Comedian James Gregory visited the John Boy & Billy Show recently.

Once he got started, he was like a rock rolling downhill, gaining speed and unstoppable.

Mr. Gregory summed up my thoughts and feelings on America, the economy, and the world pretty effectively.

The interview runs 20 minutes and is divided into two parts.

It would be well worth your time to hear what Mr. Gregory has to say.

Second half below the fold.
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So many fine historical posts on D Day today, but so many of those memories are in black and white. I did find this video in color. A rarity at the time:

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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You gotta watch this video from France. Some group called Europalestine.com organized a “boycott” to protest the Israeli’s. Boycott’s usually mean your not going to buy the product anymore right? Not for these French. Instead it means to steal what you can while screaming about the “criminal” Israeli’s….

A reader to Powerline notes it is even more disgusting then first glance:

This video is even more grotesque than you think. It was shot in a suburb of Paris called Aulnay-sous-Bois. The next-door town to Aulnay is called Drancy, about 1 mile away. Drancy was used by the Nazis between 1942-1944 as a deportation holding camp for the Jews of Paris prior to the deportation to the extermination camps in eastern Europe. 65,000 Jews passed through Drancy, of whom 63,000 were killed. In other words, the Israeli boycotters have chosen, of all the supermarkets in France, the one closest to France’s most important holocaust memorial site. Look on google maps to see how close they are.

And guess what happened in Drancy two weeks ago?

The latest Mike’s America video captures our shame…

Charles Krauthammer describes Europe’s “leading role:”

Blame America First Alive and Well

Obama’s criticism of his own country is nothing new for Democrats. The George Soros wing of the Democrat Party which is now in complete control at the White House has long held the view that whatever problems which exist between the U.S. and other nations we can find fault first in what America is doing. This mode of thinking goes hand in glove with the view First Embarrassment Michelle Obama expressed when she said she had never been proud of her country until her husband was nominated.
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All of a sudden, six nations are building aircraft carriers (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, India and China.) For over half a century, most of the carrier building took place in the United States. Russia built some, without much success, towards the end of the Cold War. Britain and France built a few, and several other nations (like India and Brazil), bought second had British carriers so they could maintain one or two in service.

But now six nations are planning or building new carriers, most of them a bit smaller (about 60,000 tons) than the larger U.S. ones (100,000 tons).

Britain & France

In France it appears that the way to celebrate the New Year isn’t the drinking of a few cocktails, no….it’s setting cars ablaze:

The Hautepierre suburb of Strasbourg on New Year’s Eve. The government mobilized 35,000 police officers nationwide. (Jean-Marc Loos/Reuters)

More than 280 people were detained and more than 1,000 cars torched during New Year celebrations across France, mostly in its troubled suburbs, the interior ministry said Thursday.

Four police officials were slightly injured, according to the interior ministry, which said its security forces “were of the unanimous view” that New Year’s Eve was “rather calm and without major incident.”

The interior ministry had earlier said 445 vehicles were set on fire overnight, but later revised that figure to 1,147.

The number of arrests and cars torched topped last year’s tally of 259 people detained and 372 vehicles burned.

But Israel DOES know how to celebrate the New Year….kill a leader of Hamas:

Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on the home of a Hamas strongman Thursday, killing him along with two wives and four children in the first attack on the top leadership of Gaza’s rulers. As the aerial bombardment escalated, the army said it also was poised to launch a ground invasion.

French Soldier Recruited
To admiration for America in Afghanistan, thanks to close contact with L’Soldats Americaine. That’s what it is purported to be, though bits of it look like it might have been charmingly ghostwritten by Steve Martin:

“We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while – they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. To the common man it is a unit just like any other. But we live with them and got to know them, and we henceforth know that we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army – one that the movies brought to the public as series showing “ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary events”. Who are they, those soldiers from abroad, how is their daily life, and what support do they bring to the men of our OMLT every day ? Few of them belong to the Easy Company, the one the TV series focuses on. This one nowadays is named Echo Company, and it has become the support company.

They have a terribly strong American accent – from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word? Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine – they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

Here we discover America as it is often depicted : their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley. Honor, motherland – everything here reminds of that : the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Read the rest of this entry »

Senator Barack Obama and Senator Joe Biden have argued that they will CHANGE the way things are done in Washington DC. One of the things they’ve pledged to do was provide a new foreign policy-one that Senator Biden claims is different from the Bush Administration’s. However, the Congressional bailout bill for Wall Street (which both fully supported) effectivelly reduces their foreign policy back to the exact same policy as President George W Bush’s.
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There was an interesting article out in the NYP that goes back and looks at how Osama Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora in 2001. Most of the article rehashes the fact that the US relied on its allies in Afghanistan to block his escape, and the US relied on its ally Pakistan to block his escape, but now we get an interesting little accusation about how OTHER allies, NATO, allowed Bin Laden to escape.

One, the US unwisely trusted Pakistan to patrol its border. Two, NATO allies objected to the use of “GATOR” mines, which are dropped from planes and could have sealed up the Tora Bora area. But mostly, Fury says the decision to let Afghan allies form “the tip of the spear” was the biggest mistake. “The idea worked like a charm when we faced a common foe, the oppressive Taliban . . . but they were fighting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden . . . we might as well have been asking for them to fight the Almighty Prophet Mohammed himself.”

In all my reading, research, conversations, etc., I have never heard about NATO blocking the use of GATOR mines. That would have been a great way to prevent Osama Bin Laden’s escape, but America’s allies let them down at every turn in 2001. I believe it, but I doubt we’ll hear Obama talk about how relying on allies isn’t as useful as it was 60yrs ago.

Similarly, I doubt that we’ll see anyone on the political left recognize that Germany and France are looking to pull out of Afghanistan rather than send more troops and do more fighting as the Obama campaign expects (according to Sen Obama, he’ll encourage them to do this by offering more foreign aid, but in the VP debate Sen Biden admitted that the very first thing a President Obama will do is CUT foreign aid.)

If you only watch part of this, start from about 7 min 30 sec. But it’s worth 10 minutes of your time.

Memo to Mr. Obama: This is the America your preacher damns. We ARE the good guys and sometimes, when talking doesn’t work, you just have to go kill the bad guys. Learn your history.

America does not forget her heroes.

H/T Media Mythbusters

Will you remember how those boys became men, how they fought against a foe that never attacked us?  Will you remember that they saw a threat, saw evil, travelled to far away distant lands, and confronted it wherever they found it-Africa, Sicily, Italy, the skies over Europe, the depths of the Atlantic, the churning seas off the Kola Peninsula, France, Luxembourg…anywhere they saw people who needed someone to fight for them.

Will you remember?
 

When I began immersing myself into politics and shedding the liberal indoctrination of my college years, one of the books I read that shaped some of my current perception, early on, was Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel. I first heard about him on the Dennis Prager Show, as he gave an interview, from France.

While researching for a post to cover this and this, I discovered that I had completely missed the news that the French intellectual had passed away almost 2 years to the date, on April 30, 2006:
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French are protesting FOR freedom and AGAINST dictators!!

I doubt many of these groups would ever risk life and limb for Tibetian Liberation, but they are making a statement. It is a start… A small start. If it is effective is another issue.

Officials put out Olympic torch 3 times

PARIS – Security officials extinguished the Olympic torch three times Monday as protests against China’s human rights record turned a relay through Paris into a chaotic series of stops and starts.

Despite massive security, at least two activists got within almost an arm’s length of the flame before they were grabbed by police. Officers tackled many protesters and carried off some of them. A protester threw water at the torch but failed to extinguish it and was also taken away.
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