President rained out of Memorial Day speech

From the White House website blog, we read how Barack Obama's planned speech at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery southwest of Chicago was scrubbed during a Memorial Day downpour ...Also, check out more here .

"Good afternoon everybody. Everybody excuse me. Everybody listen up. Excuse me. Everybody listen up. We are a little bit concerned about lightening. This may not be safe. So I know that all of you are here to commemorate the fallen and that’s why we’re here. What we’d like to do is, if possible, have people move back to their cars, and if this passes in the next 15-20 minutes, I will stick around and we’ll come up and start up the ceremony again. But we don’t want to endanger anyone, particularly children in the audience. So I’d ask everybody to very calmly, move back to your cars. I’m going to move back to mine. We will wait to make sure that the thunder has passed. A little bit of rain doesn’t hurt anybody but we don’t want anybody being struck by lightning. God bless you everybody. We will be staying here and will make an announcement shortly. Thank you."

Obama took shelter and the crowd did the same, trudging through a blinding downpour in make-shift ponchos and wind-breakers utterly overwhelmed by the deluge. Many in the crowd huddled under small rectangular canopies or near large trees, despite the lightning risk.

Obama's motorcade waited briefly, then started to leave the cemetery. It stopped alongside several buses parked on the side of a cemetery road, drenched and disconsolate attendees inside. Obama hopped aboard, chatted briefly and exited to applause. The president held at the cemetery's administration building for more than 30 minutes deciding to cancel the speech and return to Washington, D.C.