Do you remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren’t. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of the bullets into the ground around him.

Lord Lovat was with him–Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, “Sorry I’m a few minutes late, as if he’d been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he’d just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken.

- Ronald Reagan, Pointe du Hoc, June 6th, 1984

Bill Millin died today at 88.

About a month from now I”ll be in Normandy looking up at the cliffs from the beach and wondering now only how each of you were able to do such an incredible thing – but also giving my thanks that men such as you walked this earth.

RIP.

I can’t begin to describe the awesomeness contained within these two blog posts.

First up, Eric Hague writes an ingenious post entitled Our Daughter Isn’t a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn’t Read Atlas Shrugged.:

I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place—a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles—and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously.

That post in, and of itself, was enough to make me warm and fuzzy inside. But then Lex came in with something even better:

Aidan can’t make a living in the marketplace, so he gets a nice, safe job with the Ball Redistribution Agency. And when he finally wanders over to Johanna and asks for a ball, he doesn’t say, “Have a ball, peas?” he says, “I’ll be taking those balls, missus.” On on either flank, he will have a couple of bigger kids with sticks, thumping them in their palms menacingly.

Johanna was a clever kid, and she saw this coming some weeks before. She has stashed a supply of balls in the Caymans, and when Aidan comes and takes all her balls but one, she picks up that ball and goes to her new home in the islands. Her workers are thrown out on the streets, her factory is shuttered, the board loses access to the taxes their output and wages once yielded and is forced to take care of the laid off workers, spending money that the board doesn’t have. The kids in the playground see all this and grow restless.

Now running at a significant deficit relative to predictions, the board turns its eyes to the Frisbee maker.

#awesomesauce… seriously

Crap like this:

5) Benedict Arnold (17)

5) Woodrow Wilson (17)

4) The Rosenbergs (19)

3) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (21)

2) Barack Obama (23)

1) Jimmy Carter (25)

There’s a case to be made that both Benedict Arnold and the Rosenbergs belong on the list of the 25 worst figures in American history. But Jimmy Carter? Woodrow Wilson? Roosevelt? Obama?

Give me a break.

Update: Jim Geraghty over at National Review Online agrees with me:

I actually think you can make strong cases for some of the political figures on this list. Anyone who’s read Liberal Fascism understands Wilson’s inclusion, and there’s a lot of supporting evidence to the argument that Jimmy Carter was the century’s worst, or most ineffective president. I think demonizing FDR is as foolish as lionizing him, and as time goes by, I feel less animus towards Bill Clinton, and his signing of welfare reform alone ought to keep him off this list.

But some of these names strike me as ludicrously small time for the scale of this list. Fahrenheit 9/11 and his other crap documentaries put Michael Moore in the top 20 worst figures in American history? I’m not even sure he’s among my 20 least favorite liberals at this moment. Al Sharpton? Soros?

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion”

-henry david thoreau

A new study by MeFeedia indicates that consumers using mobile devices are more engaged video watchers than those on desktop computers. Jay Yarow reports that iPad owners lead the pack on consumption of mobile video

via Poynter Online – Mobile Media.

A Microsoft executive states:

It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that…

Oh really?

Like MG says, I have a feeling that you’re going to regret that statement. How’s that Windows Mobile business going?

Cross-posted at Telegraphik

This video over at WCCO has one of my favorite admissions by a politician ever – that as one of the strongest opponents against the Minnesota Permit to Carry law that her strongly stated facts about how firearms crime would go up were totally wrong.

All in all, a very balanced story that stuck to the facts – not at all what I expect from our local media here in the Twin Cities.

The Boston Globe highlights the life and death of a priest who gave us an amazing lesson on how to die with grace:

“Under my promise to always tell you the truth, I have discontinued chemo and other treatments,’’ he wrote, adding, “I’m beyond the place where chemo can help me. I have come home to die. I am near the end of my journey.’’

Father Field, who had stood in the pulpit month after month, performing pastoral duties through intense pain, sat in a wheelchair on June 27. Speaking into a microphone, he asked if anyone had questions. There were none. Instead, the parishioners took their turn to stand. They began to clap, their applause echoing through the church for minute after minute, as if to prolong his time with them.

A masterful teacher who deftly discovered new insights in familiar Gospel passages, Father Field spent the past two years using his own life as a lesson in how to let life shine in the shadow of death. “I am in a place of great peace and gratitude,’’ he wrote. Father Field, who lived in the church rectory, died Monday. He was 59 and had celebrated his 20th anniversary as an ordained priest last month.

His journey reminds me the life and death of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago…

The idea of public funding for the press stirs deep unease in American culture. To many it seems inconsistent with our strong commitment, embodied in the First Amendment, to having a free press capable of speaking truth to power and to all of us. This press is a kind of public trust, a fourth branch of government. Can it be trusted when the state helps pay for it?

via Lee Bollinger: Journalism Needs Government Help – WSJ.com.

No, journalism does not need government help. And we’re not willing to pay for it.

WordPress is free. So are other blogging platforms. Go use them, write interesting and insightful content, you will bring in business.

When companies like the New York Times spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build new HQ buildings in New York City, find themselves unable to pay for the building a few years later, and then wonder what happened to their business model – there are bigger issues at stake here than just government funding.

Her obituary, printed in Tuesday’s Review-Journal, reads in part, “We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate.”

via Charlotte zings Reid from beyond the grave – John L. Smith – ReviewJournal.com.

Radley Balko, as usual, gets it right on the trial and verdict of former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle:

Early in the morning of January 1, 2009, in a now infamous incident captured on video by dozens of cell phones and replayed across the globe, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed 23-year-old Oscar Grant as Grant lay on his stomach on an Oakland BART platform. Last week, a Los Angeles jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Because the jury had the option to convict Mehserle of second-degree murder, and perhaps because the jury contained no blacks (Mehserle is white, Grant was black), the verdict has enraged civil rights groups and sparked protests and rioting in Oakland. The Department of Justice is now looking into the possibility of trying Mehserle a second time under federal civil rights law.

The jury got it right.

via Justice for Johannes Mehserle – Reason Magazine.

The New York Times profiles Gave Rivera and Techmeme today, one of my favorite websites:

News lovers in Washington can’t live without Mike Allen at Politico. Hollywood squabbles over the relative merits of Sharon Waxman’s TheWrap versus Nikki Finke’s Deadline. The newspaper industry reads the news collected by Jim Romenesko.

One of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.

There are moments when Scott Brown evokes a 12-year-old boy who woke up one day in a politician’s body—as if the Tom Hanks character in Big had asked that fortune-telling machine for a Senate seat. He certainly has the 12-year-old’s vernacular. Stumping for John McCain at a small Christian college in March, the junior senator from Massachusetts opined, “If you told me five months ago that I’d be standing here in front of you, I would say, ‘You’re full of it.”’ He also has the 12-year-old’s gee-whiz sensibility. After learning that he’d made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most powerful people, Brown exclaimed to The Boston Globe, “I didn’t realize it was in the world. … Lady Gaga’s number four, so let’s be real.” As a senator, he seems most excited by activities that appeal to the prepubescent mind. “As soon as his hip gets better, we’re going to do some bike-riding,” he said in April when asked about his relationship with his new buddy, John Kerry.

via Mr. America | The New Republic.

It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I’m readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I’ll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials – after the fact.

- Robert E. Lee, 1863

I could care less about Lebron…

That said, the letter that was written by Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavs, Lebron’s former team, was published using the Comic Sans font.

Do people still actually use that thing? Egads.

What?! You mean the power of the federal government isn’t unlimited? Shocking.

A federal judge ruled today that part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional.

Judge Joseph Tauro, of U.S. District Court in Boston, issued rulings on two separate cases today.

"This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status," Tauro wrote in the decision for Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services.

"The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and, in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment. For that reason, the statute is invalid," he wrote.

In the other case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, Tauro ruled that DOMA violates the equal protection principles in the Fifth Amendment, according to Bay Windows. From his decision (PDF):

via Federal Judge Rules Part Of DOMA Unconstitutional | TPM LiveWire.

The exchanging of jerseys at the end of a soccer match is a longtime ritual that is well established in the sport, even as it has evolved. With each swap — like the ones that take place after games in this World Cup — there is usually a story.

Often the tales are personal, speaking to a player’s standing in the game or marking a chapter in his career.

As for the jerseys themselves, sometimes they are washed, sometimes not. Sometimes they end up being given away, auctioned off, framed for display in a player’s home, boxed up in storage, or — as Berhalter learned — who knows where?

via Jersey Swaps, a Ritual That Comes With a Story – NYTimes.com.

And he’s posting Over at the DailyKOS of all places – in this piece Why Liberals should love the Second Amendment:

When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as “gun nuts.” They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.

And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.

Those who fight against Second Amendment rights cite statistics about gun violence, as if such numbers are evidence enough that our rights should be restricted. But Chicago and Washington DC, the two cities from which came the most recent Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment rights, had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation, and also some of the highest rates of violent crime. Clearly, such restrictions do not correlate with preventing crime.

So rather than continuing to fight for greater restrictions on Second Amendment rights, it is time for liberals to defend Second Amendment rights as vigorously as they fight to protect all of our other rights. Because it is by fighting to protect each right that we protect all rights.

The author goes on to write quite an impressive piece. There’s already nearly two thousand comments as of the time of this writing, I’m sure there will be more soon.