Support the troops! You damn well better…

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This home on Holly Dr in the hills above Santa Barbara goes up in flames as a wind whipped brush fire roared through the area on Wed. May 6, 2009. Fierce winds blew a wildfire into Southern California homes Wednesday, forcing thousands of people to flee as columns of smoke rose from a scenic coastal enclave. Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Drew Sugars said 5,430 homes were under mandatory evacuation. The estimated population of those homes was 13,575 people, he said. [AP Photo/Mike Meadows]

Support the troops.  Go to college.  Save money.  Spend money.  Buy a house.  Invest.  Or don’t.. be wise smart healthy friendly kind good but not if it means LOSING.  Have children, mind the children, punish the children, save the children.  USE the children.

Light the fire!  Put out the fire, douse the fire.. All fired up!  Where are we going?

Suck it up, spit it out.  Hold it in let it go.  Bombardment.  Aerial bombardment.

Every news presentation a medical BREAKTHRU… but strangely we go on dying.  The goal is to die, and move on — but not til 150.  So keep trying.  Try harder!  Don’t smoke.  OR, smoke and tax a newly legal tobacco.  That’ll work!  Sure why not.

What a crap heap.

The anniversay of Kent State… no need to worry about the horrors of……… a [front door] draft.  An economy this lousy (things are looking up!  Geithner said so! So did Ob.. so did Summers!) and enlistment is no problem.  No problem at all.. a volunteer army.  And don’t you dare forget it.

I heard an ad today, no kidding, that GE is “the most military friendly company in the US”.  I bet it is.  As is NBC and MSNBC.  And CNBC.  And all the other alphabets.

Soon alphabet soup will come with a tiny AK 47 in the mix.  Funnily enough, I read over and over it is a better weapon, more reliable in the tough weather of the ME, ground zero of our global war, than our comparables.  Doesn’t that say a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what you saw when you were standing there.

ALAN CANFORA: Well, I saw the Guardsmen reach the hilltop, and we expected that they were just retreating. It looked like they were going away, back over the hill where they had come from. But suddenly, at the hilltop, out of seventy-six Guardsmen, only about a dozen from Troop G stopped, turned. They began to fire. They continued to fire for thirteen seconds. The closest student was sixty feet away. He was wounded. Another student ninety feet away was wounded. I was near the bottom of the hill with my roommate. We were both shot and injured. And then, behind us, in a parking lot, is where all of the four students were killed, at distances of between 265 and 400 feet. So it was nothing but a slaughter. They fired into the distant parking lot, because that’s where the most radical and vocal students were gathered.

AMY GOODMAN: And were you shot first?

ALAN CANFORA: I think I was. I think was the first student shot. I was waving a black flag of protest that day. I carried that black flag as a symbol of my despair and my anger, because only ten days earlier I attended my friend’s funeral. He was killed in Vietnam at age nineteen. So that was very fresh in my memory, and that’s why I joined the protests and I helped lead the protests May 1st through 4th in 1970. And that’s what led to me being shot.

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Smoke from the Jesusita fire seen from the shoulder of the southbound 101 heading into Santa Barbara on Wednesday afternoon. [LAT readers’ photos, Rick Kelly]

More:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like Kent State understands the history today?

ALAN CANFORA: Kent State understands it, yeah. In fact, the university administration here gets it more than ever. But I think it’s important for people to understand the legacy of Kent State, the wrongfulness of the massacre. It was murder. It was intentional. There was an order to fire. I think it’s very clear that the state government and the federal government were involved.

We’re still working on that, revealing the truth about that order to fire, for example. Next week, I’m going to California. The tape recording, which proved the order to fire, is going to be analyzed for a national TV show. So we’re going to try to find out who gave that order, and we’re convinced that the order ultimately would go to the White House. President Nixon had a vendetta against Kent State SDS since 1968, when we went over to Akron and disrupted his speech in October of ’68 at Akron University. And Nixon was very vindictive, and we think that maybe he worked with the governor to give the order to shoot and kill here at Kent State, a working-class school, not a Yale or a Harvard or a Berkeley, where a lot of rich kids went to school.

And so, they decided to shoot students here to try to terrorize or silence the antiwar movement, but it backfired, because it triggered the only national student strike in US history. Over four million students protested from coast to coast during the national student strike of May 1970. Hundreds of universities were shut down. And that was the high point in the history of American student activism. So if Nixon tried to silence the antiwar movement by killing the students here, it backfired entirely, and it triggered the only national student strike in US history.

Oh Nixon was so bad.  Bad bad bad.  He was.  AND grace a dieu he LOOKED bad! Shifty as all hell.  What luck.  Reagan was bad.  Bad bad bad.  But he looked like a wrecked old B movie star.  Auburn hair, orange cheek spots, all he needed was a pouting, bee stung mouth… Fixer for GE…groomed by William F Buckley for fixer greatness…

People seemed to like that, tho his favorables have risen under careful R revisionism and tutelage.  The Dems helped.

Don’t they always.