Yesterday was Memorial Day in the United States. Traditionally observed on the last Monday of May it commemorates the service of men and women in the American Armed Forces.
As the day was passing by I came across a very interesting private project, which uses Google Earth to pinpoint the location of birth and death of all of the fallen heroes of the U.S. Military. I believe no further commentary is necessary as the program speaks for itself. So does the image below.
More information can be found at http://www.mapthefallen.org/. You will find the download instructions and necessary programs (for both PC and Mac) at the website.
As part of Memorial Day I would also like to draw your attention to the HBO documentary “Taking Chance“. A very touching one-hour long documentary about the honor and tradition given to all fallen members of the USMC.
Not too long after I wrote about Pres. Obama’s 100 days he has been faced with another gigantic challenge – his first Supreme Court Justice nomination. Due to the nature of the Supreme Court pretty much every president gets to appoint a justice at least once per term (Ronald Reagan got 3; George H.W. Bush got 2, despite being one term in office; Bill Clinton got 2; George W. Bush got 2). Appointing a justice (so-called associate justice) to the Supreme Court is a big thing and always shapes the President’s legacy and how historians assess the presidency in the future. There’s no wonder it works this way – appointing a judge, who deals with the constitution and shapes the law is a matter of ideology and politics. It very often happens that a judge retires on purely political grounds. Whether that’s the case with 69-year-old justice David Souter we will never know, although one might suspect it is not. 
