Wedding Day

Finally, the reason for our trip to Southern California and the reason for several friends and relatives to come from as far away as Bountiful, Utah and Taylor, Arizona was the wedding on this evening. The celebration was held in the Holiston United Methodist Church in Pasadena. I had hoped to have some of the ceremony to share with you because it was humorous and touching. As soon as I can get hold of it, I will post it in a later posting on this blog.

As near as I could tell the ceremony went off exactly as rehearsed and, in fact, I didn't hear of any problems with either the ceremony or the reception afterward which was so graciously hosted by the Chenoweth's, Lisa's grandparents.

Wedding rehearsal

Rehearsal:
1. The act of practicing in preparation for a public performance.
2. A session of practice for a performance, as of a play.
3. A detailed enumeration or repetition: "a long rehearsal of his woes"

Steven and Lisa have been rehearsing marriage for the last several years. This evening they finally got to rehearse their wedding. They carefully kept the script a semi-secret since it contained a lot of the dry humor that Lisa and Steve are famous for.
In spite of a day that was much warmer than everyone expected and the impressive setting of the Holiston United Methodist church building, the bride Lisa and her maid of honor Kristi were cool as cucumbers in their summer dresses.

In fact, everyone was pretty cool about the whole rehearsal thing. It became obvious fairly quickly that this ceremony was not going to be stiffly formal. In fact it looked like it had been arranged to be as comfortable as it was meaningful to all the involved parties. The first part would consist of the minister walking into the sanctuary with the groom and best man in tow. It sort of looked like he had been giving them a good talking to.

After the bridesmaid, grandparents, mothers, and father of the groom had come down the aisle to join in the festivities Larry, the father of the bride, with his daughter the bride on his arm, marched down the aisle as serious as he could be while humming "Pomp & Circumstance". "Wrong tune, Dad!" muttered Lisa.

For a non-drinking crowd, everyone did their best to keep things light hearted.

Whenever it came to important parts such as the minister's advice to the couple or their mutual pledge of faith to each other, all the rest of us heard was blah, blah, blah, etc. and so forth. No reason to ruin a good script and the element of surprise in what was to be a good humored ceremony. But we could tell by the wedding couple's body language that neither was being pressured into this relationship.


Finally, when we had gone through the whole process three times (the third time at warp speed), everyone retired to Beckham Grill - a fine dining tradition in Pasadena and just a short drive west on Walnut from the Church.


There we were joined by family and friends for a relaxing rehearsal dinner. Entrees of Prime Rib of Beef, Broiled Chicken Breast, or Grilled Salmon seemed to satisfy almost all the attendees. (One couple had the misfortune of missing their flight and Lee managed to pick up some stomach ailment.) The piece de resistance of the evening was the Raspberry English Trifle. A wonderful end to a wonderful evening.

Ancestral family home

When we left Long Beach and one or more of our kids took up residence in our former house, there was some concern about what to call the place. After all "Mom and Dad's old home" or even "Grandma and Grandpa's old home" didn't seem to be quite right. I don't know who first started calling it the "Ancestral Family Home". I found it sort of ironic because the only ancestors to live there are all still very much aroundd and ancestral doesn't seem to fit a home that we moved into in 1980. But the name has stuck.

Now that Jessica and Jon have replace half the square footage with a much better built and better designed building, it probably should be called Jon & Jessica's house or Jessica & Jon's place. We were really impressed this time to see how nice the kitchen is now that it is complete. We also admired the front yard which has been completely redone in a lawn-free mode. Rather attractive and never need mowing. I don't know how much upkeep it will require.


We also admired the day care sign that Jessica has on the front door. She was tending so many of her nieces, nephews, and assorted in-laws that she decided to get certified as a family day care. It's really an ideal home for it and Jessica has already shown she has what it takes.

Glasses

Sometimes I forget just how dependent I am on corrective lenses. Last night, having no night stand on my side of the hotel bed where we're staying, I left my glasses on the floor without protection. Carolyn accidently stepped on them and "pop" goes the lens. Fortunately, nothing was broken. However, as often as I've been able to get Carolyn's lenses back in place when something similar has happened to her, I couldn't get mine to budge.

It turns out that wearing just one lens was even worse than going without the glasses. If I ever had to do that, I'll need to wear an eyepatch over the lensless eye. We were able to find a optician (Dr. Leulinda Tomlin) with the nicest staff that fixed the problem in seconds.

Clean up detaill

One of the disadvantages of moving North is that we don't get a chance to help the kids and grandkids as much as we might have otherwise. But being back in town for a wedding this weekend, we did have a little time on our hands in between other obligations.

Sometimes we've been able to help with installing lighting or a sprinkler system. This time we were able to help organize things a little bit at our son's house. Or maybe I should say that Carolyn had a chance to organize. I'm not very organized myself, so I stuck with something a little more my style - sweeping, mopping, and vacuuming. That way Carolyn had more time to figure out what should go where.

We're hoping that we can get the grandkids to choose some of the organizing tools themselves such as boxes, labels, etc. so they'll feel more a part of organizing their lives. At least we can hope.

Gas guzzler??

This first picture of my gas gauge was taken by the side of the road after I had been traveling about a mile from home.

This picture was taken a little over a mile later. If I didn't know better, I'd think I was driving an SUV or that there was a hole in my gas tank. Fortunately, I know better and know that it is just one more thing that is starting to go haywire with my car. I've gone about 120 miles on a full tank so I'm probably just a little over half full but you sure can't tell from my gas guage.

Jawbreaker - book review

The jacket cover for Gary Berntsen's "Jawbreaker" claims this is "The book the CIA doesn't want you to read!" I find that a little hard to believe since the CIA has already apparently had their chance at redacting sensitive information leaving wide swaths of black ink on about 75% of the pages. Sometimes one black line apparently stands for several pages of redaction while at other times a small rectangle of black eliminates a single word that obviously wasn't very important to the story. The book's subtitle is "The attack on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda: a personal account the CIA's key field commander". That's another good hint that the CIA isn't too upset about the book being published. I personally think they rather enjoy seeing a successful book which details a CIA mission that was exciting, action-packed, and 99% successful. Only at the very end of the book do we find that second guessing on the part of the White House or Pentagon may have cost us the opportunity to kill Bin Laden at the end of the Afghan war.

The book is both detailed and moving. I got the feeling of being swept up with Gary Berntsen's "Jawbreaker" team, a small group of CIA agents pulled together from around the world with the express mission of coordinating the US and Afghan (Northern Alliance) forces in eliminating the Taliban and al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. It is amazing what can be done with $8 million in cash and the air power of the most heavily armed nation in the world at your beck and call. I'm not downplaying the heroism and talent the Jawbreaker team displayed. But this is no rogue unit defeating the Taliban on their own. Once given the green light, they had tremendous logistic and air support for the daunting mission.

Berntsen has also given us a glimpse of the Northern Alliance and the difficulty of coordinating a group of warlords who are as interested in protecting their own power and turf as they are any loyalty to Afghanistan. Several of the warlords have a history of switching sides to whoever appears to be winning the battle. And several of the groups aided al Qaeda in the face of the US effort to capture or kill all members of that group.

Money, equipment, and weapons talk. All this was used in the war by the US directly as well as for hostage negotiations, taking over territory, and winning the "loyalty" of Northern Alliance armies. The book makes it perfectly clear that conventional warfare just doesn't work in situations like Afghanistan. You might not like your allies but you hate your enemies even worse.

Overall, an enjoyable book.

Father's Day work party

It's enough to make a fella drool. No, I'm not talking about all the very nice ladies sitting around our dining room table, deeply absorbed in their work and ongoing discussion about church and Relief Society matters. I'm talking about all those yummy candy bars in the middle of the table that are being carefully overwrapped with festive yellow, green, blue, and white wrappers declaring "Happy Fathers Day".

As everyone knows, anything goes better with cholocate and Father's Day is no exception. We're still a week away but I for one am happy to see that the women are ahead of the game already.

Tomato plant update - week 6

Our upside down tomatores continue to prosper. This is the beefsteak tomato plant.


A closeup shows that we actually have a few green tomatoes on the vine - the largest about the size of a raquetball.


Number 2 tomato plant, the Better Boy tomato, is also growing well.

It doesn't have any tomatoes that I can see but it does have lots of beautiful blossoms so I'm sure the tomatoes aren't far behind.

Obviously not a tomato plant, this is an example of the pomegranate blossoms on our bush in the back yard and the neighbor's tree which reaches over our fence. I'd say there was a good chance of our getting some pomegranates this year.

One martyr down, how many more to go?

It was with a certain amount of measured optimism that the White House and Iraqi government announced the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi yesterday. Certainly the U.S. military could be justly proud that one of their most important missions for public relations had gone right and that an avowed and dangerous enemy of the United States was put out of commission for good.

But in the great scheme of things, will this make any difference? Zarqawi's followers are already praising his name and thanking Allah that he died as a martyr. His designated successor(s) will take over and the war will continue. If anything, we will see an upsurge of violence and deaths as revenge and retribution is added to the hatred of the insurgents. When will it all end? How can it all end?

I think it was a travesty to call this current action a "War" on terror just as it was to call previous efforts a "war" on drugs or a "war" on poverty. Drugs, poverty, and terror have always been around as long as there has been civilization and there doesn't appear to be any reason that they will soon disappear. At what point do we declare victory? Do we change campaign slogans and let the war die as we did with the war on poverty? Or do we maintain a continuous, low level effort as we are with the war on drugs?

I'm hopeful that Zarqawi's death will mean something to the Iraqis - maybe show them that none of their enemies is invincible. Maybe they'll be able to rally around some show of justice and pull together enough that we can start bringing our troops home. Maybe this will be the excuse to start declaring (again) "Mission Accomplished."

Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget - a review

"Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget" by Marianne J. Legato, MD, is a self-help book along the lines of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus". Dr. Legato's experience in gender specific medicine lends great credibility to this book that basically describes all the ways that men and women are different and gives some clues as to why that might be. From hormones to differences in the size and placement of various body organs, nature has insured that there will be differences. She speculates about the evolutionary advantages that such differences might have conferred and compares humans to animals which often show even more gender differences.

She is cautious almost never to state categorically why something appears to cause a difference, instead throwing out possibilities in the hope that we'll agree with one or the other. I found this a little unnerving because that isn't much better than simply listing all the differences and saying, "Well, we really don't know why these differences exist, but we have lots of documentation that shows they do."

The book is easy to read. It also tempts a person to find themselves or acquaintances in the examples she uses so profusely. But except for the overall, "Men and women are different. Get over it." sort of advice, there really isn't much else to the book. It's sort of a Do It Yourself kind of self-help book.

Number of the beast

Yesterday was the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year (of this century) or 6-6-06 (666). The usual hexakosioihexekontahexaphobics must have too much on their minds to worry about it but others obviously didn't. For your enjoyment I bring you the following:

SIGN OF THE BEAST
(Original by Richard Findler)

OK, we all know that 666 is the number of the Beast. But did you know that:

$0.66: Ground Beast per pound.
00666: Zip Code of the Beast.
1-666: Area Code of the Beast.
1-666-666-6667: Wrong number of the Beast.
1-888-666-6666: Toll free number of the Beast.
6, uh... What was that number again?: Number of the Blonde Beast.
66-66-66: Bust, waist and hips of the Beast.
666DD: Number of the busty Beast.
333: Half brother of the Beast.
555: Number of the Wanna-Beast.
666....999: Quotation mark of the Beast.
666º F: Oven temperature for roast Beast.
666B: Neighbor of the Beast.
666 Minutes: Weekly news program about the Beast.
666@hell.org: E-mail address of the Beast.
Motel 666: Beast Western.
Phillips 666: Gasoline of the Beast.
Vick's Formula 666: Cough syrup of the Beast.
666DL: Volvo of the Beast.
Lexus 666: Luxury sedan of the Beast.
Mazda 666: Economy car of the Beast.
Windows 666: Bill Gates IS the Beast.
666....999: Quotation Mark of the Beast.
Sick Sick Sick: Humor of the Beast.
666 Pennsylvania Ave: Address of US President Beast.

Carmichael Shade - part 2

Google finally got their picture uploader working so I could finish our story.

As part of the Shades of Carmichael fundraiser, the hundred patio umbrellas that had been painted so beautifully were to be auctioned off with the resulting funds going to the cause of the municipal pool and other parks and recreation needs. Ten of the umbrella deemed to be on the high end of value were to be sold by live auction, the others through a silent auction. I don't think I mentioned that on Saturday, while admiring all the umbrellas, Carolyn put a bid on 8 or 9 and I even bid on one.

Sunday afternoon we dropped over to the park again to see if any of the umbrellas that Carolyn had bid on were still "ours". We got there in time to take part in the last 2 or 3 umbrellas of the live auction. Some of them were selling for as much as $400 so we didn't participate in all of them.

However, when this one came along, Carolyn did manage to be the high bidder.

We had to wait a couple of hours before the bids closed on the silent auction. We still had a couple of umbrellas that were in our price range while a couple that we wanted had already gone too high for our tastes.


While we waited, we strolled over to the bandshell where several areas bands were putting on a concert. Every hour a new bank would take over the stage, some of them definitely "community" bands and others sounding very professional. With pizza and drinks available, it was a great way to spend an afternoon.

As the silent auction came to a close, some people were jealously guarding the umbrella they were high bid for. We didn't fight anyone but still came away with the following three umbrellas.





We're thinking that this might become a real tradition for Carmichael and with that the prices are liable to increase. We'll remember when we were able to contribute while still feeling like we got a good deal.

The church doesn't speak for me

This article in the Salt Lake Tribute caught my eye. BYU instructor and management consultant Jeffrey Nielsen comments on the General Authority pronouncement that was read in our church yesterday and in all other Mormon churches either yesterday or the week before. I will quote it in its entirely.

The leaders of my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, recently spoke out against gay marriage and asked members to encourage their U.S. senators to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting homosexual marriage.
As a member, I sustain the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as LDS general authorities; however, I reject the premise that they are thereby immune from thoughtful questioning or benevolent criticism. A perfect God does not require blind obedience, nor does He need unthinking loyalty. Freedom of conscience is a divine blessing, and our privilege to express it is a moral imperative.
When the church hierarchy speaks on a public issue and requests that members follow, it is difficult indeed if an individual feels the content of their message would make bad law and is unethical as well. I believe opposing gay marriage and seeking a constitutional amendment against it is immoral.
Currently the preponderance of scientific research strongly suggests that same-sex attraction is biologically based. Therefore, it is as natural as a heterosexual orientation, even if rare. It seems it might be caused by environmental conditions in the mother's womb, before birth, triggering the DNA to give the fetus a homosexual orientation. Neither the mother nor the child has any choice in the matter; it is a completely natural process.
Truly, God would be unjust if He were the creator of a biological process that produced such uncommon, yet perfectly natural results, and then condemned the innocent person to a life of guilt, while denying him or her the ordinary privileges and fulfillment of the deep longing in all of us for family and a committed, loving relationship.
Even if the scientific evidence does not yet establish this beyond reasonable doubt, it seems that virtuous moderation and loving kindness require us to exercise caution before making constitutionally binding discrimination against a whole class of people based only on fear and superstition. In fact, when we examine the statements opposing gay marriage, we find few reasonable arguments. It is not enough to claim that we should oppose gay marriage because historically it has never been recognized. This is the fallacy of appealing to tradition, which was also used to fight against civil rights and equal treatment of women.
Further, to say that gay marriage will destroy traditional marriage and the family without giving any reasons why is the fallacy of appealing to fear. Indeed, once you get past the emotion, it is quite an unfounded claim. How could the union of two committed and loving people negatively affect my marriage? I believe that quite the contrary is true; namely, legalizing gay marriage reinforces the importance of committed relationships and would strengthen the institution of marriage.
Ultimately, any appeal to religious authority to create law is misplaced. Our Founding Fathers were inspired by their study of history to separate constitutional authority from religious belief, recognizing as they did the potential for tyranny in unchecked religious influence. In our pluralistic democracy, attempting to restrict an individual's rights and privileges based upon a religious claim is a dangerous rejection of our Founding Fathers' wise insight, and it should be unacceptable to all Americans.
As for the statement by church leaders that God has ordained marriage to be a union between a man and a woman, I find it quite troubling. It sidesteps the role of polygamy in past and future church teachings. It seems to me that if church leaders at one point in time, not very long ago, told members that the union of one man with several women was important for eternal salvation, but now leads them to believe that God only recognizes the union of one man to one woman, then some explanation is required. (I am not endorsing polygamy.)
God is not the author of incoherence or injustice, but we humans often are. We in the LDS Church must be more honest about our history, including the past and future practice of polygamy in our official doctrine. This will be difficult, for it will reveal that we have been less than truthful in our public relations, and it will show our inconsistency with current statements opposing gay marriage.
We can no longer afford to teach only what is useful and hope people won't discover what is true. In this day of easy Internet access, a person can find more real history of the LDS Church in 30 minutes online than the same person would in a lifetime studying approved church materials.
This is not right. Too many individuals have suffered a loss of faith when they were forced to choose between the truth or their family after innocently discovering the discrepancy between genuine history and the official story of the church.
We need to trust the membership of the church and treat them as adults, as equals. We are a church of brothers and sisters, not one of the few privileged leaders and the many subordinate followers. There might be a diversity of roles and responsibilities from prophet to Sunday School teacher, but we are all peers with one another and equally irreplaceable in God's thoughts and affections.

The last time the church encouraged us to let our elected representatives know our feelings about gay marriage I did exactly that, just not the opinion that church leaders probably expected. Between the people who move further from the center of the church because of the church's political stand and those members who outright oppose such positions, the church may yet decide that the separation of church and state is good even for Mormons.

What kind of American English do you speak?

Time for another quiz. I ran across this little gem the other day and found it fascinating. It was rather difficult to take the quiz because I found myself being so influenced by the suggested answers. Sort of like the suggestion that "when in Oklahoma speak like the Oklahomans do."

Anyhow, this is what I came up with. Please click on the link below the chart and report back in a comment how you did.

My Linguistic Profile::

70% General American English

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I found a test about memory loss that I was going to share on this blog but I forgot where it was.

Bonus humor (an old verse that made the rounds several months ago):

Ode to a spell checker

Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marks four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot wea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
and weight four it two say
Wheather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My spell checker tolled me sew.

Shades of Carmichael

The swimming pool at Carmichael Park has become unusable which is a shame because the park otherwise is so attractive and multi-functional. There is a band shell, two complete play structures, tennis courts, and even a nice dog run. But the pool needs help. Actually the Department of Parks and Recreaction has shut down the pool and is now drawing up plans to replace it. Thinking that some additional funding might bring about the replacement a little faster than otherwise, Carmichael has started a fund-raiser - "Shades of Carmichael".

Local artists were recruited to paint patio sun shade umbrellas to be auctioned off this weekend. Both mature and young artists were involved. In a couple of cases, groups of children participated. You can see some of the elaborate examples here. I tried to upload more pictues but Blogger decided it didn't want to cooperate any more today.





It was a really fun event for a good cause.

Roasting marshmallows

This is certainly the time of year to enjoy a backyard picnic. Although it was a little too hot for my taste during the day (over 90) it cooled down to a comfortable 80 in the evening and 75 by the time we had the party going.

The kids invited us over to enjoy their backyard with them last night. We got to help the grandsons put up the tent and get ready to enjoy it.

We also watched Ed chop wood for the new fire ring he got for his birthday.

Chuck enjoyed supervising the activities.

And Jake learned how to roast marshmallows and make s'mores out of them with chocolate and graham crackers.

The lazy man's geocaching

Several weeks ago I had randomly come across a web site that was sort of like the geocaching website which allows geocachers to log the caches they find. This site, however was designed for registering dollar bills (and other denominations) so their movement could be tracked. I thought it was an interesting idea but never did anything about it.

So I was surprised a couple of days ago to see Carolyn pull this dollar bill out of her purse:


According to the web site noted on the bill Track Your Cash there are 667 registered users and slightly less than 30,000 bills that have been registered on the site. With about 25 billion bills in circulation in the country the chance of finding a bill that is stamped like this is something like 1 in 1,000,000.

When I did some research I discovered a website that is much more active called Where's George. This site claims to have over 3.5 million registered users who have registered a total of 83.9 million bills worth $470 million. Now that's a database where there is a bit higher chance of getting hits. Not quite the lottery of the other site. In fact, according to their statistics about 11% of those bills that are registered are "hit" by being registered a second time. They estimate that about .065% of the currency in circulation is registered on the website so you have about 1 chance in 1,700 of ending up with one.

To play the game, you sign onto the web site and enter the serial number of all the bills in your wallet. Later, when someone else enters the same serial number, they will see how far the money has traveled since it was last registered. As a registered user who logged that bill you get notified as well. This is all done by zip code rather than actual addresses so there isn't much danger of big brother noting your spending habits - at least no more than there already is. Of course, no one will even think of registering the bill you did, unless you mark it something like this dollar has been. Our particular bill started out in Porland, Oregon last July so it has traveled at least 480 miles in the last 320 days or about 1.5 miles per day.


This map shows where the greatest "action" is, yellow being the counties with the most registered "hits" and red being next.

What I found really interesting in the comments for registered bills on Where's George was how frequently they had been placed in geocaches and had been making the rounds of the country much like the travel bugs that geocachers are used to transporting. The difference, of course, is that you use muggles to help move the "dollar bug" and you don't have to find any caches. Hence, the lazy man's way to geocaching.

Rest in Peace, Skippy

It may be hard for some of you to believe but I actually shed a few tears when I heard from Natalie that Skippy had died. We're not sure how old Skip was when he came to live with us but he was probably at least 15 when he died. Not bad for a dog. Ever since my dog Meatball died when I was a teen, I've tried to keep some emotional distance between any of our pets and myself. But I'm not always successful. Skip is a good example.

He came to us from the Seal Beach Animal Shelter with a healing broken shoulder (hence the name Skippy) and a name that was something like Cheyenne. The thing I remember most about the process was how careful the shelter was about letting us have Skippy. We had to explain what our home and yard was like and state that we were going to treat him like one of the family. They even explained that they might do an onsite visit in a few days to verify that we really were taking good care of him.

Of course a trip to Petsmart was necessary to get all the necessary equipment such a leash, feeding and watering bowls as well as some dry dog food. But I went along with it thinking that would be the extent of my involvement. After all, he was Natalie's dog, a present for her 16th birthday. We all know how that goes. A mission, marriage and living in a "no pets" apartment, can certainly change the plans. I won't claim to have been the major caregiver for Skippy at any time but I did my share of picking up his poop on some of our neighborhood walks. It seemed like it was his job to make sure we didn't walk too far or too fast.

When we bought the "ancestral family home" in Long Beach, it came with a dog and when we left the house in the care of Natalie and Richard, Skip went with the deal. He was finally back with his own human.

Please feel free to add your own comments about Skippy.

Anatomy of a news story

It’s not that often that I’m so up on the news of the day that I can watch a news story unfolding but I feel that way about the alleged Haditha massacre that is now rapidly becoming a major news event.

On May 19 I happened to be listening to the local NPR radio station air a piece about an ongoing investigation into an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by a small squad of U. S. Marines in November 2005. Since I hadn’t heard about it before, I assumed it was the breaking news of the day and would be all over the next morning’s paper. It wasn’t. In fact, there was no mention I could find about the alleged massacre.

That evening I Googled the topic “Iraq massacre” getting only a few relevant hits. Virtually all the hits were from right leaning blogs and websites denouncing Representative John Murtha (Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, former Marine of 37 years, and long-time military supporter) for his “too eager” revelation of the incident. He was called a “bandaid soldier” and worse for “speaking without any facts” and “aiding and abetting the enemy”. I didn't even remember NPR quoting Murtha but I could have missed that part.

Days went by and the Googled references increased but still heavily weighted in favor of those who were mostly upset that anyone would dare discuss this in public.

Finally, 12 days after I first heard the program, the story reached the main news outlets. The story hasn’t changed from what NPR discussed 12 days earlier but the right-leaning websites and blogs had changed their tune. Now they were accusing the press and liberals of “convicting before a trial” and “tarring the entire military” with this one incident. Now most sites that I visit are impartially reporting what is known and quoting the military as saying that there will be full disclosure once the investigation is over. Left leaning websites and blogs are “tarring” the war (not the military) with the evil that a massacre represents and also pointing out that such misdeeds aid the enemy much more than our discussion of them. They are also claiming that the military wouldn't be investigating this event if Time hadn't first begun raising the question. Now congress is even investigating the possibility of a cover-up

I doubt we’ve seen the end of this news story. And to think that I heard about it almost before it was born.