Last of WWII’s Doolittle Raiders Keep Promise to Their Commander, Make Final Toast

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Known as the Doolittle Raiders, the 80 men who risked their lives on a World War II bombing mission on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor were toasted one last time by their surviving comrades and honored with a Veterans Day weekend of fanfare shared by thousands.

Three of the four surviving Raiders attended the toast Saturday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Their late commander, Lt. Gen. James “Jimmy” Doolittle, started the tradition but they decided this autumn’s ceremony would be their last.

“May they rest in peace,” Lt. Col. Richard Cole, 98, said before he and fellow Raiders — Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93, and Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, 92 — sipped cognac from specially engraved silver goblets. The 1896 cognac was saved for the occasion after being passed down from Doolittle.

Hundreds invited to the ceremony, including family members of deceased Raiders, watched as the three each called out “here” as a historian read the names of all 80 of the original airmen.

The fourth surviving Raider, Lt. Col. Robert Hite, 93, couldn’t travel to Ohio because of health problems. But son Wallace Hite said his father, wearing a Raiders blazer and other traditional garb for their reunions, made his own salute to the fallen with a silver goblet of wine at home in Nashville, Tenn., earlier in the week.

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Thousands Feared Dead in Philippines Typhoon

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Authorities expect a “very high number of fatalities” after one of the strongest typhoons on record devastated the central Philippines, cutting communications and severely damaging an airport in one of the hardest-hit regions.

A senior regional police official and a city administrator in the typhoon-ravaged city of Tacloban in the central Philippines said early Sunday that the death toll there could reach 10,000 people, according to the Associated Press.

Regional police chief Elmer Soria said he was briefed by Leyte provincial Gov. Dominic Petilla on Saturday and told there were about 10,000 deaths on the island, mostly by drowning and from collapsed buildings.

Tacloban city administrator Tecson Lim said that the death toll in the city alone “could go up to 10,000.”

On Samar Island, which is facing Tacloban, Leo Dacaynos of the provincial disaster office said Sunday that 300 people were confirmed dead in Basey town and another 2,000 are missing.

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Veteran Affairs Sued for Harassing Christian Chaplains

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Photo Credit: WND Two military chaplains are suing Eric Shinseki, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, or VA, for allegedly being harassed and drummed out of a training and placement program because of their Christian faith.

Chaplains Major Steven Firtko, U.S. Army (Retired) and Lieutenant Commander Dan Klender, U.S. Navy, claim they were mocked, scolded and threatened for their faith while enrolled in the San Diego VA-DOD Clinical Pastoral Education Center program, which trains and distributes chaplains to military and VA medical centers in the San Diego area.

According to their lawsuit, Firtko and Klender allege the Center’s supervisor, Ms. Nancy Dietsch, a VA employee, derided them in classrooms and even had one of them dismissed for failing to renounce his Christian beliefs.

For example, on Sept. 24, 2012, the lawsuit claims, during a classroom discussion, Dietsch asked Firtko what he “believed faith was.”

Firtko responded by quoting Hebrews 11:1 – “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

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Box Office Star Reveals He’s a Conservative (+video)

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Photo Credit: Dan Steinberg/Invision/APAsk actor Vince Vaughn about his political views and he’ll proudly tell you he’s conservative – and he doesn’t really care what Hollywood thinks.

In a telephone interview with Adam Carolla, Hollywood A-lister Vince Vaughn made a strong declaration about his conservative principles. When Carolla asked him very directly, “Do you count yourself a conservative?” Vaughn did not hesitate or stammer, he merely replied, “I do, yeah…I mean I’m very supportive of Ron Paul, but I’ve always been more conservative than not.”

During the three minute interview Carolla tried to see if Vaughn’s conservatism was a product of a conservative upbringing. Vaughn talked about growing up in Chicago, with a father who came from a working class family that leaned more democratic.

However, the actor also stated, “As a guy that worked very hard, and sort of put himself through school and stuff, he was more conservative, for sure.”

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Obamacare Is Running Out of Bullets

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Photo Credit: Andrew Harrer/BloombergBy Megan McArdle.

There are two key signs that the administration of President Barack Obama is having trouble coping with the events of the last month.

The first is what it hasn’t done: attacked insurance companies. For the past four years, insurers have been a punching bag of the administration and the Democratic Party. Whenever insurers did something the administration didn’t like as a result of the new health-care law, Democrats punched back, hard, with complaints about greedy insurers who were blaming the White House for their own failures.

Not this time. Left-leaning columnists and policy wonks have been suggesting that the cancellation letters were part of an insurance company scam to enroll their customers in expensive policies, but the administration itself has been remarkably oblique. It needs the insurers, especially with the exchanges in so much trouble. Their cooperation is essential to avoiding another round of nasty premium shocks next year.

It reminds me of a late-Soviet joke: A man stands in line all day for bread, only to have the baker come out and say there is none. He loses it, and begins ranting about the government. Eventually, a man in a trench coat puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Be careful, comrade. You know, in the old days, it would have been …” and he mimes a gun pointed at the head.

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Beyond HealthCare.gov, Obamacare’s other challenges

By Jon Kingsdale.

Jon Kingsdale, who oversaw the Massachusetts health insurance exchange from 2006 to 2010, is a managing director of the Wakely Consulting Group. Wakely has provided actuarial and other technical assistance for the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.

“The Affordable Care Act is not just a Web site. It’s much more,” President Obama said last month. This focus beyond short-term technical problems is meant to bolster the faith of those, like me, who support the Affordable Care Act. However, it will succeed only if the administration does much more than fix the Web site.

As HealthCare.gov — the main door to insurance shopping for 13 million of the 17 million uninsured who are eligible for subsidies — gets patched up in the coming weeks, the government must also prepare the world’s largest insurance store to meet two equally daunting challenges.

The first is to get enrollment, billing and premium collections working smoothly. In 2006, when we launched the Massachusetts Health Connector, which became the prototype for insurance exchanges under the ACA, my team encountered start-up problems. Tracking billing and collections was a much bigger challenge than getting our Web site to work.

Here’s why: Enrollees are not covered until their first month’s premium is received. In the individual insurance market, premium billing and collection is difficult to track. Folks frequently pay late or in weekly installments, or send too little or even too much. And when they stop paying, they often do not notify the insurer; the company must determine whether it is an intentional termination, an oversight, or a lost or late payment. Unlike most of today’s 15 million direct enrollees, who pay premiums on their own, an estimated 27 percent of those who will be eligible for tax credits under the ACA do not have checking accounts. So they must use cash, money orders or prepaid debit cards to pay their share of monthly premiums.

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Rush Limbaugh: The Regime’s Shocking Iran Deal (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube RUSH: I’ll tell you, the news out of Geneva regarding the United States, Israel, and Iran… Folks, I don’t know how else to categorize this or explain it to you. This man, Barack Obama, is fundamentally transforming this nation in ways that are gonna be next to impossible to reverse in many ways, the longer he goes. Do you realize that the regime has been secretly working behind the scenes to lift the sanctions on Iran? Iran is going to have the sanctions lifted without making any concessions in their nuclear program. They’re not gonna have to tear down any centrifuges. They’re not gonna have to dismantle anything. We’re just gonna take the sanctions away.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has said, “This is disastrous. This is worse than a bad deal.” And he told Lurch — and, by the way, some have asked, I need to dispel something quick. You know Liberty? The talking horse in Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims was not modeled after John Kerry. I can’t tell you how many people have asked, “We’ve seen Liberty on the cover of your book. Were you thinking of John Kerry?” No, no. We wouldn’t do that to Liberty. Our horse doesn’t purposely look like John Kerry, and I don’t think it does. (interruption) What do you mean, Sarah Jessica Parker? That’s the first I’ve heard of that.

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Tom Cruise: My Work as an Actor is as Hard as Fighting in Afghanistan

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Photo Credit: GettyTom Cruise not only thinks he trains harder than Olympic athletes, he believes his job as a professional actor is as grueling as fighting the war in Afghanistan — this according to legal docs obtained by TMZ.

As we reported, Cruise recently sat for a deposition in his $50 million libel suit against a magazine publisher that claimed he abandoned daughter Suri — and his quotes are GOLD.

First, the Middle East — Tom says his location shoots are just like serving a tour in Afghanistan, “That’s what it feels like. And certainly on this last movie, it was brutal. It was brutal.”

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The Death of Writing, and Its Impact on Our Politics

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Photo Credit: Real Clear Politics For four months before the battle of Gettysburg, Pvt. Myron A. Clark, a 21-year-old clerk in Company I of the 14th Vermont Infantry, wrote every day in a leather-bound diary he’d bought in Washington, D.C.

He filled it with descriptions of camp life’s boredom and tedium and flashes of news. His prose, marked with spelling errors, was spare, yet lively and informative, and an entry often said more than its words. On March, 19, for instance, Clark noted: “Peter Berges on Knapsack Drill for laziness & Frank Pasno in the Guard house for drunkenness.” Four days later, he complained of “a miserable straggling march of about 7 miles.” The 14th Vermont, in the middle of a nine-month enlistment, was having discipline problems.

By July 1, Clark was camped in a wheat field south of Gettysburg, Pa., ready for a fight after a 12-mile march. “I washed myself, changed my shirt, threw away my old one so it makes my load only a Rubber & Fly tent and pr. Socks, but it is enough. This P.M. marched for Gettysburgh & saw the smoke — guess the village is burnt.”

Then, two days later, different handwriting recorded that Clark had been killed at 4 a.m. by a 12-pound cannon ball that took off “all the back part of his head.” He was one of the first casualties of the battle’s final, bloody day.

“He was a good boy and soldier,” the anonymous writer scrawled. “The whole Co. mourns his loss & Especially his Capt. Such are the fortunes of War and they are deplorable.”

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Everything You Know about Matthew Shepard is Wrong

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least by anybody that really matters, as a traitor to the cause. Yet.

The “cause” in this case would be gay rights, in all of its astounding exfoliations. Jimenez’s book threatens to uproot a foundational myth of the movement: that the murder of a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard, in 1998, was a “hate crime.”

The approved account, received for 15 years now as both a horror and an inspiration, tells us that Shepard was approached in a bar one night by two strangers, who drove him to the outskirts of Laramie and then beat him nearly to death with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, for the simple reason that he was homosexual. One of the blows fell so hard it pushed Shepard’s brain into his brain stem, cracking it. He was found the next morning tied to a rail fence crucifixion-style, after 18 hours in near-freezing temperatures, comatose.

Even before his death five days later, Shepard had been made a symbol, thanks to quick work by mainchancers from national gay rights organizations and by compliant reporters from back East, who found in the story a ready-made example of the intolerance, cruelty, violence, and raging homophobia of America’s flyover country, Western States Division.

Well, no, says Stephen Jimenez. Beginning as a self-described amateur journalist (the best kind), he studied Shepard’s murder off and on for 13 years, conducted hundreds of interviews with sources on and off the record, and pored over a public record many thousands of pages long. His comprehensive account corrects the approved version in small matters and large. Shepard was not tied to the rail fence as if crucified, for example, and it’s still not clear, even after Jimenez’s exhaustive reporting, how this piece of misinformation became common knowledge—beyond the obvious explanation that reporters thought the detail was, as the saying goes, too good to check.

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Right Wing’s Surge in Europe Has the Establishment Rattled

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Photo Credit: Laerke Posselt for NYTAs right-wing populists surge across Europe, rattling established political parties with their hostility toward immigration, austerity and the European Union, Mikkel Dencker of the Danish People’s Party has found yet another cause to stir public anger: pork meatballs missing from kindergartens.

A member of Denmark’s Parliament and, he hopes, mayor of this commuter-belt town west of Copenhagen, Mr. Dencker is furious that some day care centers have removed meatballs, a staple of traditional Danish cuisine, from their cafeterias in deference to Islamic dietary rules. No matter that only a handful of kindergartens have actually done so. The missing meatballs, he said, are an example of how “Denmark is losing its identity” under pressure from outsiders.

The issue has become a headache for Mayor Helle Adelborg, whose center-left Social Democratic Party has controlled the town council since the 1920s but now faces an uphill struggle before municipal elections on Nov. 19. “It is very easy to exploit such themes to get votes,” she said. “They take a lot of votes from my party. It is unfair.”

It is also Europe’s new reality. All over, established political forces are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll.

This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.

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