Today we remember those who have fallen for the cause of promoting freedom and defending the rights of all men. God Bless those troops who’ve given their ultimate sacrifice and God Bless those families who have lost loved ones.

I thought this would also be a good time to share with you my experience today.

I found out about a memorial set up each year (since 2003) one week before Memorial Day & taken down one week after Independence Day. Now there are efforts in the works to make this memorial permanent. The city of Irvine has approved $150,000 of the estimated $387,000 costs for a permanent memorial at Northwood Community Park. This will include a new arc memorial with the interior wall displaying the names of those who’ve fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I wanted to see it first hand so I went over and took some pictures of the memorial.

Pictures below the fold

Hahahahaha little commie Hugo is scared. Good riddance, that piece of filth SHOULD be afraid.

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday warned Colombia not to allow a U.S. military base on its border with Venezuela, saying he would consider such an act an “aggression.”

Chavez said he would not permit Colombia’s U.S.-backed government to establish an American military base in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.

The Venezuelan leader said if Colombia allows the base, his government will revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region.

“We will not allow the Colombian government to give La Guajira to the empire,” Chavez said, referring to the U.S. during a speech to a packed auditorium of uniformed soldiers. “Colombia is launching a threat of war at us.”

He said Washington’s top diplomat in Bogota, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield, recently suggested that a U.S. military base in Ecuador could be moved to La Guajira.

Chavez urged his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, to “think it over well” before making such a decision because Venezuela will do “whatever it takes” to ensure that a U.S. military base is not built on the peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.

So commie dictator Chavez claims the US is an Empire, while he is trying to dictate to another country’s government that it can’t do business with the US. You have to be prettydeluded to accuse the US of imperialism while you threaten a country you share a border with.

I feel a great deal of pity for the Venezuelan people, who are being held hostage by a tyrant.

This article is available in its entirety on FOXNews.

A very emotional and moving ceremony today at the White House.  Michael Monsoor was presented with the medal of Honor for laying his life down for his fellow comrades.  President Bush gave a great speech and another woman recounted the heroic events carried out by the brave soldier.

Watch the video here…

From CNN

When a grenade bounced off his chest and fell to the floor near his fellow troops, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor acted out of instinct.

His actions didn’t stem from a lack of training. His instant reaction was to protect his comrades.

The Navy says he committed a selfless act — jumping on the grenade and taking the full force of the blast.

President Bush presented Monsoor’s parents with a posthumous Medal of Honor for their son at an emotional White House ceremony on Tuesday.

Bush quoted one of the SEALS saved by Mansoor as saying, “Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, ‘You cannot take my brothers. I will go in their stead.’”

Monsoor was one of the U.S. military’s most highly trained combatants, a Navy SEAL. He’s the first SEAL to receive the Medal of Honor for actions in Iraq.

On September 29, 2006, Monsoor was part of a major clearing and isolating operation to root out enemy fighters holding parts of Ramadi, the Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.

Monsoor was in a sniper position on a rooftop along with two other SEALs when a grenade flew into his location from out of nowhere. It bounced off his chest and landed in an area where it likely would have killed or seriously wounded all three of them.

Monsoor was in a position to escape before the explosion but instead leapt on the grenade.

“He recognized immediately the threat, yelled ‘grenade’ and due to the fact that two other SEAL snipers, our brothers, could not possibly escape the blast, he chose to smother it with his body, absorbed the impact and lost his life in the process,” said Lt. Cmdr. Seth Stone, Mansoor’s platoon commander.

The blast did not kill him right away — he hung on for 30 minutes. His two comrades also were wounded but survived the shrapnel that ripped through their bodies.

Stone said: “He essentially saved [the] Navy SEALS on the rooftop and three Iraqi soldiers who were there.”

Great post from ThisAin’tHell on the rally by the troops of Vets For Freedom for General Patraeus in his lead up to appearing before Congress to discuss the progress in Iraq.

Pictures and video included…

About 480 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan assembled beginning at 8:30 this morning just across the street from the Senate wing of the Capitol. The temperature was about 45 degrees - global warming had struck. In their sand colored polo shirts, emblazoned across their broad chests, they renewed old friendships and established new ones.

In this instance, “Party of Defeat” = Democrats, as they call themselves these days. You might also know them as the ‘Cut N Run’ advocates, or recognize them by their repeated calls for surrender to terrorists in Iraq.

THE COLLECTED TALES OF AMERICAN ATROCITIES, WHICH LEFTISTS RELY UPON THE WAY OTHERS SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES FOR SOLACE, is getting shorter. Like allegations of torture at Guantanamo, Koran desecration, and detainee murders in Afghanistan, the Haditha “massacre” is increasingly being exposed as a fairy tale. Unfortunately, this canard was invented and popularized, not by terrorist propagandists to discredit an enemy army, but by American politicians to demonize U.S. soldiers and drain their own nation’s will to fight an ongoing war – a war which we are winning and which the same politicians voted to authorize.

Last Friday, the government dismissed all charges against the third of four defendants accused of perpetrating the aforementioned atrocities in Haditha. All charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, 26, were dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning Tatum cannot be tried again for the incident, although by the time the trial commenced, the Haditha “massacre” had already shrunken considerably.

Tatum and three others stood accused, not of murdering “innocent civilians in cold blood” as Congressman John Murtha characterized it, but of failing to properly identify every target before opening fire. In reality, terrorists had fired on the squad from inside the house, and the room where innocent people had been killed was smoke-filled; moreover, according to multiple witnesses, everyone heard an AK-47 “racking” – that is, getting ready to fire upon them. A positive identification would have been both impossible and suicidal. The investigating officers report further observed, according to the prosecution’s case, Tatum would have been absolved of throwing a grenade into the room without positively identifying everyone inside, but not firing his rifle. The government ultimately found his actions had not violated the rules of engagement.

So it looks more and more like this brave Patriot was doing his job, within the rules of the Geneva Convention(which muslim terrorists are not obligated to follow, as evidenced by repeated attacks on civilian men, women and children, holy sites, and any place else they choose to detonate themselves).

Nonetheless, the accused was not unrepentant for his actions, inadvertent of not. Far from the emotionless warmonger often depicted by the leftist press, Tatum nearly broke down on the stand last July, telling the judge: “I am not comfortable with the fact that I might have shot a child…That is a burden I will have to bear.”

Of course no one in the mainstream media will print any such statement from him, for that would prove wrong their depiction of the Defenders of Freedom as cold-blooded warmongers, which the libtards would hate to do, in addition to actually reporting the TRUTH.

I wonder how Jack Murtha sleeps at night, knowing full well he is a traitor not only to his constituents and the Servicemembers he slandered in the media, but also to the Constitution, in that his actions provide not only comfort, but encouragement to terrorists.