The McCaffrey Report on Iraq Status

This is a fascinating and informative report by a retired General and adjunct professor at West Point. Here's one gem among many:

Mr. Rumsfeld was an American patriot, of great personal talent, energy, experience, bureaucratic cleverness, and charisma—who operated with personal arrogance, intimidation and disrespect for the military, lack of forthright candor, avoidance of personal responsibility, and fundamental bad judgment.

Read every word of it.

Something Fun

Well, it's been a while since I made the time to post anything, so I thought I'd put up a few pics.




For Halloween, Aidan was Dr. Aidan, and Honor was a Tulip Fairy (doesn't Macon look fabulous wearing Honor's little Tulip Fairy headband?)


Also, I just wanted to include a recent photo of Aidan and his pony, "Fire." Fire lives at my parents' house and has been quite the hit. And, for any of you out there who doubt that children imitate what they see on television, let me share a story. There is an episode of the Backyardigans where Uniqua is a western horse rider and Pablo is a jockey. They compete against one another and at one point as they are boasting and competing, they decide to ride on their horses, standing on one leg while the horse turns in circles. What do you think was the first thing Aidan did after getting onto Fire's back? That's right! He got up on one leg and "rode" Fire while standing on said one leg. Note: all the while he was saying, "Look, Mommy, I can ride just like Pablo and Uniqua!"

This does not bode well, and I can't wait to start explaining to the emergency room doctors about the fantastical feats that my children will no doubt soon be doing.

How Aquatic!

The Tuna to rescue the Dolphins.

A Running Mate for McCain

What do you think? (Watch the video.) Thanks, Instapundit.

Hate Crimes Trump Gun Control Ideologies

At least with the Miami Herald. Otherwise, you would never hear of this from MSM.

UPDATE: Speaking of Race and Guns, see what Condoleezza says about gun-control.

Mary's TZ Post.

Sooooo interesting!

FIU Med School and Miami Children's Hospital

The new med school at Florida International University (opening 2009) will be working with Miami Children's Hospital, the latter institution having been a big part of our family's life.

Big personal life changes

I'm changing my voter's registration to Republican so that I can vote for McCain. Having gotten a new workstation at the office that has Word 2007 already installed, I'm changing to Word and saying good by to WordPerfect. Both choices are flawed and I'm turning my back on a lot of history, but the choices are the best available at this point.

UPDATE: Good company.

UPDATE UPDATE: See the video.

"Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers?"

Oh, well.

Bye, Huck.

The Baptists are Coming! The Baptists are Coming!

Huckabee corrals the endorsement of Pastor Howard's kids. He can't lose!

(Pastor Howard is my partner Jane's pastor, at the First Baptist Church of Homestead. See his blog here. Funny post here.)

Maybe not the way to win the election, but . . .

Huckabee, wow! But this was in 1998. Will he affirm it today? Will be interesting to watch.

Ron Paul. Seriously?

He's got the abortion thing right.

O, Christmas Tree!

We had a Christmas party at our house Saturday night for the people in our Bible study classes and their spouses. The purpose was, in part, to force us to get our house ready for the Holiday. With none of our children coming home this year, we thought we needed a little prodding like this. The rest was social.

Counting Carol and me, we had 29 people. Carol crock-potted a turkey breast (a recipe from Micki) and fixed a chicken curry dish that we enjoyed last year in Kenya at the home of one of Mary's colleagues. The curry is served on a bed of rice (or wrapped in a chapati; one of our Indian friends brought chapati, which is sort of like a tortilla, but made of wheat, I think). The curry called for toppings, chopped pineapple, raisins, chopped onions, and chopped peppers, all of them together if you like (and I liked - mmmm!). For the rest of the feast, it was "covered dish", a formula for a plentiful and varied banquet.

This is what our Christmas tree looks like. (Click on the picture to enlarge. At the bottom of the tree, on the right hand side, is a little felt christmas-tree ornament that Walter made, and it has his photo in it.) Once I got the tree in place, Carol did the decorating. (I have to confess, I don't have much patience for tree trimming. But I help with untrimming it.) The tree is in our living room, next to the bookcase.

On the bookcase are some items from Christmas past, including two Nativity creations of Mary, one on a shoe-box lid (three shelves from the bottom, on the left) and the other made from Popsicle sticks (five shelves from the bottom, on the right). The two stockings hung on the bottom are for Carol and me (Carol made them years ago, and one each for the kids). The stocking toward the top of the right bookcase belonged to Juanita, and she bought it years ago from the 10,000 Villages store in Montreat. It is embroidered and was made in India, I believe. It's there in memory of her. She celebrates her first year in heaven this year.

On the top of the bookcases, on the right, there is a reindeer head, made from the base of a palm frond, the part where the rest of the palm frond is attached to the trunk. Mary and Walter each made one of these in pre-school. The other one is hanging elsewhere in the house.

The tree, of course, is also full of memories, as family Christmas trees become over the years, and the rest of the living room, den, dining room, and kitchen are full of such objects as well.

As people are finding out that we have no kids home this Christmas, we are getting some invitations for meals and the like on Christmas day. But we are going to drive over to see my sister Julia and her family in New Port Richey, FL, after we get up and open our presents. My niece Audrey is having a party at 4PM that day, and so we will go to that party and spend the night with Julia, her husband Greg, and their son, Gregory Paul. We will drive home Wednesday morning.

Way to go, Steve!

Steve Peifer won one of CNN's Heroes awards on December 6. There's a lot at the CCN site about the show, the process of selection, video, and photos of Steve and the other winners and nominees. I would start here.

The Love of a Christian Father

At yesterday's men's breakfast, the issue of abortion came up, and Austin told us a family story of a Christian father's leadership and love.

Years ago, Austin's uncle and aunt brought into their home to live a teenage boy, 15 or 16 years of age, whose own family was so broken that the young man did not have a place even to sleep. (Austin's uncle and family are members of the Reformed Church, where Austin's immediate family were Pentecostal. He described how important and intensely held were the particular Christian beliefs of their two families, and it seemed to us that presently a great deal of that intensity has seeped out of American Christianity.)

The boy was about the same age as a daughter of Austin's uncle, and after awhile she became pregnant by the boy. I can only imagine the intensity of that crisis. Abortion would have been a quick solution and, of course, throwing that ungrateful boy out of the house.

Instead, Austin's uncle told the young people they needed to get married and, as their respective guardians, he signed the marriage license on behalf of each of them.

Now this young couple have grown up; they have 8 children and a couple of grandchildren. (Austin said the couple's own children married young.) They live in their own house, near where Austin's uncle and aunt live, with a big yard that has a big tree and a tire swing and a bunch of kids running around having fun. The young man is a cabinet maker and so good at it that wealthy people from Boston fly him to their city to do work for them. Their first baby was a boy, Josiah, and all of their children have Biblical names. Josiah attended Pensacola Bible College.

I have heard Austin tell that story before, and I love to hear it. What a wonderful story of love, of a sort of muscular forgiveness on the father's part, and of how God redeems a difficult situation, especially when those "in charge", a father this time, are obedient to him.

CQ CQ CQ

Ham radio to the rescue.

Mary Scrubs

More here.

The Other Robert E. Lee

Maybe Robert E. Lee is not a big deal in that part of your mind's eye that looks back over American history. He wasn't at the center of my study of Southern history at Duke, but I understood something like he was the greatest man the South ever produced, etc. I did enjoy Grant's biography, which I read a couple of years ago, but I guess, from the South's perspective, Grant's best use was as a slightly disreputable, cigar smoking foil for General Lee, and that the best thing one could say about Grant was that he treated General Lee well and let the rebels keep their guns at Appomattox.

In the September 2007 issue of The New Criterion, Daniel Mark Epstein has it out for Lee, as he reviews Elizabeth Brown's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. His review, entitled "Who Cares About Robert E. Lee?" presents the revisionist view of the great man.

For example: Lee married well, or it looked like that initially. But when he was 49, his father-in-law died, "naming him as executor in charge of a debt-ridden estate and 196 slaves on several plantations". The father in law stipulated in his will that the slaves should be liberated, and they all expected to be. But Lee didn't liberate them and, instead, leased out the able-bodied ones to raise money for the estate. He broke up families to do so and "most of these families had been together since General Washington's time". Two of the slaves ran away when they learned they would not be freed, a young man and a young woman, brother and sister, but they were apprehended and brought back. Lee supervised 50 lashes for the young man and 20 for the young woman.

This is only one part of the indictment. The indictment also alleges that he was not such a great general, that he was silent when the Virginia legislature might have stayed in the union had he spoken up, and that he resigned his commission, thereby renouncing an oath, and took up arms against the US, all out of pride and not out of a true sense of duty to Virginia. The worst charge of all (to my mind) was that he was an engineer and thought like one. Now, as a liberal arts major, I can concede that that criticism may have some merit to it.

But first Beowulf, and now General Lee. I just don't know what to say,

Bush Gets One Right!

Some backbone on stem-cells gets him some credit. (See my earlier post on the stem cell breakthrough subject.)

So Bad!