March 1, 2011
BRUCE A. BRENNAN BLOG FROM THE WORLD AND MY MIND
The news as I see it and the views as I want them.
March 1 is … National Pig Day and Peanut Butter Lover's Day
I have a son who lives on peanut butter. He eats two peanut butter sandwiches a day, at least. He loves peanut butter and banana but he will try anything if it has peanut butter on it. All of my children like pork, but then, who doesn’t, except for Jewish people and they just don’t know what they are missing.
So after years of arguing, arm-twisting and lying about the health care plan, Obama is now dismantling it. In a nod to pressure from state governors, President Obama announced a plan on Monday to allow states to opt out of some aspects of the nation's health care reform law three years earlier than previously mandated. As currently written, the law says states must wait until 2017; the new bill would allow them to begin pursuing alternate plans as early as 2014. Twenty-six states have sued the federal government to void the law. That means at least half of the states will likely opt out. Who is this health fiasco for? It is for welfare recipients and illegal aliens. Who is not going to opt out? Sooner or later, individual American citizens living in the land of the free will be given back the free will to opt out. The land of the free only applies anymore if you are on welfare or here illegally.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is losing friends fast: first his diplomats at the U.N., then nearly the entire eastern half of his country and now the "voluptuous blonde" nurse who's been by his side for years. Galyna Kolotnytska, 38, was described as such by the U.S. ambassador to Tripoli, Gene Cretz, according to secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year. She's said to accompany Gadhafi everywhere, "knows his routine" and may even be his lover. She was last seen talking to Paul Simon about fifty ways to leave your lover.
Frank Buckles was repeatedly rejected by military recruiters and got into uniform at 16 after lying about his age. He would later become the last surviving U.S. veteran of World War I.
Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in World War II, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in Charles Town, biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said. He was 110. Buckles had been advocating for a national memorial honoring veterans of the Great War in the nation's capital and asked about its progress weekly, sometimes daily. "He was sad it's not completed," DeJonge said. "It's a simple straightforward thing to do, to honor Americans." When asked in February 2008 how it felt to be the last of his kind, he said simply, "I realized that somebody had to be, and it was me." And he told The Associated Press he would have done it all over again, "without a doubt."
On Nov. 11, 2008, the 90th anniversary of the end of the war, Buckles attended a ceremony at the grave of World War I Gen. John Pershing in Arlington National Cemetery. He was back in Washington a year later to endorse a proposal to rededicate the existing World War I memorial on the National Mall as the official National World War I Memorial. He told a Senate panel it was "an excellent idea." The memorial was originally built to honor District of Columbia's war dead. Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the "war to end all wars" in April 1917. He was repeatedly rejected before convincing an Army captain he was 18. He was actually 16 1/2. "A boy of (that age), he's not afraid of anything. He wants to get in there," Buckles said.
Details for services and arrangements will be announced later this week, but DeJonge said Buckles' daughter, Susannah Flanagan, is planning for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. In 2008, friends persuaded the federal government to make an exception to its rules and allow his burial there. Buckles had already been eligible to have his cremated remains housed at the cemetery. To be buried underground, however, he would have had to meet several criteria, including earning one of five medals, such as a Purple Heart.
Buckles never saw combat but joked, "Didn't I make every effort?" The family asked that donations be made to the National World War One Legacy Project. The project is managed by the nonprofit Survivor Quest and will educate students about Buckles and WWI through a documentary and traveling educational exhibition. More than 4.7 million people joined the U.S. military from 1917-18. As of spring 2007, only three were still alive, according to a tally by the Department of Veterans Affairs: Buckles, J. Russell Coffey of Ohio and Harry Richard Landis of Florida. The dwindling roster prompted a flurry of public interest, and Buckles went to Washington in May 2007 to serve as grand marshal of the national Memorial Day parade. Coffey died Dec. 20, 2007, at age 109, while Landis died Feb. 4, 2008, at 108. Unlike Buckles, those two men were still in basic training in the United States when the war ended and did not make it overseas.
The last known Canadian veteran of the war, John Babcock of Spokane, Wash., died in February 2010. There are no French or German veterans of the war left alive.
Buckles served in England and France, working mainly as a driver and a warehouse clerk. An eager student of culture and language, he used his off-duty hours to learn German, visit cathedrals, museums and tombs, and bicycle in the French countryside. After Armistice Day, Buckles helped return prisoners of war to Germany. He returned to the United States in January 1920. Buckles returned to Oklahoma for a while, then moved to Canada, where he worked a series of jobs before heading for New York City. There, he again took advantage of free museums, worked out at the YMCA, and landed jobs in banking and advertising. But it was the shipping industry that suited him best, and he worked around the world for the White Star Line Steamship Co. and W.R. Grace & Co.
In 1941, while on business in the Philippines, Buckles was captured by the Japanese. He spent more than three years in prison camps. "I was never actually looking for adventure," Buckles once said. "It just came to me." He married in 1946 and moved to his farm in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle in 1954, where he and wife Audrey raised their daughter. Audrey Buckles died in 1999. In spring 2007, Buckles told the AP of the trouble he went through to get into the military. "I went to the state fair up in Wichita, Kansas, and while there, went to the recruiting station for the Marine Corps," he said. "The nice Marine sergeant said I was too young when I gave my age as 18, said I had to be 21." Buckles returned a week later. "I went back to the recruiting sergeant, and this time I was 21," he said with a grin. "I passed the inspection ... but he told me I just wasn't heavy enough." Then he tried the Navy, whose recruiter told Buckles he was flat-footed.
Buckles wouldn't quit. This guy was on a mission. In Oklahoma City, an Army captain demanded a birth certificate. "I told him birth certificates were not made in Missouri when I was born, that the record was in a family Bible. I said, 'You don't want me to bring the family Bible down, do you?'" Buckles said with a laugh. "He said, 'OK, we'll take you.'"
He enlisted Aug. 14, 1917, serial number 15577. I wonder what number you would get today if you enlisted in the military. God Bless Frank Buckles. He left the world a better place for having lived in it.
Bernie Madoff says the Government is a Ponzi scheme and that investors and hedge funds were complacent in his financial schemes since they should have realized that you cannot make the money he was promising, especially during tough economic times.
Nineteen of the players on the CUBS forty-man roster are foreign born. I did not investigate this further but that is probably on the high end although all teams have plenty of foreign born players.
BRUCE A. BRENNAN
DEKALB, IL 60115
COPYRIGHT 2011
VISIT ANY OF THE SITES LISTED FOR REVIEW, RESEARCH, ORDERING MY WRITING PRODUCTS OR TO CONTACT ME.
Email: brucebrennanlaw@aol.com
Go to web sites below to buy books by Bruce A. Brennan. It is still a good time to purchase any of my books. The books are interesting and inexpensive reads. My third book should be available later this year, in late 2011. More information will be forthcoming.
http://ebooks.ebookmall.com/ebook/497984-ebook.htm (second book not here)
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ (do a quick search, Title, my name)
http://www.smashwords.com/ Do a Title or author search, Check this site out.
https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/dashboard NEW SOURCE FOR BOOK
“It is far better to be deceived than to be undeceived by those we love.”
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