ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Bill O'Reilly on the Today Show this morning:

These pin-heads running around going, "Get out of Iraq now" don't know what they are talking about. These are the same people before Hitler invaded in WWII that were saying, "He's not such a bad guy." They don't get it.

From the November 28 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: It is now time to draw the line, ladies and gentlemen. We must decide whether we value our heritage or not. Make no mistake about this. Merry Christmas is an emotional, but small, issue. The drastic change the secular progressive movement wants in this country is the big issue.

Those people want an America free from spirituality and judgments about personal behavior. And they may get it.

So "Talking Points" is putting together a coalition of the willing to fight against this secular movement. George Soros and Peter Lewis, the money men behind the secular curtain, have financed a number of websites which routinely attack those with whom they disagree in the most vile ways.

Most mainstream media avoid the far-left smear sites, but some help them. In the coming weeks, we will expose those media which pass along the vicious personal attacks.

We've already listed some of them on billoreilly.com. And we hope you steer clear of those organizations.

If traditional America rises up and punishes the mainstream media, which furthers the cause of Soros and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], they will lose. The defamation pipeline that has been cleverly devised will collapse. If Christmas in America can be marginalized, any tradition can be, including marriage and the way you raise your kids. This is what the culture war is all about.

The substantive issue first: The Supreme Court has ruled that states can require that doctors notify a pregnant teenager's parent before performing an abortion. But the court has also made it clear, beginning with its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, that any restrictions on abortion rights must contain exceptions to protect a woman's health and life. This is a core principle that New Hampshire lawmakers ignored in 2003 when they passed a parental notification law that omitted any exception for medical problems that were not life-threatening.

Quite predictably, the law was challenged. Two days before it was to take effect, a federal trial judge in New Hampshire issued an injunction barring its enforcement. Neither the trial judge nor the reviewing appellate court had any trouble dismissing the claim by New Hampshire's attorney general, Kelly Ayotte, that the state had covered the problem of the health exception by giving a pregnant minor the option of seeking permission for an abortion from a judge. Neither should the justices. In an emergency, as Planned Parenthood of Northern New England notes in its brief, a young woman needs to get to a hospital, not a courthouse.

The implications of the procedural issue are even more serious. With support from the Justice Department, Ms. Ayotte is asking the court to end, or severely constrict, the longstanding power of federal courts to do what the trial judge in New Hampshire did: bar the enforcement of potentially dangerous and unconstitutional abortion restrictions before they go into effect and injure people. Though it is obscured by technical-sounding legalese, this issue concerns what would essentially be a radical court-stripping plan, one that would leave state legislatures free to ignore the Supreme Court's parameters for abortion regulation until a minor, already unconstitutionally endangered and in the midst of a medical crisis, somehow made it to court to challenge the law.

New Chief Justice John Roberts seemed sympathetic to the state, but other justices said they were troubled that the law does not make an exception for minors who have a medical emergency.

At the same time, the court did not appear satisfied with an appeals court ruling that struck down the law, one of dozens around the country that require parental involvement when a teen seeks an abortion.

Although the case does not challenge the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that said abortion is a fundamental constitutional right, the stakes are still significant and could signal where the high court is headed under Roberts and after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Does God Want YOU To Be a Success?

When God wants something done, He always gives it to ONE PERSON to do—a Moses, a Peter, a Paul, a David, a Gideon, a Mary. Had you noticed?

In Pray and Be Rich, Dr. Richard Gaylord Briley reveals a startling Biblical truth that has great implications for your life:

One person, committed to a goal, is all God needs to change the world.

He's done it many times. And if history turns many more pages, He'll surely do it again. At the very least, you and God together can change your world.

The new audio program – Pray and Be Rich – is about one person—YOU—and the success plans that God has for all who believe, pray and act on the message of the Bible.
...
It astonishes many that Jesus spoke more about wise use of our possessions (our wealth) than any other subject. Riches are extensions of whatever we make of ourselves. Wealth is extra power to use for good or evil.

All babies are born poor. But as you'll find out in Pray and Be Rich, five percent of them, in free societies, grow up to be richer than the rest.

This widely-ignored fact gives extra hope for success to anyone with a clear goal in life.

Pray and Be Rich reveals the Biblical secrets that will enable you to become a member of the five percent of people who rise to the top and succeed.

Sen. John McCain is leading the charge against so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by U.S. interrogators, insisting that practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist suspects to give accurate information.

Nearly forty years ago, however - when McCain was held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp - some of the same techniques were used on him. And - as McCain has publicly admitted at least twice - the torture worked!
...
He described the day Hanoi Hilton guards beat him "from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes."

"For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards . . . Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5 1/2 years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope."

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."

That McCain broke under torture doesn't make him any less of an American hero. But it does prove he's wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don't work.

The White House and Congress need as many as five academic economists of high caliber, and it's not obvious where they will come from. The Republican Party may be facing something of a shallow bench.

"Bush's reputation in at least the academic community is about as low as you can imagine," said William A. Niskanen, who was a member of the council during President Ronald Reagan's first term and is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group. "A lot of people would not be willing to give up a good tenured position for a position in the White House."

Back in 2003, the choice of N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, to head the council initially provoked some wonderment from economists. He had condemned supporters of some Reagan-era tax cuts as "charlatans and cranks" in the first edition of his basic economics textbook, and he had suggested replacing part of the income tax with higher taxes on gasoline - a nonstarter in this White House. But it's possible that the administration had few other options.

American workers at big companies used to think they had made a deal. They would be loyal to their employers, and the companies in turn would be loyal to them, guaranteeing job security, health care and a dignified retirement.

Such deals were, in a real sense, the basis of America's postwar social order. We like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists, not like those coddled Europeans with their oversized welfare states. But as Jacob Hacker of Yale points out in his book "The Divided Welfare State," if you add in corporate spending on health care and pensions - spending that is both regulated by the government and subsidized by tax breaks - we actually have a welfare state that's about as large relative to our economy as those of other advanced countries.

The resulting system is imperfect: those who don't work for companies with good benefits are, in effect, second-class citizens. Still, the system more or less worked for several decades after World War II.

The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle.

They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.

Embattled White House aides have begun to believe President Bush must take the reins personally if his evaporating agenda and credibility are to be salvaged.

"We're just plodding along," admitted a senior Bush aide from deep within the West Wing bunker. "It's up to the President to turn things around now."

Even as his poll numbers tank, however, Bush is described by aides as still determined to stay the course. He resists advice from Republicans who fear disaster in next year's congressional elections, and rejects criticism from a media establishment he disdains.

"The President has always been willing to make changes," the senior aide said, "but not because someone in this town tells him to - NEVER!"

For the moment, Bush has dismissed discreetly offered advice from friends and loyalists to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and bring back longtime confidant Karen Hughes from the State Department to shore up his personal White House staff.

"He thinks that would be an admission he's screwed up, and he can't bring himself to do that," a former senior staffer lamented.

So aides have circled the wagons as Bush's woes mount, partly hoping they can sell the President on a December blitz of media interviews to help turn the tide.

"The staff basically still has an unyielding belief in the wisdom of what they're doing," a close Bush confidant said. "They're talking to people who could help them, but they're not listening."

BLITZER: But this has become, your suggesting, a religious thing for him? HERSH: Some people think it is. Other people think he's absolutely committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He's been sold on this notion.

He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change.

I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy.

We have generals that do not like -- anymore -- they're worried about speaking truth to power. You know that. I mean that's -- Murtha in fact, John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, which most people don't know, has tremendous contacts with the senior generals of the armies. He's a ranking old war horse in Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The generals know him and like him. His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. They know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them.

And if you're a general and you have a disagreement with this war, you cannot get that message into the White House. And that gets people unnerved.

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding."

Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don't want to sound like I'm off the wall here. But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able -- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years.

He talks about being judged in 20 years to his friends. And so it's a little alarming because that means that my and my colleagues in the press corps, we can't get to him maybe with our views. You and you can't get to him maybe with your interviews.

How do you get to a guy to convince him that perhaps he's not going the right way?

Jack Murtha certainly didn't do it. As I wrote, they were enraged at Murtha in the White House.

And so we have an election coming up -- Yes. I've had people talk to me about maybe Congress is going to have to cut off the budget for this war if it gets to that point. I don't think they're ready to do it now.

But I'm talking about sort of a crisis of management. That you have a management that's seen by some of the people closely involved as not being able to function in terms of getting information it doesn't want to receive.

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an
Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.

It also signaled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.

The statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year "in large numbers."

According to Biden, the United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and "a significant number" of the remaining 100,000 the year after.

The blueprint also calls for leaving only an unspecified "small force" either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents, if necessary.

Less than two weeks ago, McClellan blasted Democratic Representative John Murtha, saying that by calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the congressman was "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore," a stridently anti-war Hollywood filmmaker.

Biden's ideas, relayed first in a November 21 speech in New York, however, got a much friendlier reception.

Boston set off a furor this week when it officially renamed a giant tree erected in a city park a "holiday tree" instead of a "Christmas tree."

The move drew an angry response from Christian conservatives, including evangelist Jerry Falwell who heckled Boston officials and pressed the city to change the name back.

"There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas," Falwell told Fox Television.

The Nova Scotia logger who cut down the 48-foot (14-meter) tree was indignant and said he would not have donated the tree if he had known of the name change.

"I'd have cut it down and put it through the chipper," Donnie Hatt told a Canadian newspaper. "If they decide it should be a holiday tree, I'll tell them to send it back. If it was a holiday tree, you might as well put it up at Easter."

Falwell and the conservative Liberty Counsel led a campaign that threatened to sue anyone who spreads what they see as misinformation about Christmas celebrations in public spaces.

The controversy reflects the legal vulnerability of city and state governments over taxpayer-funded displays of religious icons and concern over crossing the line in the separation between church and state.

Long before the advent of Christianity, plants and trees that remained green all year had a special meaning for people in the winter. Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. In many countries it was believed that evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness.

In the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year falls on December 21 or December 22 and is called the winter solstice. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and that winter came every year because the sun god had become sick and weak. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun god would begin to get well. Evergreen boughs reminded them of all the green plants that would grow again when the sun god was strong and summer would return.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a blazing disk in his crown. At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from the illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palm rushes which symbolized for them the triumph of life over death.

Early Romans marked the solstice with a feast called the Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon farms and orchards would be green and fruitful. To mark the occasion, they decorated their homes and temples with evergreen boughs.

In Northern Europe the mysterious Druids, the priests of the ancient Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreen boughs as a symbol of everlasting life. The fierce Vikings in Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder.

Why the big change between now and then? Many reasons. But there's one particular reason that students seem reluctant (some even scared) to talk or think about. In those long-ago days, more college women used to plan on staying home to rear children. Those women had other goals than careers in mind, by definition. They saw learning as worth having for its own sake; otherwise why bother with a college education, if you weren't planning on a big-deal career? (There were social reasons, of course — such as finding a husband. But social reasons don't explain why so many of those students who planned on being mothers rather than CEOs took hard courses, did well and wound up at the top of their classes.)

In the days when many college-trained women stayed home to rear children, the nation as a whole devoted a significant fraction of all its college-trained worker-hours to childrearing. This necessarily affected society's attitude toward money and careers. A society that applauds a highly educated woman's decision to rear children instead of making money obviously believes that, under some circumstances, childrearing is more important than moneymaking. No one thought women were incapable of earning money if they wanted or needed to: Childrearing versus moneymaking was a genuine choice.

In those days, liberals looked down on corporations and careerism. In fact, society at large did. "The Organization Man," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" were all about the silliness (or, to be less polite, the stupidity) of U.S. corporate culture. Deans pleaded with their students to treasure learning for its own sake.

But all that changed with feminism's decision to champion the powerful and successful working woman. Nowadays, feminists and many liberals are delighted when women make careers in large corporations, which are still the road to riches and power in this country.

No doubt contempt for the corporation was overdone back then, just as corporation worship is today. In any event, college deans tell their students nowadays (especially women, but men can't help overhearing): Go out there and make money! Get power! Build those careers!

The Vatican says sexually active homosexuals and those who support "gay culture" are unwelcome in the priesthood unless the candidate has overcome homosexual tendencies for at least three years, according to a church document posted on the Internet by an Italian Catholic news agency.

The long-awaited document is scheduled to be released by the Vatican next Tuesday. A church official who has read the document confirmed the authenticity of the Internet posting by the Adista news agency.

The document said that "the Church, while deeply respecting the people in question, cannot admit to the seminary and the sacred orders those who practice homosexuality, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support so-called gay culture."

"Those people find themselves, in fact, in a situation that presents a grave obstacle to a correct relationship with men and women. One cannot ignore the negative consequences that can stem from the ordination of people with deeply rooted homosexual tendencies," it said.

Moominmamma hurried off to pack. She collected blankets, sauce-pans, birch-bark, a coffee-pot, masses of food, suntan-oil, matches, and everything you can eat out of, on or with. She packed it all with an umbrella, warm clothes, tummy-ache medicine, an egg-whisk, cushions, a mosquito-net, bathing-drawers and a table cloth in her bag. She bustled to and fro racking her brains for anything she had forgotten, and at last she said: "Now, it's ready! Oh, how lovely it will be to have a rest by the sea!"

Moominpappa packed his pipe and fishing-rod.

"Well, are you all ready?" he asked, "and are you sure you haven't forgotten anything? All right, let's start!"

Campus newspapers aren't generally known for making waves inside the Beltway. Recently, however, the Daily Princetonian published a story that merits attention from senators gearing up for the confirmation hearings of Samuel Alito, George W. Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." Lamented Cullom Davis: "I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed." Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that "the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" in recent years--Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969--and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a "sex-blind" policy "removing limits on the number of women." In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy."

An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin, which is slated for the National Museum of Australia later this decade, has failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution.

The entire $US3 million ($1.7 million) cost of Darwin, which opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the weekend, is instead being borne by wealthy individuals and private donations.

The failure of American companies to back the exhibition reflects the growing influence of fundamentalist Christians, who are among President George Bush's most vocal supporters, in all walks of life in the US.

While the Darwin exhibition, which features a live Galapagos tortoise, has been unable to find a business backer, the Creationist Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, which takes literally the Bible's account of creation, has recently raised $7 million in donations.

In a ceremony mixing solemnity with a bit of humor, Germany's parliament today elected the conservative party leader Angela Merkel to the post of chancellor, making her the first woman to head a German government and the first chancellor to grow up under the Communist regime of the former East Germany.

Kathleen brings a breadth of professional experience, as well as a strong science background and passion for women's health, to her new position," acting FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach said in a statement.

A family physician and clinical pharmacologist by training, Uhl joined the FDA in 1988 and has held a variety of jobs reviewing the safety of drugs, devices and other products. Most recently, she has been leading an office that is trying to improve warning labels for women who are pregnant or lactating.

There were calls for Downing Street to publish the transcript of a conversation between Tony Blair and US President George Bush, amid claims that the Prime Minister persuaded Mr Bush not to launch a military strike on a TV station in a friendly Arab state.

According to unnamed sources quoted in the Daily Mirror, the memo - stamped Top Secret - records Mr Bush suggesting that he might order the bombing of Al-Jazeera's studios in Qatar.

And it allegedly details how Mr Blair argued against an attack on the station's buildings in the business district of Doha, the capital city of Qatar, which is a key ally of the West in the Persian Gulf.

Al-Jazeera had sparked the anger of the US administration by broadcasting video messages from al Qaida head Osama bin Laden and leaders of the insurgency in Iraq, as well as showing footage of the bodies of US servicemen and Iraqi civilians killed in fighting.

...more than a quarter (26%) of those asked said that they thought a women was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, and more than one in five (22%) held the same view if a woman had had many sexual partners.

Around one in 12 people (8%) believed that a woman was totally responsible for being raped if she'd had many sexual partners.

Similarly, more than a quarter of people (30%) said that a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was drunk, and more than a third (37%) held the same view if the woman had failed to clearly say "no" to the man.

Vice President Cheney made a striking claim a few minutes ago at the American Enterprise Institute:

Those who advocate a sudden withdraw from Iraq should answer a couple simple questions. Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with Zarqawi, Bin Laden and Zawahiri in control Iraq? Would we be safer or less safe with Iraq ruled by men intent upon the destruction of our country.

Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging? He guessed that "men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." I had occasion to think about that yesterday. One thing Kevin failed to note is that male attacks on women are not so much of a food fight as a sex fight. Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

House Republican leaders scored a narrow, hard-fought victory by passing a sweeping bill to reduce federal spending over the next five years early Friday morning without the support of one Democrat.

Senate Republicans beat back Democratic attempts to use the bill to pinch oil and energy companies that have been reporting record profits while consumers pay high gasoline prices, efforts that reflected sensitivity on Capitol Hill to high gasoline prices and fears of skyrocketing home heating costs this winter.

The largest oil companies, nevertheless, would be hit with about $4.3 billion in taxes through a change in accounting methods. That provision drew a veto threat from the White House and upset some Western Republicans, who deemed it an unfair and political attack on the energy industry.

"Is it a windfall tax by another name?" said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

The Senate defeated a Democratic effort to impose a temporary windfall profits tax, 50 percent on the sale of oil over $40 a barrel, on profits not reinvested in increasing domestic oil and gas supplies. The money would have been returned to energy consumers through an income tax rebate. A 64-35 procedural vote defeated the effort.

'Who has all the pain?'
"The major integrated oil companies have all of the gain. Who has all the pain?" asked Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who then answered his own question: "All the American people who are trying to pay for the price of a tankful of gas or trying to figure out how they are going to heat their home in the winter."

The Senate also defeated an amendment to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to fund a low-income heating assistance program.

Senator John Kerry says losing last year's election hasn't soured him on wanting to be president.
Asked if he wanted to run again in 2008, Kerry says it's too early to say. But he added: (quote) "Would I like to be president? Yes, obviously."

Stupid, smug woman comments on blogs

Stupid, smug man comments on blogs

Stupid, smug Amy comments on blogs?

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.