As Allied troops were storming the beaches on D-Day, FDR was leading the nation in a prayer for victory.

Go figure that the one day Obama doesn’t talk about himself is during a D-Day tribute. Good for him, and us:

Over at Aarrggh there is a copy of an email sent to members of the Combined Joint Task Force 82, who are currently in Afghanistan, from the French:

To Combined Joint Task Force 82,

65 years ago, at 2h30 (French Local time), you jumped from hundreds of DAKOTAS in the dark skies over Normandie in order to liberate France and Europe.

That D-Day, you wrote the most glorious page of your history and the name of your Division is forever famous in France.

That D-Day, you and the allied forces met their rendezvous with destiny.

6 June 2009, Afghanistan; we are still brothers in arms.

We will never forget what you did on D-Day.

In the name of all the French soldiers embedded with CJTF-82, thank you for what you have done.

Today, in celebration of those events 65 years ago, we are “All Americans.”

Airborne!

Ltc Pierre V.
French LNO

And while Obama’s speech was nice, there is one that many people have not seen because of the death of Ronald Reagan that same day. President Bush gave one that brought the people out of their seats in 2004: Read the rest of this entry »

25 years ago it remains a timeless memorial address to the American sacrifice that liberated a continent!

Remarks by President Ronald Reagan on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day
delivered 6 June 1984 in Pointe Du Hoc, Normandy, France

Full text here.

Mata has the video below.

More photos:
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Lesson yet to be learned by President Obama: Don’t make promises you can’t deliver on.

By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service:

BERLIN, May 28 — The Obama administration’s push to resettle at least 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Europe is meeting fresh resistance as European officials demand that the United States first give asylum to some inmates before they will do the same.

Rising opposition in the U.S. Congress to allowing Guantanamo prisoners on American soil has not gone over well in Europe. Officials from countries that previously indicated they were willing to accept inmates now say it may be politically impossible for them to do so if the United States does not reciprocate.

“If the U.S. refuses to take these people, why should we?” said Thomas Silberhorn, a member of the German Parliament from Bavaria, where the White House wants to relocate nine Chinese Uighur prisoners. “If all 50 states in America say, ‘Sorry, we can’t take them,’ this is not very convincing.”

Here’s a novel idea: Do a complete about face and salvage Guantanamo’s reputation as the most transparent and humanely run detention facility in the world.
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Cue the violin and color me unsympathetic. I simply found this disillusionment amongst jihadi-wannabes simply amusing and pathetic:

Reporting from Brussels — Determined to die as martyrs, the French and Belgian militants bought hiking boots and thermal underwear and journeyed to the wilds of Waziristan.

After getting ripped off in Turkey and staggering through waist-deep snow in Iran, the little band arrived in Al Qaeda’s lair in Pakistan last year, ready for a triumphant reception.

“We were expecting at least a welcome for ‘our brothers from Europe’ and a warm atmosphere of hospitality,” Walid Othmani, a 25-year-old Frenchman from Lyon, recalled during an overnight interrogation in January.

Instead, the Europeans — and at least one American — learned that life in the shadow of the Predator is nasty, brutish and short.
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Think all you need is your passport for a visit to Britain? Think again… check your political views at the customs gate, please.

Stunning story by AP’s Beverley Rouse appeared in the UK’s Independent today. Apparently, Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has released the names of 16 people banned from entering the country so others could better understand what sort of behaviour Britain was not prepared to tolerate.

On the list were jihad preaching clerics, two members of a Russian skinhead gange who committed 20 murders, a KKK grand wizard and neo-Nazi… plus Muslim activist Abdul Ali Musa (previously Clarence Reams), murderer and Hezbollah terrorist Samir Al Quntar and Kashmiri terror group leader Nasr Javed.

Sharing that spot of “shame” was Michael Savage and anti-gay protesters, American Baptist pastor Fred Waldron Phelps Snr and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper.

“Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can’t live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what’s more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded.

“We are publishing the names of 16 of those that we have excluded since October. We are telling people who they are and why it is we don’t want them in this country.”

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Today, April 21st, is Yom Hashoah Day, the day of remembrance.

This day is designated by the Jewish people to remember those who were lost in the Holocaust.

Jews who were classified as “not fit to work” waiting in a grove outside of Crematorium IV before they were to be gassed.

‘Men to the left! women to the right!’ Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt pressure of my father’s hand. We were alone. – Elie Weisel, Night
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Victor Davis Hanson writes about Obama’s constant apologies for those who came before him….from slavery (Europe never engaged in that practice right?), to the genocide of Indians, to nuke’s, to torture….all to get the adoration he so desires, and what else he should apologize for:

A modest suggestion: from now on, every president who wishes to go abroad and review all his lesser citizens’ collective past and present sins, with accompanying apologies — to applause from foreigners — must first, in the spirit of New Testament atonement, review his own regrettable transgressions. It would go something like this:

“Today we witness a global financial meltdown — a result of a dangerous nexus between lax politicians and unethical high finance. I know this well, and wish to apologize for taking thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the now-bankrupt AIG financial firm, which sought to escape proper regulation by offering campaign contributions to politicians like myself, who unilaterally renounced the three-decade tradition of public campaign finance.”

~~~

“Racism is an insidious pathology that reaches even into the pulpit; it is a human sin that no one race has a monopoly on. I am well aware of the havoc it causes the innocent — after failing to say “No! Stop!” to my own Rev. Wright as he caricatured in my church whites, Jews, Italians, and almost anyone else who does not look like himself and our congregation. Likewise, class prejudice and stereotyping are often at the heart of much of the world’s problems; I too have engaged in such hurtful condemnations when just recently I labeled, in blanket fashion, the working class of rural Pennsylvania as xenophobes, fundamentalists, and nativists.”

“We need to adopt a new attitude toward the mentally and physically challenged; too often we flippantly make fun of the disabled, as I did, when I unthinkingly made a joke in front of a national television audience at the expense of those who participate in the Special Olympics.”

“Now turning to my country’s own regrettable past, let me begin with an apology for its . . .”

Of course to a narcissist like Obama….these apologies will never be uttered.

Last fall, Senator Obama urged the passage of the TARP bailout plan that cost at least $1 TRILLION dollars after interest. Then President-elect Obama urged the first and second bailout of the Big Three automakers. Barack Obama also urged the bailout of financial giant AIG. As President, he and the Democrats Congress rammed a partisan spending bill through Congress under the claim that it was “stimulus.” This too will cost at least $1 TRILLION dollars after interest. Recently, Obama and the Democrats’ Congress proposed doubling the Federal Government’s budget to about $4 TRILLION dollars and doubling the national debt to about $18 TRILLION dollars.

America is at war (though, the term “war” is no longer being used because the Obama Admin finds it too belligerent, and the Democrats’ Congress don’t want to be reminded that they declared the war lost). Still, America is in a bad economic situation, and the TRILLIONS spent on the economy by Barack Obama and the Democrats’ Congress really should have had some sign of slowing the economic decline if not already bringing about recovery. Their efforts to spend and give away hundreds of billions of dollars has been going on now for almost half a year.

Yet, the economy is not slowing its decline. It is getting worse-seriously worse.
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It was only six days ago I warned that the world had put the US dollar on a death watch. At that writing, a UN panel, backed by Russia, was pushing to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a basket of international currencies instead.

In a not so surprising move, China joined the choir, advocating the dollar demotion, but with a twist. Bejing’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, proposed creating a currency made up a basket of global currencies and controlled by the International Monetary Fund … saying it would help “to achieve the objective of safeguarding global economic and financial stability.”

Zhou did not mention the dollar by name. But in an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for a foreign audience.

China has long been uneasy about relying on the dollar for the bulk of its trade and to store foreign reserves. Premier Wen Jiabao publicly appealed to Washington this month to avoid any response to the crisis that might weaken the dollar and the value of Beijing’s estimated $1 trillion in Treasuries and other U.S. government debt.

~~~

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Yeah, I know, you’ll have to change “Brown” to “Obama,” “UK” to “US,” and things like that, but the mettle’s the same.

Is Obama setting up other nations’ governments to blame if his spending spree doesn’t work? Certainly appears so.

There’s been no shortage of news that other world governments have no intention of following the Obama/Pelosi/Reid heist of taxpayer dollars. On March 11th, NPR reported on the impending clash of economic policies in the upcoming G20 meeting.

The Obama administration has set out on what could be an economic policy collision course with some of its closest allies. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is heading to a weekend meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors with this message: The United States thinks other governments should be spending more on economic stimulus programs.

The message may not go down well with European leaders, however, many of whom have different ideas about what needs to be done to get the world economy back on track.

The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that Geithner will urge the G-20 governments to implement stimulus-spending programs worth at least 2 percent of their gross domestic products this year and next.

At that time, the only country with significant capital – China – was willing to spend that much. And much of that may have to do with how intrinsically woven their economic success is with the US economy.

But the Europeans are finding such language “not to our liking”.

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Well, it’s been a busy time for me but I could not let this thankathon go by without providing my own post to thank a great President. One I am so thankful was in office after Sept. 11th 2001.

One of the best qualities in the man that I will sorely miss is that he never backed down on something he felt was right due to public opinion. He knew we had to finish the Iraqi mess once and for all after 9/11. There was no way we could allow Saddam to thumb his nose at the world, supporting terror, and obtaining WMD, in a post-9/11 world. He knew 13 years of conjoling, begging and pleading was enough. But even then he gave Saddam a chance to stop it. He didn’t just give him a chance to stop the war from happening he went to the UN for help in getting him to comply with a strong resolution. A resolution that any sane leader would have recognized was his last chance:

…in 2002 President Bush bucked the advice of his more hawkish advisers and agreed to take Tony Blair’s advice and seek another U.N. Resolution — was it the 16th or 17th? — against Saddam Hussein. Resolution 1441 passed 15-0. True, the Administration failed to obtain a second resolution, not least because the French reneged on private assurances that it would agree to a second resolution if America obtained the first.

He has done everything in his power to insure that we would not be attacked again. Again, making unpopular decisions, but he never backed down in the face of public opinion because he knew it was the right thing to do. We do not find many politicians like that. It’s a rare quality and the one I will miss sorely. Read the rest of this entry »

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