Nicely done video by Ed Driscoll. Have a look:

The Blather house has exploded with Christmas cheer in the last seven days. Tonight, as the New Orleans Saints thump the Patriots, from my strategic vantage point here in my comfy chair I have 360 degrees of festiveness. Want proof? Okay . . .

With FOU #1 home from Baylor and FOU #2 recently back from the Serengeti, we had five places around the table for the first time in months. It was good and sweet and fun and right.

This was Mrs. Blather’s mom’s first holiday since the passing of Poppa George a few months ago so we went to Oklahoma City on a mission to fill Gramma’s house with joy and baking smells. Or failing that, fill it with snoring and dog smells. Mission accomplished.

On Friday I made the three-hour drive alone down to my folks house in the hills of Southeastern Oklahoma to visit and install a new computer for my Dad. His old one . . . and I mean OLD one (I think it was running Windows 95) had crashed recently and he was missing having email, web weather, and solitaire. Of course now an 80-year old who is battling Alzheimer’s is having to get used to Windows XP. Could be worse though. It could have been Vista.

Dr. Baker joined us for some Thanksgiving leftovers, after which, I headed back to OKC to rejoin my family.

We’re facing a lot of challenges this holiday season, but so is almost every family we know. And we remain rightly and profoundly grateful for daily demonstrations of God’s faithfulness. And how can a guy be glum when he’s surrounded by such cheer and love?

In these days of confused situations.
In these nights of a restless remorse,
When the heart and the soul of the nation,
lay wounded and cold as a corpse.
From the grave of the innocent Adam,
comes a song bringing joy to the sad.
Oh your cry has been heard and the ransom,
has been paid up in full, Be Ye Glad.

Oh, Be Ye Glad, Be Ye Glad,
Every debt that you ever had
Has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord,
Be Ye Glad,

(M.K. Blanchard)

I seem to have missed this when it made the rounds last Christmas. Heard it on a Christmas station today and loved it. Check it out, particularly the end of the song when it morphs into Toto’s “Africa.”

A friend of the helpful folks over at the American Enterprise Institute went to the considerable trouble of classifying the backgrounds of each past president’s cabinet, going back 100 years. The following graph shows, for each president, what percentage of his cabinet had private sector work experience before entering the cabinet.

In other words, what percentage of the folks surrounding the president have ever had a real job. Behold:

If this research is accurate, about 93% of the folks advising President Obama and running executive branch departments on his behalf have never held a meaningful job outside of government or academia. Is it any wonder this administration seems so utterly clueless about and dismissive of businesses and business owners?

From the AP newswire:

BRUSSELS – A mother says her son has emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state to say he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed.
Rom Houben had a car crash in 1983 and doctors thought he had sunk into an apparent coma. Still, his family continued to believe their son was conscious and had sought further medical advice.
Dr. Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse said Houben’s mother finally met Belgian expert Steven Laureys, who realized that the medical diagnosis for her son was wrong. Laureys then taught Houben how to communicate through a special keyboard.

Makes you wonder how many people who have been declared to be in a “persistent vegetative state” actually overheard discussions of removing them from food and water but were helpless to say, “Hey! I’m still here!”

Horrifying to contemplate.

In the post below, I noted, “The Dems pursued a strategy of trying to help job seekers by attacking and hamstringing  job providers.”

Today, Congressman Michael Burgess (from this neck of the woods) had a chance to grill Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and made pretty much the same point:

BURGESS: Your own special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program has got several concerns about it. Why not just stop spending on the TARP funds? And why not repeal the program? We don’t need it anymore. The American people never liked it. Let’s just do away with it.

GEITHNER: Let me just point out the disagreement between what your colleague said and I think what most people across the country understand and believe, which is that, if you look at what’s happening in housing, if you look at what’s happening to small businesses, this economy still faces tremendous financial challenges.

BURGESS: What’s happening in small businesses is people are frightened to add jobs, because they don’t know what we’re going to do to them in health care. They don’t know what we’re going to do to them in financial regulation. They’re scared of what we might do with energy prices in the future with cap and trade. Small business — medium sized business is frightened at jobs right now.

I could help the president and his panel. He doesn’t need another program. We don’t need another stimulus. We need to provide some tax relief and then get the heck out of the way, and the American economy will recover as it has always done.

Well said, Congressman.

John Hinderaker over at the Powerline Blog has additional thoughts about the Burgess-Geithner exchange. Well worth a read.

You may have already seen this astonishingly informative moving graphic elsewhere. If not, check it out:

It is a compelling visual picture of what happens when a government compounds the negative effects of a recession by declaring war on business owners. Such a war is precisely what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pursued after taking control of both houses of Congress in 2006 while the Bush administration was so unpopular it had no political clout with which to stop them.

Watch the acceleration of misery in October of ’08 as it became clear to the nation that Obama was going to be the next president. The psychological effect this had on the economy is stunning.

The Dems pursued a strategy of trying to help job seekers by attacking and hamstringing  job providers. Here you have the results.

Rick Reilly at ESPN has a very funny overview of the explosion of tattoos among professional athletes.

Excerpt:

And why would Shawn Marion of the Dallas Mavericks get an ornate Chinese character tattooed down his leg without having a Chinese person in tow? See, Marion thought he was getting his nickname, “The Matrix,” but instead got something that — crudely translated — comes out to “Demon Bird Mothballs.” Still, it would be a very good intramural team name.

Read the whole thing here.

To every man or woman in uniform far away from home today . . . to every person who has worn the uniform with honor . . . to every family that has endured the hardship of separation or the pain of loss because someone they love has served . . .

On this Veteran’s Day, and every day, we say “thank you.”