Theodore's World

Wounded but still fighting
BETHESDA, Md. – The first round blew through Maj. K.C. Schuring’s helmet, creased the top of his head and popped out through his goggles.
The second round felt as if Tigers slugger Magglio Ordonez were teeing off on the center of his back.
But it wasn’t until rounds three and four blasted through each thigh that the big Marine went down, a pool of his blood spreading in the street in Ramadi, Iraq. While two dozen of his Iraqi Army trainees and two U.S. military advisers took cover, Schuring took stock.

OK, he thought. I’m still breathing.

“I remember thinking to myself, with that shot to my head, I shouldn’t be alive right now – and I was,” he said.

Staying that way would be another matter.
In that instant, Schuring joined more than 10,000 American troops wounded so severely in Iraq that they were sent home
Among all branches, more than 550 troops have lost legs, arms, hands or feet – mostly to roadside bombs – in Iraq and Afghanistan. That compares with 24,000 Americans wounded overall and more than 3,000 killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Lying in the street on that sunny morning of Nov. 14, Schuring was determined not to add to the total of dead. The man who had just tried to kill him – a bearded man in a gray dishdasha, a traditional long garment – was running toward him with an AK 47.

“The only thing I could think about was, ` I’m the next captive,’ or ` They’re going to drag my body through the streets of Ramadi,'” he said. “And I couldn’t let that happen to my wife and my family. … I didn’t want her to see me on Al-Jazeera” television.

Additionally – and unfortunately for the insurgents – Schuring was really ticked.

“I was mad, because, well, I don’t get shot,” said Schuring, 37, who has an MBA. In the civilian world, he works as a quality assurance manager. “I never get shot. And now I got shot. It infuriated me.”

He also realized he couldn’t get to cover.

“So I rolled to my right side and I brought up my M 16,” Schuring said. “I aimed in on him and shot him in the head.”

A moment later, a second armed insurgent rounded the same corner, looked down at the dead man and looked up just in time to catch three fatal rounds from Schuring’s rifle.
Schuring’s first steps on the road to recovery – killing two of the six insurgents who tried to kill him – came when he was unable to take any steps at all. And with those steps, Schuring, like other wounded warriors, began a painful journey to recovery.
Cpl. John Lockwood, a Washtenaw County, Mich., sheriff’s deputy, was manning a machine gun atop a Humvee during a Nov. 19 mission to root out insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq. The 26-year-old helped stake out a position, then stayed with Lance Cpl. Jeremy Shock, the driver, to guard their vehicle as their comrades searched nearby buildings.
That’s when a bomb, hidden 5 inches below the road surface, blew up.
The explosion killed Shock of Tiffin, Ohio. Lockwood suffered a litany of injuries: two broken feet. Two broken legs. Broken bones in both hands. A nose more crushed than merely broken. Legs peppered with shrapnel wounds. A left eye lost to more shrapnel.

“I don’t remember what happened,” Lockwood said. “The guys that helped me told me about it.”

They stabilized him in an alley near his burning Humvee, then rushed him to Fallujah Surgical, where Navy doctors tended his wounds. He woke briefly at some point, then spent the next two weeks in a medically induced coma while surgeons opened his wounds every 48 hours to clean them. The frequent surgeries help fight infection.
Four months later, Lockwood is still healing.

“I’ve got a long road ahead of me, ” he said, “but I’ll make it.”

While Lockwood was busy with surgeries and rehab, family, friends and at least a few hundred people he doesn’t even know were busy in Washtenaw County. His supporters came together last month at the Farm Council Grounds for what was modestly termed a fundraising spaghetti dinner and auction.
By the end of the day, about 2,000 people had plunked down at least $10 each for the right to eat spaghetti and bid on items ranging from autographed Red Wings jerseys to a ball thrown in the World Series last fall by Tigers pitcher Nate Robertson.
They raised almost $40,000 to help Lockwood and his wife, Lisa, defray some of his costs while recovering. The military takes care of his hospital bills. But Lisa Lockwood left her job and her college studies to be with her husband during his stay at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. And he’ll still need her help when his hospital stay ends – which friends say may be as soon as three weeks from now.

“His spirits are spectacular,” said Saline Police Sgt. Jay Basso, who visited Lockwood at Bethesda recently. “If I was half as strong as that guy, emotionally and physically … he’s a squared-away young man at 26. I’m in awe.”

Lockwood said he’s in awe, too.

“It’s just amazing all the support back home, ” he said. “I’m so humbled by it. All I can do is get better and give back as much as I can.”

Marines wounded by what the military calls improvised explosive devices often have a hard time telling a coherent story about their injuries. They remember driving away from a dusty combat outpost in Fallujah or Baghdad, then recall waking up in a hospital bed in Maryland or California or Texas.

That was the case for Lance Cpls. Josh Bleill and Eric Frazier, who last month sat beneath a scarlet Marine Corps flag at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and described their injuries.
But Cpl. Chad Watson, who sat with them, is an exception. He remembers exactly what happened about 9 a.m. Nov. 29 as he led a team of Marines in the streets of Fallujah. The team from the 1st Battalion of the 24th Marines had just searched the car and were starting to roll again.

“We didn’t get more than 100 meters, and it was like I got punched in the face like 10,000 times,” Watson said.

What pummeled Watson was a bomb, not a fist. The moment he looked down, he knew his life had changed forever.

“I looked at my right leg, and it was gone – completely gone,” said Watson, 24, a college student from Mt. Zion, Ill. “There was a big hole under the driver’s side; that’s where it hit.”

Watson’s training took over. Despite his missing leg, the smashed bones in his left heel and ankle, a fractured vertebra, burns and shrapnel wounds to his face, arm and eye, he grabbed his weapon and struggled to get out of the Humvee to defend himself and his comrades. But he couldn’t free his twisted left leg from what remained of the Humvee’s floor. Marines from other vehicles came running to help.

“I remember them yelling, `Is anybody still alive?'” said Watson.

Finally, after his fellow Marines dragged him into a nearby courtyard, a Navy corpsman tied off his bleeding right leg with a tourniquet. The corpsman gently informed Watson that most of his right leg was gone.

“I was kind of like, `Yeah, no kidding, I saw that.'”

Through it all Watson – still the team leader, despite his grievous wounds – was shouting orders.

“I was actually yelling at the guys to get out of the courtyard … because there were too many of them,” and a large group was liable to draw the insurgents’ fire, said Watson. “I was glad how I reacted. I acted good under pressure, and I was happy to hear that they told my parents that.”

All Bleill really remembers about the moments before the explosion that took both his legs and killed two comrades is gazing out his Humvee window in Fallujah.

“You’re always looking outside,” explained Bleill, 29, whose civilian job is running a call center in Indianapolis. “You’re looking for anything suspicious.”

Bleill woke up in Germany with his jaw wired shut days after he was injured Oct. 15. Medical staff explained his injuries to him while he was groggy: the loss of both legs above the knee, a broken jaw, a pelvis shattered so badly it required 32 pins to piece together.
Frazier’s story is similar. The 20-year-old from McMinnville, Tenn., was heading out to count Iraqis for a local census when a bomb destroyed his Humvee on Oct. 23.

“It blew up right underneath the driver and killed him instantly,” said Frazier, a factory worker. A second Marine also died.

The blast took both of Frazier’s legs – one above the knee – lacerated his liver and a kidney, fractured his pelvis in three places, and broke a vertebra , one arm, a wrist, his jaw and several fingers.

“I guess it wasn’t my time to go,” said Frazier. “I died out there in the streets of Fallujah, and no one can explain how they brought me back.”

Now the soft-spoken man from the mountains works every day to regain the physical strength he’ll need to again do the things he loves. For Frazier, that means using his computerized prosthetic legs to roam the hills and hollows with a fishing pole or a hunting rifle in his hands.
Generally, Marines like to organize things by threes. Three Marines make a fire team, three fire teams make a squad, three squads make a company, and three line companies make a battalion.

So Watson, Frazier and Bleill have formed their own sort of rehabilitative fire team during their stay at Walter Reed. “We joke with each other, or say, `Hey, we gotta catch up with him,'” Watson said. “It makes us work that much harder.”

When they’re working painfully to build their upper body strength, they push each other to work even harder. When one is working on his balance on the parallel bars, the others are watching.
Marines have always taken a perverse pride in their grueling daily doses of group PT, or physical training. It binds them together. And the equation hasn’t changed much just because they’re wounded. Now, the initials “PT” stand for “physical therapy.”

“It’s the same thing, just a different setting,” Watson said. “It’s just a different group of guys you’re with now.”

Even for Marines like Schuring, who is getting rehabilitation through Beaumont Hospital near his home in Farmington Hills, Mich., thoughts of his fellow Marines in Iraq are never far away while he’s sweating and groaning through painful physical therapy. Teamwork is something the former center on the Hope College football team in west Michigan has understood for a long time.
The ceramic plate in his body armor saved him from the shot to his back. His Kevlar helmet helped dissipate the shot to his head, which didn’t penetrate his skull. And the bullet that hit his right thigh missed the bone.
But the one that hit his left thigh almost cost him his leg, shattering his thighbone in three up near his hip. An infection nearly did the rest until it was brought under control by antibiotics.
His doctors expect he’ll make a full recovery – thanks to physical therapy sessions it would take a Marine to love.
None of the wounded men is willing to let his injuries define him. None expressed bitterness. All said they would rejoin their units tomorrow, if they could.
Schuring, whose mission was training Iraqi soldiers, was especially emphatic.

“We were doing good things there in Ramadi – I mean phenomenal things,” Schuring said. “The Iraqi army, the soldiers, they’re the Iraqi heroes. They’re not the best soldiers in the world, but they’re trying.”

The wounded men have had time while convalescing to process their experiences. They’ve met cabinet members and generals and members of Congress. Some have gone to the Super Bowl, and Watson was personally introduced to his baseball heroes, the St. Louis Cardinals, by the president of the United States.
But that’s all gravy. It’s everyday life that’s a gift to these survivors.

“This puts everything into perspective,” Lockwood said. “You get blown up, and all of a sudden the type of rims you have on your car, that doesn’t mean anything. Your family, your friends, that’s the stuff that’s important. That’s what keeps you going.”

Wild Thing’s comment……
To know as we all do that this is just one of the many stories of our brave troops. I just sit here with tears in my eyes and such pride in my heart of how truly awesome our soldiers are. God bless them all and keep them safe. I pray too that they know every day how very much they are appreciated!

WASHINGTON
(Reuters)
Iran is training anti-American Iraqi Shi’ites at sites inside Iran and Lebanon in the use of armor-piercing munitions blamed for the deaths of 170 U.S. troops in Iraq, the top U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, newly installed U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell said it was “probable” that Iranian leaders including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were aware that weapons known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, had been supplied to Iraqi Shi’ites.
But he and other senior intelligence officials told a hearing on threats to the United States that al Qaeda remained the greatest threat facing the United States and had reestablished itself in Pakistan since being driven out of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

“We inflicted a major blow. They retreated to another area. And they are going through a process to reestablish and rebuild, adapting to the seams, or the weak spots,” McConnell said in his first congressional testimony as the U.S. director of national intelligence.

In describing Iran’s role in Iraq, he stopped short of he stopped short of saying the Islamic Republic was directing EFP attacks on U.S. forces.

“We know there are Iranian weapons manufactured in Iran.

“We know that Quds Forces (of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) are bringing them (into Iraq),” McConnell said.
“Is there a direct link from Quds Forces delivering weapons, to the most senior leadership in Iran?” he said. “I would phrase it as ‘probable’ but, again, no direct link … I am comfortable saying it’s probable.”

HEZBOLLAH ROLE
Under questioning by Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, McConnell tersely acknowledged that the United States has evidence showing that Iran is training Iraqi Shi’ites at sites outside Iraq to use EFPs.

“And some of that training is occurring in Iran?” asked Lieberman.
“Yes, sir,” McConnell replied.
“I’ve heard reports that some may be occurring in Lebanon in Hezbollah training camps,” Lieberman said.
“We believe Hezbollah is involved in the training as well,” McConnell answered.
“If Iran is training Iraqi militants in the use of Iranian weapons which are then being used to kill Americans in Iraq, I think that’s a very serious act and one that we ought to consider taking steps to stop,” Lieberman said.

McConnell’s comments were the latest in a series of assertions by U.S. military and intelligence officials that Iran is behind the appearance of EFPS in Iraq, where the weapons have been able to pierce some of the heaviest U.S. armor.
Officials said Iran’s influence in Iraq has grown steadily since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and predicted Iraq’s postwar government would have great difficulty overcoming sectarian violence and achieving reconciliation between Shi’ites and Sunnis.

Wild Thing’s comment…….
This war is on so many fronts, and it just makes me angrier that one of those fronts is right here in our own country with the actiions, words and deeds of the left fighting our troops every step of the way. This is good information in this article and it will hit deaf ears when it comes to the likes of Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy and others that do NOT love America and are against our military.
It would be so cool if we could do a fly over and bomb the hell out of those places within Iran that are training people to fight our troops.

Blast at Afghan Base Causes Causalities, Vice President Cheney Is Safe, Officials Say
Fox News
Tuesday 1:30AM ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — An explosion outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan went off Tuesday as Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting, causing an unknown number of casualties but apparently not putting the vice president in danger, officials said.
The blast happened at the first gate outside the base at Bagram, and there were an unknown number of casualties, said Kabir Ahmad, the district chief of the Bagram region.

Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to the vice president, who was “safely inside the base” during the blast.

BAGRAM (Afghanistan) – Two Afghans were killed and 18 wounded in a suicide bombing perpetrated at the entry of the American base of Bagram, in the north of Kabul, during a visit of the American vice-president Dick Cheney, declared in AFP the chief of the district of Bagram, Kabir Ahmad.
“It is about a suicide bombing perpetrated in front of the principal entry kept by American soldiers”, declared Mr. Ahmad, without being able to give more explanations.
“According to first information’s, two Afghans were killed and 18 wounded”, it added.
The number two American, who was inside the base, was not wounded, according to its spokesman.

Updates:
KABUL, Afghanistan: An explosion outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan killed at least two people and wounded 12 on Tuesday during a visit by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, though the vice president was apparently not in danger, officials said.
The blast happened near the first security gate outside the base at Bagram, killing two people and wounding 12, said Kabir Ahmad, the district chief of the Bagram region.
Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to the vice president, who was “safely inside the base” during the blast.
Cheney, who spent the night at Bagram, ate breakfast with U.S. soldiers Tuesday morning, Mitchell said. He was expected to later meet with President Hamid Karzai after their meeting was scrapped on Monday because of bad weather that prevented him traveling to Kabul.
“At this point it does not appear that the explosion was intended as a threat to the vice president,” Mitchell said. “He wasn’t near the site of the explosion. He was safely within the base at the time of the explosion.”

KABUL, Feb 27 (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed 20 people outside the main U.S. base in Afghanistan on Tuesday, a Pakistan-based news agency reported.

“The suicide bombing took place at gate 2 where Afghan labours were waiting,” the Afghan Islamic Press quoted a provincial police officer as saying.

The agency quoted provincial governor Abdul Jabbar Taqwa as saying 20 people had been killed in the blast outside the Bagram air base.

Wild Thing’s comment……
Cheney’s meeting with Karzai is expected to continue. The meeting had been delayed due to weather conditions. Bagram is a sprawling complex and the main gates are some distance from offices and living quarters. All the other reports I am reading say all the dead and injured where Afghans.
I am so glad our troops are ok and VP Cheney was not injured or worse. Prayers for Cheney and our troops, any area there is dangerous for all of them.

Wayne Spring scans the airwaves for fellow ham operators from his Orange home. He uses Morse code, but doesn’t oppose licensing operators who don’t know the language.

It’s taps for Morse code
A new FCC rule is seen as a sign that the language is fading into history like smoke signals
ocregister
Morse code is in need of some serious SOS.
The language of dots and dashes, first used during the infancy of electronic communication in the mid-1800s, is going the way of Latin.
Beginning today, amateur or “ham” radio operators in the United States won’t be tested in Morse code – also known as Continuous Wave – in order to be licensed by the federal government.
In an effort to advance the hobby, the Federal Communications Commission in December agreed to eliminate the five-words-per-minute Morse code requirement for people seeking their upper-level class licenses.
So with another nail in Morse code’s coffin, some of the 15 or so ham radio clubs in Orange County are hoping the less stringent testing will ignite interest and beef up declining membership. There are more than 9,600 licensed ham operators in the county, according to FCC data.
But the loss of Morse code has also created a rift between longtime operators, some who say the tap, tap, tapping is a skill steeped in tradition.

“There’s a tendency for people who use Continuous Wave all their lives to shun or think of the people who don’t use it as second-class citizens,” said Fullerton Radio Club President Larry McDavid of Anaheim.

Walt LeBlanc, a member of the Anaheim Amateur Radio Association, learned Morse code when he first got licensed in 1976. He laments its loss as part of the licensing process.

“I think it’s all part of the dumbing down of America,” said LeBlanc of Westminster. “They keep lowering requirements like they did (for ham radio beginners) in 1991. But it didn’t do anything then, and I don’t think it’ll do anything now.”

The Anaheim association, which formed in 1964, saw as many as 300 members in its heyday; now there are about 30, with only 10 active.
The Fullerton Radio Club began in 1950, but while its ranks peaked at about 300 members in the early 1960s, there are only about 60 today. Most of the members are over age 50.
Amateur radio operators say cell phones, text messaging and the Internet have easily become more popular outlets for making long-distance contact.
But the need for ham operators is great, especially during disasters, operators say. Ham radio played a key role in early communications during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

“We’re often there first, and we’re often the only communication early on,” McDavid said.

Wayne Spring of the Orange County Amateur Radio Club is one of the ham hopefuls who think nixing Morse code testing can only help the hobby.
Spring, who lives in Orange, learned Morse code as a search-and-rescue radio operator for the U.S. Coast Guard in the 1940s. While his code has gotten a little rusty, he isn’t quite ready to say “73” (Morse code for “goodbye”) to the electronic language.

Wild Thing’s comment…….
How are they ‘advancing the hobby’ when they are taking one of the more interesting aspects of it away? I think it is sad, another vanishing skill and why say it is a hobby like that is all it is. It has meant much more to this country over the years.
I have heard that here in Florida there are very active, effective and experienced crew of hams on the hurricane net who give of their own time and resources on a regular basis in times of emergency.
Click HERE for a Morse Code Translator I found online.
…. .- …- . / .- / –. .-. . .- – / -.. .- -.– / . …- . .-. -.– — -. .
Translation
Have a great day everyone

More Americans killed by illegal aliens than Iraq war
National Border Patrol Council
January 22,2007
Illegal aliens are killing more Americans than the Iraq war, says a new report from Family Security Matters that estimates some 2,158 murders are committed every year by illegal aliens in the U.S. The group says that number is more than 15 percent of all the murders reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. and about three times the representation of illegal aliens in the general population.
Mike Cutler, a former senior special agent with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (the former INS), is a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and an advisor to Family Security Matters (FSM). He says the high number of Americans being killed by illegal aliens is just part of the collateral damage that comes with tolerating illegal immigration.

“The military actually called for the BORTAC team, … the elite unit of the Border Patrol, to be detailed to Iraq to help to secure the Iraqi border,” Cutler notes. “Now, if our military can understand that Iraq’s security depends in measure on the ability to protect its border against insurgents and terrorists, then why isn’t our country similarly protecting our own borders ?” he asks.

“We are not five and a half years, nearly, after 9/11, and yet our borders remain open,” the Center for Immigration Studies fellow observes. “We have National Guardsmen assigned on the border, but it turns out they are unarmed,” he points out. “Their rules of engagement are very simple : if armed intruders head your way, run in the other direction.”

This situation would “almost be comical if it wasn’t so tragic:

” Cutler asserts. “If our borders are wide open, this means that drugs, criminals, and terrorists are entering our country just as easily as the dishwashers,” he says.

The report from FSM estimates that the 267,000 illegal aliens currently incarcerated in the nation are responsible for nearly 1,300,000 crimes, ranging from drug arrests to rape and murder. Such statistics, Cutler contends, debunk the claim that illegal immigration is a victimless crime.

“Then we even have another problem,” he adds, “and that’s the Visa Waiver Program.”

The federal government’s Visa Waiver Program enables nationals of certain countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa. According to the U.S. State Department website, the waiver program was established in 1986 with the objective of “eliminating unnecessary barriers to travel,” stimulating America’s tourism industry, and allowing the government to focus consular resources in other areas.
Cutler says the U.S. retains the Visa Waiver Program because the nation’s travel, tourism, and hospitality industries want America’s borders wide open. In other words, the former INS official contends, the nation’s security is being compromised in the name of trade.

Arms seized at U.S. – Mexican border town

( NIN) On February 11, 2007, a tractor-trailer registered in Texas and containing a large shipment of weapons, ammunition and a Nissan pickup truck fitted with armor and bullet-proof glass was stopped by the Mexican army in Matamoros, just south of the U.S. border at Brownsville, Texas.
The weapons seized included 18 M-16 assault rifles, including at least one equipped with an M-203 40mm grenade launcher, several M-4 carbines, 17 handguns of various calibers, over 200 magazines for different weapons, and more than 8,000 rounds of ammunition, assault vests and other military accessories.

Although the origin of the shipment is unclear, it is vividly obvious that areas along the U.S.-Mexican border are as much war zones as transshipment points. Matamoros has long been recognized as a vital choke point for the shipment of drugs, weapons and illegal aliens, including Islamic terrorists, into the United States from Mexico. Based on the sophistication of the weapons seized earlier this month, it is apparent that a battle is shaping up just across the border from Brownsville – one that will undoubtedly have ominous implications for those protecting our southern border.

Border town of Matamoros, Tamaulipas across from Brownsville, Texas

Wild Thing’s comment…….
Imagine a scene of a man sitting in his living room, his family that he loves sleeping in their specific bedrooms. The man is sitting there, alone and well armed to protect his precious family. There is a large front door, a side door and a back door. Not only are these doors unlocked but they are wide open for easy entrance for anyone wanting in.
And there are some dogs that are also family members as pets always are. But instead of being free to defend the home and their loving family they live with, these dogs are tied up outside, preventing them from any guard duty, any form of protection. They have muzzles on as well to keep them from barking (alerting) the man sitting in the house.
Some time ago, an additional two dogs he had were put in the pound because they tore into one of the invaders that meant harm and danger for this American family. The invader, well he was paid a vast amount of money, not even a slap on the wrist, and those in authority in this families city made this invader, this criminal a reward as an American visitor with special treatment showing thanks for entering illegally and bringing his criminal business into a once safe place.
Is the family man sitting in his living room with the gun wasting his time trying to protect his family? Will this man one day find himself in a human pound, a jail if he attempts to fight back and do what any loving and caring head of a family would do to protect his own? And how many more of the guard dogs will be sent to the pound for doing their job?
This is a Chrissie version of what has been happening. The two guard dogs are the two border patrol agents that have been sentenced and jailed for doing their job. The doors to our country are still wide open and the criminal, the illegal immigrant drug pusher, POS walks free with a financial apology from our country.
What was up is down and what was down is up, the world, as we know it is on some kind of spiral into hell and misery if this kind of thing is not fixed. It won’t just be the Border Patrol Agents that will find themselves jailed for doing their jobs, it will also be home owners, land owners, renters, heads of families, fathers, mothers and young people that attempt to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Sounds negative doesn’t it?! But wait… we have already seen this happen and who would have dreamed it in their worst nightmare that these agents would be jailed and the illegal immigrant been treated as he was treated. I have a tremendous imagination, it helps in being creative with art etc. but it’s certainly doesn’t take an imagination to see that this will happen and the tables will continue to turn against those of us that are here legally, those of us that intend on defending our lives, our homes, our loved ones, and yes our country!
Our troops are busting their butts every day for us, risking their lives, for our security and to keep us as safe as possible. Our Border Patrol Agents, our police etc. too and this is the thanks they all get!
Consistency is important in leadership, it adds strength in it’s own right. Leaders cannot lead if they are wishie washie, if they double speak, if they are NOT consistent. There can’t be an axis of evil list and exceptions for countries made just because of oil or any other kind of trade. Evil is evil and one can’t put flowers on it to make it less evil. This country is set apart because we have the rule of law. When exceptions are made for our laws a sick virus begins to grow that spreads from one law to another and soon laws will mean nothing even to those that once obeyed them. When our leaders ignore existing laws and constantly try to rewrite them to promote their political agenda, or gain favor with the enemy wanting to erode our Nation it will crumble like a building imploding from the inside out.
I am very concerned about my country, I love her dearly with all my heart. I won’t ever give up but I am disgusted. For me I will never vote for anyone that I do not think will see America as I do, that it needs to be protected from the inside as well as in far off lands from those wanting to do harm to us, and to our Nation. I am a Conservative, NOT a compassionate conservative.
At the top of my blog just below the large graphic, is my statement, it has been there since the day I began this blog, and I will always feel this way.
I am an American first, a Conservative second and a Republican third.
I have voted Republican all my voting age life. So has my family except for some of my husband’s relatives. I pray every day we will have a Conservative to vote for when the time comes. I am VERY impressed with Vietnam Veteran,173rd Airborne Brigade and the 75th Army Ranger Duncan Hunter. And I am also concerned for the way I see Rudy being pushed and yakked up in the media, pushed in our faces as though we HAVE to pick him. Duncan Hunter on the Issues. Hunter is the real deal. And this this important to me too, his father was a Marine and so is one of Duncan’s two sons, his name is Duncan also and he has served two tours in Iraq in the U.S. Marine Corps.
I wasn’t gonig to state yet the name of the person I have been reading up on, since it is still so very early, but the more I read about Hunter the more I am filled with hope.
This next election will be drawing the line in this country as to what the future will be on many levels. God help us all if a vote is made for the lesser of two evils, because that is still a vote for evil. That is still a vote for the enemy within, just a slower walk to the guillotine.

Please click
on the above image and photo will enlarge to 

see the awesome
detail work!!!

ARABIAN SEA (Feb. 22, 2007) – A helicopter from the Eight-ballers of Helicopter Anti-submarine Squadron (HS) 8 prepares to land on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69).
Eisenhower and embarked Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 7 are on a regularly scheduled deployment in support of Maritime Security Operations (MSO). U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Jon Dasbach

Sgt. Benjamin Webb, an infantryman with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 325th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, plays dominos with an Iraqi girl during a break on a patrol in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad. The Hampton, Va. native split four games with the girl. The 325th PIR has been getting out into the neighborhood surrounding Combat Outpost Callahan to foster good relationships with the residents they are here to help protect. Photo by Sgt. Michael Garrett

U.S. Veteran Kills Would be mugger
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) –
American tourists watched as a U.S. military Marine Veteran in his 70’s used his bare hands to kill an armed assailant in Costa Rica.

“ I thought it was a skit. But then he pointed a gun at my head and grabbed me by the throat and I thought I was going to die,” Clova Adams 54, said by telephone Friday from the Carnival Liberty cruise ship.

The assault occurred during a stopover 80 miles east of San Jose. Adams was with 12 American tourists who hired a driver to explore. They were climbing out of the van when three men wearing ski masks ran toward them, she said. One held a .38 caliber revolver at her head and the other two pulled out knives.

Suddenly, one tourist, a U.S. military Marine veteran trained in self-defense, jumped out of the van and put the gunman in a headlock killing the mugger by snapping his neck, according to police chief Luis Hernandez. Hernandez said. “His neck was completely snapped.”

Segura died instantly and two other unidentified thieves, one of whom was armed with a knife, fled the scene, Hernandez said.
No charges will be filed against the tourists because police viewed the incident as an act of self-defense. Police questioned and released the group, which rejoined the cruise and left Cost Rica.
The Americans were passengers aboard the Carnival cruise ship Legend. They got off their tour bus to take photos in a notoriously rough neighborhood a short drive from Limon.
After the attack, they put Segura’s body on their bus and found a police officer in Limon to report the incident.

Wild Thing’s comment…….
Don’t bring a .38 to a rasslin’ match with a 70 year-old Marine.

Girls dragged in streets, hacked to death
SANGHAR
The cruel custom of ‘karo-kari’ claimed another two lives when two village girls were dragged in the streets and hacked to death by their uncles, accusing them of having tarnished the family’s honour. The girls — first cousins — were buried without any religious rites and the family declined to accept condolences.
The gory incident took place on Thursday in the village of Allah Bux Brohi, near Shahpur Chakar. The two uncles surrendered to police. They said they had done the right thing and felt no remorse.
They told journalists that they had been informed at about midnight on Wednesday that the girls — Farida, 18, and Hamida, 22 — were missing from their room. They went in search of them and found them in a banana orchard with two men who ran away.
The two uncles have been identified as Khamiso Brohi and Imamdad Brohi.

Wild Thing’s comment……
So sick, so horrible and of course we are the bad guys according to the lefties and rhino’s that want sit down’s with these sub humans that follow Islam. Another disquieting thing about this is that it occurred in Pakistan, a country with an extensive nuclear arsenal.
Of course this is more news that will never be NEWS in the Main Stream Media. Now if it were U.S. Soldiers that did it, then thats different.

…

Could Al Gore make bid for presidency at Oscars?
cnn
LOS ANGELES, California
We’ve seen plenty of political moments at the Oscars before. But on Sunday, we could see the most unusual political moment ever.
Consider this scenario: It’s Academy Awards night. Best documentary feature is up. And the Oscar is favored to go to . . . “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring former Vice President Al Gore.
Lawrence Bender, producer of “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the film’s other producers come up to accept the Oscar — with Gore.

“There’s even some speculation that he would use his Oscar as the occasion to announce that he’s running,” Martin Kaplan, director of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center, told CNN. “Imagine that: a billion people worldwide! Take that Jay Leno, as an announcement venue!”

Could it happen? Gore’s producer thinks a potential Gore speech would be a historic moment, but not the way Kaplan envisions.

“It’s electrifying, not politically, because is Al Gore going to run or not going to run. There’s nothing going to happen like that,” Bender told CNN. “It’s electrifying because the man who is responsible for solidifying the forces around global warming is going to” be acknowldged.

But could an Oscar start the momentum for a draft-Gore movement? USC’s Kaplan thinks it could.

Wild Thing’s comment……
LMAO, oh whew! OK so several weeks ago my husband and I got our package from the Academy for us to vote this year for the Oscars. Obviously we did not vote for Gore’s film. hahaha No way! Every year it gets harder and harder to vote because we go to less and less films. They usually send a few DVD’s f films they think will win anyway. Funny and thank goodness they did not send us Gore’s film hahahahha
This is such perfect timing. As I was preparing this post I got an emaijl from Jack at Conservative Insurgent and here is a Petition we can sign. The Petition is to to Stop Gore and Reject the UN’s Global Warming Treaty To sign Petition just go HERE.

I don’t know how everybody else feels about it, but to me I think Hispanic people in this country, legally or illegally,
made a huge public relations mistake with their recent demonstrations.
I don’t blame anybody in the world for wanting to come to the United States of America, as it is a truly wonderful place.
But when the first thing you do when you set foot on American soil is illegal it is flat out wrong and I don’t care how many lala land left heads come out of the woodwork and start trying to give me sensitivity lessons.
I don’ t need sensitivity lessons, in fact I don’t have any-thing against Mexicans! I just have something against criminals and anybody who comes into this country illegally is a criminal and if you don’t believe it try coming into America from a foreign country without a passport and see how far you get. What disturbs me about the demonstrations is that it’s tanta-mount to saying, “I am going to come into your country even if it means breaking your laws and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
It’s an “in your face” action and speaking just for me, I don’t like it one little bit and if there were a half dozen pairs of gonads in Washington bigger than English peas it wouldn’t be happening.
Where are you, you bunch of lily livered, pantywaist, forked tongued, sorry excuses for defenders of The Constitution?
Have you been drinking the water out of the Potomac again? And even if you pass a bill on immigration it will probably be so pork laden and watered down that it won’t mean anything anyway. Besides, what good is another law going to do when you won’t enforce the ones on the books now?
And what ever happened to the polls, guys? I thought you folks were the quintessential finger wetters. Well you sure ain’t paying any attention to the polls this time because somewhere around eighty percent of Americans want some thing done about this mess, and mess it is and getting bigger everyday.
This is no longer a problem, it is a dilemma and headed for being a tragedy. Do you honestly think that what happened in France with the Muslims can’t happen here when the businesses who hire these people finally run out of jobs and a few million disillusioned Hispanics take to the streets?
If you, Mr. President, Congressmen and Senators, knuckle under on this and refuse to do something meaningful it means that you care nothing for the kind of country your children and grand-children will inherit.
But I guess that doesn’t matter as long as you get re-elected.
Shame on you.
One of the big problems in America today is that if you have the nerve to say anything derogatory about any group of people (except Christians) you are going to be screamed at by the media and called a racist, a bigot and anything else they can think of to call you
Well I’ve been pounded by the media before and I’m still rockin’ and rollin’ and when it comes to speaking the truth I fear not. And the truth is that the gutless, gonadless, milksop politicians are just about to sell out the United States of America because they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to face reality.
And reality is that we would never allow any other group of people to have 12 million illegal in this country and turn around and say, “Oh it’s ok, ya’ll can stay here if you’ll just allow us to slap your wrist.”
And I know that some of you who read this column are saying “Well what’s wrong with that?”
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. These people could be from Mars as far as we know. We don’t know who they are, where they are or what they’re up to and the way the Congress is going we’re not going to.
Does this make sense? Labor force you say? We already subsidize corporate agriculture as it is, must we subsidize their labor as well? If these peo ple were from Haiti would we be so fast to turn a blind eye to them or if they were from Somalia or Afghanistan ? I think not.
All the media shows us are pictures of hard working Hispanics who have crossed the border just to try to better their life.
They don’t show you pictures of the Feds rounding up members of MS 13, the violent gang who came across the same way the decent folks did. They don’t tell you about the living conditions of the Mexican illegal some fat cat hired to pick his crop.
I want to make two predictions.
No. 1: This situation is going to grow and fester until it erupts in violence on our streets while the wimps in Washington drag their toes in the dirt and try to figure how many tons of political hay they can make to the acre.
No 2: Somebody is going to cr oss that border with some kind of weapon of mass destruction and set it off in a major American city after which there will be a backlash such as this country has never experienced and the Capitol building in Washington will probably tilt as Congressmen and Senators rush to the other side of the issue.
I don’t know about you but I would love to see just one major politician stand up and say, “I don’t care who I make mad and I don’t care how many votes I lose, this is a desperate situation and I’m going to lead the fight to get it straightened out.”
I don’t blame anybody for wanting to come to America , but if you don’t respect our immigration laws why should you respect any others?
And by the way, this is America and our flag has stars and stripes Please get that other one out of my face.
God Bless America
Charlie Daniels

Thank you Mark for sending this to me.