Tag Archives: masks

Current Events

A COVID Christmas

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Please allow me to take this moment to say that I sincerely hope  all my blessed followers had a wonderfully merry Christmas regardless what your local dictators may have said. Mine said have a joyous Christmas with your families and friends, but then I consider myself fortunate by choice to have a sensible, for the people, Governor. My bride and I go to church every Sunday and then to a late breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants.  Life is good in Florida.

I will wish you a very happy new year if you can. I will not have a happy one as best as I can see into the near future. Our MSM wants you to believe 2020 was the worst ever. Well, don’t chalk it up to record books just yet for 2021 may prove to be a close competitor.

Here another thought provoking article from one of my favorite authors.

 

By: G. Maresca

 

American religiosity has been in decline for more than a generation and with the added fear of COVID-19, many Christian leaders have deserted their flocks.

Welcome to Christmas 2020, where the biggest crisis is not a virus but a lack of faith.

Church leaders have conceded to government diktats in this era of COVID-19 in a doleful attempt to brand themselves as benevolent.

The Constitutional right to freely worship, virus or not, was underscored with the recent Supreme Court ruling prohibiting arbitrary limits on church attendance.  Despite the court’s 5-4 decision, religious liberty has never been in more need of defense, especially when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and “political.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would have made attending Christmas midnight Mass, a criminal offense.  Perhaps Newsom would find Mass more acceptable if it were celebrated in the French Laundry restaurant – site of his crowded birthday party?  This is another example of directives made by the faithless affecting the faithful in the ongoing leftist agenda to secularize America.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be appalled how the church hierarchy has acquiesced to the state.  The state prohibits Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, yet liquor stores remain open.  Churches should have had the same rights as beer distributors, pot smokers and abortion clinics – all deemed essential.

Mandatory masking, overflowing hand sanitizer, and social distancing are in vogue in houses of worship, but what is missing are the children.  Churches will not survive without them.  Few in the pews are under age 50.  Sign-up sheets, roped off pews, and parking lot services did little to bring anyone back, let alone evangelize.

Limiting, or worse, cutting off sacramental grace from Christ’s mercy has only deepened the divide.  The science supporting lockdowns has failed to stop the spread, and may prove deadlier than the virus it was meant to heed.

If anything, COVID-19 underscores daily that no human endeavor can prevent our eventual death from any cause.

Any government that has the authority to restrict your livelihood, family gatherings, and houses of worship is worse than any virus.  The alternative is subservience, empty pews, and lost souls.

The COVID-19 generation may never come back.  The unrelenting attack on Christianity will never cease until the faithful stop kowtowing to tyrants.  Science isn’t going to save you and it is no coincidence Democrats are leading the charge.  What do you expect from a political party that has forced religious sisters to provide for contraception?   The left knows all too well that faith can be exorcised by breaking one’s spirit and will.

Too many politicos claiming to be Christian believe Jesus Christ came to put a chicken in every pot rather than to feed souls and offer salvation.  As long as a portion of a bishop’s budget is generated from government service contracts, towing the party line will be its low-hanging fruit.

Where are the bishops’ supernatural faith?

Where are today’s St. Thomas Mores, and St. Joan of Arc’s, or Fulton Sheens?

Prophetic voices must emanate among the bishops to speak truth to this abuse of government power.  As suicides and other mental health issues increase, we need more prayer, not less.  The secularist, dictatorial governors and mayors and designated so-called experts seeking to oppress worship reveal their contradictory priorities, daily.

Christmas is not the time to take counsel of your fears, but recall the hope that only a sincere faith provides.  Has there been a year in living memory when the Christmas promise is in such demand?  The reason for the season is here, and never leaves.  Jesus was born during one of the darkest periods in human history as the Roman Empire begot moral depravity on an unparalleled scale.  Our Lord did so by entering the world in the humblest of ways to show He will go anywhere when invited.

In a remarkable sign, Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths this past week appearing as one body in the night sky.  They were closer than they have been in nearly eight centuries and was labeled the “Christmas Star.”

Many need to heed the message the angels announced that first Christmas: Fear not!

The child whose birth we celebrate is Emmanuel, “God with Us.”

If God is with us, who can be against us?

 

Originally posted 2020-12-26 10:26:05.

Recent Posts

Orange Man Bad

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From The American Spectator

As late as March 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio was still telling New York City residents to carry on life as normal: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” Two days earlier, Italy had announced a national lock down to prevent the spread of coronavirus, and cases were already beginning to appear in New York, but de Blasio did not close the city’s schools until March 15.

Now that New York City has become the epicenter of this pandemic — more than 32,000 cases as of Sunday, with nearly 700 deaths — Mayor de Blasio’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak appears astonishingly irresponsible. Jim Geraghty of National Review has compiled a timeline of how New York City officials dealt with the crisis, and their recklessness seems mind boggling in hindsight. Early on, their main concern was that the virus might discourage city residents from attending Chinese New Year celebrations. “I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about #coronavirus,” the city’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a Feb. 9 tweet, promoting festivities in Chinatown.

As idiotic as such declarations seem now, we must note that hindsight is always 20/20, and very few Americans in early February believed that we faced any great danger of this disease becoming rampant here. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have spent recent weeks blaming President Trump for this crisis, but it is important to point out that the same people were downplaying the coronavirus threat just a few weeks ago. Trump’s critics want us to forget, for example, that when the president announced a ban on travel from China on Jan. 31, many of them condemned this measure as a racist overreaction. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science,” Joe Biden said the day after the China travel ban was announced, while falsely claiming that Trump had made “draconian cuts” to federal health agencies.

At that time, the known worldwide death toll from the Wuhan virus was still less than 200, and, because the Chinese government had sought to suppress facts about the disease, the scope of the danger was not apparent. The liberal media weren’t sounding the alarm, but quite the opposite. The headline on a Jan. 28 BuzzFeed article advised Americans, “Don’t Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu.” On Jan. 29, Farhad Manjoo published a column in the New York Times with the headline “Beware the Pandemic Panic.” Manjoo downplayed the danger of the virus and instead cautioned, “What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world.” One thing we can never expect from elite journalists is accountability. Rather than admitting his own errors, Manjoo simply pivoted to blaming Trump: “Coronavirus Is What You Get When You Ignore Science” was the headline on his March 4 column, in which he asserted that the president had “gut the United States’ pandemic-response infrastructure.”

This is the “Orange Man Bad” theory of causation, where everything bad is ultimately Trump’s fault, and the proponents of this theory evidently can’t understand why it has cost them their credibility. When journalists insist on interpreting every event from a partisan perspective — “How can we spin this to hurt Trump?” — their errors follow a predictable pattern. Thus, at one point, the danger of coronavirus was Trump’s “xenophobia,” which threatened “racial and religious minorities.” Now, we are told, the problem is that Trump is “anti-science.” Last week, one New York Times columnist blamed “the science denialism of [Trump’s] ultraconservative religious allies” for the coronavirus pandemic. The “evidence” cited in such tendentious arguments is irrelevant; what matters to liberals is the conclusion, i.e., Trump is always wrong.

Because they imagine themselves infinitely superior to the rest of us, the journalistic elite think we don’t notice the methods by which they dishonestly manipulate the narrative. They believe we won’t notice, for example, how they ignore the bungling of Democrats like Mayor de Blasio. Nor are we expected to contrast the media’s alarmism over COVID-19 with the way they treated the swine flu (H1N1) pandemic of 2009–10. According to CDC estimates, about 60 million Americans were infected with swine flu, which caused more than a quarter-million hospitalizations and more than 12,000 deaths. Yet cable-news networks didn’t provide 24/7 coverage of the swine flu outbreak or blame President Obama for the spread of the disease, so why is the Chinese coronavirus such an emergency? Obvious answer: “Orange Man Bad!”

We might not resent this belated effort to blame this plague on Trump so much if Democrats and the media (again, I repeat myself) had spent January and February spreading the alarm about COVID-19. But for much of that period, Democrats and their media allies were consumed with impeaching the president over Ukraine, and when that anti-Trump crusade failed, their attention next turned to trying to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It was not until early March — after Biden’s wins on Super Tuesday stopped the Sanders threat — that the coronavirus pandemic became the media’s obsession. It was March 6 that an MSNBC panel discussion hosted by Nicolle Wallace turned into a sort of pep rally for coronavirus, with the guests expressing the enthusiastic hope that the pandemic would become “Trump’s Katrina.”

Having made clear their intention of scapegoating the president for this virus from China, the media are now astonished that Americans aren’t buying their blame game. After polls showed Trump’s approval ratings had risen during this crisis, the networks decided to stop carrying live broadcasts of Trump’s coronavirus briefings. This is more evidence of media bias that we’re supposedly too stupid to notice, in the same way we’re not supposed to notice either (a) Joe Biden’s rapid descent into senility or (b) the media’s effort to promote New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a substitute presidential nominee for the Democrats.

So far, U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are still only a single-digit percentage of the more than 30,000 Americans who die annually from ordinary flu infections. As bad as the coronavirus outbreak is — and it’s likely to get much worse before it gets better — we must keep it in perspective. We must be able to distinguish between real risks from this disease and the politically motivated fear campaign being hyped by the media. Eventually, the coronavirus pandemic will end, but the media’s liberal bias is incurable. From now until November, the blame game will continue, and if Trump gets reelected, we’ll have another four years of the same shrieking journalistic hysteria: “Orange Man Bad!”

Epilogue. I have not posted anything on the virus attacking our country as I am sure you are getting enough from other areas since we are all at home doing our duty to help. But I just had to post this well written article from the American Spectator.  In doing so I  had to throw in some Bathurst thoughts. This virus has brought out the best AND THE WORST In my fellow Americans. New Orleans holds their Mardi Gras,  NYC Mayor tells everyone to go about thei business, Trump is called a racist for shutting off China flights, students defy logic and go on Spring Break,  Pelosi accuses Trump for lack of action, Sleepy Joe tells the Trump he needs to create a task force and put somone in charge of it, etc., etc., etc. It has been a lesson we didn’t need because we already knew it all. Now the MSM thinks Trump is getting too much air time so some are not covering the Daily briefings at all, while others are simply showing sound bites of their choosing. As far as I know, FOX is the only one who still covers the entire briefing.

GM had to be forced into stepping up, while 3M is (was) selling much needed medical supplies overseas – they were afraid it would hurt their reputation. WHAT? Meanwhile 100’s and 100’s of American companies have voluntarily stepped up to do their share. It’s a shame it takes something like a National Emergency to see who’s who and where their priorities lie. Some companies have been caught hoarding medical supplies, which were confiscated by the Government. Let us remember companies like GM and 3M when it comes to buying their products!

We shall prevail and get through this, but let’s not forget what it has told us about some of our so-called Americans!

Originally posted 2020-04-04 10:01:14.

Current Events

A Crime Scene Where the Victims Wore Masks

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We, as normal Americans, are too stupid to have any opinions or to think for ourselves — so believe our elected officials, especially those from the entire administration, even some of our GOP RINOS. But I sincerely believe their day is coming with each passing month until doomsday in November. God, help us to be able to sustain sanity until then. A very well written piece from the WSJ

From the Wall Street Journal

FREE EXPRESSION

By Gerard Baker

A Crime Scene Where the Victims Wore Masks

As terrified passengers stumbled from the train at the 36th Street station in Brooklyn last week, it was noticeable how many of them were complying with the mandate that to enjoy the privilege of venturing into the underground abyss known as the New York City Subway system, you must be wearing a face covering.

There they were, desperately fleeing a gunman or bravely helping rescue injured passengers, but still dutifully playing their part in the absurdist theatre of pandemic regulations scripted and directed for us by our little overlords.

Those flimsy pieces of fabric might have offered some minimal protection from the noxious fumes of the smoke bombs that Frank James allegedly set off in that subway car. But they were never going to be a match for the bullets fired from the 9mm semiautomatic handgun recovered at the scene. Many innocents were wounded, and it is something of an Easter miracle that no one was killed. For the millions of people who have dared to ride the city’s subway this year, the greatest danger to life isn’t some escaped molecule of a virus of rapidly diminishing potency. That exiguous risk is dwarfed by the combined threat of being pushed in front of an oncoming train, stabbed, hit in the head by a psycho with a hammer, robbed at gunpoint or being sexually assaulted. The number of robberies on the subway so far in 2022 is up 72% from the same period in 2021. There is no easily discover-able record of how many maskless riders have been struck down this year by Covid.

It’s hard to think of a tableau that better captures the disordered priorities of our governing classes than that scene in Brooklyn.

The politicians and bureaucrats who run almost all major cities, many states and the federal executive branch seem to care more about preserving the symbol of their authority that mask mandates represent than about the actual physical safety of citizens. In their warped ideology, crime is the result of material deprivation, prejudice and wicked police officers. The real need for enforcement is shown by those tempted to show their faces in public.

Masks are only an example. It’s hard to recall a time in recent American history when there has been such a monumental mismatch between the priorities of the people who govern us and the needs of the people. On issue after issue—crime, inflation, immigration— we have leaders so entrenched in their ideological priors that they seem incapable of, even uninterested in, addressing the actual challenges faced by hard-pressed Americans. Joe Biden was at it again last week with inflation. It has been clear for a long time that the return of this old horror is the largest threat to living standards and economic stability. But acknowledging that would have required the Democrats to abandon their ideological goals of ever-higher spending and forced them to reorder their governing priorities. So they didn’t.

Now, unable to dismiss it anymore, they have offered not a serious set of policies to relieve inflationary stresses, but a series of public-relations gimmicks that will have virtually no alleviating impact. Lifting the summertime ban on blended ethanol fuel will be about as effective in addressing higher energy costs as publicly shaming greedy corporations or blaming Vladimir Putin.

On immigration, the administration instinctively reflects a progressive mindset that regards border control as racist. It spent the better part of a year undoing the immigration restrictions imposed by its predecessor. As the inevitable border surge swelled, it feigned some concern. Now, as apprehensions of aliens in border areas reach their highest level in 22 years, what is its response? The repeal of Title 42, a measure that had been effective in curbing illegal crossings.

Interestingly, as the pandemic rationale for that measure is no longer deemed operative, the administration insists elsewhere that the emergency continues when it suits it. So, even as the nation yearns to return to normality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week announced another extension, for 15 days, of the federal mask mandate on airplanes and public transportation. It had been scheduled to end this Monday at long last. (And on Monday a judge in Tampa, Fla., held that the mandate exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority.)

On it goes. from needless bailouts for student loans to a fixation on sacrificing energy capacity in pursuit of long-term climate goals, Democrats display an unerring focus on aims Americans don’t see as pressing—or even necessary.

Obdurate insistence in the face of evidence of both rising unpopularity and accumulating failure is a common political flaw. No leader willingly acknowledges the irrelevancy of his policies. but it seems to be especially embedded in the modern progressive philosophy that the rulers know best; that they, by dint of their scientific expertise and moral superiority better understand our true needs.

Like all such authoritarian conceits, it doesn’t survive long in a democratic environment. That helps explain why leftists are so panicked at the thought of losing control over information, why they feel so threatened at the thought that a communications channel such as Twitter might fall out of their hands. Anything that challenges their right to go on pursuing their priorities is “disinformation.”

But it won’t take the intervention of a rogue billionaire to restore democratic equilibrium. A popular reckoning is coming.

November 8th 2022 is the Democrat’s  D-day. Get ready Americans!

 

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Go Army or Not?

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Biden Throwing Cadets In Solitary Confinement For Not Getting Vaccinated

Well, well, how goes it at West Point? What have the swamp creatures done now? Shocking to say the least. This is despicable, I don’t care what service we are talking about. What a shame for an institution that produced such great leaders e.g. MacArthur, Pershing, etc. to have become Woke Academies. I’m sure those from years past when our country was a Republic are screaming in their graves.

National File

Military cadets at West Point Academy who refuse to take one of the controversial COVID vaccines are being put in solitary confinement, with more stringent restrictions than those who tested positive for the virus.

At West Point Military Academy, a number of cadets are currently rebelling against the push from the Biden administration and military higher-ups to take one of the controversial COVID-19 vaccines. 700 cadets who initially refused the vaccine were brought together into a meeting room, and were briefed as to the benefits of the vaccine. The number of cadets has now dwindled significantly after allegations of daily pressure by “senior officials” at the school, and rumors of reductions of leave. Some cadets relented and received the vaccine, while many left West Point due to the pressure.

Those who still refuse to take the vaccine are forced to wear masks everywhere, marking them out from everybody else who is vaccinated. A number of parents of those holdouts have now organized legal counsel on behalf of their children, with CDMedia reporting that they are “banding together to fight this perceived criminal behavior by those in power over their children.

An anonymous whistleblower, whose identity National File is protecting, gave a breakdown of the current restrictions that West Point cadets who refuse to take the COVID vaccine have to face. For those cadets returning for summer programs, they will have their two week leave shortened to one, as they have to spend 7 days in a quarantine that amounts to serious solitary confinement. The cadets are locked up for 23 hours each day in one room, and are only allowed out for one hour to walk or run outside.

Crucially, these cadets are not tested for COVID-19 before they are put into self-isolation. In fact, they are only tested at the end of the period. If they test negative, they will be released to their training programs. In a letter sent to the cadets deemed “high risk,” there was no detail as to what would happen if the cadet tested positive instead, in terms of whether they would be forced to endure another week or more of the solitary confinement. National File contacted West Point for details on this program via phone and email, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

The new regime could not accurately be described as self-isolation or quarantine, as such programs already existed at West Point for cadets returning after the summer and Christmas breaks this academic year who tested positive. For those cadets, before the vaccination program kicked into high gear, they would be restricted at some points, but could also work out in the outside gyms, and leave their accommodation to go and order food, albeit being ordered to stay away from cadets who were not infected. These luxuries are not afforded to the cadets who refuse to take the vaccine, even though they may not have the virus.

West Point allegedly plans to round up all the cadets who are refusing the vaccine and transfer them into all one company or platoon based on how many they’re are. At the time of writing, around 50 cadets have not backed down. The whistleblower said this would likely be better for them, as they would not be around other troops who derogatorily shout at them, calling them “anti-vaxxers,” and instead would be with those who stand with them. “They’re being treated like criminals,” the whistleblower added. “They’re trying to protect other people’s rights and their rights are being compromised.”

National File reported last year on two successive suicides from the Colorado Springs Air Force, with students expressing to the academy that the deaths may have been linked to depression springing from the then extremely strict social distancing policies and punishments for violating the six-foot distance protocols. Following the deaths, looser restrictions were enacted.
I read the comments and vehemently disagree with two of them. I spent nearly thirty-six years in the Corps and no one, absolutely no one, ever “made” me take the Flu shot. I don’t know what service they were in, but it sounds like “War Stories” to me. Now, I was made to take certain inoculations if I was being sent to an area rampant with some disease e.g., Vietnam and Peru.
Current Events

Making America 1979 Again

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Good Morning Gang, it’s Saturday, the day before the traditional Memorial Day, initially referred to as Decorations Day by MajGen Logan after the Civil War. Personally, I celebrate on the traditional Day, 30 May. So, I will lower my flag tomorrow morning and raise it back up at noon. Changing the day so federal workers could get another day off with pay didn’t impress me since my experience with those snakes in the grass (in the Corps, we called them “Sand Crabs”) has been  most don’t earn a day’s pay anyway. But then that’s my personal opinion and preference.

So what are the swamp creatures up to as they begin their long weekend cook out? Well, the big talking point this week has been inflation. What is that? Well simply, it is the rising cost of goods and services.  There is cost-push inflation where the cost of goods is caused by a rise in the cost of production e.g., gas. Then there is demand-pull inflation where the rise in prices is caused by an increasing demand and firms push up prices due to the shortage of goods e.g., toilet paper. LOL.

The swamp doesn’t fear inflation, just like Peanut Jimmy didn’t in the 70s, but beware folks, the signs are there, they are just being ignored.

By: G. Maresca

You do not have to be a scholar with a dollar to notice how prices are increasing. The Consumer Price Index that measures costs for goods and services increased 4.2% in April. Gas jumped 9%, while housing prices rose 17%.

The Powerball Lottery jackpot is now a tank of gas, a bag of groceries and a sheet of plywood.

A late seventies ambiance has returned with the cyber-attack on the Colonial pipeline cyber-attack and its resulting gas lines. Add to it emboldened Iranian Ayatollahs in a cooking Middle East; an increasing U.S. crime rate; a refugee crisis at the southern border, and a simmering Cold War II. The recent visit Joe and Jill Biden had with Jimmy and Roslyn Carter makes it official that the torch has been finally passed. Their photo op, if you have not seen it, is one for Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

The Carter’s even gifted to Hunter Biden their home-brewing recipe to Billy Beer.

It is time travel Democrat style and for those 41 and younger, welcome to 1979.

At least back then the music was better, and you didn’t need a second mortgage to attend a major league baseball game. Kids went to school and actually played outside, and mask wearing was strictly for Halloween.

It was also in the summer of ‘79 that Carter gave his infamous “malaise speech” about “the erosion of our confidence.” Today, Biden successfully dismantles the myth of white privilege and primacy every time he comes in contact with a microphone.

The Labor Department’s latest jobs report had employers adding only one-quarter of an anticipated one million jobs, while unemployment claims actually increased. Many are choosing not to work since being paid to stay home is now an option. Such a major disincentive to work is unprecedented and brings with it the predictable consequence of labor’s availability. With jobs plentiful combined with escalating unemployment benefits only serves to grease the rails for socialism.

Former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and former head of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama, Larry Summers spoke truth to power when he warned against too much stimulus.

There is no true stimulus, only irrational leftist reasoning that justifies increased deficit spending that is endorsed by bogus good intentions that leads down a path to fiscal ruin.

No one on either side of the aisle gave Summer’s reasoning a second thought.

Biden and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen actually claimed, “there is no significant inflation.” Record-low interest rates coupled with a rise in prices is what happens when central banks have a surplus of money that outstrips demand. As we stifle the supply side with handouts, while printing dollars by the trillions the result is Inflation. Prudent advice to any weather forecaster is to look out the window first. Perhaps this dynamic economic duo needs to go grocery shopping and fill the gas tank before making their next inflation forecast.

In a recent press conference, Vice President Kamala Harris ignored a question about inflation with her infamous laughing crackle as she quickly walked away. Perhaps she was on her way to the southern border?

The fear of inflation is why the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield is up 80%, and the 5-year U.S. Treasury yield is up 123%.  Spending and printing comes with consequences as you cannot print your way to prosperity.

Perhaps Biden should consider surrounding the White House with an orchard since he and his economic team believe money grows on trees. The only problem would be when Biden ends up chopping down all the trees for the paper to print even more money.

When the Federal Reserve finally admits that there is too much inflation, interest rates will rise and polarize the economy followed by a toxic bout of stagflation. Such economic malaise hurts the same people that the spend and tax Biden Democrats say they want to help.

Moreover, any stock market gains will be deceiving thanks to inflation where any capital gains taxes will be a direct result of the dollar’s decline.

In 1979, the Carter coast-to-coast malaise paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s conservative reform.

History would do well to not only rhyme but repeat itself.

 

Happy Memorial Day everyone. While cooking steaks, burgers, dogs, and drinking your favorite libation, please remember the nearly 1.1 million Americans who gave their lives  so we could celebrate this day! And remember to lower you flag to half mast on which ever day you traditionally celebrate and raise it back to full staff at noon.. Semper Fi, Jim