Quite the anniversary gifts:

Medals 60 years delayed
Both served in the Navy in World War II
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
Last Updated: 7:12 am | Tuesday, April 10, 2007

For more than 60 years, Gerald and Cecilia O’Connor Grever of Blue Ash had no medals to mark their World War II Navy service and their long-distance romance, but they did have some wonderful memories.

Now, they have both.

The Grevers are something out of the ordinary among the World War II generation – a married couple who both served in the U.S. military: he as a Navy Seabee in the South Pacific; she as a young petty officer serving as a stenographer for the secretary of the Navy in Washington.

“I don’t know why, but neither one of us ever got the medals we earned,” Gerald Grever said at a ceremony Monday. “That’s a long time ago. That’s why we’re so pleased to have them today.”

After carrying on an airmail romance through the war years, the young couple was married Feb. 7, 1947, at St. Cecilia Church in Oakley.

As their 60th wedding anniversary approached, their daughter, Kerry Grever of Blue Ash, thought it would be a nice anniversary present if they finally got the honors they earned.

So Kerry Grever contacted the office of Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Miami Twp., whose staff sifted through the paperwork and had the Department of Defense issue the medals.

Monday afternoon at the American Red Cross office in Blue Ash, surrounded by friends and family, Schmidt presented Gerald Grever with a plaque containing his World War II Victory Medal, an American Campaign Medal, an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and his honorable discharge pin, known to military men as the “ruptured duck.”

Cecilia Grever was awarded her own “ruptured duck,” along with the World War II Victory medal and an American Campaign medal.

They also received plaques from John Guinn, president of the Lebanon-based Thank You Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up to raise public awareness of veterans and their service.

Before the ceremony, Gerald Grever, who was born and raised in Rossmoyne, said he joined the Navy in 1942 and became a Seabee – a member of the Navy’s construction force.

After spending 13 months helping build airstrips in Alaska, he came home to Cincinnati for a 30-day leave before being shipped out to the South Pacific.

While at home, he met a young woman named Cecilia O’Connor, who worked with two of his aunts.

“I took her out to lunch,” he told one of the guests at the ceremony. He turned to his wife, sitting nearby, and said, “You remember that, don’t you? I think I had a beer.”

“You certainly did not,” she said. “I remember it very well. It was at a popular place near the UC campus. You had a club sandwich.”

The two kept up correspondence during the war, even after Cecilia Grever joined the Navy and was stationed in Washington.

Gerald Grever helped build air strips on several South Pacific islands, including at Saipan, where he remembers seeing Japanese soldiers who had been trapped by Marines on one end of the island, committing suicide by jumping off cliffs into the ocean.

“My husband has all the interesting stories,” Cecilia Grever said. “He saw a lot. All I ever had to worry about during the war was catching the bus home from work.”

I hope the folks at the Examiner aren’t holding their breath waiting: When will Duke apologize? (HT Instapundit)
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O, M, G.

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John Stossel notes that two things are causing a booming economy in Estonia (HT Cato at Liberty via Chaos from Order). The first is that the country has a flat income tax. The second, which he notes but doesn’t dwell on, it that the flat tax’s rate has been lowered once already, and will be lowered again in two years. It must be heresy to say it given the political climate in Washington, but the US needs another tax cut to keep the current boom going and government revenues from stagnating. One of the reasons that the 1980s cuts has such a long-lasting positive effect was that there were actually four of them (5% in 1982, 10% in 1983, 10% in 1984, and the collection of what were mostly cuts in 1986).

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From the “and I want a pony” department:

Flemish liberals call for 200,000 jobs

I don’t know what else to call what is described here:

Opposition to EU divorce rules plan
19 April 2007

Luxembourg (dpa) – A European Union proposal that would allow the laws of non-EU countries to be applicable in divorce cases ran into fierce opposition from Sweden on Thursday.

Liberal Sweden strongly resists the plan, which it says could force EU member states to dissolve marriages on the basis of foreign law, including traditional Islamic law, or Sharia.

“It is not acceptable that the planned rules would lead to Swedish courts having to apply foreign law,” a Swedish diplomat told reporters at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg.

Germany is pushing for new rules under which international couples, prior to marriage, would be able to set out in a contract which country’s laws will reign in a divorce court.

I can’t grasp why Germany, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, is pushing the idea.

Have “enlightened” EU feminists and civil rights groups worthy of the name ever looked at what Sharia law does to women? Are they really just going to acquiesce?

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RELATED: Last One Out of Europe, Turn Off the Lights

Updating a story blogged about here in early March, Ann Althouse (HT Instapundit) takes on the 10 or more Madison (WI) Common Council members who signed a “supplementary statement” on their official oaths of office — in other words, engaging in openly selective oath-taking:

Oh, aren’t you righteous? And I suppose when the next guy comes along and withholds his commitment to some part of the Constitution that he dissents from, you’ll say it’s not the same, because the part he doesn’t like doesn’t besmirch it.

Congrats to Eli Judge, who didn’t cop out.

Althouse’s first commenter nails the posturers:

This is a cowardly way out for people who’d like to resign on point of principle but aren’t willing to suffer the career damage such courage would inflict.

My position that you don’t have the right to take the office you have been elected or appointed to unless you take the oath of office unconditionally and without reservations hasn’t changed.

In a story that bemoans the fact that mutual fund holders have to pay taxes on their gains because fund managers sold some of the underlying stocks in the mutual funds’ portfolios (a complaint I don’t have a lot of sympathy for, but that’s a matter for another time, Investment News stumbled into a result (requires paid subscription) supporting the positive impact of supply-side tax cuts:

Investors in taxable mutual funds paid 56% more in taxes on their fund holdings in 2006 than they did in 2005, according to a report released today by Lipper Inc.

Mutual fund investors paid $23.8 billion in taxes last year even without selling their funds, according to the 141-page report, “Taxes in the Mutual Fund Industry—2007: Assessing the Impact of Taxes on Shareholders’ Returns,” issued by the mutual fund research firm in Denver.

Fueled by changes in the tax law reducing taxes on dividends, mutual funds distributed a record $418.5 billion last year, up 57% from $266.5 billion 2005, said Tom Roseen, senior research analyst.

That’s roughly $8.5 billion more to the federal treasury, and $152 billion more in capital that could either be reinvested by fund holders if they continued to be confident in future fund performance, or redirected elsewhere if they saw better opportunities elsewhere.

More dollars to the federal treasury and better allocation of capital. What’s not to like?