Medal of Honor: A Wrong Put Right

Staff Sergeant Melvin Morris

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On March 18th, 2014, President Barack Obama will award 24 Army veterans the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry.

These veterans will receive the Medal of Honor in recognition of their valor during major combat operations in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Each of these Soldiers’ bravery was previously recognized by award of the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest military award; that award will be upgraded to the Medal of Honor in recognition of their gallantry, intrepidity and heroism above and beyond the call of duty.

In 2002, Congress, through the Defense Authorization Act, called for a review of Jewish American and Hispanic American veteran war records from WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, to ensure those deserving the Medal of Honor were not denied because of prejudice. During the review, records of several Soldiers of neither Jewish nor Hispanic descent were also found to display criteria worthy of the Medal of Honor. The 2002 Act was amended to allow these Soldiers to be honored with the upgrade – in addition to the Jewish and Hispanic American Soldiers.

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Obama apologized to Melvin that racism stopped him from getting the medal 44 years ago. Melvin dropped to his knees. pic.twitter.com/EdlJit9kDM

— America Tonight (@AmericaTonight) March 18, 2014

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The President will award the Medal of Honor to:

Specialist Four Santiago J. Erevia: For his courageous actions while serving as radio telephone operator in Company C, 1st Battalion (Airmobile), 501st Infantry, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) during search and clear mission near Tam Ky, Republic of Vietnam.

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Staff Sergeant Melvin Morris: For his courageous actions while serving as Commander of a Strike Force drawn from Company D, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, during combat operations against an armed enemy in the vicinity of Chi Lang, Republic of Vietnam on September 17, 1969.

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Sergeant First Class Jose Rodela: For his courageous actions while serving as the company commander, Detachment B-36, Company A, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces during combat operations against an armed enemy in Phuoc Long Province, Republic of Vietnam on September 1, 1969.

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The President will posthumously award the Medal of Honor to:

Sergeant Candelario Garcia: For his courageous actions while serving as an acting Team Leader for Company B, 1st Battalion, 2d Infantry, 1st Brigade,1st Infantry Division during combat operations against an armed enemy in Lai Khe, Republic of Vietnam on December 8, 1968.

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Specialist Four Leonard L. Alvarado: For his courageous actions while serving as a Rifleman with Company D, 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) during combat operations against an armed enemy in Phuoc Long Province, Republic of Vietnam on August 12, 1969.

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Staff Sergeant Felix M. Conde-Falcon: For his courageous actions while serving as an acting Platoon Leader in Company D, 1st Battalion, 505th Infantry Regiment, 3d Brigade, 82d Airborne Division during combat operations against an armed enemy in Ap Tan Hoa, Republic of Vietnam on April 4, 1969.

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a ghoulishly good evening

Original video here

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First Lady Michelle Obama waits with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg in the Green Room of the White House before making remarks to the White House Historical Association, Oct. 31. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

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This is excellent:

GOPolitico: Anchors from nine local television affiliates will spend a day behind the scenes at the White House on Tuesday, meeting with top officials and getting brief individual interviews with President Obama before broadcasting evening newscasts from the South Lawn.

“Live from the White House” is a 21st-century update to the “radio row” tradition, which brought talk-show hosts to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to interview West Wing officials going from microphone to microphone during their drive-time shows.

The White House is building risers on the South Lawn for the evening newscasts, which are being spread out by time zones – three from the East, two from Central, one from Mountain and two from Pacific.

The anchors will get to ask White House press secretary Jay Carney a question during the daily press briefing; have lunch with senior adviser David Plouffe; interview a White House staffer from each station’s home market; get an on-camera tour with a White House curator; and tour the White House kitchen garden with Sam Kass, White House assistant chef and policy adviser.

The ringmaster is Josh Earnest, principal deputy White House press secretary, who said the mission is “to increase interest and raise the profile of the president’s efforts to strengthen the economy and create jobs in local communities across the country, and explain to Americans how their communities will benefit from the president’s agenda.”

The stations and their anchors will be from Portland, Ore. (KGW, NBC, Tracy Barr); Phoenix (KSAZ, Fox, John Hook); Denver (KUSA, NBC, Adele Arakawa); Minneapolis (WCCO, CBS, Amelia Santaniello); Houston (KTRK, ABC, Dave Ward); Omaha (KETV, ABC, Rob McCartney); Tampa (WTVT, Fox, Mark Wilson); Hampton Roads (WAVY, NBC, Tom Schaad); and Philadelphia (WPVI, ABC, Brian Taff). A 10th participant will be Nikole Killion, representing Hearst stations.

“The highlight of the day will be an opportunity to briefly interview the President from the Cabinet Room about the American Jobs Act,” Earnest said. “The anchors will also interview Cabinet secretaries … about how the bipartisan proposals included in the president’s American Jobs Act would create jobs in their community and put money in the pocket of every single American worker and small business owner.”

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Also tomorrow: The President has a ceremony at which he’ll sign a proclamation – which the White House will identify later tonight …  discusses legislative strategy with House Democratic Leaders ….. welcomes the crew of the final space shuttle mission to the Oval Office ….. The First Lady holds a Let’s Move event for children In New Orleans and does fundraisers in New Orleans and Houston ….  On Wednesday the President will push for $60 billion in new spending in an 11:25 am ET speech in front of the Key Bridge at Georgetown’s Waterfront Park in Washington, DC.

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AP: President Barack Obama is in excellent health and tobacco free, his doctor said Monday in the results of the president’s second physical exam since taking office.

In the two-page report released by the White House, Dr. Jeffrey C. Kuhlman also said Obama is physically active, eats a healthy diet, stays at a healthy weight, and on occasion drinks alcohol in moderation.

“The president is in excellent health and ‘fit for duty’,” Kuhlman wrote. “All clinical data indicate he will remain so for the duration of his presidency.”

….. The president is 6-foot-1 and weighs 181.3 pounds, according to the report. His blood pressure was recorded at 107 over 71, up from 105 over 62 in February 2010, but still well within the normal range.

…. The president also has “periodic physical therapy” to deal with recurrent upper right back pain, and he had benign skin tags removed from his neck.

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Eugene Robinson: Responding to his insurgent campaign’s first crisis, Herman Cain was upbeat and defiant. “To quote my chief of staff and all the people around this country, ‘Let Herman be Herman,’ ” he said Monday. “And Herman is gonna stay Herman.”

I was afraid of that.

Cain’s policy positions range from the ignorant to the unworkable to the just plain goofy – and yet he is running first or second in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination. He trumpets his utter lack of government experience as a selling point and boasts of not knowing foreign leaders’ names. If through some bizarre series of events he were actually elected president, the result would surely be an unmitigated disaster.

It’s not yet clear whether this remote possibility has been made even more unlikely by reports that Cain faced allegations of sexual harassment from two female employees when he headed the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

…. He needs to answer more questions about the alleged harassment …. I hope he does, because we’re running out of bandwidth. Cain’s famous “9-9-9” tax plan would be ruinous. He wants to privatize Social Security. He believes that “extensive foreign policy experience” is not something a president needs, since when he was named chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, “I had never made a pizza – but I learned.”

So many reasons to oppose this loopy candidacy, so little time.

Full article here

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😆 – thank you Marlz

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Nothing more to say

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santorum? just shut up.

wednesday wrap-up

North Carolina State University

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He’s lost the base, right? It’s true: well, he’s lost a masssive 14% of them, leaving a teeny 81% who approve of him. Doomed! (See here)

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He’s lost the youth? Sadly, yes – listen to the stony silence that greeted him at North Carolina State University today:

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He’s lost the African American community, right? Like this young man at North Carolina State University today?

They’ve turned against the President, now taking their leadership from inspirational figures like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley?

Well, yes, an enormous 5% of the African American community, according to the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, disapprove of the President, a tiny 92% approving of him (up 9% from July). Vindication for West and Smiley, then.

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But what about Hispanics, his figures are tanking there, right?

Well yeah, look at their outright hostility towards the Obamas at tonight’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus Gala:

See? An ugly, baying mob, just looking for the President’s blood.

But, back to that poll – it has him at 57%-38% with Hispanics, up from 45%-48% in July. Crikey, that’s rather friendly baying.

Honestly, it’s just so hard to imagine why Hispanics/Latinos aren’t more attracted to the GOP:

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He’s looking at you. Have you contacted members of Congress yet about the jobs bill?

The ever magnificent What is Working has all the contact details you’ll need

Do your bit.

Pass. The. Bill. 😉

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But Americans hate the Jobs Act!

Oh really?

Gallup

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There are no words for this:

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Need a dinner date?

Donate!

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Read Bob Cesca. Now!

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Enough of this positivity: the New York result was a disaster, right?

Well, it certainly wasn’t pretty, the fool that is Weprin (D) was trounced in Brooklyn (but actually won in Queens) but the notion that the district had ever been an Obama-loving hot-spot is kind of comical – as Nate Silver put it, “I doubt that there was any district in the country (in 2008), perhaps outside a few remnants of the “Solid South,” where so many enrolled Democrats voted against Mr. Obama”.

And as Steve Kornacki pointed out, “Obama performed one point worse there than John Kerry had in 2004 and 12 points worse than Al Gore had in 2000”.

So, New York’s Ninth Congressional District was never big on the President. I’ll leave you to speculate why.

Nate Silver: “Roughly 40 percent of voters in the Ninth District are Jewish, 20 times the rate in the country as a whole. Moreover, and perhaps more important, many of those voters are Orthodox Jews, who often have starkly different political viewpoints than Reform or secular Jews, and who are extremely rare in the United States outside a few spots in the New York region.”

So, no, Jews haven’t turned against the President, it’s just that Orthodox Jews oppose him – as they always have done.

And don’t forget, Anthony Weiner won the seat in the first place thanks to some real classy race-baiting – see here

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Open for Questions: Youth and the American Jobs Act

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Harry Reid’s (first!) Twitter Town Hall on Job Creation

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Vice President Biden Hosts a “Campaign to Cut Waste” Cabinet Meeting

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Dublin, Ireland, May 2011

But Europe hates him, right?

Ahem.

President Barack Obama remains highly popular in Europe, with 75 percent in 12 EU nations approving his handling of global affairs, a poll said Wednesday.

He is also much better liked than his predecessor George W. Bush, whose rating in Europe was just 20 percent in 2008, said the Transatlantic Trends poll by the German Marshall Fund.

Obama’s success in eliminating Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden appeared to be a factor in his popularity in the EU, with 73 percent backing his efforts to fight international terrorism.

(There’s a PDF at the link with all the poll findings)

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Yep, he’s still looking at you.

If you love him and everything he has achieved and everything he stands for, fight for him – contact Congress now, and donate if you can.

‘the dirty trick that launched anthony weiner’s career’

Steve Kornacki (Salon): …if this does end up being the end for Anthony Weiner’s public career, it might not be quite the injustice it seems like – at least if you know how his career began.

Twenty years ago, Weiner’s opening came when the City Council was radically expanded … One of the new districts, the 48th, would be in Southern Brooklyn. It was a neat match for Weiner … there was no incumbent, and the population was heavily Jewish. He jumped in the race.

He was not the favorite … as the all-important Sept. 10 Democratic primary approached, the consensus was that he’d come up short…

It was at this point that Weiner’s campaign decided to blanket the district with leaflets attacking his opponents. But these were no ordinary campaign attacks: They played the race card, and at a very sensitive time. They were also anonymous.

Just weeks earlier, the Crown Heights riot – a deadly, days-long affair that brought to the surface long-standing tension between the area’s black and Jewish populations – had played out a few miles away from the 48th District…

It was just days after order had been restored that Weiner’s campaign distributed its anonymous leaflets, which linked (Democrat rival) Adele Cohen – whose voters he was targeting in particular – to Jesse Jackson and David Dinkins, who was then New York’s mayor. It is hard to imagine two more-hated political figures in the 48th District at that moment … The leaflets urged voters to “just say no” to the “Jackson-Dinkins agenda” that Cohen supposedly represented. At City Hall, Dinkins held up the flier and branded it “hateful.”

….Weiner finished in first place … only after the ballots were counted did he admit that he’d been behind the leaflets, claiming that “We didn’t want the source to be confused with the message.”…

… who knows where Weiner would be today if he hadn’t made such a dark appeal to racial hostility days after a notorious riot?

…..Is it unfair if he loses his political future because of a scandal as dumb as this one? Sure. But it’s also not exactly fair that he ever made it this far.

Full article here

some things never change….

The right sure are original, eh? Irish-American Catholics, African Americans, so many people to hate….

some things never change….

Carolyn’s comment here reminded me to post this again … the right wing sure are original, hey?

the president’s base is collapsing! oh, wait

Obama ‘core’ coalition hardly ‘shattered’

NBC: While some think President Obama’s “core” coalition “has been shattered,” here are some numbers from our latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll that looks at Obama’s approval among some of those “core” groups:

– Blacks: 90% approve/6% disapprove
– Democrats: 82/12
– Liberals: 79/16
– Latinos: 56/33
– Post grads: 56/41
–  18-29: 53/38
– Women: 52/43

…….As Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the NBC/WSJ poll with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, said after the poll, “It’s a reminder again … for a guy who took a shellacking, he’s got a pretty strong core pulse.” He cited Obama’s strong support among a core constituency of younger women, blacks, Latinos, young voters, voters in the West, and under-30 urban moderates. “This is a president that retains political standing,” he added.

55 years ago today…..

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger – Parks’ action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Parks’ act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and she became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

“My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest…I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.” Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James F. Blake, demanded that she get off the bus and re-enter through the back door. As she began to exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat down for a moment in a seat for white passengers to pick up her purse. The bus driver was enraged and barely let her step off the bus before speeding off.

After a day at work at Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the “colored” section, which was near the middle of the bus and directly behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she had not noticed that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several white passengers boarded.

Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or three men standing, and thus moved the “colored” section sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said, “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats ….

…… I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”

By Parks’ account, Blake said, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of them complied. Parks said, “The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn’t move at the beginning, but he says, ‘Let me have these seats.’ And the other three people moved, but I didn’t.” The black man sitting next to her gave up his seat. Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the newly repositioned colored section. Blake then said, “Why don’t you stand up?” Parks responded, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.'”