My Grandpa Ken

This article was in the Millard County Chronicle today to honor my Grandpa, he was also honored by the University of Utah as the Veteran of the Year.

Ken Porter, 84, of Sutherland, enlisted in the Army Air Corps which eventually became the U.S. Air Force from 1943 to 1945.

“Too many people do not appreciate what the veterans have done, nor do they realize what a blessing it is to live in this country,” said Porter. “I have the utmost respect for these guys and those who spent time in the prison camps.”

Porter attended school in Sutherland until the eighth grade and then went to Delta High School. At the age 17, he convinced his parents to let him join the Army Air Corps as a cadet in the fall of 1943.

Told he was too nervous to be a pilot by the Army psychologist, Porter was sent to gunnery school in Kingman, AZ. After training in Kingman, he went to pre-combat crew flight training in Gulfport, MS. From there he and his crew went to Foggia, Italy, join the 5th Air Force’s 463 Bomb Group, 772nd Bomb Squadron.

“In as much as we had fighter escorts for most of our missions, our main concern was for the flak (flak from the German Fliegerabwehrkanone, aircraft defense cannon) that became more accurate as time passed. We didn’t fly many missions in which we didn’t pick up flak holes. Numerous times we came home with one or two engines completely knocked out by flak. Porter wrote the following account for the Delta South Elementary’s Defenders of Freedom book:

“Our worst mission was one that should have been easy. We had just dropped our bombs when a string of four 88’s went off, peppering us from nose to tail. The first one flew off the nose cone, knocked out both windshields and all the windows. The pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier were all wounded. The 88ís also knocked out the number two and four engines, cut five of the nine spark plugs leads on number one engine and wounded the right waist gunner, cutting all the control cables but the one leading to the automatic pilot. Fortunately the engineer was able to flip in the automatic pilot and we recovered.

“After assessing the damage we decided to try and make it home. By throwing out all the guns, ammo and anything else we could, we were able to maintain sufficient altitude.

The engineer happened to have some extra cables and camps with him and he and I determined what cables went where and put them back together, clamping the cables while I pulled them as tightly as possible. In this fashion we managed to render the controls usable though very sloppy. Eventually the 332nd ‘All Black’ fighter group (the Tuskegee Airmen) escorted us to where we eventually made a crash-landing at Foggia’s main air base, the pilot using only the left landing gear as the right gear and the tail wheel had been shot to pieces. While attempting to land, we did many ground loops and eventually stopped about 40 yards from 10 fully loaded British Wellington aircraft, sending the Brits scattering in all directions. Needless to say our plane was a flying junk pile. We counted more than 300 holes in its right side alone.”

“One of the most memorable experiences stands out, but occurred when my crew and I were nearly halfway finished with our tour. Our plane was loaded and ready to fly. We took off and at about 300 feet, the two left engines simply quit. I looked out of the plane and told a waist-gunner, ‘Your mother is going to get her gold star in about ten seconds!’ Then the pilot cut the power and we hit the ground, taking off the end of the left wing. Fortunately, we didn’t hit hard enough to destroy the entire wing so we were able to say we were one of the few crews to crash a fully loaded B-17 without blowing up the plane,” told Porter.

On another mission, the 99th Bomber Group flew over the top of Porter’s group dropping their bombs taking out a plane in front of his.

“One of the bombs missed our horizontal stabilizer by about two feet. It was so close I could have reached out and grabbed it,” he said.

Porter finished his tour of duty with 275 combat flying hours.

“I was one of the few who put in a full tour of missions. The 5th Air Force credited me with 57 missions but I was given double credit for quite a few missions. All of them were flown while I was 19 years old,” said Porter.

After finishing his tour, Porter refused to fly home. Instead, he waited in Naples for a ship to sail home. He finished the war at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, AZ. Porter was discharged October 1945 with the rank of Staff Sergeant.

His life has been one of continual service to his community and nation. Porter is on hand when American Legion Post 135 shows up to assist with Memorial Day celebrations, funerals, holiday parades and other occasions requiring, or desiring, a military presence. He will be honored at a special ceremony in Salt Lake City this Veterans Day as an example of the Utah Veterans to whom so many owe so much.

“I’ve tried to be a good citizen, active in church and in politics, and doing what a good person should do,” Porter said.

Thoughts from Ben Stein...

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called 'Monday Night At Morton's.' (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I 'slug' it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is 'eonlineFINAL,' and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a 'star' we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit , Iraq . He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordinance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded.. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject



There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York . I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

You are not alone, We Surround Them

If you missed it here is Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" messege.
Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5

You can pry it from my cold dead hands

The restrictions on guns getting tighter, taxes on ammunition are sky-rocketing and so many in government are trying to strip us of our right to bear arms. Do we realize how important this right is? It was important enough to be #2! Why is it number two? Because without being able to bear arms we will not be able to defend the other rights we have. Jefferson made it clear when he said:

For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

and

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. -Thomas Jefferson

Similarly, in a released Senate report on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms,

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, chairman, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, states: They argue that the Second Amendment's words "right of the people" mean "a right of the state" — apparently overlooking the impact of those same words when used in the First and Fourth Amendments. The "right of the people" to assemble or to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is not contested as an individual guarantee. Still they ignore consistency and claim that the right to "bear arms" relates only to military uses. This not only violates a consistent constitutional reading of "right of the people" but also ignores that the second amendment protects a right to "keep" arms. "When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When they sought to record forever a guarantee of their rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to nothing but the protection of their right to keep and bear arms against governmental interference. Under my chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will concern itself with a proper recognition of, and respect for, this right most valued by free men."

As the argument rages on about definitions and the true intent of the second amendment; the reality remains that without a way to defend ourselves we will be robed not in the dead of night but in the light of day right in front of our faces and we will only be able to stand and watch as our rights and freedoms are stripped from us.

Today as we write a check...

As for the bill that President Obama signed today, I can honestly say I hope it works. Because, that is a whole lot of money to just give away. The sad reality is that it is not likely to work. This quote seemed appropriate to mention:

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. -Sir Winston Churchill

The good news today... The Former Border Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were realeased today. It was good to see them reunited with their families.

Another day, another promise broken

Nancy Pelosi is going to make me have to take blood pressure medicine at the age of 25!

Reading the Drudge Report this morning is see this:
Rep. John Culberson, TX claims the "stimulus" bill must be urgently voted on today -- because Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leaving at 6:00 PM for an 8 day trip to Europe!

You know what Nancy Pelosi, STAY THERE!!!

This will not give those men and women we are trusting to vote on this bill a chance to read the 1,071 page beast of legal gibberish! Let alone "we the people " the ones that will be paying the taxes.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) predicted on Thursday that none of his Senate colleagues would "have the chance" to read the entire final version of the $790-billion stimulus bill before the bill comes up for a final vote in Congress.
(via CNSNews.com)
They go on to quote several Senators that didn't think that they could read through it either.

Glenn Beck's crew figured that they would have to read this document at a pace of 600+ words a min, just to get through the thing.

Oh, and they have now broken their promise to have the public able to see the bill for 48 hours, not that they ever planned to keep it.

So what does this mean?

Well we can only hope that a few of the democrats might gain some sort of a conscience and vote against this so that they can have time to go over it and see what is in this bill, really I think its the least they could do. but Will it happen? Probably not.

This all comes down to the fact that they do not want us to see what is in this revised bill, they do not want us to question them, they would like for all of us to drink the kool-aid and fall in line with the sheep to be lead to the slaughter under the guise that they are taking care of us, when have we ever trusted them.

I will leave with these quotes from Thomas Jefferson and will try to find a way to relax to keep my head from exploding.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
-Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-Thomas Jefferson

We were warned of this...

Something to think about...

With all that is going on I thought this might get you thinking:

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
-Benjamin Franklin

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-Thomas Jefferson

The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly men.
-Lyn Nofziger

If we would only listen those who have come before us and have warned of such things...
Even though it seems that no matter how much we shout we feel as we are whispering into a hurricane and will not be heard, we must not give up. We are not alone Please read the post below that I am trying to spread from Glenn Beck to join together as a storm of conservative voices that will hold Washington responsible and hopefully make some changes.