Today is Pentecost Sunday, one of the worst days in the year for those who hate Judeo Christian values because it’s not only the birthday of the Church when the Holy Spirit comes upon the Apostles and they begin to preach the good news but it’s also comes from the Jewish feast of Pentecost commemorating when Moses gave the Jews the law which is one of the cornerstones that Christian belief is built on.
Christ promised that when it came to his church “the gates of hell would not prevail against it”. Given recent events some might have doubts on that but a church that has survived Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, the Black Death the reformation, Attila the Hun and the Islamic invasions of Europe will be able to handle Biden, Obama, Pelosi and any number of drag queens.
Pentecost Sunday is one of the few weekends where the vigil mass has different readings than the Sunday Mass. I was surprised to see that they had revised the readings for the vigil mass to add three additional readings to make it look more like the Easter Vigil. The Pope has also added a feast for Monday, Mary the Mother of the Church.
These little tweaks are generally a good idea as they tend to address current needs while preserving what is already there.
Nancy Pelosi went on Morning Joe defending her abortion position and noting that abortion was not mentioned in the bible, a rather disingenuous argument as the practice was specifically forbidden by the Hippocratic Oath until late last century. What’s more interesting is her invoking Matthew on feeding the hungry etc. I note the attempt o change this responsibility from the individual who has a soul to a government that doesn’t.
She is the perfect illustration of a story I was once told by a longtime pol concerning some advice he was given when he was young: Politics is a living for you, it’s how you make your money, if you manage to do something for the people, that’s a nice bonus but it’s about making your living.
Pelosi and her family have been exceedingly good at making a very comfortable living out of “compassion” paid for with other people’s money.
One of the realities of God is that if you ask him to leave you he will back away until invited back.
We pushed God out of our schools and they have fallen to the point where sending your child to a public school is practically child abuse.
The day will come when he invited back and when we do he will be there.
Until then it will be a desolation.
Finally In addition to Pentecost Sunday Today is also game 2 of the NBA finals with the Boston Celtics facing the Golden State Warriors.
The Celtics 4th quarter comeback in game one was one of the biggest shocks I’ve seen in such a game, The Celtics have made a season of doing the unexpected but now when stuff like this happens I can’t help but wondering where the money was bet these days.
I suspect I’m not the only person who thinks this way, but you want to push gambling in sports, that’s what you get.
One of the enduring principles of the left is to convince Republicans that in order to be elected or re-elected they have to follow the media agenda no matter what.
Congressman Chris Jacobs (R-27) addressed school safety in a press conference at a VFW post in Lancaster Friday and said he supports a ban on the sale of AR-15s, as well as increasing the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21. He was joined by New York State gubernatorial candidate and fellow congressman Lee Zeldin (R-1) at the presser.
The Democrats and media were delighted , the GOP not so much:
“This is not the person we endorsed. We did not endorse this Chris Jacobs … he’s actually to the left of [US House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi on this,” Conservative Party state Chair Gerard Kassar told the Post Thursday about his party withdrawing support for Jacobs’ reelection.
And poof, just like that in the year of the coming big red wave a GOP incumbent became unelectable:
Rep. Chris Jacobs is dropping his reelection bid after coming under fire from fellow Republicans for backing a ban on assault weapons.
The New York Republican said his newfound views on gun control would make a re-election bid difficult and divisive.
“The last thing we need is an incredibly negative, half-truth-filled media attack, funded by millions of dollars in special interest money coming into our community around this issue of guns and gun violence and gun control,” he said in announcing his withdrawal from the race.
Which means that instead of a sitting incumbent the left gets to run against a rookie which is exactly the result they where hoping for.
I’d feel sorry for Representative Jacobs if it wasn’t for two things:
He did this to himself.
He will without a doubt become the favorite GOP goto person whenever the left wants someone to hit the GOP on the issue of guns assuring him a place as a MSNBC on CNN Analyst once he leaves office.
At least he will until they decide the useful idiot is no longer useful.
On Memorial Day, Joe Biden made some very ominous statements, which were cloaked in his customary mistruths and utter gibberish. These statements should send chills down the spines of supporter of the Second Amendment. Once you fed the statements into a Joe Biden gibberish and lies decoder they translated into the message “we’re going to ban all guns including hand guns.”
From this quote you can see that Biden will be targeting the Democrat’s usual bugaboo ‘assault weapons.’
I know that it makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds. I know it makes — and I know what happened when we had rational action before, back in — when the crime bill was — the law that got passed. It did significantly cut down mass murders.
And so there’s only one reason for something that can fire, you know, 100 shots.
The fraudulent claim about effects of the unconstitutional assault weapons ban are debunked here.
This next statement exploded across social media and conservative news websites because it is both ominous and entirely devoid of reality.
I mean — and I’ll just conclude with this: Look, when I first started doing hearings on the issue of what rational gun laws should be, it was during a period when I was a senator and the death rate was going up. Not that many more people were being shot, but the death rate was up. And when I think of — I’m not sure, I think it was (inaudible) hospital in New York — whatever the largest trauma hospital is.
And I sat with a trauma doctor, and I asked him — I said, “What’s the difference? Why are so many people…” — and not that many more people were being shot. This is now 20 years ago, or 25 years. I said, “Why are they dying?” And they showed me x-rays. He said, “A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out, may be able to get it, and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”
Joe Biden proved that he knows absolutely nothing about the Second Amendment and the rest of the Constitution when he made the following statement:
So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is of — there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting. I mean, I just — and remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute. You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.
And those who — not many are saying it anymore, but there was a while there where people were saying that, you know, the Tree of Liberty is watered with the blood of patriots, and what we have to do is you have to be able to take on the government when they’re wrong. Well, to do that, you need an F-15, you know? Or you need an Abrams tank.
Joe Biden has repeated the same mistruth about the First Amendment preventing Americans in early America from owning cannons often. Each time he uttered it he has been fact checked.
In the second paragraph of that last quote, Joe Biden shows utter contempt for the founding principles of the United States. He spits on the graves of every founding father of the United States. Only a petulant tyrant would threaten American citizens with tanks and fighter aircraft for simply standing up for their rights.
On Memorial Day I am re-running one of my former posts on Shreveport’s Kelley brothers. As we remember those who gave the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country, take time to learn about some of these heroes in your own community. In Shreveport, one family lost three sons in less than two years in World War II. During that war many families across our nation lost more than one son, but as far as I know, the Kelley family is the only family in Shreveport that lost three sons– one of them in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Like all of America, Shreveport watched the unfolding events at Pearl Harbor in 1941 with horror.
In February 1942, William G. Kelley (his friends and family called him “Bob”) felt the call to service and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He had graduated from the local high school, attended Louisiana College, and was attending seminary. He was ordained at the First Baptist Church in Shreveport. When he enlisted, Bob was preaching at the Evangeline Mission, a new church in town that he helped build with the assistance of the Queensborough Baptist Church.
Bob Kelley went to officers’ school and became a bombardier; he went with the Eighth Air Force to England. Lt. Kelley had been overseas only six weeks when his plane crashed near Fontainebleau, France and claimed his life on November 10, 1944. He was twenty-four years old.
The Evangeline Mission, where Bob was a preacher, was renamed for him as Kelley Memorial Baptist Church
A second Kelley son, Bose, Jr., died in the D-Day invasion. Al McIntosh, writing for the Rock County Star Herald, wrote on June 8, 1944, after learning that the expected invasion of France had finally taken place:
“This is no time for any premature rejoicing or cockiness because the coming weeks are going to bring grim news. This struggle is far from over – it has only started – and if anyone thinks that a gain of ten miles means that the next three hundred are going to go as fast or easy, he is only an ostrich.”
He was correct: the grim news was only beginning. Bose Kelly, Jr. enlisted in May 1942. Bose graduated from Fair Park High School in Shreveport. He was married to Betty Miller and worked as a mechanic at Central Motor Company, a car dealership. Bose volunteered for the Army Airborne, went to jump school, and became a paratrooper. Bose was part of the 507 PIR which became attached to the 82nd Airborne in 1943. The 507 PIR was activated at Fort Benning, Georgia on July 20, 1942, and trained there and in Alliance, Nebraska. In 1943, the 507th PIR shipped out to Northern Ireland, then England, and it was in Nottingham where they prepared for the coming Allied invasion of France. They studied sand tables, drop zones, and were given Hershey’s chocolates and a carton of cigarettes.
Bose was on a C-47, number 13 in his stick, as the plane lumbered through the fog banks toward Drop Zone T, near the west bank of the Merderet River. Because of the fog and the incoming German flak, the C-47s flew faster and higher than anticipated which caused almost all the paratroopers to miss the drop zone. They were scattered over a 15-mile area. The 507th was the last regiment to jump and by the time Bose Kelley’s C-47 was over the Cotentin peninsula the entire area was stirred up with flak coming from every direction. There were sixteen men in Bose Kelley’s stick and at least eight of them were killed that night. The Germans had flooded the valley as a defensive tactic and some paratroopers, weighted down by equipment and unable to swim, drowned. Bose Kelley was killed by a direct hit from an artillery shell.
“This regiment unquestionably received the worst drop of the six US parachute regiments dropped that night.”
Howard Huebner, who was number 3 in Bose’s stick, survived that drop. He wrote:
I am a Paratrooper! I was 21 yrs old when we jumped into Normandy.
We knew the area where we were supposed to land, because we had studied it on sand tables, and then had to draw it on paper by memory, but that all faded as our regiment was the last to jump, and things had changed on the ground. Most of us missed our drop zone by miles. As we were over our drop zone there was a downed burning plane. Later I found out it was one of ours. The flack was hitting our plane and everything from the ground coming our way looked like the Fourth of July.
When I hit the ground in Normandy, I looked at my watch. It was 2:32 AM, June 6, 1944. I cut myself out of my chute, and the first thing I heard was shooting and some Germans hollering in German, “mucksnell toot sweet Americanos”.
We the 507th, was supposed to land fifteen miles inland, but I landed three or four miles from Utah Beach by the little town of Pouppeville. I wound up about 1000 yards from a French farmhouse that the Germans were using for a barracks, and about 200 feet from a river, an area that the Germans had flooded. If I would have landed in the water, I may not be here today as I can’t swim. A lot of paratroopers drowned because of the flooded area.
Local writer Gary Hines spoke to Bose’s widow, Betty, for an article he wrote for the August 2000 issue of SB Magazine. She told him, “He was going to win the war and come back home.” Betty was married at 18 and a widow at 20. She told Mr. Hines “We were both young enough to feel that he was coming home. He wasn’t going to be one of the ones who was lost.”
A third Kelley son, Edgar Rew, was drafted into the Army in 1943. He was sent to Camp McCain in Mississippi where he died five weeks later from an outbreak of spinal meningitis. He never made it out of basic training. He was 27 years old; he left behind a wife of five years.
The remaining Kelley brother was Jack. Jack Richard Kelley was serving in the medical corps in Washington at Fort Lewis. His father, Bose Kelley, Sr., wrote to U.S. Representative Overton Brooks and pleaded with him to prevent his oldest son from going overseas. It is reminiscent of the scene in Saving Private Ryan where General Marshall reads the Bixby letter to his officers. In this case, in a letter dated December 8, 1944, Mr. Kelley received word that his son Jack would remain stateside for the duration of the war. Jack Kelley died in 1998.
The bodies of Bose Kelley, Jr. and his brother William (Bob) were buried in separate military funerals in France but were returned to the United States in September 1948. Bose and his brother now rest side by side in the veteran’s section of Greenwood Cemetery in Shreveport. Their brother, Edgar Rew Kelley, is in a civilian cemetery across town, the Jewella Cemetery on Greenwood Road. Their father, who pleaded for his fourth son to be spared, died just one month after Bose and William’s bodies were buried in Greenwood Cemetery. It’s as if he was just waiting for them to come home.
For sixty-five years their sister, Ruby, tended the graves of her brothers. There has never been a time that I visited the graves that there was not a crisp American flag flying over each and flowers. Ruby died a few years ago, and the graves are now tended by Ruby’s daughter. I visited the graves of Bose and William last week and sure enough, there were two new flags and flowers steadfastly in place.
As we observe this 70th anniversary of D-Day, we remember the sacrifices of young men like the Kelleys all across the country. Their name belongs alongside the Sullivan brothers, the Borgstrum brothers, the Niland brothers, and the Wright brothers. It is their heroism and their sacrifice, along with that of so many others, that we remember and honor.
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