Pray this Independence Day that we are sheltered from this storm. Pray that the blood shed in the past was not for naught. Pray that reason will trump agenda. Pray for our LIBERTY and FREEDOM – JUST PRAY!

When the Titanic set sail there was plenty of hope and change to go around for all that were lucky enough to be a part of this historic event. When launched there was an aura surrounding this great ship, the unsinkable Titanic. This is akin to our recent election, another historic event, where hope and change was sold like so many steerage tickets on the Titanic. I reflect today on a T shirt I saw this morning – “Barack Obama – he got my back” and that image is haunting. Just like the image of watching all those smiling passengers board the majestic Titanic. The designers and promoters “got their back”, the Titanic was unsinkable just as Obama is infallible. Neither of these historic event can be seen as occurring free from outside influence. There was little warning when the Titanic hit the iceberg that cold cloudless night. And there was little time to do anything once the damage was done. We have had ample warning as our ship of state nears the economic iceberg made up of trillions of dollars of deficit spending. But, will we steer clear? There were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic and when the great ship sank many were forced to chose death in the cold waters of the Atlantic. There is no safety net for our economy now that the free market has been deconstructed. While we may not be threatened by the cold ocean waters we are most certainly in for a period of “sink or swim” while the ship of state starts to fill with the weight of debt. This is a ballast we just can’t carry now nor can our children and their children and their children carry it when we turn over the helm to future generations. We need to start pumping and hope we only hit with a glancing blow. If not, God help us…..

That day, the day he came ashore on Iwo Jima in February 1945, the seas unleashed a stomach-churning fury, accentuated by bursts of enemy fire and the beating of his own heart.

“The place stunk with a rotten egg smell,” recalls Callahan, 82, who served as a Marine in the 5th Engineer Battalion, Company B, attached to the 27th Combat Regiment. “We were told to get off the beach as fast as we could, and that’s what I did.”

Iwo Jima was Callahan’s first and only battle of World War II. He was there less than a week before a shell blast hurled him into the air, injuring his back. He spent nine months in the hospital and earned a Purple Heart before finishing his military hitch in New London.

“I have a scar on my back you can just about put your finger in,” he says. “But they never found any shrapnel in me. My back still hurts now and then. I really don’t think there’s anything exceptional about my war experiences.”

Many Americans might disagree.

As the country prepares for Veterans Day on Saturday, Iwo Jima’s importance shines particularly bright thanks to the new movie “Flags of Our Fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood. Based on a best-selling book, it tells the story of the soldiers who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima. It also tells of the famous news photo of the flag raising that bolstered the nation’s resolve for winning the war.

Callahan saw the flag flying over Mount Suribachi in person.

“That was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Once you saw it on the top of that mountain, you felt, ‘This island is ours.’ It was a relief, too.”

The battle of Iwo Jima, considered by many historians to be a key engagement in the war’s Pacific theater, cost nearly 7,000 American lives. The military awarded 27 Medals of Honor as a result of Iwo Jima, the most of any single battle in U.S. history.

Callahan was part of the third wave of Marines to storm the island, which was defended by 22,000 Japanese troops hunkered down in camouflaged positions and underground bunkers. Callahan, a private, was a demolition man. He came ashore wearing a demolition pack on his chest with squares of TNT, primer cord and blasting caps.

“Our job was to blow up stuff,” he says. “I never got to that stage.”

Callahan had joined the Marines in 1944 after his graduation from Hamden High School. His father was a veteran of World War I, and Callahan was proud to serve during wartime.

“The day of the invasion, I stood with my buddies on the deck of our ship and watched the bombardment,” he recalls. “That whole island was a mass of explosions, smoke and dust. We were told the whole thing would last three days. We thought it would be a cake walk.”

He was there an eventful four days.

Almost as soon as he’d left the beach and started running up a hill, Callahan nearly ran into the aperture of a Japanese pill box. Luckily, the compartment had been abandoned.

He and his buddies soon settled into a constant pattern of digging into a position, then moving forward 50-60 yards, then digging in again. It was both monotonous and terrifying.

Once, he dove into a position where there was another soldier. He spoke to the man, and when he didn’t get an answer, he noticed the soldier in a pool of blood. Another time, Callahan took cover in a hole left by a mortar shell and found a dead Japanese soldier.

“When you come under machine gun fire, you’d be surprised how quick you can dive into a position of shelter,” he says.

Then one day, while on the march, he was hit. There was an explosion behind him which tossed him into the air and over the head of the soldier in front of him. He landed on his backside, with no feeling in his legs.

Even after his comrades removed him from danger, leaving Iwo Jima proved difficult. The small transport he was in nearly capsized several miles off shore, leaving him guessing if he could swim all the way back to the island without using his legs. But it didn’t come to that and Callahan eventually made his way home to finish his service commitment in Connecticut.

He recovered from his injuries, as well. In fact, he remembers saying a quick “Hallelujah” when the feeling in his toes returned.

“I walked with a limp for a long time,” he says.

Then in short order, he got on with his life. Callahan met Eileen Coyle on a blind date in 1946 and married her a year later. They raised four children, living first in Wallingford and then Hamden.

He worked several jobs, including manufacturing equipment sales and teaching at Eli Whitney Vocational Technical School, before retiring at age 65. Eileen died in 1996 and Callahan now lives near the water, where one of his hobbies is carving birds from wood.

Callahan says he doesn’t go out of his way to talk about the war, but he answers questions if people ask him about it. He says his contribution was minor, compared with that of other combat veterans.

“But it was an experience you’d never want to go through again,” he says.

This politician turned scientific “guru” tells us that carbon dioxide is the most important and dangerous atmospheric gas and that we need to stop emitting or we will perish. Worse than that, a group of jackals known as the US congress and the recently installed president have seized on this idea as a way to completely kill any industry that emits carbon dioxide. Now that’s a fine approach to a down turn. It has been reported that the industry that emits the most C02 is the farming industry. We better be prepared to pay what Obama does ($100/lb) for our beef.

The CAP and trade works this way; a company that moves lots of paper, such as an insurance company or perhaps a bank, can sell carbon credits to that nasty dirty factory belching C02 down the street. This way, that nasty factory is penalized for their transgression. Oh and by the way, this is the filthy factory that the bank and insurers provide with loans and insurance protection. Are you beginning to see the irony here? This is just a way for the banking and insurance industries, when fully government controlled, to send all of this CAP and trade money back to their new owner so those that need are taken care of. Meanwhile the new administration has just thrown a wrench in the spokes of the recovery engine.

Now the fly in this ointment is who in their right mind would continue to manufacture anything here in the USA when we would be the only country in the world enforcing such a stiff penalty on manufacturers (and farmers for that matter)? All the increased costs would either have to be passed to the market or the factories would have to shut down. Either way, the lower and middle working classes, you know the working people Obama promised to protect, are ruined. They either pay more for what they buy or they stand in bread lines.  Are we stupid enough to establish such a flawed program?  Schemes like this have been tried before and they don’t work. Unfortunately the answer here may be yes perhaps we (our elected officials) are that stupid. The reason may be as simple as this – there are those elected officials in DC, including the president, who believe it is their destiny to write legislation that will save the planet one carbon credit at a time. This very legislation is brought to you by the people who’s penchant for  “feel good” legislation created the biggest banking disaster the world has ever seen. Need I say more.

Now, as they switch their attention to the scientific realm, they are attacking a problem so complex that no computer model to date, as sophisticated as they are, comes close to accurately supporting Gore’s ridiculous claims.  We can’t even get the 3 day weather forecast and Gore is projecting long term, destructive, climate fluctuations. Its absurd. The premise used to bring us to this precipice is fantasy, OK flawed at best. From a half baked slide show which includes a series of doctored pictures and graphs we end up on the eve of our elected officials voting for CAP and trade. Manufacturing here in the USA, once drivers of  a flourishing economy, are now seriously wounded. As with the Alamo, these manufacturers will make a last stand but with the government wishing them dead the outcome is clear to predict. As the saying on the left goes, save the planet kill industry. CAP and trade is just one more cobble stone in the road to US ruin.

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Confidence is essential for an economic turn around. Thankfully our MSM has decided simple global issues like Dubai downsizing by about 1500 foreign workers per day are trivial or we could be panicked. Oh wait, didn’t our new president use fear to try to create panic when he was ramming trillions of debt down our throats? Is there anyone out there other than me that feels isolated in thinking adding debt to debt doesn’t bode well for prosperity. It is difficult to have confidence in a man that claimed running his campaign on his resume when asked about running the free world. Now, many are seeing why sometimes fresh and new changy hopey is not exactly the remedy for tangible problems like those we are faced with. The con game has been going on since a neighborhood organizer took the helm of state. This is something analogous to letting your 8 year old take the wheel of you Ferrari on the Autobahn. Is anybody feeling like we are in for a monstorous crash?

While the “people” elected Obama in what was a mandate for change is it possible these people are now a bit worried about what they have done? I grew up as did the Obama’s, in the land of opportunity. The mere fact that Barack Hussein Obama has been elected is an example of just what opportunities there are in this Country for those that want to better themselves. And there is much room for a leader who can instill the cool confidence we now need to weather this raging storm we have sailed into. Confidence is key and Obama does not exude same, he is a walking talking monster ego who believes the mandate he was given came with no strings….

Let’s watch this play out as in DC everything has strings attached.