WW1 - The Definitive Collection

British Pathe'  "August 2014 marks one hundred years since the start of World War One. To commemorate this landmark occasion, British Pathé have launched this definitive collection of WW1 films.

"British Pathé holds one of the finest and most comprehensive First World War archives in the world.

"If you are unable to find what you are looking for, you can explore the entire archive using the search bar at the top of this page."

One sample of many: Verdun

Some of the images ;
 ... "French soldiers cross field. Map showing French Army's advance. Shots of another mess; with mangled equipment; rubble; etc. on hillside. French soldiers carry material through well-fortified trench; past entrances to dugouts with sandbags stacked around wooden frames. Soldier filling jugs of water from puddle in shell crater; he and another carry them away. Shots of bombs exploding. Gun barrel sticks out of its hiding place; fires several times. A few men walking. CU man looking through binoculars. More explosions and guns. Shot from hill; looking downward. French soldiers walking down hill inside trench; while a group of German prisoners walk up the hill towards camera. Next; a few French soldiers join several comrades sitting up on a rocky ridge; just below the top (where they could not be seen from other side). "

Thug Playing The Knockout Game Gets Shot Twice By Victim

The PCMD Gazette

"A game called “Point-em-out, Knock-em-out” has made its way to Lansing, and it’s exactly how it sounds. The game consists of someone being randomly targeted, then attacked.

"It’s a game that has been growing with popularity on the internet, with teenagers filming themselves punching unsuspecting victims. Lansing had its first case of the game brought to light this summer, but it’s possible that it has been happening under the radar for months.

"On February 26th a man waiting for his six-year-old daughter to be dropped off from school, had no idea he would be the city’s first reported victim.

“ 'I saw the van circle twice, and the second time three kids came out. I didn’t suspect anything. I hadn’t any enemies, or any reason to believe they would be looking to do anything to me.”

Hat tip to Dan Terry at Texas Tea Party Patriots PAC

Where Obama Is Right; Obama’s decision to reengage in Iraq signals that America is serious about preventing Iraq’s collapse.

Tom Rogan

We remember the specter of sectarian violence — al-Qaeda’s attacks on mosques and pilgrims, militias that carried out campaigns of intimidation and campaigns of assassination. And in the face of ancient divisions, you stood firm to help those Iraqis who put their faith in the future.

— President Obama, announcing the last withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, December 14, 2011

 

"When he spoke those words nearly three years ago, Obama thought the war was finally over. Accordingly, yesterday’s announcement might have been the most difficult of his presidency: a speech he never wanted to give." ...

 

Necessary because....
 

Toppling tyrants is ineffective in the long term without years of unpopular occupation.

..."Whichever bad choice the Obama administration prefers, it should at least level with the American people. Every postwar occupation in our history has dealt with unappreciative and unstable allies such as Maliki — from difficult South Korean strongmen of the 1950s and 1960s to Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Pulling completely out of a mostly quiet Iraq just because we had to work with unsavory characters made no sense." ...  Victor Davis Hanson

It's Obama's fault!  Recent events are a result of Obama’s indifference to the war.

...While the gains in Iraq were indeed impressive, Biden — and the entire Obama administration — was dead wrong for two reasons: First, the accomplishment was never this administration’s. Second, what he called their greatest accomplishment is now their spectacular failure. In the end, President Obama removed the two key ingredients needed for such an achievement: commitment and resolve. ...

 

No! It's Maliki's fault! Obama Stops Bragging About Withdrawal from Iraq    
"Why isn't the president proud of keeping his campaign promise?"  

 During his Thursday press conference on the Iraq crisis, the president was asked whether he regretted his decision not to leave a residual force there. He replied: “Well, keep in mind that wasn’t a decision made by me. That was a decision made by the Iraqi government.”

 

Herman Cain Urges Uninformed Voters To Stay Home: ‘Stupid People Are Ruining America!’

Weasel Zippers     "Getting a voters ID is complicated."

“ 'I’ve even heard people say, ‘Well, I don’t vote because I don’t know what’s going on,” he continued. “And I say ‘Good!’ Stupid people are ruining America, and I’m glad some of them stay home!”

 

"The audience laughed and applauded while Cain continued. “The solution is real simple folks,” he asserted. “Those of us that are informed have got to out-vote the stupid people!' ”

 

So you don't like the Republican candidate, just vote to cancel some Democrat's vote! 
Three Million Republicans did not vote in the last election, meaning four million votes for Obama went uncancelled. Democrats are not the only ones with low-information voters. TD

Update from Charles Fregeau on Facebook:

Advocates of splitting California into six states gathering signatures

LA Times

Molly Kelley, 62, of Klamath River, holds up a State of Jefferson flag as she folds it inside the

Klamath River Community Hall in California.

"The idea is the brainchild of Timothy Draper, a venture capitalist from Menlo Park – or as he hopes to some day call it, the state of Silicon Valley.  Draper has sunk $2 million into signature gathering for the proposal.

 He maintains it will break bureaucratic deadlock in Sacramento (proposed state of North California) and attract more business.

" 'California has become the worst managed state in the country," he told The Times this spring. "It just is too big and too ungovernable."

"Draper, a political independent, needs about 808,000 signatures by July 18 to get the measure on the ballot in two years. He has said he has support from the Oregon border (proposed state of Jefferson) to San Diego (South California), but the plan has been given almost no chance of success by some experts and ridiculed by Democrats and Republicans alike."

Fears of EPA ‘land grab’ create groundswell against water rule

The Hill

"Lawmakers are up in arms over an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal that they fear could give federal officials expansive new powers over private property and farmland.

"The EPA is seeking to redefine what bodies of water fall under the agency’s jurisdiction for controlling pollution. The scope of the final Clean Water Act (CWA) rule is of critical importance, as any area covered would require a federal permit for certain activities.

"The rule is facing a groundswell of opposition from lawmakers, who fear the EPA is engaged in a “land grab” that could stop farmers and others from building fences, digging ditches or draining ponds."  Read more...

EPA's rules destroy our property rights  "As American Farm Bureau Federation president Bob Stallman testified to Congress last month, “The proposal … categorically regulates as ‘navigable waters’ countless ephemeral drains, ditches and other features across the countryside that are wet only when it rains and may be miles from the nearest truly ‘navigable’ water. It would also regulate small, remote ‘wetlands’ — which may be nothing more than low spots on a farm field — just because those areas happen to be adjacent to a ditch or located in a floodplain.”

"The EPA’s public statements are filled with words like “wetlands” and “waters,” he points out. But those words don’t mean the same thing to the EPA as they mean to us."

Inside the jealous feud between the Obamas and ‘Hildebeest’ Clintons

NY Post

 

"Outwardly, they put on a show of unity — but privately, the Obamas and Clintons, the two power couples of the Democrat Party, loathe each other.

“ 'I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” Bill Clinton said to friends on one occasion, adding he would never forgive Obama for suggesting he was a racist during the 2008 campaign.

"The feeling is mutual. Obama made ­excuses not to talk to Bill, while the first lady privately sniped about Hillary."
...
"Their favorite bête noire was Hillary Clinton, whom they nicknamed “Hildebeest,” after the menacing and shaggy-maned gnu that roams the Serengeti."

Radical Marxist DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA list of members in Congress...for your reference in elections

Mona Breed Johnson

Quoting:

 

Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy
Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].
Q: Who are these members of 111th Congress?
A: See the listing below... 

Our Vacuous* Foreign Policy; Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t.

 

No bro hug?

Andrew C. McCarthy   ... "Syria, we are told, disintegrated because President Obama’s abdication created a leadership void — “the vacuum” — that al-Qaeda rushed in to fill. The “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” the story goes, were poised to fulfill America’s top priority, undermining Iran, by overthrowing the Shiite regime the mullahs control in Damascus. But the president failed to back “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” who threw in their lot with al-Qaeda — strictly, we are to believe, owing to Obama’s default, not to the ideological harmony of the “rebels” with the jihadists.

"Cross Syria’s eastern border, though, and the vacuum abruptly warps. Now, far from undermining Iran, America’s top priority somehow becomes propping up an Iran-backed Shiite state. Obama’s abdication is thus said to be the failure to “consolidate the gains of the Iraq War” by keeping about 20,000 U.S. troops in place to fend off Sunni “rebels,” who — I know you’ll find this hard to believe — have yet again thrown in their lot with al-Qaeda.

"In fact, it turns out that if the same “rebel” gravitates from Syria to Iraq, he’s no longer even a “rebel” anymore; he’s a “terrorist.' ”...

*Vacuous   1. without contents; empty: the vacuous air.

2. lacking in ideas or intelligence: a vacuous mind. 

3. expressing or characterized by a lack of ideas or intelligence; inane; stupid: a vacuous book. 

4. purposeless; idle: a vacuous way of life.

 

Any time you see definitions included in a post, you will know I had to look up the meaning myself.

The #Iraq War Comments @TheDemocrats Would Like You To Forget

American Glob  "Here’s an important yet inconvenient history lesson.
"Do you think Bush just charged into Iraq with no bipartisan support? If you do, you’re wrong. In fact, that description is more fitting for the way Obama and Democrats handled ObamaCare, but I digress.
"Let’s take a walk down memory lane with Democrats on Iraq, courtesy of Instapundit…"  

Scenes From D-Day, Then and Now

The Atlantic Monthly via Robert Hope, former Marine at my duty post in Hawthorne, NV back in 1958. Thanks, Bob, and Semper Fi.

The body of a dead German soldier lies in the main square of Place Du Marche after the town was taken by U.S. troops who landed at nearby Omaha Beach in Trevieres, France, June 15, 1944. Click to view the same location on August 23, 2013.

 

(Posted on June 5th, 2014) "Tomorrow, June 6, 2014, will be the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Allied invasion of Europe in World War II. Seven decades ago, the largest amphibious invasion in history took place, changing the course of the war. Nearly 200,000 Allied troops boarded 7,000 ships and more than 3,000 aircraft and headed toward Normandy. Some 156,000 troops landed on the French beaches, 24,000 by air and the rest by sea, where they met stiff resistance from well-defended German positions across 50 miles of French coastline. Two photographers recently traveled to France, seeking to rephotograph images captured back then. Getty photographer Peter Macdiarmid and Reuters photographer Chris Helgren gathered archive pictures from the 1944 invasion, tracked down the locations, and photographed them as they appear today. Starting with photo number two, all the images are interactive -- click on them to see a transition from 'then' to 'now', and see the difference 70 years can make. [21 photo pairs] "

 A crashed U.S. fighter plane on the waterfront some time after Canadian forces came ashore on a Juno Beach D-Day landing zone in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, France, in June 1944. Click to view the same location on August 23, 2013 

Plus this: 

"Here's a Normandy Beach landing photo they don't show you in textbooks. Brave women of the Red Cross arriving in 1944 to help the injured troops." 

Do Something

Teachers At Texas School Have Come Up With A Brilliant Way To Protect Their Students From Shootings

This comes via the Independent Journal Review :

Longview News-Journal, Longview, TX   "The Union Grove ISD board in January enacted a policy to allow select, licensed and trained teachers and administrators to possess a firearm on campus. Community members wholeheartedly supported the move.

"Union Grove ISD, a 2A school district with 761 students in rural Upshur County, was the second district in Texas to enact such a policy. The first was Harrold ISD in 2007.

“ 'The worst thing we can do is nothing,” Union Grove school board Vice President Rusty Dyar told the News-Journal in January." ...

Hat tip to John A Diefenbach at Conservatives Network