Valkyrie, Bajio and Apollo

Brent and I met his parents at Jordan Landing to go see Valkyrie. I had seen the previews and thought it looked good despite what the critics had said. But I was feeling under the weather so if I happened to doze off, so be it.


I didn't doze off

The movie was really good! I knew there had been several assassination attempts on Hitler's life but this movie chronicled "Operation Valkyrie" and the man behind the attempt, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Tom Cruise did a good job. I thought the eye patch would be distracting but it wasn't. The movie moved along quickly for being two hours long. I wondered how it would end, though I knew how history played out, but hoped Hollywood would take some creative license so the good guys would win. My eyes watered in the end and after the movie was over those words pop up on the screen explaining what happened after the "movie" part. It was kind of sad but a bit inspiring. Just good overall.

After the movie, we were all feeling a bit hungry so we went to Bajio. I love Bajio! I got my usual: chicken enchiladas. We talked a bit at our table and guess who was sitting right behind us? Apollo Anton Ohno! Of course, I knew who he was. When the Olympics came to Salt Lake I did a report on him and speed skating. And who could forget Dancing with the Stars? I looked at him but didn't go say anything, but of course my mother-in-law did. (She loves Dancing with the Stars) She asked if he was going to dance anymore and he said he's too busy to have time for dancing right now.

O Christmas tree

Our Christmas tree! I had to make the tree kitty-proof this year, so a couple of light strands, ribbon and unbreakable ornaments...and viola! I've already caught Elle scaling the tree multiple times, but I guess that's what cats do.



Looking so innocent...

when you've seen one... you've seen them all

Ahh, the festival of trees. Rows and rows filled with elaborately decorated trees, gingerbread houses dripping with icing, homemade chocolate.... the girls loved it! We couldn't think of a better way to spend two hours. The boys, however, would have been fine after seeing about five trees. My dad, Zach and Brent were all good sports about it, so to that I say thank-you.


It really was fun. My favorite tree was the pink tree done by Good Things Utah. I liked the gingerbread houses, I couldn't believe the detail on some of them. Ally and I took turns saying which house we wanted to live in. I'm still living in the castle.... Ally gets the Christmas cottage.

New addition.....

Meet Olive! or Elle, for short. She's our new kitty! She was only eight weeks old when Brent brought her home. We have another cat, Pep, and the two get along famously. But they can be trouble... like when they knocked over the fish bowl a few days ago... I was not happy.

Mr. Forester

Brent in his classroom - he just finished his first quarter of his first year teaching!

Are the facts being swept under the rug?

I was forwarded this article written by Orson Scott Card. As someone who works in TV, I hate how most people generalization that we are all part of the liberal media, because there are conservatives in this field. But Card has a valid point and I do side with him on this.

And remember to vote on Nov. 4th!!!


Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naiveté time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission

What a Relief!

Check out the I-team story from last Thursday! Lots more are coming up in November!

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

beLIEve & superstars

We saw Criss Angel Believe with Cirque du Soleil at the Luxor in Vegas and... it is awesome!!!

Criss is the headliner and does mind blowing demonstrations throughout the show, just like on his A&E series "Mindfreak". I was mesmerized by the dancers from Cirque, they're amazing. You may have seen one of the numbers, 'Homage to the rabbits' on "So You Think You Can Dance". It was choreographed by Wade Robson, as was the rest of the show. Anyone who is a fan of Criss Angel would LOVE the show! And Criss is hot.

We also saw American Superstars at the Stratosphere. It was a fun show - complete with Vegas dancers and the celebrity tribute artists were SO good! Celine Dion was probably my favorite but Michael Jackson was the best dancer!

Game on!

First BYU game of the season and it was SO HOT! It was an afternoon game so we grabbed lunch at Burgers Supreme (a pre-game ritual for as long as I can remember) then headed to the stadium. We all thought we were going to melt by the end of the first quarter so Brent and I got Snowies (and waited in line for like 30 minutes) and everyone else had ice cream. Stef came up from Snow and made the game that more fun. Plus, BYU won 41-17.

This is American Idol.... on tour

I've always wanted to go to American Idols live. After religiously watching A.I. this past season we just had to go see Utah's idol, David Archuleta. The concert was really good. The idols put on a great show complete with pyrotechnics, I might add. Chikezie kicked off the show with three numbers and then the countdown started: Ramiele, Michael Johns, Kristy Lee Cook, Carly, Brooke, Jason, Syesha, David A. and then David Cook.


Ramiele was mediocre, I was never really a fan of hers. But when Michael Johns hit the stage, the women went crazy, including myself. He really is a talented singer and he's good-looking. Queen would be proud. Kristy Lee is really good, I voted for her several times. I had hoped she'd make it further in the competition, but it's America's choice. Brooke brimmed with confidence which is more than I can say during the competion. She has a good voice though, I'll give her that. Jason was really mellow, kind of like Jack Johnson, but the time he was done I had had enough. Syesha sang some songs she didn't sing on the show. She reminds me of a lot of singers out there but her part of the show was really high energy. And now for the Davids.....
What can I say about David Archuleta? Utah loves him! Whether or not you voted for him, you can't deny his voice is of a higher caliber than those he competed against. The girls went crazy! My ears were ringing the next day. My bet is that David A. will go far in his career, he's no one-hit wonder.

David Cook is awesome. He sang his new single and a few others he didn't sing on the show. He's a performer. The girls were equally taken by D.C.'s performance as they were by David A.'s.


Overall the idols were entertaining, even Brent enjoyed the show. And to cap it all off, the next day David Archuleta performed on Studio 5 and I got my picture with him! Me and David!

Two days of pure Idol mania, it's a great thing.

South Dakota

Brent and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary on June 15th. 4 years! It's hard to believe...
It's been tradition for us to always go somewhere for our anniversary, so this year we went to romantic South Dakota. Brent had never been to Mount Rushmore so we thought it'd be different. We stayed in Rapid City, the drive was long but worth it when we saw how pretty it is up there. We went to Mount Rushmore, Jewel Cave, drove through Black Hills National Forest, visited Deadwood and Thunderhead Falls.

Save FOX's "Back To You"!

May 15, 2008 from KCRA 3 in Sacramento, California:
LOS ANGELES -- Kelsey Grammer said that it's a surprise and a shame that the Fox television network is canceling his sitcom "Back to You."

It's so much of a surprise that on Friday, Grammer taped an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show promoting the series had been canceled.

Grammer told The Associated Press that prior to that call, he'd been told the show was coming back.
Grammer doesn't agree with people who say "Back to You" -- which also stars Patricia Heaton -- is costing Fox too much.

"That's rarely a stumbling block if they really want a show. There are ways around that," Grammer said. "They just really didn't want it."

A comedy about a news anchor who returns to his former station years after he left for the big time, "Back to You" had a strong debut last fall but its audience has slipped.

Brent and I have never enjoyed a show as much as this one! It's hilarious, well-written and very entertaining.

Sign this petition to save "Back To You"

http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/back2useason2

more California pics

scam at the home show

I produced an investigative piece last Thursday. But that's not the coolest part... I've gone international!

Here's the story:

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=3207020

A few days after our report aired, we (the I-Team) got an email from CBC News in Newfoundland, Canada saying, "The fraud artist in your home show story is in custody in Canada". How cool is that? Turns out, our salesman was at a home show and one smart shopper took in that whole 'buyer beware' sentiment and checked him out on the Internet. Authorities were notified and viola - here's what happened.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2008/05/05/utah-warrnt.html?ref=rss"

CaLiFoRnIa

Brent and I spent a week in Southern California. He's done with school and I needed a to get away from work for a bit. It was great weather - we came back with a nice tan (and a slight burn). I went to my first Angels game and Brent hadn't been in years. We stayed in Huntington Beach and were just steps away from the ocean. Brent hit a few waves and we built a sand castle. We spent a day in Universal Studios Hollywood. The Mummy ride is a must! Disneyland and California Adventure were fun too! The Tower of Terror is awesome!