Reminiscing about my excursion to the country a few weeks ago. While driving out with my husband and his friend to my sisters’ house in the woods we had to slow down to let two deer cross the road.

We were up early and arrived in the country around nine a.m. My sister, Lucy was our guide, leading us down the mountain through the woods to the place her husband had set up as a make-shift range.

The guys had quite a few different kinds of guns. They were carrying way too much gear so I ended up helping them out by carrying one bag which got heavier and heavier as I went down the hill.

The guys had forgotten to bring a target so a small white sticker was stuck to the wood.

My husband’s friend, Mike knows how to shoot. He is a former Army officer and is now a policeman.

Lucy tried this gun and so did I. It didn’t have as much recoil as I expected which was fun.

We spent about an hour down at the range in the woods and then packed up to make our trek back up the hill. It was hot and we were all tired, except for my tiny Amazon sister, Lucy, who beat us up the hill.

I took a slow walk up the hill, taking photos along the way. Bob and Mike decided to go on back to town but I stayed to visit with Lucy. She made me a cup of Irish tea. We practiced singing a song we were to sing at church the following Sunday for Fathers Day.

The tea was so good. Then came a lunch of bacon, eggs and tomato juice. Yum. We enjoyed our very American day even though a thought came to me at the time…Guns, bacon, eggs, tea. None of these delectations and items of self defense are popular with the political elite and yet most Americans enjoy some or all of these American standards.

Sorry, Elena. The Young Are Learning about The Declaration of Independence.

Earlier this year I tasked one of my sixth grade art classes to write, in long hand, the Declaration of Independence. Some of the students took to the task with enthusiasm, others groaned but in the end it was a useful and educational effort. I know that on September 17th Constitution Day is observed and our public schools here in Arkansas are encouraged to celebrate it. I don’t know if there is a day in the American school calendar in which to celebrate the masterful Declaration of Independence, especially since most students are not in school on the 4th of July.

I was inspired to have the students write the Declaration in long hand from this post by Bill Whittle, which I learned about from the wonderful Sissy Willis.

The Declaration of Independence – the foundational “why” of why we are here – is faded, irreparably faded, and lost to us forever. And the sight of it filled me with despair. Not only for the lost document. I became overwhelmed with despair because the loss of the words on the parchment beneath the glass at my fingers felt a perfect analogy for the fading of those words and ideals from the pages of society. Like the ghost signatures on this pale surface, so many of these ideals are faded and worn — almost invisible, today.

And the instant I had that thought I had another. This document, this piece of parchment, is unreadable. So I resolved to make a copy: just for me.

I wrote it out, by hand, using a four-dollar fountain pen I got at the drug store and copied onto regular printer paper. I could have typed it – heck, I could have texted it – but wanted to write it out by hand. I wanted it to hurt a little.

And I would urge you now – I would urge each of you listening to this today, especially those of you with children – to help me recover this document. We can’t get that ink back on that paper. But we can do something better.

I was inspired by Sissy’s Bill Whittle link and post to write the following on sisu…

Bill Whittle has given me a new idea for an art project for my sixth graders. I just ordered new calligraphy pens and paper.

OBJECTIVE: The students will recover, evaluate, analyze and create an artwork by writing in longhand, with calligraphy pens, the Declaration of Independence.

I have a large copy of the Declaration hanging in a place of honor in my art room.

As always, when I click on sisu, there is something that brings tears of joy or posts that inspire me to think.

If we don’t teach them, American children will not learn about the most stirring and eloquent document ever written.

As the eloquent Bill Whittle wrote back in March, Many of us talk a lot about the Constitution these days, but I don’t want to talk about the Constitution – I want to talk about the Declaration. The Constitution is the “how” of America, but the declaration is the “why.”

Now that we know that Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan thinks little of our natural rights as espoused in the Declaration of Independence, we need to teach our children that now, more than ever, the phrase, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are unalienable rights”, that is, our Founding Fathers believed that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are not to be “separated, given away, or taken away.”

At the Supreme Court confirmation hearings Kagan dismissed the importance of the Declaration of Independence out of hand.

Kagan responded, “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution.”

“So,” Coburn asked, “you wouldn’t embrace what the Declaration says, that we have certain God-given rights” and that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

Kagan answered, “I believe that the Constitution is an extraordinary document, and I am not saying that I do not believe there are not rights preexisting the Constitution and the laws, but my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws.”

The Obama administration has worked from Day One to separate, give away or take away our American rights.

On this day of days in our American world my hope is that the students I taught about the Declaration of Independence will remember and consider the profound truths that Thomas Jefferson revealed to the world.

Somehow, through all the noise and megabytes of video games, ipods, iphones and all the other static that seeks to confuse and distract the young from the knowledge and understanding of our great history we have to keep persevering to teach them.

There is reason to hope as Suzanne Fields writes in The Washington Times.

Happy Birthday to America, the land that I love.

“Go away, boy. You draw flies.”

Twenty people perished in a flash flood this weekend, the gulf is being flooded with oil, while Obama seeks butts to kick…on the golf course.

LANGLEY, Ark. — Like they had time and again, Leslie and Adam Jez packed their camper and headed for Arkansas’ Albert Pike Recreation Area. But instead of leaving Friday, they and their 3-year-old met up with family a day earlier — a decision that proved fatal.

Flash floods pushed a torrent of water through their campsite on the edge of the Ouachita National Forest before dawn, killing at least 19 people including Leslie and her mother, Sherry Wade. Adam survived, but authorities haven’t said whether their child, Kaden, was among the victims.

State police said one person is still missing, and search teams plan to resume their work Monday morning.

The twentieth victim was found yesterday, a little girl.

The grim recovery of bodies after flash flooding tore through a western Arkansas campground was nearing its end Tuesday, as officials awaited DNA tests to confirm that a young girl killed by the rising waters was the final victim.

Rescue crews planned a limited search Tuesday of the Albert Pike Recreation Area, where a wall of water came rushing through early Friday after a heavy storm, killing 20 people.

Arkansas State Police say they’re confident the girl whose body was recovered Monday was the last to have been killed by the floodwaters. They said they believe many others first feared missing were camping in other parts of the state, without cell phone coverage.

“We did have some names of individuals whose families did come to us with direct evidence or information of persons present in the park and we believe we have identified all of those individuals in one way or the other,” Arkansas State Police Spokesman Bill Sadler said.

Although Arkansas Gov. Beebe expressed his sympathy to the families who lost family members in the flood, President Obama has yet to comment. He was too busy playing golf this past Sunday.

Obama holds no brief for pelicans.

Thoughts that have occurred to me lately while I was away from the keyboard…

It seems to me that the White House has worked harder at offering jobs to Democrats they want out of the way than in actually doing the things that will ignite our economy and create real jobs.

How many weeks did it take for Obama to respond to the tragic oil rig explosion and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf? Was there ever any kind of Obama administration response to the floods in Nashville?

I came to the conclusion that Obama couldn’t care less about the South after the presidential election in 0-8. Arkansas and Louisiana rejected Obama even more strongly than they did John Kerry in the 0-4 election. I suspected then that there would be hell to pay for the states that voted strongly for McCain. It seems to me that the Obama administrations’ belated response to the horror in the Gulf has been grudging to say the least. Obama seems to be annoyed that he has had to travel south to see the impact in person.

On Day forty nine of the oil spill Louisiana fisheries, oil industries and the hospitality industry are suffering and will be hurting for many years to come. There hasn’t been much in the way of constructive concern coming from the White House for the economic devastation that will most certainly occur.

My daughter-in-law’s father was killed in a horrible accident on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana when she was thirteen years old. Her family has suffered from that good man’s loss. It’s very sad that there has been very little mention of the deaths of the eleven men who died in the explosion on the oil rig.

Knowing how much my Louisiana relatives love everything to do with fishing, boating and all the unique ways of life the state offers, it makes me sad that their world as they know it is upside down. Now the livelihoods of so many in the Gulf states are threatened.

Then there was the Helen Thomas outing this weekend. She was finally revealed as the anti-semitic, pro-Palestinian hag that she is. I never understood why the White House press corps sat in the same room with the woman during the years of President George W. Bush. She was so over-the-top biased against President Bush that it was sickening.

This woman’s downfall was a long time coming but it was inevitable. Yesterday was the anniversary of D-Day and my husband and I watched one of the few tributes to it on the Military Channel. Kind of ironic that Ms. Thomas met her doom on the 66th anniversary of the allied invasion to free Europe from Hitler.

“Most people in the White House don’t share Helen Thomas’ anti-semitic views,” press secretary, Robert Gibbs said today. “Obviously those remarks are — do not reflect certainly the opinion of most people in here, and certainly not of the administration.”

Hmm. Wonder who in the White House does share Helen Thomas’ views?

Yesterday a census worker knocked on the door of my parents’ house, even though they had already mailed in the census months ago.

The census worker asked my parents why they didn’t fill in the blank for race/ethnicity and instead wrote in “Two Americans.” My Dad answered, “We are two Americans. That is all the federal government needs to know about us. We are two Americans who pay our taxes.”

The female census worker then asked my parents to tell her their names. My Dad refused to do so. He did agree to write his initials on the form that stated that the census worker had spoken to them.

My Dad.

All Obama’s horses and all of his men better not mess with him.

My Uncle Max was a tailgunner in the Pacific in World War ll. He got a Dear John letter during the war and wrote to my Dad asking him to be kind to his ex-wife. That was the kind of man he was.

My Father-in-law was a pilot in World War ll.

My Uncle Ed was in the Battle of the Bulge and the Ardennes in World War Two.

All three men came home safely from the war, and raised families. None of them spoke of the war until they were much older.

Butch on the right flexing his muscles with my cousin, Gary in happier days.

My cousin, Jeanne’s boyfriend, Roger Dale Cecil (Butch) was a marine killed in Vietnam. I still remember the anguish of those days when letters he had written were delivered after we had attended his funeral.

None of these men will be with us tomorrow as we celebrate the many freedoms we enjoy on Memorial Day.

Neither will the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines killed in the War on Terror, the Gulf War, the Korean War and other conflicts.

Here is a list of just a few soldiers who laid down their lives in recent years.

Spc. Erich Smallwood

Maj. Andrew Olmsted

Army Spc. Dustin Fisher

Sgt. Buddy James Hughie

Sgt. Michael James Stokely

President Bush spoke these stirring words about our fallen heroes on May 27th, 2007 and we should cherish them in these worrisome times as we will not hear them from the current president.

On this Day of Memory, we mourn brave citizens who laid their lives down for our freedom. They lived and died as Americans. May we always honor them. May we always embrace them. And may we always be faithful to who they were and what they fought for.

Michelle Malkin has a thought provoking tribute to those who are missing among us.

Thanks to Lucianne on Facebook for the title.

Sissy Willis has a Memorial Day Salute.

From Drudge…disgusting news.

A small Syrian-backed terrorist group in Gaza said its activists blew up a donkey cart laden with explosives close to the border with Israel on Tuesday, killing the animal but causing no human casualties.

Abu Ghassan, spokesman for the terrorist group, said more than 200 kilograms of dynamite were heaped on the animal-drawn cart. He added that the explosives were detonated 60 meters from the concrete security barrier that separates the territory from Israel.

Coming soon to a mosque near Ground Zero? Or a church camp in any state in the Union?

Earlier this week, masked gunmen from an Islamist group torched a UN-run summer camp for children and teens in Gaza.

The head of UNRWA in Gaza, John Ging, said the assailants tied up the guard, burned tents and vandalized bathrooms at the campgrounds. UN officials said the attackers left behind three bullets and a note threatening to kill Ging and others unless the UN cancels its activities for some 250,000 Gaza children.

Two days before the incident, the previously unknown “The Free of the Homeland” group issued a statement criticizing the camp’s organizer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for “teaching schoolgirls fitness, dancing and immorality.”

The color is good but the bodice looks too tight and the sparkly belt is out of place. As always the Washington Post gives Michelle Obama sighs and oohs and ahhs.

It’s doubtful that Michelle sampled the Chocolate-Cajeta Tart