Mastah Preddi

When 27-year-old Army lieutenant Fred Hargesheimer's P-38 Lightning was shot down on June 5, 1943 over New Britain he had no idea whether he would live or die. Below him was a forbidding jungle, reputedly filled with headhunters. Instead he found a people who would risk their very lives to save his. And save him they did. Fred Hargesheimer and his late wife Dorothy spent decades paying back the people who risked so much for him back duriing the war. 

BIALLA, Papua New Guinea — The Japanese fighter caught the American pilot from behind, riddling his plane with machine-gun rounds. The left engine burst into flames. It was time to bail out.

He yanked on the release lever but the cockpit canopy only half-opened. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose to shake the canopy loose and was instantly sucked out.

Swinging beneath his opened parachute, he plunged toward a Pacific island jungle of thick, towering eucalyptus trees, of crocodile rivers and headhunters, into enemy territory, and into an unimagined future as a hero, "Suara Auru," Chief Warrior, to generations of islanders yet unborn.

'Mastah Preddi'

Fred Hargesheimer was shot down in the southwest Pacific on June 5, 1943. A lifetime later, he sits in his quiet California ranch house amid the snow and soaring sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The light blue eyes, at age 91, can't see as well as they once did. But when he looks back over 65 years, the smiling Minnesotan sees it all clearly — the struggle to survive, the native rescuers, the Japanese patrols and narrow escapes, the mother's milk that saved him. He remembers well his return to New Britain, the people's embrace, the fundraising and building, the children taught, the adults cured, the happy years beside the Bismarck Sea with Dorothy, his wife.

"I'm so grateful for getting shot out of the sky," he says.

Fred Hargesheimer has raised funds for and built schools, libraries and a clinic for the people who saved his life. He and Dorothy even went there to teach in the schools they built. Hargesheimer was not a rich man, he held a sales position for Sperry Rand. But he did all this, nonetheless. 

Go read the whole thing. Mastah Preddi's story is worth reading.

When The Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead

WE therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, (when the Sea shall give up her dead,) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.
The Book of Common Prayer, Church of England

The Royal Navy floated a wreath over the wreck of HMS Hunter today. The destroyer was sunk with 110 members of its crew in 1940 off the Norwegian port of Narvik. The wreck was discovered by a Norwegian minesweeper a few days ago. The BBC talked with one of the 35 men who survived the sinking.

On the morning of 10 April 1940, 110 people on board HMS Hunter died when the Royal Navy ship was sunk by German forces during World War II's first Battle of Narvik, in Norway.

John Hague, now 87, but then a 19-year-old able seaman, was one of just 35 survivors.

"It was early morning, around four-thirty or five o'clock and I was down, below deck, in the ammunition room feeding munitions from the shell room to the gun room," he said.

He and the other men on duty felt "a jolt" and realised HMS Hunter had been hit, but they did not know the extent of that damage.

He recalled there was no evacuation siren, no orders to abandon ship.

Climbing the steps to the outside world, the men were struck by the chilling winds of the blizzard and an eerie absence of people.
   
I tried not to think about the cold and I tried to keep moving to keep warm

"The first we knew it was bad was when we started to tilt, we went up to the deck and saw that there was no-one around - those that could leave had gone," said Mr Hague.

The Norwegians have named HMS Hunter as a war memorial. Rest in peace. 

Camp Clinton: If We Top The Ticket, We’ll Team Up

None other than Bill Clinton himself is floating the idea that so long as Hillary tops the ticket, Obama is more than welcome to a secondary role. Or rather a tertiary role behind him and Hillary.

Today, however, the President seemed especially tickled by the answer, and chose to share with his personal thoughts on picking Obama as a VP.

"She said yesterday and she said the day after her big wins in Texas and Ohio and Rhode Island that she was very open to that and I think she answered explicitly yes yesterday," Clinton began, referring to Hillary's own answers on the topic in recent days.

"I know that she has always been open to it, because she believes that if you can unite the energy and the new people that he’s brought in and the people in these vast swaths of small town and rural America that she’s carried overwhelmingly, if you had those two things together she thinks it’d be hard to beat.  I mean you look at the, you look at the, you look at the map of Texas and the map in Ohio. And the map in Missouri or — well Arkansas’s not a good case because they know her and she won every place there. But you look at most of these places, he would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was president. If you put those two things together, you’d have an almost unstoppable force," Clinton went on to say.   

All it will cost is for Obama to give up his lead in delegates. And his pride. And his hopes for a future in the big chair. All minor things to the Clinton ambitions.

Deathmatch

Michael Barone looks at the utter mess of the Democratic primary and believes there is little hope for either candidate to win this thing before the  convention.  It is turning into a disaster for both Clinton and Obama. There is a real opportunity for John McCain in all this - if he plays it smart.

The March 4 results suggest Obama may not turn out to be as strong a candidate against McCain this November as he is in current polls. Clinton's "red phone" ad asked which candidate you would want to rely on to respond to a crisis at 3 o'clock in the morning. Obama's campaign said this was a Republican tactic.

Yes — but Walter Mondale ran a similar ad against Gary Hart in 1984. It worked then, and it worked now. In Texas, where the ad ran, Clinton got a 60 percent to 39 percent margin among those who made up their minds in the last three days. That single ad may have made the difference in a contest she had to win to continue in the race.

In contrast, Obama's demagoguery on trade failed to attract white working-class voters: He ran far behind Clinton in Mahoning County (Youngstown) and the west side of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). In southeast Ohio, settled originally by Virginians and still Southern-accented today, Clinton carried all-white counties with 70 percent to 80 percent of the vote — more than she was carrying nearly all-white counties in central Texas. That raises doubts that Obama could run well in these counties, which provided critical votes in Bill Clinton's wins in Ohio in the 1990s and Jimmy Carter's narrow win there in 1976.

But Clinton is still about 100 delegates behind, and the Democrats' proportional representation rules make it impossible for her to close the gap in the remaining primaries. Her only plausible path to the nomination is to win a majority of super-delegates (party and public officials) and, perhaps, to reverse the party's decision disqualifying the Michigan and Florida delegations — i.e., overruling the voters in one case and changing the rules after the game has been played in the other. 

McCain has to provide a positive message against the bitterness on the Democratic side which is bound to get much, much worse as the unsolvable mess of the Democrat's primary process continues.  

Still More Brutal Winter Weather

A massive winter storm is sweeping across much of the United States, leaving up to a foot of snow in its wake. People from Arkansas to Ohio are already digging out or are bracing for the impact.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A heavy late-winter snowstorm Friday pummeled residents from Arkansas to the Great Lakes, knocking out electricity for thousands and promising to bring near-blizzard conditions to Ohio and Kentucky.

In several Florida communities, tornadoes damaged buildings and left residents without electricity. Two people died.

While the storms dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of Arkansas and left about 44,000 homes and businesses without power, people in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky were bracing for a massive snowstorm.

"It could get real nasty," said Dusty Harbage, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Jackson, Ky.

Kyle Rose, 34, of Springfield in southwest Ohio, said he was heating up leftover chili for dinner instead of going to the grocery store in the snow. He planned to spend a lot of time shoveling this weekend.

"I guess I try to stay in front of it," Rose said. "I'd rather shovel 4 inches twice than 8 inches once." 

Accuweather is reporting that Fox, Arkansas got 18 inches of snow and that the eastern great lakes region may get up to two feet. They are warning of blizzard conditions and very strong winds. The upper Midwest, meanwhile, is shivering under a blanket of arctic air with subfreezing temperatures. The jet stream has punched all the way down to the Gulf Coast , so people all over the country can "enjoy" this lovely gift from the Arctic. Right now it is hovering right around 0° F outside my door under clear skies. The wind just adds to the misery.

Best Wishes For An Iron Lady

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been hospitalized for observation and tests. There is no word as to what led up to this at this time.

LONDON — Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was hospitalized in stable condition in central London on Saturday and was undergoing medical checks, authorities said.

St. Thomas' Hospital said the former leader, 82, was expected to spend the night in the hospital for observation.

"We can confirm that Baroness Thatcher has been admitted to St. Thomas' Hospital and is expected to remain in hospital overnight for observation," the hospital said in a statement. "Her condition is stable and she is speaking to the medical staff who are caring for her."  

One hopes it is precautionary. Britain could use more leaders like her. 

Resume Inflation

One of the Nobel Peace Prize winning negotiators who won the prize for brokering the Irish Good Friday agreement that paved the way for peace in Northern Ireland is debunking Hillary Clinton's claims that she was a key player in the accords. He and others who negotiated the difficult agreements say she was little more than a tourist, nothing more than a peripheral character.

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

 "I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.  

The funniest part of the article is Clinton's claim that she "pulled together" a meeting of some Irish women. In actually, she attended a small photo-op pulled together by the US Consulate where the press far outnumbered the few participants and Clinton is best remembered for admiring the teapot.

It is nothing new for a politician to inflate their resumes, of course. But this is a bit much. Claiming to be a key player just because she happened to accompany Bill on a few trips is wild exaggeration.  

Obama Refuses VP Slot

ABC News reports that Barack Obama quite openly rejected any possibility of him filling the vice presidential position on the Democratic ticket in November. In answer to a question about the possibility, Obama answered:

Well, you know, I think it’s premature. You won’t see me as a vice presidential candidate — you know, I’m running for president. We have won twice as many states as Senator Clinton, and have a higher popular vote, and I think we can maintain our delegate count — but you know, what I’m really focused on right now, because all that stuff is premature, is winning this nomination and changing the country. And I think that’s what people here are concerned about. How are you going to provide health care to every American? So I spend a lot of time talking about the plan I wanted to put in place that would not only lower costs for those who already have health insurance, but also make sure people who don’t have health insurance can get health care as good as the health care I have as a member of Congress. Those are the kinds of issues that really make a difference in people’s lives, and we’re going to keep on talking about them.

I said before that Obama would be crazy to take the second spot. He would likely never sit in the big chair if he did so. Of course, he'd be even crazier to have the Clintons beside him on the ticket. With the sudden series of stumbles that have revealed Obama's feet of clay, it may not be an issue, though. Hillary might just pull off a victory and Obama is signaling that he'll wait for another chance rather than be her VP.