Memorial Day.

It’s more than just another day off, a day to go shopping or enjoy a barbecue.

Take a moment to remember our fallen heroes.

Michelle Malkin has a great post about Memorial Day.

Teach your kids about it.

As a veteran myself, I salute those who have fallen and those who are still in harm’s way today.

God bless them and their families and keep them safe.

As I’ve reported previously, U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling.

Bush isn’t off the hook, as you can see. But just as with spending, Obummer’s answer to something Bush screwed up is to make it worse.

Hat tips to The Patriot Room and Gateway Pundit.

Doug Powers filling in for Michelle Malkin notes that it was all for… a photo op.

Gateway Pundit has video.

Meanwhile, we have the following exclusive photo (well, okay, photoSHOP):

O Farce One buzzing the Statue of Liberty for a lousy photo op.

Now, my question is, how’d it get to their training camps? Was it they themselves who were experimenting with it and it went bad (thankfully)? Or… something else?

Who knows, but at least for once it got the right targets. According to the Sun, the terrorists are running scared now:

The al-Qaeda epidemic began in the cave hideouts of AQLIM in Tizi Ouzou province, 150km east of the capital Algiers. The group, led by wanted terror boss Abdelmalek Droudkal, was forced to turn its shelters in the Yakouren forest into mass graves and flee.

The extremists supporting madman Osama bin Laden went to Bejaia and Jijel provinces — hoping the plague did not go with them.

A source said: “The emirs (leaders) fear surviving terrorists will surrender to escape a horrible death.”

Serves them right! Gitmo’s beginning to look REAL good now, huh boys?

I know a young man who is in desperate need of help. His name is PFC Hunter Levine. He is 20 years old and hails from Houston, TX.

He was in my company and was wounded on 9 May, 2008 while conducting combat operations in East Baghdad. He received a very serious injury to his face, resulting in the loss of his entire bone structure, mouth, nose, and vision.

He was evacuated to Walter Reed Hospital where the doctors performed numerous surgeries to repair his face. I was fortunate enough to attend a Purple Heart Ceremony at Walter Reed while I was home on leave in June. I was also able to meet with Hunter’s father Beau.

PFC Levine is now in the VA hospital in Palo Alto California, but he’s seriously depressed. A care package, card, or letter would be nice. Find out how to help at the very excellent ParentsZone blog for military families.

Hat tip (and happy birthday) to Michelle Malkin.

Army Specialist Stephen Fortunato gave his life a few weeks ago fighting the bad guys in Afghanistan. He blogged when he had some spare time and his mother released his August 30, 2008 entry to the Boston Globe (I know, I was shocked too that they’d actually publish it).

Here’s an excerpt:

I am a proud American. i believe that my country allows me to live my life more or less however i want to, and believe me, i have seen what the alternative of that looks like. i also believe that our big scary government does way more than it has to to help complete [expletive deleted]-ups get back on their feet, a stark comparison to places where leaders just line their own pockets with gold while allowing the people who gave them their power and privilage to starve. I have chosen my corner. I back my country, and am proud to defend it against aggressors. Also, if you dare accuse us of being inhumane, or overly aggressive because we have rolled into someone else’s country and blown some [expletive deleted] up and shot some people, let me remind you of just how inhumane we COULD be in defending ourselves. Let me remind you that we have a warhead that drops multiple bomblets from the stratosphere which upon impact, would turn all the sand in Iraq to glass, and reduce every living thing there to dust. Do we use it? No. Instead we use the most humane weapon ever devised: the American soldier. We send our bravest (and perhaps admitably craziest) men and women into enemy territory, into harms way, to root out those whom we are after and do our best to leave innocent lives unscathed.

There’s a lot more where it came from on the Boston Globe or Michelle Malkin’s blog (which, by the way, I give a tip of the hat to for putting this out there).

A growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

Yep, a nuclear power with al Qaida types all over the place is descending into a violent, chaotic cesspool. Makes you sort of pine for the days of Pervez Musharraf, doesn’t it.

Equally scary is this part of the article:

Six U.S. officials who helped draft or are aware of the document’s findings confirmed them to McClatchy on the condition of anonymity because NIEs (National Intelligence Estimate) are top secret and are restricted to the president, senior officials and members of Congress.

So much for “top secret” when we have not one, not two, not three, but SIX intelligence officials blabbermouthing to the media about a draft intelligence report.

If that’s not enough heroism for one lifetime, he gave his life on September 11, 2001, helping to save the lives of nearly 3,700 of his co-workers from the firm Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Think about it: the number of dead on 9/11 might well have been double had it not been for Rick.

I posted about Rick on my other blog, Castro Death Watch. But you can read more about him here and here.

We owe it to Rick and others like him to remember 9/11.

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I ran across it.

The editorial was based on the report released last week by the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence. Of course, the lamestream media jumped all over Senator Rockefeller’s–the committee’s chairman–comment that the report “proved” that Bush lied (only, of course, Rockefeller stopped short of using the word “lie” himself).

But the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor, Fred Hiatt, actually did something novel: he took a look at the report itself! And look at what he found:

But dive into Rockefeller’s report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements “were substantiated by intelligence information.”

On chemical weapons, then? “Substantiated by intelligence information.”

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.” Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? “Generally substantiated by available intelligence.” Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

I sense a recurring theme here… “substantiated by intelligence.”

Here’s the money quote:

…(T)he phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology from the Daily Kooks, Keith Olbermann, Al Franken, Congressional Democrats, etc. If anything, just as those who claimed in their day that the earth was round, or that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, expect Mr. Hiatt to be treated like a heretic by the Left. Indeed, you only need to see some of the comments posted to this editorial to see that this is already happening.