Ten Most Corrupt Politicians 2009

The folks over at Judicial Watch have published their much awaited list of the Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians of 2009. It had to be very difficult for them to cut the list to a mere ten. Certainly it would have been easier to publish the Top 100.

Here is the list of Judicial Watch selections. Enjoy!

H/T: Bkmck

Hawkeye Music

From the internet:

This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa .. Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft , Iowa .....Yes, farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort.

It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

H/T: rkwlsn

Shelby Steele explains Barack Obama

Shelby Steele, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution provides the most erudite analysis to date of our current president, in today's Wall Street Journal.

This is a Must Read to understand how Barack Obama got elected and "became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency."

Here are some clips from the article:

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

You can read the full article HERE.

The Media - a Slight Exaggeration of Bias

A Harley biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents. The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has watched the whole event.

The reporter addressing the Harley rider says, 'Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I've seen a man do in my whole life.'

The Harley rider replies, 'Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger and acted as I felt right.'

The reporter says, 'Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page... So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?'

The biker replies, 'I'm a U.S. Marine and a Republican.'

The journalist leaves.

The following morning the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:

U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH

Thomas Sowell on Unhealthy Arrogance on NRO

Unhealthy Arrogance by Thomas Sowell on National Review Online

In a sense, this administration is only the end result of a long social process that includes raising successive generations with dumbed-down education in schools and colleges that have become indoctrination centers for the visions of the Left. Our education system has turned out many people who have never heard any other vision and who can only learn what is wrong with the prevailing vision from bitter experience.

Andy McCarthy on Interpol's Immunity from American Law.

Former prosecutor (the Blind Sheik) Andy McCarthy had some interesting thoughts on why we are granting immunity from American Law, on The Corner on National Review Online a few days ago.

Why Does Interpol Need Immunity from American Law?

Mark Steyn on the All Government No Health Care Bill

Mark Steyn wrote today on National Review Online about the misnamed "health care" legislation emerging from both sides of Capitol Hill.

Looking at the millions of Americans it leaves uninsured, and the millions it leaves with worse treatment and reduced access, and the millions it makes pay significantly more for their current health care, one can only marvel at Harry Reid’s genius: government health care turns out to be all government and no health care.

Cross the River, Burn the Bridge by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

Merry Christmas from Minnesotans for Global Warming

Handel's Messiah: Hallelujah Chorus

Merry Christmas Day.

Handel's Messiah: For Unto Us a Child is Born

This is my personal favorite.

Merry Christmas.

Handel's Messiah: Rejoice Greatly

Merry Christmas.

Handel's Messiah: Glory to God

Merry Christmas.

Handel's Messiah: And the Glory of the Lord

Merry Christmas.

Handel's Messiah: Every Valley

Merry Christmas.

Handel's Messiah: Overture

Tonight is the annual performance of Handel's Messiah by the Jacksonville Symphony, marking the official start of the Christmas Season at our house.

Messiah is an English oratorio composed by George Frideric Handel in 1741. The work is his most famous creation, and is entirely drawn from the King James and Great Bibles. It interprets the Christian doctrine of the Messiah.

Messiah is most often performed around Christmas, and the performances usually consist of only the first of the oratorio's three parts, with the addition of the Hallelujah Chorus which originally concluded Part Two.

From now until Christmas, this Blog will feature a different selection from Messiah each day, ending with the Hallelujah Chorus (it is a tradition for concert goers to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus). We begin today with the Overture to Messiah, performed by the Bow Valley (Canada) Chorus.

Merry Christmas.

A Mosque at Ground Zero? Where's the Outrage?

How would you like to see something like this at Ground Zero in New York City? This piece from the Hudson New York Briefing Council talks about the distinct possibility that a mosque will be built "steps away from where the WorldTrade Center once stood," where thousands of our citizens were murdered by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001. Where, indeed, is the outrage?

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Al Franken is an Embarrassment.

How can the same state that gives us the Power Line Blog and Minnesotans for Global Warming, and the wonderfully well-spoken Michele Bachmann, give us such an ignorant clown as Al Franken? This video is proof positive that Franken is a hopeless partisan with nary a qualification (other than the three made requisite by the Constitution) to serve in the U. S. Senate.

Vaclav Havel on Weakness: Guess Whose.

The inestimable Vaclav Havel, was the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He was interviewed, on December 9, 2009, by Foreign Policy Magazine, and the interview was published in the Wall Street Journal today. There is a very strong message for our current president in the interview, but unfortunately President Obama seems unable to accept such a message - at least not yet.

The interview was in the Notable & Quotable section of the Journal. It can be found HERE.

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From The Three Tenors Christmas Concert in Vienna 1999.

Merry Christmas.

The Legacy of Jimmy V

From the website of the Jimmy V Foundation:
http://www.jimmyv.org/

The V Foundation for Cancer Research was started in 1993 to honor Jim Valvano. From very humble beginnings of Jim's personal friends and family, The Foundation grew. Today, that circle of friends has expanded and the support structure of The Foundation includes people of all walks of life, those who knew Jim personally, those who knew of Jim and many who have joined the cause simply because they believe in the possibility of Jim's final wish - to fund research to find cures for cancer.

The V Foundation takes great pride in its fiscal responsibility and is proud to announce that it gives 100 percent of all new direct cash donations to cancer research and related programs.

There are not a lot of charities where every penny of your donation goes toward the stated goal of the charity; the V Foundation is one of them.

Jimmy V's advice to those who watch the above video of his now famous speech, delivered on the occasion of his being awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 1993 ESPY Awards Ceremony, was threefold. He said that every day we should laugh, we should think, and we should cry. Just listening to his speech makes every listener do all three of of those, without even trying.

Jimmy V died, on April 28, 1993, eight weeks after giving this speech. R.I.P.

Howard Dean Speaks the Truth - Again.

The Heritage Foundation addressed the above interview of Howard Dean in today's Morning Bell.

This is Governor Dean's second documented foray into Truth as documented on this Blog. The first foray is recounted HERE. In that first foray, Dean admitted that the only reason for the absence of any mention of tort reform in the debate (or in any of the Bills) was the tremendous influence of lawyers - influence in terms of dollars contributed to mostly Democrat lawmakers.

If he keeps this up, he will end up with more friends on the right side than the other side.

I would, though, have been happier had the interviewer asked Dean if he thought a government run insurer would have administrative costs less than 27 percent.

Palin and Shatner - Both Good Sports

Allen West for Congress in Florida

That's LtCol (Ret) Allen West, who is running for Congress in the 22nd District (Broward County) in Florida. He ran for the seat in 2008, and barely lost to the incumbent. He's running against the same incumbent in 2010, and this time it's looking good.

His name might be familiar to you, and this clip from a December 4, 2003 piece by Jed Babin on National Review Online should refresh your memory.

Between August 16 and 20, intelligence identified an Iraqi policeman who was allegedly involved in the assassination plot, and the man was arrested on Aug. 20. According to the officer's defense attorney, this is what happened.
Lt. Col. Allen B. West was told the policeman was uncooperative, so he took a few of his men to the interrogation area to see for himself, where he found the prisoner being questioned by two female officers. They told him the man was belligerent, and wasn't giving them any information. (Surprise, surprise. The idiocy of having women question male Arab prisoners is apparent to everyone except the army commanders.) West entered the room, sat across from the man, drew his pistol, and placed it in his lap. West told him he had come to either get information, or to kill him. The prisoner responded by smiling and saying, "I love you." The interrogation continued, and one of West's troops lost his temper and started slapping the man. West then had his men take the prisoner outside, where he again threatened the man, telling him that he would kill him on the count of five if he didn't tell what he knew. The prisoner refused, and West fired his pistol into the air.
The interrogation continued, but not the beating. After about 20 more minutes of useless questioning, West grabbed the man, held him down near a box full of sand used to discharge jammed weapons, and said something like, "This is it. I'm going to count to five again, and if you don't give me what I want, I'm going to kill you." West held the man down, counted to five, and then fired his pistol into the discharging box about a foot from the Iraqi's head. He began talking. Over the next few minutes, the prisoner gave very specific information about the plot. He named the conspirators, gave times and dates of the assassination plan, and even described how attacks would be made.
West and his men went back to their base camp. The lieutenant colonel immediately went to his boss, woke him up, and told him what he had done, and about the information he'd gotten from the Iraqi. West didn't say anything about what his troops had done. The boss — Col. Kevin Stramara — responded only by saying something like, "Alan, we need to take the high road." Leaving Stramara, West went to the medics' area, and ordered one of the doctors to examine and treat the prisoner. The doctor found the man bruised and scared, but not injured in any significant way. The next day, West briefed his own staff about the incident, and told them he took full responsibility. And that, West thought, was that. Apparently so did Stramara, who never even reported the incident.
The local election was postponed, the ambushes were avoided, and all was quiet until a disgruntled sergeant wrote a long, rambling letter to the commanding general of the Fourth I.D., Gen. Ray Odierno. The letter complains about harassment by Stramara, inconsistent uniform discipline, disrespect of officers by enlisted men, and mentions the West incident only in passing. The lawyers ended up with the letter, and that's where the PC Police took over.

LtCol West, thanks to a small, but influential number of Congressmen who rallied to his defense (and a groundswell of support from the citizenry), was finally allowed to retire after paying a $5,000 fine. He moved his family from Texas to Florida, where he taught school for a year, and then decided to enter the political arena. Sounds like just the kind of guy we need to bring (pardon the expression) CHANGE to Capitol Hill.

For more information on Allen West from his website, go HERE.

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Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer was founded in 1978 by tenor Louis Botto, who sang in the Ensemble until 1989 and served as Artistic Director until his death in 1997. This world famous group is based in San Francisco (I know, I know), and perhaps is best know for its signature song, the Franz Biebl version of Ave Maria. They cannot end a performance without honoring a request to perform it. The Biebl Ave Maria was brought to the United States, from a singing tour in Germany, by the Cornell University Glee Club, in 1964, and adopted quickly by Chanticleer.

Merry Christmas.

This would be funny even if it weren't true.

Click on the cartoon to enlarge.

H/T: BMCK

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The UN Can't Run a Conference - but it wants to run our lives.

Live at Copenhagen: Left Out in the Cold » The Foundry

Stuck out in the cold trying to get into the convention center that the developing countries had left were thousands of registered participants including delegations from universities, trade unions, and the press. It took more than 8 hours for non-governmental delegates, like Heritage’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman, to check in on December 14th. The New York Times described the registration system as chaotic, and notes that the overflow of freezing unregistered delegates forced the Copenhagen police to shut down the subway stop nearest the conference. The problem: despite some two years of planning, the United Nations organizers failed to come up with a way to fit the 45,000 people they registered for the conference into the 15,000 person capacity Bella Center. Oops.

Bush Bashing on "60 Minutes."

Will he never stop bashing his predecessor? This has gone well beyond politics - even banana republic politics. Obama's constant need to blame others for his failures, I bet, goes way back to his childhood, and is, in fact, a character flaw most often displayed by those who were fawned over as "special" all their lives.

Here's a video of the 60 Minutes interview of 12/13:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5975130n&tag=api

And here's a snippet from the transcript, which is about as mean spirited a comment as you will ever hear from a president of the United States. It says more about Obama than it does about his predecessor.

"...And, you know, I think that one of the mistakes that was made over the last eight years is for us to have a triumphant sense about war. This is a tough business. And there are tough costs to it. And I think because it was detached from our day to day lives in so many ways -- unless you were a military family; unless you were one of those who were being deployed. Because we didn't even get asked to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a tendency to say, "We can go in. We can kick some tail. You know this is some glorious exercise."

If we survive the next three years of this attitude in the White House, we won't only be the greatest country in the world, we'll be the luckiest.

Duplicitous Demagogues Win: Kids Lose

Remember these kids? They were enrolled in the D. C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (see prior posts dated: April 29, April 30, May 6, and July 11). It looked, back in July, as though the kids might win, and this very successful program would continue. That presumed happy ending did not take into account the tremendous power (with this administration) of the NEA (teacher's union), which is more interested in preserving the failed public school system than in helping disadvantaged children.

Please watch the video in this post from The Heritage Foundation, and visit the prior posts on this subject. Juan Williams continues to speak out against ending this program, but his voice and the voice of parents and D.C. politicians (who strongly support the program) apparently were not enough to counter the lobbying of the teacher's union. Shame on the NEA and double shame on Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives. The Senate could still do something to keep the program functioning, but don't bet on that happening.

House Leaders Vote to End D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program » The Foundry

Here's the full video "Let me rise," with Juan Williams.

Mark Ingram of Alabama: 2009 Heisman Trophy Winner

The first Heisman Trophy winner in the history of the University of Alabama, Mark Ingram, speaks from the heart. Although Alabama is on the verge of winning its 13th national championship, the school had never produced a Heisman Trophy winner until now, which says a lot about the team concept at the school. Mark Ingram typifies that idea of team in his very gracious acceptance speech.

Lord Monckton & Greenpeace

Lord Christopher Monckton, who served as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher's policy unit in the 1980s, is the British equivalent of Senator Jim Inhofe. Both are trying to bring sanity to the global warming debate. Of course science is not about debate or consensus, but politics is about both - and global warming is all about politics.

The Greenpeace disciple being interviewed by Lord Monckton in the above video is a typical ill informed nice person who believes everything said by Greenpeace, and has never taken the time to check on any of the so-called facts that group puts out. It's encouraging to observe that she is apparently open to the facts presented by Lord Monckton, and might well become a convert to the truth.

Sundays are for Beauty - Libera choir

The singers of Libera are aged seven to sixteen. They attend many different local schools in South London and come from a variety of backgrounds.

They sang at the Papal Mass at the climax of Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to the USA, performing to a capacity congregation of 60,000 at New York’s Yankee Stadium. They were the only British artists to take part in this historic event.

With only one more Sunday until Christmas, Libera should make this one another Beautiful Sunday.

Did the other 49% not understand the question?

Click on photo to enlarge.

51% in Illinois Oppose Prison for Guantanamo Terrorists In Their State

Posted using ShareThis

Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans and 57% of voters not affiliated with either major party are against moving the prisoners to their state. Forty-nine percent (49%) of Democrats support the proposal, while 37% are against it.

While the president believes the prison camp established by his predecessor, George W. Bush, weakened national security, only 30% of Americans agree.

MERRY CHRISTMAS (6)

Nice medal, Mr. President, but that money is ours.

Does Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Violate the Constitution? » The Foundry

Army vs Navy: Game of the Year

When Army Battles Navy
by John Feinstein
published: 12/06/2009

This coming Friday night, on the eve of the 110th football game between Army and Navy, Anthony Noto, 41, will walk into a bar in Philadelphia wearing a black Army letterman's sweater.

He will be greeted by David Lillefloren, 40, and they will hug each other, order drinks, and toast.

The men became friends off the field after three years of battling each other on the field--as Army and Navy players often do. They still argue--every year--about whether Lillefloren, an offensive lineman who graduated from Navy one year after Noto graduated from Army, sent Noto flying on the opening drive of the 1990 game.

"I pancaked you," Lillefloren will say, using a football term for knocking someone flat while blocking.

"Not me," Noto will answer. "It was our other linebacker. I'll show you the tape."

"I remember it. I got you," Lillefloren will respond.

"Who won the game, Dave?"

"Who has won the last seven games, Anthony?"

And so it will go all night.

For years now, they have had a friendly bet on the game. Their latest is that the loser has to wear his letterman's sweater the night before the next year's game--whether it fits or not.

On Friday, Noto, who has lost the bet seven straight years, will be wearing his Army sweater.

While Lillefloren and Noto are teasing and toasting, this year's teams will be getting ready to play in the only rivalry in college football where the opponents truly feel bonded to one another.

Army cornerback Mario Hill will go to bed knowing he has one final chance to beat Navy.

"My last game in high school, we finally beat our archrivals for the first time," Hill says. "I've spent this whole year thinking my college career will end the way my high school career did.

"There's no one you respect more but no one you want to beat more," he says. "Every year, I get chills when we run onto the field. But I want to hear our alma mater played second--just once--before I'm through."

One of the great traditions in sports is the playing of the alma maters at the end of the Army-Navy game. The players, coaches, and students (the entire corps of cadets and the entire brigade of midshipmen attend the game) stand together. The losers always go first. Then the players cross the field together to hear the winner's song.

"The greatest feeling you can have in the world is crossing that field to hear 'Blue and Gold' [Navy's alma mater] after they've played Army's song," says Ram Vela, who at 5 feet 9 and 193 pounds may be the smallest linebacker playing major college football. "When we stand there and I know the Army guys are standing right behind us, or sometimes even with us, it's like nothing else we experience. It sounds corny, but they are our brothers."

In many ways, Vela is a poster boy for those who play for Army and Navy. Since every graduate of both academies must serve five years in the military, almost no one with serious NFL ambitions considers either school. That means the coaches seek players like Vela who may be overlooked because they lack size or speed but who make up for it with smarts, toughness, and desire.

As a high school senior in San Antonio, Tex., Vela jumped at the chance to go to the Naval Academy. He not only became a starter, he made the key defensive play of Navy's stunning triple-overtime upset of Notre Dame in 2007, jumping over a Notre Dame blocker for a fourth-down sack late in the game. It was the first time in 43 years that Navy had beaten the Irish.

"We all like the idea that what we do here is overcome odds, do things we aren't supposed to be able to do," Vela said. "Most of us have been told that we aren't good enough to play big-time football. There's nothing we love more than proving those people wrong."

When they play the alma maters after the game on Saturday, regardless of who wins, Lt. Cmdr. Damon Myers will no doubt feel waves of emotion. He will be in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he is currently deployed, meaning the game will begin shortly after midnight. But he will find a way to watch it or listen to it one way or the other.

In 1997, while a junior at Navy, Myers was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes seven days before the Army-Navy game. He was admitted to Bethesda Naval hospital for treatment and watched the game that Saturday from the hospital, choking up when he saw that not only were his teammates wearing the letters "DM" on their helmets, the entire brigade was wearing them.

Navy won the game that day, breaking a five-game losing streak to Army, and his teammates dedicated the game to him. Two days later, Myers was resting in his room when a nurse told him the superintendent had come to visit him. Myers was delighted that Adm. Charles Larson, superintendent of the Naval Academy, was coming to see him.

But when the door opened, Larson wasn't there. Gen. Daniel Christman, the Army superintendent, was, and he was carrying a football. He introduced himself to Myers and said, "Damon, our football team wanted me to bring this to you."

It was a game ball, signed by every member of the Army team. "They all want you back on the field next year," Christman said, smiling. "They want a chance to whip you and your teammates."

A year later, Myers was on the field as a Navy senior. Army won the game late 34-30, and as he crossed the field to hear Army's alma mater, Myers was emotional, thrilled to be healthy and playing but sad to have lost his final college football game.

As the song and his tears started, he felt an arm around his shoulder. He looked up and saw General Christman. Without a word, he buried his head on Christman's shoulder and cried.

"There was no need to say anything," Christman said later. "At that moment every year, Army and Navy are one team. And everyone on that field knows it."

As does everyone watching. Regardless of who has to wear the letterman's sweater a year from now.

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The signature song of the late Luciano Pavarotti (very appropriate for this time of the year - especially for kids waiting for Santa) is from the Puccini Opera, Turandot.
Nessun Dorma: Nobody sleeps.

Jim Inhofe is the most honest and candid man in the U. S. Senate.

Senator Inhofe speaks for about 44 minutes on this video from his appearance yesterday at The Heritage Foundation. He covers more than just Climategate; he is asked questions on a number of topics including: the Obama administration's disarming of America (around the 30 minute mark), the EPA's violation of the Separation of Powers doctrine (documented in the first three articles of the U. S. Constitution), the prospects for Cap and Trade passing the Senate, and the possibility of a third party movement brought on by the Tea Parties, and answers them all with a degree of candidness unique in Washington political circles.

If you don't have 44 minutes at one sitting, please watch a little at a time. It's well worth any time you can spend on it.

Memo to St. Francis: Is she really one of yours?

Jay Richards of The Enterprise Blog
posted an interesting piece yesterday that questioned whether the religious voices attending the ongoing meeting of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen will provide wisdom or camouflage for this ambitious group. You can read the post by Richards HERE.

Sunday started like any other day for Sister Joan Brown—with a period of prayer and meditation just before dawn at her home in Albuquerque.

Then, instead of going to Mass, the Franciscan sister boarded a plane to Copenhagen.

That’s a priceless juxtaposition. Perhaps Sister Brown attended Mass on Saturday night, but the symbolism here is palpable—going to Copenhagen “instead of going to Mass.” Going to Sunday Mass is obligatory for Catholics. The accompanying photograph shows Sister Brown and others praying, not before a cross or a crucifix or anything vaguely Christian, but before a big model of Mother Earth.


Somehow I can't imagine that St. Francis would be proud of Sister Brown.

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Perry Como was one of a kind. Christmas was very special for him, and he would not be happy today with the treatment this very holy season, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, is getting from the politically correct crowd. God bless him.


The following is from his internet biography:

Combining a gentle voice with a pleasant personality, Como celebrated in life and in song romantic love and lifelong fidelity. He parlayed these values and his ability to express them in song into one of the most successful careers in twentieth-century popular entertainment.

Perry Como died in his sleep on May 12, 2001 --a national treasure was lost.


Merry Christmas and God Bless America.

Comrades in Copenhagen

Bret Stephens, the foreign-affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal, and winner of the 2008 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, makes a good case in his column today that those in charge of the ongoing
United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen are using the same method of operation to achieve their goals as that used by V. I. Lenin, and that should concern anyone who believes in freedom. Stephens suspects that one of the things at work with the alarmists is what he calls the "totalitarian impulse." This is not to say that global warming true believers are closet Stalinists. But their intellectual methods are instructively similar.

Pathetic Propaganda

Anyone who doubted the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in Copenhagen was more about politics than science need only view this video of the opening ceremony film. It's called "Please Help the World," and it uses a child the same way LBJ used a child sitting under a mushroom cloud to dissuade people who knew better from voting for Barry Goldwater in 1964. The film was produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. One wonders how many real Danes believe this stuff. I'm betting about as many as the number of real Norwegians who believe the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is deserving.

The use of children in this way, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of those whose "scientific" case simply cannot be made scientifically.

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Sen Inhofe Speaks Truth to EPA Power Grab

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pulling an end run around the constitutional power of Congress, and doing it based on questionable (to say the least) data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is calling them on it. The EPA action, if left to stand, will have a detrimental effect on the life (and breath) of every American.

Chalk up yet another scandal of the Obama administration.

Click on the below Label: Global Warming for prior posts on the scandal.

Is NPR Fair & Balanced?

This is fascinating. NPR is upset with their national correspondent, Mara Liasson, for appearing (for a decade now) on Fox News. As you probably know, she's a regular on Fox News Special Report, formerly with Brit Hume, now with Bret Baier. She's also a regular panelist on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace.

You really have to read the below account from Politico.com to believe it. To draw a pretty fair and balanced analogy, I would equate this to Janeane Garofalo calling Laura Bush crude.

NPR reporter pressured over Fox role - - POLITICO.com

No Ambiguity from FDR

Great speech, but he forgot to mention our EXIT STRATEGY. Oh, that's right, it was VICTORY!

Sundays are for Beauty - Bach

Sheep May Safely Graze
was written by J. S. Bach in 1713. It's really a secular piece, and was part of his Hunt Cantada, but it is often heard at Christmas time probably because of the Good Shepherd metaphor. It's a beautiful piece for a Beautiful Sunday.

Merry Christmas.

Britain Dismayed by Obama Afghan Strategy

John Hideraker of Power Line Blog just posted a piece citing criticism by UK Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, who questioned President Obama's decision to put a date on the start of US troop withdrawals.

In an interview with The Times, Bob Ainsworth said that the Government would not follow Washington's promise to start pulling out in 2011. "You can't put a time on it. You've got to look at conditions," he said. ...

His comments reflect dismay at the highest level in the British Armed Forces about Mr Obama's suggestion this week that US troop withdrawals would start by mid-2011. Britain expects to have substantial forces on the ground in Afghanistan for at least five or six more years.

According to Lt. Col Ralph Peters, whose New York Post column is linked to the Power Line piece: Afghanistan's over. More splendid American men and women in uniform will die or suffer terrible wounds, but it was over when our self-absorbed president put the 2012 presidential election above our national security last Tuesday. It was over the moment he uttered the words that doomed his presidency: "July, 2011."

Hideraker calls that declaration by Peters, hyperbolic. Maybe it is.