Ninety-seven years ago today a funeral was held for the unknown soldiers of World War I. In this war, more than 116,000 Americans died in the fight, including 1,652 who were too damaged to be identified. Over 5 million Allied soldiers died during the war and over 12 million were wounded.

On November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the armistice that ended the war, the British military buried an unknown casualty at Westminster Abbey with state honours. France, likewise, interred an unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.

In March 1921, Congress approved a measure to locate a tomb for the unknown soldier(s) in front of the newly constructed Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery.

If you get the opportunity, visit the Washington D.C. area. So much of our country's history is on record there.

After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat, administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

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Just what the planet needs: a little more air pollution, please.

U.S. aircraft and those from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates struck Islamic State targets in Syria on Wednesday, including 12 oil refineries, the U.S. Central Command said.

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The issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

The election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 was a major turning point. Palestine’s sovereignty over the offshore gas fields was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court. Sharon stated unequivocally that “Israel would never buy gas from Palestine” intimating that Gaza’s offshore gas reserves belong to Israel.

NYT: U.S. Troops to Leave Iraq by Year’s End, Obama Says

According to a report from the KNS, it will be peaceful today, and sunny.

A new movie is coming out in January (January 21 maybe) called The Way Back. It is based on the memoir of Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom.

The movie stars Ed Harris and Colin Farrell. It is directed by Peter Weir. All looks good.

Slavomir Rawicz was a Polish Army lieutenant who was captured by the Russians in 1939 and sent to the Siberian Gulag. A year later he and six others escaped the gulag and walked 4,000 miles to British India. As one reviewer said, the book "chronicles perhaps the most extraordinary true story of human endurance in recorded history."

If this topic is of interest, I highly recommend you read the book before seeing the move. It is an excellent read.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has been summoned to the White House to explain derogatory comments about the Obama administration in an upcoming Rolling Stone feature. There is speculation that he might be fired.

The takeaway from this is that I guess we're lucky to have the Rolling Stone and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to keep us actually, you know, informed and stuff.

UPDATE: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs just had a press conference and was highly critical of McChrystal and would not rule out his being fired. There appears to be a consensus among cable chatterati that he will be. This is turning into a pretty big deal.

RELATED: Rolling Stone: The Runaway General

Anyone interested in protesting the latest Israeli assault on Gaza can join the weekly Women in Black protest tomorrow (Tuesday) at 12 noon in front of the John Duncan Federal Building in downtown Knoxville.

...for the war in Afghanistan (97 months) to outlast the Revolutionary War (100 months). The Iraq War follows behind at 80 months and counting, while Vietnam set our benchmark at 128 months. WWII went 44 moons.

Creepy chart at Congress.org. Watching the Adobe flash player bar graph load is like watching a horse race.

I can’t go along just because it’s Obama’s war
by Don Williams

Neither you nor I nor Barack Obama know enough about the world to say whether his decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan at a cost of billions and untold casualties makes any sense.

It’s a huge gamble in a series of gambles now defining Obama’s place in history. I’d suggest he’s thought through this move, but even he can’t know the outcome.

Kucinich Addresses Escalation in Afghanistan:

Tonight the President will announce an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. An additional 30,000 troops will bring the United States' total in Afghanistan to 100,000. Tomorrow I will offer an analysis of the President's plan.

The community I represent in Cleveland, Ohio, is suffering from massive unemployment, record home foreclosures, and small business failures. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their homes, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. The middle class is gravely threatened. What is happening in Cleveland is occurring nationwide. Yet, Wall Street received over $13 trillion in bailouts, with untold millions for high salaries and bonuses, while Main Street loses its power through unemployment, reduced wages and benefits and little or no access to credit or investment capital. There is something fundamentally wrong with our economy which borrowing more money to spend on war cannot and will not cure. Perhaps nation building should begin at home.

An escalation of the war in Afghanistan at a time of such economic dislocation and hardship raises questions about America's priorities and whether or not we are losing our way as we attempt to stride aside the globe as some Colossus. Tomorrow we will begin anew the discussion.

SEE ALSO: Rep. Jimmy Duncan: Bring Our Troops Home Now

UPDATE: Text of President Obama's speech. Good speech, not so sure about the policy. Sounds like a face-saving way to disengage from a no-win situation. Whatever it takes to get our troops home. Hopefully we will see light at the end of the 18 month tunnel.

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Sixty-five thousand troops already stationed in Afghanistan. So far, a nine year war. Over nine hundred US troops lost, nearly a third of those lost were in the last year.

Rumsfeld mixed Bible with intelligence for Bush

According to a front-page story in the Knoxville News Sentinel, Iraq's PM says "any withdrawals must be done with our approval and in coordination with the Iraqi government."

According to AP, government security contracts are not being renewed and Iraq has let them know they are no longer welcome there, so Blackwater is "abandoning its tarnished brand name" and will now be known as "Xe."

Four former Abu Ghraib detainees who were wrongly imprisoned, tortured and later released without charge are suing two U.S. military contractor corporations and three individual contractors, according to four separate lawsuits being filed today by their U.S. legal team.

is what Obama said true?

At a time when we're facing the largest homecoming since the Second World War," Obama said of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, "the true test of our patriotism is whether we will serve our returning heroes as well as they've served us."

Just a quick Google search on the Vietnam war:

1968. U.S. strength in South Vietnam totaled more than 500,000 by early 1968.

January, February, March, 1972. U.S. troop strength in Vietnam dropped to 136,500 by 31 January 1972, to 119,600 by 29 February, and then to 95,500 by the end of March.

What if I Googled the Korean War?

Etc., etc., etc....

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday. He was 65.

...

"If you didn't think about the danger, it looked like a performance," he said. "It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don't get killed. But because you know it's going to kill, it's no longer beautiful."

The Iraq War is an abomination, as was the Vietnam War. Why must it continue?

Pran was certainly a courageous man. May he rest in peace.

We're coming at you. Your ships will explode in a couple of minutes.

Looks like the Straits of Hormuz Incident wasn't what we were told.

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