January 30, 2008 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Mary Pearson: (916) 441–6197 or Email: mary@MoveAmericaForward.org

 

 

City Calls Marines “Unwelcome Intruders”

SAN FRANCISCO – The City of Berkeley, California has passed two resolutions attacking the United States Marine Corps, calling the Marines, “uninvited and unwelcome intruders in the city.”

The Berkeley City Council voted to condemn the Marines on Tuesday night (January 29th) as part of a campaign by anti-war activists to shut down a U.S. Marine Recruiting Center located in the city of Berkeley.

The votes by the Berkeley City Council were immediately condemned by Move America Forward (website: www.MoveAmericaForward.org), the nation’s largest grassroots pro-troop organization.

“It is disgraceful that in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, anti-military activists would attempt to silence the same military men and women who serve this country and give their lives to protect the free speech rights of all Americans, including these ungrateful and despicable people on the Berkeley City Council,” said Melanie Morgan, Chairman of Move America Forward.

The actions by the Berkeley City Council followed continuous protests by Code Pink and other anti-military organizations that vandalized and defaced the U.S. Marine Recruiting Center in September 2007.

One of the two resolutions passed by the Berkeley City Council last night granted a parking spot in front of the Marine Recruiting Center to be used by anti-military activists to harass Marine recruiters.  The anti-military activists would not need to apply for a sound permit for the next six months – allowing them free reign to disrupt the day-to-day operations by the Marines.

Move America Forward organized a counter-protest in support of the Marines last October that attracted over 400 pro-troop supporters who stood in solidarity of the Marine Recruiting Center.

“We have hundreds of thousands of military men and women serving honorably overseas to protect our freedoms.  Imagine how they feel when they go to turn on the news and see that they are being stabbed in the back by shameful people here at home, it’s disgraceful!” said Catherine Moy, Executive Director of Move America Forward.

This release posted at:  http://www.moveamericaforward.org/index.php/MAF/MAFNews

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The Stars That Truly Shine
by Ben Stein
Tampa Tribune, Jun 3, 2007

 

[Note:  For many years Ben Stein wrote a biweekly column called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of

steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the

column to move on to other things in his life. This is his final column for the enterprise.]

 

I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much

for so long I came to believe it would never end.

 

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a

small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich

people in droves and definitely some stars.

 

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that "Splendor in the Grass" was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

 

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly

pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage

for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up

to.

 

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by

a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs

of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese

girls do their nails.

 

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

 

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq.

He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and

the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

 

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the

bomb went off and killed him.

 

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing

with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw

himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

 

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets

of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to

protect Iraqis from terrorists.

 

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely

scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic

Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

 

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those

values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

 

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament ... the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South

Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in

terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for

autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

 

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters.

This is my highest and best use as a human.

 

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve

Martin ... or Martin Mull or Fred Willard - or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as

Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

 

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so

much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

 

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help).

I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into

extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

 

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the

lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

 

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

 

We Cannot or We Have Forgotten How to Fight
Friday , February 16, 2007

By Col. David Hunt

Go to:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250712,00.html for Col. Hunt's Q&A

   

     This has to be said, written about, yelled about, cried about and fixed, or we can all start learning to pray

on rugs.

     We cannot fight. Specifically, we cannot fight a global war — against anything really — but we especially don’t

seem to be able to fight one against terrorism.

     We, that is, the United States of America, are the greatest country with the smartest, bravest, most

compassionate people on the planet. The problem is we have forgotten how to fight. We have elected presidents

simply because they are not someone else, and we have elections in which we argue about a war that happened 40

years ago, but hardly touched the one we are in right now. We send soldiers into war without the right gear and

claim it’s OK, even as they die.

     We cannot even figure out why we go to war. Was it WMD that weren’t even there? Was it a noble act to get

Saddam out of power, which we did (but probably would not have gone to war just to do that)?

     We promote generals and admirals with no combat experience and absolute zero leadership skills, who only knew

how to use PowerPoint slides, and required those slides from combat soldiers before they were allowed to go

into combat. We allow some of the deadliest, most competent warriors on the planet — United States Navy SEALS —

to sit on their ultra-conditioned butts in a war zone without using them for even one damn day.

     We allow a country we completely control (Afghanistan) to become the single largest provider of raw heroin,

while the country we live in (USA) continues to be the largest users of that same heroin.

     We allow victories achieved by our great soldiers to turn into Civil War at best — and complete chaos at worst.

     We lose $12 billion, because we don’t know how to distribute money — so we put it on trucks, and give to people

without checking on them and what they are doing with it. We deny for years that a country (Iran) is actively

killing our soldiers. We prosecute our soldiers and Marines for shooting a bad guy too many times. We create

rules that stop our soldiers from not just protecting themselves, which would be bad enough, but even worse,

prevent them from fighting — or maybe that’s not worse, but equally criminal.

     We have not captured the men directly responsible for 9/11. We have not captured these murderers because we

allow others to create safe havens where terrorists can hide and make their videotapes.

     Now, some will counter my argument with patriotic remarks or with examples of how we really are doing well

because … wait for it … because we have not been attacked again. Yeah, these are the same politically-blinded

nutjobs who have allowed up to 20 million illegal aliens to not only get into our country and get drivers’

licenses and complete medical care, but also created states that will not even question the status of these

illegals, and therefore grant their children college educations. We cannot fight. Hell, we not only cannot

fight, we work against ourselves while we are trying to fight.

     The things I am pointing to are happening every day in this government of non-fighters. Wake up, kick them out

of office, protest, yell, demand they protect your son’s and daughters in uniform, demand we fight and fight to

win — not just fight not to lose. We need a nation at war, not just a military fighting in one.

     Right now, the State Department cannot even fill the posts they have in Iraq, because they cannot order their

people to go. Unbelievable! Right now in Iraq, there is no legal system, no banking system and close to no

government — yet we the greatest nation in the world, with thousands of government workers in D.C., and we

cannot afford, or worse, aren’t willing, to send some of them to Iraq? We not only cannot fight, we won’t. You

see, fighting is not just soldiers dying in Mosul — it is also FBI agents doing their jobs, (by the way, they

can’t, because only 33 of them speak Arabic). Fighting is also the Department of the Treasury cracking banks

with links to terrorists.

     Fighting this war can happen in our homes, where we should sacrifice to help the cause. In World War II, it

happened with war bonds, moms working in factories, with blackouts, and tin drives. In this war, our leaders

not only tell us not to fight, they also tell us to go about our business as if nothing is wrong. We cannot

fight if we are lying to ourselves while we’re doing it.

     “So what?” you might ask, “We have not been attacked, and well, we like this president — or we don’t, but there

is global warming or there is that blonde who died with at least four guys claiming to be the father of her

baby, while her own body is getting ripe in a morgue — or some diaper-wearing astronaut running around — or my

flat screen TV works really well.” Did I mention that we cannot fight?

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Colonel David Hunt has over 29 years of military experience, including extensive operational experience in

Special Operations, Counter Terrorism and Intelligence Operations. You can read his complete bio here.

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