adviser to Donald Winter, secretary of the Navy, to the helm of the USS Boxer, a large deck assault ship patrolling off the Gulf of Aden, otherwise known as “Pirate Alley,” in the Arabian Sea.

Now the Boxer had become Howard’s flagship, where she is the first African-American woman and second female to head a Navy strike force. And in this role she oversees a dozen warships and a contingent of 1,000 Marines, as well as runs the international Combined Task Force 151 with another 14 warships.

When Howard received word that the containership Maersk Alabama had been attacked and boarded by pirates and its American captain, Phillips, was taken hostage, she immediately devised a tactical plan with her team to save his life.

When the Navy Seal snipers took out Capt. Phillips’ captors, they were under the command of Adm. Howard.  And when Capt. Phillips returned home to the embrace of his wife and kids, it was because of the tactical plan Adm. Howard had devised.  And I don’t know about you, but I never heard peep one about this until today.

Now, I suppose there are some crazed leftists out there that will confront this same set of facts and scream hysterically that America is a sexist, racist country for not glorifying Adm. Howard’s role in these dramatic events.  But they miss the point. To us, Adm. Howard is just Adm. Howard, a consummate Navy professional doing the job she was sent out to do, and doing it as a Navy officer, not a black woman Navy officer.

She has made me prouder to be an American, because her quiet, competent work shows that we are the world leader in utilizing the talents of our best, no matter what their race, gender or heritage may be.

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quarter-century after World War II came to an end, actress Donna Reed joined the anti-war movement, becoming Another Mother for Peace [in Vietnam] and working for Eugene McArthy’s anti-war 1968 presidential campaign.  Perhaps there was more than mere Hollywood liberal activism behind her stance.  Perhaps it was those 341 letters tucked away in a shoebox that made her unable to accept the personal loss that comes along with heroic sacrifice for liberty.

Reed’s daughter, Mary Owen, found the letters in an attic, carefully put away and preserved, unlike most letters from World War II soldiers to Hollywood movie stars. Today the NY Times tells the story in a touching piece of journalism, letting the soldiers reveal to us a very different time and place.  Here are a few quotes from their letters:

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.”

Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in “The Human Comedy” made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

Of the letters presented by the Times, this is the most touching, from Lt. Norman P. Klinker:

“One thing I promise you — life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the ‘movie’ version,” he wrote. It is “tough and bloody and dirty,” he explained, “quite an interesting and a heartless life at one and the same time,” but without “that grim and worried feeling so rampant in war pictures.”

The letter was dated “April 12, 1943, I think.”  On Jan. 6, 1944, Lt. Klinker was killed in action in Italy, during an assault on Mt. Porchia.   The Times tells us an official history of the battle indicates that his unit was part of a task force “organized … for the purpose of taking the ‘suicidal’ objective.”

As a lieutenant, Klinker may well have understood his chances of surviving the “tough and bloody and dirty” mission ahead, but it didn’t stop him from taking on the mission.  Just as my great-cousin Christopher Fassnacht knew darn well his bomber could be shot down over Germany, but left on that ill-fated mission nonetheless, to a fate honored through the brothers and cousins I have named Chris.

To a lot of stars of the WWII era, the letters from GIs seem to have hardly been noticed, but they apparently touched Reed and she was unwilling to let them go.  Whatever her feelings about the Vietnam war, the care she gave those letters assures me that she never disrespected the young men who were fighting, that she honored their sacrifice.

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he US Navy has released this photo of our troops boarding a Somali pirate mother-ship and seizing 17 pirates after they attacked an Egyptian vessel.  Also released was this one of the approach before the boarding:

When I first heard of the “motherships” that extended the pirates’ range far beyond the Somali coast, my mind conjured up the only association I had: The Japanese whaler motherships, large, sophisticated meat-packing factories on the sea. To see this tiny rust-bucket put the Somali pirate problem in sharp perspective. They’re a bush-league Mafia using cash, weapons and street smarts to play in the big leagues.

It’s nice to see the show of force, but we’re busting the crack-runners on the corner here, not the criminal brain trust at the top.  Look, it’s easy enough to spot the pirate honcho’s houses along the Somali coasts – they’re the palaces with the satellite antennas on the roof and the new German cars in the driveway.  Knock out one with a Tomahawk, and tell the rest of them to lay off the pirating or they’ll be next. 

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Petraeus + Iowa = Excited Speculation

Update: This turned out to be a bad joke by Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard. He deserves a blogsopheric flogging – here are the facts.

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uried at the very bottom of a Weekly Standard article about Gen. David Petraeus accepting an invitation to speak at Princton – more on that in a moment – was this enticing little add-on:

“THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that General Petraeus is planning on delivering the commencement address at the University of Iowa in 2010. Hmmm.”

Hmmm indeed.  That’s a little less than two years before the Iowa caucuses and it could be a meaningless coincidence, but Petraeus teaches his troops to consider the meaning of seemingly meaningless coincidences.

First, he affirmed Princeton’s request in just a few a few minutes, indicating that the general suddenly has an eagerness not just to be seen in public, but to be seen in a swirl of media attention.  You and the general both know that Princeton’s academics will fall all over themselves to see who can be the most obnoxious, unappreciative, seditious voice at that event, assuring Petraeus of plenty of coverage as he responds from far above the fray.

Second, why Iowa?  He has no known ties to the state, having been raised a few miles away from West Point, where he went upon graduation from high school.  Could it be that the slog to the White House starts in Iowa, typically in the spring a couple years before the election?

If the Obama camp is schooled in counterintelligence, the information before them would make them start planning for a presidential run by Petraeus.  What a race that would be! Son of an immigrant vs. son of an immigrant.  Patriot vs. promiser.  Protector vs. poser. Continue Reading »

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atch this two-minute clip – even if you have to hunker down in your cubicle with the volume turned down as your boss lurks nearby.  The premise is simple:  The Marines welcome Bush/the Marines welcome Obama; the Marines say goodbye to Bush/the Marines say goodbye to Obama. 

God bless the Marines – they just don’t mask their feelings about their Commander in Chief well at all.

A big hat-tip to Infidels are Cool for this one, especially since Infidelesto grabbed this freeze-frame from the video that pretty much says it all:

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at-tipee extraordinaire Jim, true to his form of finding the most interesting stuff wherevre it might be lurking, just sent over this:

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ontinuing with Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) here are the next two lies Schweikart lists in his review of what liberal revisionist history profs are doing to despoil the proud history of our nation and pollute the minds of the next generation with their drivel.

Lie #8 – Ronald Reagan Knew “Star Wars” Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with Russia

Nicknamed “Star Wars” after a popular science fiction film, it spent billions of dollars trying to establish a space-based defense system. Most scientists contended that the project was as fantastic as the movie. – James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations

Despite the flip dismissal of SDI technology by the Left, when Reagan announced the program in 1983, most of the technologies needed were in place, Schweikart says. The Left should have loved it because they hated the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction which SDI sought to deconstruct – but because it came from Reagan and was directed at the Soviets, no such normalcy was evidenced.

Recently released National Security Council docs from 1982 lay out a U.S. goal of not just containing the Soviets, but reversing their expansion, with tapping out USSR military spending as one of several tactics to be employed. The strategy cunningly used the Soviet’s great respect for our technology so that “you leverage their perceptions dramatically” through technology investments.

Contrary to the Davidson quote above, it was the media not the scientists who pegged the Star Wars moniker on the program. The Soviets, fearful of our computer technology, certainly didn’t see the system as fantasy – and subsequent tests (carried out within Reagan’s original 20-year timeframe) proved that ultimately it was anything but Hollywood scriptwriting. Schweikart provides these quotes;

Inside the Kremlin, the top Soviet generals were terrified. They knew SDI had the potential to work. Nikolai Leonov said “it underlined still more our technological backwardness.” Gen. Makhmud Gareev, the deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, agreed, saying it was “beyond our power” to compete with the Americans technologically. In 1981, a Soviet arms negotiator said, “Oh, you Americans! … You are going to make us spend and spend to keep up and our lousy standard of living will go down and down and in the end you will win.”

And we did. And not soon after, during the first Gulf War, Patriot Missiles shot incoming Scuds out of the air, and in 1992, space-based interceptors – real Star Wars stuff – were successfully tested, just 10 years, not 20, after Reagan’s speech. By 2008, an SDI antimissile missile shot a falling satellite to smithereens – but no one’s revising the textbooks yet.

The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3

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his Veterans Day, I’d like to tell a story of one of the veterans I respect the most, my brother in law, Brian “Doc” Burry.

Brian got his nickname in Vietnam, where he served as a Special Forces medic until, as our enemies so frequently do, the Viet Cong got him in their sights as he was working on a wounded comrade, and took him out of action. His wounds were awful, but he eventually healed, and went on to serve in the Army Reserve for several decades before finally retiring a couple years ago.

Now a police officer, he’s on the board of directors of Brotherhood of the Badge, a group that solicits contributions of used police equipment – vests, helmets, radios – from departments across the U.S., and ships them to Iraq and Afghanistan to equip police forces there. Brian has been to Iraq several times and Afghanistan once to oversee the distribution of equipment. (That’s not Brian in the picture, but it is a Brotherhood of the Badge operation.)

So for this effort, he recently received this email:

Hello;

Why don’t you collect ballistic vests for innocent Iraqi KIDS and their mothers and fathers?!

I’m sure the police can afford to BUY THEIR OWN !

Or are the lives of police more important than civilians?

The same goes for steel pots!

I’d be happy to contribute if your group ever decides to give INNOCENT CIVILIANS things they really need (besides our troops handing out cheap junk like: candy and used clothes)

Mike Korman
misterfact@yahoo.com

Maybe they like candy and can use used clothes, but that’s beside the point.  Despite Korman’s abusive tone, Brian answered politely:

You obviously do not see the true picture here sir. We have been to the villages where these new police officers are working, sat and broke bread with them and discussed their families, their precious children and their aspirations for democracy and self-determination.

Our mission is quite simple, all countries have laws and civilian rule; these police are the Thin Blue Line for their communities. The sooner they take over, the sooner we can have our troops come home and to date, as of last week 13 of the 18 Provinces are now turned totally under Iraqi control. We are contributing equipment to police and firefighters in Afghanistan as well with similar results.

War is a terrible thing, no one likes war, not even us, however the rule of law in all countries is the foundation for civil peace and freedom. I have been a combat medic in war, and we treated all people, just like in this war, for ailments of all types. We taught sanitation techniques for fresh water and disposal of sewage and garbage.

Here we are merely working to end this war and it is working. Over 60 police officers in Iraq have been shot and their lives saved due to our equipment. It is recycled, used but serviceable gear, yet those fathers, husbands, sons and brothers are now alive for their precious children.

It is unfortunate we do not agree; however that is the great thing about democracy, we can do so.

Respectfully,
Brian “Doc” Burry
Director, Brotherhood of the Badge International

Nice, huh? But that didn’t keep Korman from firing off one more round:

Thanks for the reply.

I guess that giving the same equipment that saves the lives of police and firefighters to innocent civilians, doesn’t interest you. You didn’t give a reason why you aren’t doing so.

Then, maybe it does but you don’t have the money. Maybe you might ask the public for the money and/or more ballistic vests. I’ll be happy to donate when you do that.

You obviously have the ability to send these items. When you decide to make an effort for ALL war victims-let me know!

Also- maybe the police of our Thin Blue Line will take over a lot sooner if more innocent civilians are ALIVE than DEAD. They certainly will get the job done if they have the SUPPORT of grateful civilians who are ALIVE.

Mike

I wonder if Mike has similar compassion for the many civilians al-Qaeda deliberately targets, or if his bleeding heart is limited only to the few civilians we accidentally kill.

Brian’s response?  He emailed me this:  “I refuse to respond to this character any more.”

Not a single bad or insulting word came from Brian on the whole matter!  That’s what comes from putting your life on the line to protect our freedoms:  A respect for freedom that transcends even unappreciative recipients of the fruits of your sacrifice.

God bless ‘em all, and keep them safe.

Update: Bookworm comments:

I assume that, using his own logic, Mike Korman believes that every civilian in South Central LA or the South Side of Chicago, or any other blighted district in America, should have unlimited access to the same guns police use, so that they too can keep themselves safe. It seems to elude him that police willingly put themselves on the line to protect others, so they should be granted the gift of more protection for themselves. What a [moron].

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he thick smoke we saw this morning turned out to be a motel a block away from my first house here in OC – and just another site where U.S. Marines showed their valor and bravery.

As fire began racing through America’s Best Value Inn, six off-duty Marines who were staying there rushed through the facility, dodging flames, to pound on doors and windows to ensure that all the guests were safely evacuated. Reports the OC Register:

Amy Amadito-Phelps, who was staying in a room on the second-floor of the third-story structure, said she, her husband and 14-month-old son would probably have died if not for the Marines.

“We were right next to a room completely on fire and we couldn’t smell smoke,” Amadito-Phelps said. “No fire alarms were going off. The only thing we heard was Marines banging on our windows and telling us to get out.”

The six Marines, all enlisted men, were Josh Hernandez, Thomas O’Brien,Adam Reidling, Jedediah Stock, John Mick, Josh Hernandez and Colton Oliver, who said:

“Everybody was out by the time the firefighters got here. It’s what we’re trained to do.”

OC Fire Authority Capt. Steve Pardi spoke for all of us:

“I’d call them absolute heroes.”

Many of those rushing away from the flames, including Amadito-Phelps, were living at the hotel and lost most of what they own. They lost their apartment when her husband’s income fell due to a slowdown in his segment of the economy: flooring.

What a tough break for these families.

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