The Few. The Proud. The Marines.
God bless our Marines, former and current.
And God bless America, the last and best hope for the entire planet.
BZ
P.S.
Thanks to Random Acts of Patriotism for the clue.
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This is what $50,000 looks like.Local, state and federal agencies likely spent more than $50,000 to respond to and clean up a small mercury spill two months ago in Twin Falls, officials said this week.
The mercury, just about two teaspoons’ worth, was found the week of Sept. 15 in a parking lot outside an apartment complex at 359 and 341 Pheasant Road W. Investigators later determined it came from several thermometers intentionally broken by kids, and one family had to be temporarily evacuated from a contaminated apartment.
A number of public entities responded to the incident, including the Twin Falls Fire Department, Idaho Department of Environ-mental Quality and South CentralPublic Health District, and submitted reimbursement requests to the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, response costs for state and local agencies were still being tallied. But they’re expected to come in between $25,000 and $30,000, said BHS spokesman Lt. Col. Tim Marsano.
In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spent about $26,000 to bring in contractors for assessments of the parking lot, eight apartment units and other nearby areas, including other homes. Only one homeowner denied the agency access, according to an EPA report. The money came out of an emergency-response budget authorized through the Superfund program.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson on Wednesday night criticized Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) for voting against the Democrats’ signature healthcare bill.
“We even have blacks voting against the healthcare bill,” Jackson said at a reception Wednesday night. “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four other top alleged conspirators have been held for years in secret detention camps overseas, and, most recently, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba -- will be tried as terrorists and criminals in a federal court in Manhattan, just blocks from the site of one of the terrorists' targets, the World Trade Center, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder announced today.

Clocking in at over 400 pages, "Going Rogue" is, at its heart, one giant complaint about the conduct of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. At the nexus of Palin's grievances lies (former McCain campaign manager Steve) Schmidt, a character cast as out of touch, overly cautious, and vindictive.
The relationship between vice presidential candidate and the campaign manager doesn't start off on the rocks -- but it ends there. And though she claims they were "very comfortable with each other right off the bat," she also describes Schmidt as "business to the bone." During her vetting Schmidt plays it cool. When Palin admits "the one skeleton [she'd] kept hidden in [her] closet for the past twenty-two years," Schmidt "didn't bat an eye" -- though he does "wince" when she mentions God. That oh-so-dark secret, incidentally, is a D-grade Palin received in a college course.
Palin complains of being "told to sit down and shut up" when she "spoke on the trail about Obama's associations with questionable characters." She bemoans the campaign's unwillingness to tackle "Obama's pastor of twenty years, Jeremiah 'God Damn America' Wright."
"I will forever question the campaign for prohibiting discussion of such association," she writes. "All the more since these telltale signs of Obama's views, carefully concealed with centrist campaign-speak have now been brought into the light by his appointments and actions in office."
Well… I guess Sarah Palin is a Great Pretender. Playing to the masses. Putting on the dog, as they say. And it all came out looking like a seriously bad version of Northwoods Barbie.
Sarah Palin’s life reads a lot like a reality program too, Jon and Kate comes to mind. Dysfunctional, didn’t finish out the contract, accusations of improprieties, lots of similarities. Personally, I want my politics to be a reality program, but I want it to be an accurate representation of LIFE, not some shrill voiced QUITTER that doesn’t represent my family values or work ethic.
I hate a quitter! Sarah Palin will forever be known as a QUITTER. You just don’t walk out on the job of Governor of Alaska because the *pressures* of the job were too much for you to take and because it was playing havoc on your family.
If Palin, or ANY of her supporters think for one minute that the pressures she would face as President or Vice President are less than those she faced as a state Governor, you are sadly mistaken! If she quit over those lesser pressures, what do you think she’ll do if it’s a GLOBAL crisis? What happens when she has to face the life or death decisions that ALL Presidents face?
Wake up folks, Palin is playing a part, that’s it, she is yesterdays news and even then she didn’t carry that much credibility. Then she became a QUITTER. Is thatwhat you want in the White House? Do you want someone that’s better suited to reality TV or someone that can LEAD this nation?
Fred, I can tell you why NO ONE wants to speak freely, clearly or truthfully anymore, and I can do it in two words:
FREE CHEESE.
The American electorate, the bulk of it, is only concerned with its Free Cheese. What can the “gubmint” GIVE ME?? is the rallying question from the great unwashed masses.
Politicians know this, and know that, without skyrocketing promises of MORE Free Cheese, they stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of acquiring much of any political seat.
The PEOPLE have brought this about; I believe every bit as much AS the politicians themselves.
The American electorate has lost its courage and is becoming more and more accustomed, through education, through youth, through the courts, of having their Free Cheese mindsets VALidated.
We’d best be talking, if we want to save this country, about a lot of NO! in our immediate future.
You know, Fred, any politician truly capable of saying NO! to the electorate?
Really? Honestly?
WHO is there?

Despite Uphill Climb, Reid Is Poised to Muscle Health Care Through Senate
by FOXNews.com
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is awaiting final word from the Congressional Budget Office on costs and coverage implications of the still-secret bill he submitted more than two weeks ago.
Under pressure from the White House, Majority Leader Harry Reid says he plans to bring a health care reform package to the floor of the Senate next week, and his goal is to see it passed by the end of the year.
Send a message to Harry Reid and vulnerable Democrat Senators: If you vote for Government Healthcare, against the will of the voters in your state, you will pay a price in the 2010 election.
The Democrats in the Senate who face voters in 2010 know they have drawn the short straw. Their colleagues who ran and won in 2006 and 2008 had the wind at their back. This class survived the George Bush win of 2004 only to now land in the middle of the blowback against President Obama and his huge lurch left. Even now aggressive groups like TalkPac.com are busy raising funds to deploy against those most vulnerable Senate Democrats who vote for cloture on Obamacare. The Democrats who had hoped to "hide" their support of Obamacare behind an eventual "no" vote as the bill passes into law have come to realize that in the era of new media, the electorate understands that the cloture vote is everything. To give a green light now is to own the bill that gets to the president's desk this year or next. There will be no shedding responsibility for the law if a yes vote on cloture is registered next week.
Democrats in the Senate need to know their constituents are watching how they vote on the health care reform that we've all worked so hard for. Make a pledge now so we can let the media and Senate leadership know how much support there will be for a primary challenger to any member of the Democratic Caucus who keeps health care reform from getting an up-or-down vote. You don't need your credit card right now—just let us know how much you pledge.



Kos impresario and [Tancredo hunter] Markos Moulitsas is urging fellow liberals to ditch donating to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — because the party is backing a slew of battleground district moderates/conservatives who voted against the big health care bill on Saturday.

Army massacre fiend Nidal Malik Hasan attended a Virginia mosque at the same time as two of the 9/11 hijackers -- and the FBI is now investigating whether there is a connection between the men, an official confirmed yesterday.
Maj. Hasan -- the Army psychiatrist accused of fatally shooting 13 people and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday -- had held his mother's funeral at the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., in May 2001.
The mosque's imam at the time was the ultraradical Anwar Aulaqi, thought to have ties to Osama bin Laden.
But clearly, the massacre might have been an act of terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said yesterday.
"I want to say very quickly we don't know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," Lieberman told "Fox News Sunday."
The brutal massacre of thirteen unarmed soldiers and the wounding of dozens more at Fort Hood, Texas is another terrorist act on American soil that could have been prevented if not for an insidious cloud of political correctness that has taken this country hostage.
The victims of this horrific tragedy died at the hands of an enemy masquerading as a friend.
Those soldiers had every reason to believe they were safe on an army base, surrounded by their patriotic brothers and sisters. They volunteered to serve their country, knowing full well that they might lose their lives on a battlefield in a foreign land.
Could any of them have imagined that the end would come at the hands of a Muslim extremist wearing the uniform of an Army Major?
We now know that Major Hasan did not hide his true loyalties and often expressed Islamist sentiments. For example, the Telegraph quotes former Hasan colleague Col. Terry Lee as saying, "[Hasan] was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans"; that Hasan admitted to being "happy" upon learning of the Muslim who killed a soldier at an Arkansas military recruitment center; and that he once said, "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square."
Chron.com reports that Hasan had created "Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats," and that "one of the Web postings that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades."
Given this, was it really shocking when Hasan walked among the "aggressors" and yelled Allahu Akbar before punctuating his story with a burst of violence?
Why was an obvious jihadist in our military in the first place, let alone promoted to major?
Well, the question has already been answered. We have become a sick society, where fantasies are favored and reality is called "racist." If there were an officer of Japanese descent in our military during WWII, he wouldn't have lasted til the next day's rising sun if he had expressed pro-Imperial Japanese sentiments. But that was then, when America was America, before she was sacrificed on the altar of the leftist dystopia in utopian clothing.
Furthermore, only a sick society would tolerate a far more dangerous fifth column: those traitors who, as Cicero said 2,000 years ago, appear not as traitors, who speak in accents familiar to their victims, who wear their victims' face and use their arguments.
I speak of those who wasted no time painting Hasan as a victim: writers such as Kenyon Wallace, who only emphasized the claim that the major was "harassed" by colleagues and theorized that post-traumatic stress disorder might have influenced this man who never saw a firefight until he started one at Fort Hood.
What bunk. Sure, Hasan got into heated arguments with fellow officers and was called names.
But that's not called harassment. Harassment is when you disgorge the enemy's rhetoric with a violent tongue. It's called a defense of God, country, and culture. It's called pushing back when pushed.