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The next couple of nights are very full. Just as well, since Pickerhead will be traveling and posting is uncertain for Christmas day and Wednesday. Lots of good stuff both nights.
Jeff Jacoby on the Muslim war against women. We lead with this because tomorrow we honor Mary with Ladies’ Day. A day when all contributors will be female. This will be a perfect example of one of the reasons the Islamic world is so backward, since half the citizens are not allowed to fully participate in their culture. Of course, don’t look for the left-leaning ladies of NOW, or any other part of the West’s “feminist” movement to protest the treatment of Muslim women.
THE “QATIF GIRL” won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan’s president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in nonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every “Qatif girl” or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes. …
Mark reviews the candidates’ Christmas ads.
This guy Huckabee is some kind of genius. A week ago, you had to be the pope or the queen to do your own big televised Christmas message. But now, since Huck climbed into his red sweater and hired George Lucas to do the notorious “floating cross” effect, every single-digit nickel ‘n’ dime presidential candidate is donning his gay apparel and trolling the ancient Yuletide carol. I haven’t seen so much festive knitwear since “The Andy Williams Christmas Show” 1973.
In seasonal market-share terms, the former Arkansas governor remains the Huckabing Crosby, the pioneer in whose footsteps all others scamper to play Perry Como and Harry Belafonte. Barack Obama’s message is warm and fuzzy and carefully poised, with one of his kids saying “Merry Christmas” and the other “Happy Holidays.” If he had a third, she’d presumably be wishing you a hearty Kwanzaa or or hailing Bob Kerrey with a cheery “Allahu Akbar!”
Ron Paul is the only candidate with the courage to be filmed in front of an artificial tree. Hmm.
In Sen. Clinton’s Christmas message, Hillary is bundling up presents for all of us. They’re beautifully wrapped, but oddly, instead of putting the name of the intended recipient on the gift tag, she’s written out what’s in them: “Universal Health Care,” “Alternative Energy,” “Middle-Class Tax Cuts.” Strange. “Where did I put ‘Universal Pre-K’?” she says. “Ah, there it is.” If you thought Christmas at the mall was too materialistic, this is bonanza time. Message: It Takes A Santa’s Village Staffed By Unionized Government Elves To Raise A Child, and I’m Santa and you’re gonna need a much bigger chimney for all the federal entitlements I’ll be tossing down there. Your stocking’s gonna be packed tighter than Monica in fishnets.
And yet it’s a strangely cheerless message. Less Santa than Frosty the Snowqueen. …
John Podhoretz puts polls in context.
… Turnout in the Iowa caucuses is expected to be somewhere around…this is serious…five percent. That means five percent of the state’s universe of Republicans will attend a Republican caucus meeting, and five percent of the state’s Democrats will attend a Democratic caucus meeting. According to Blumenthal of pollster.com, “The historical high for turnout in the Iowa Caucuses was 5.5% of adults for the Democrats in 2004 and 5.3% of adults for the Republicans in 1988.â€
Now here’s what this means. For a poll to achieve a measurable degree of scientific accuracy, a pollster “would need to screen out nineteen out of twenty otherwise willing adults in order to interview a combined population of Democratic and Republican caucusgoers strictly comparable in size to past caucus turnouts.†Because no pollster can afford to do such a thing — to reach thousands of people and then discard the results from 95 percent of the phone calls — each polling firm has to come up with its own theory of how best to locate and identify likely voters in sufficient numbers. That’s why, Blumenthal says, the results of each poll vary so wildly. …
The Captain posts on the chance Bush might kill a lot of the earmarks.
The omnibus spending bill made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue this week, and it could have slid all the way down on the grease it contains from over 9,000 earmarks. In remarks yesterday, George Bush warned that his budget director will look at ways to eliminate wasteful spending, and thanks to Congressional dishonesty, he may have a way to do it:
The White House threatened yesterday to cancel thousands of pet projects that Congress inserted into a massive spending bill before leaving town this week, a move that could provoke a fierce battle with lawmakers in both parties who jealously guard their ability to steer money to favored purposes. …
And he has the goods on the media Iraq bias.
Pew Research Center issued a stinging indictment on Wednesday regarding the press coverage of Iraq this year, one that shows a subtle but clear editorial bias. The news media gave plenty of attention to the war in Iraq when they could show it as a failing enterprise, with half of all their coverage focusing on anecdotal stories of violence. When the success of General David Petraeus made even that coverage difficult, media outlets simply stopped reporting on Iraq (via Wake Up America): …
He also posts on the Bill Clinton column from Gene Robinson.
… reporters who have tallied his words say that he talks more about himself than about his wife — at a ratio of about 9 to 1.
And Michael Goodwin says to Bill Clinton, “It’s about Hillary, stupid!”
Something was bugging me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it hit me. While I was reading about the campaign, the realization came like a thunderbolt: I’m tired of Bill Clinton.
Tired of his half-truths and full lies about where he stood on Iraq. Tired of his bull, as when he says he’d campaign for Hillary “if we weren’t married” and calls her a “world-class genius.” Tired of his whining, as when he says the media has been too tough on her and too soft on Barack Obama.
All of this is as real as the lovey-dovey, hug-and-smile photo ops of them in Iowa. It’s theater, staged for maximum political impact. We’re being played again on the two-for-the-price-of-one angle.
But, as always, the game for him is about him. A vote for her is a vote for him. Vanity is a big part of it, with her victory the succession legacy he was denied when Al Gore lost.
All true, but I fear there is more to it now. He wants to be The Man, again. He wants it so much that it’s not clear which President Clinton would be the President. The way he hogs the spotlight, the way he’s trotted out to rescue her when she’s in trouble and the way he sets the talking points mark him as the lead dog in the Clinton pack. Would he also make the decisions in the White House? All of them? Some of them? …
Power Line has another Clinton post.
One of the things that makes the Clintons such tiresome public figures is the low opinion in which they hold the American people. They know they’re incredibly smart and they think we’re incredibly stupid. The credulity of the press has frequently confirmed the Clintons’ perceptions of the American people.
To some extent, however, the spell is wearing off this year, as the Clintons’ calculations have become so transparent. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports, for example, with a mocking headline, “Gee, what a coincidence on the trail with Clinton.” Don Frederick and Andrew Malcolm write: …
Michael Barone has an overview of the GOP field.
… the preference for smaller rather than larger government is not as ample as it used to be. The strongest case against big government has been its failures in the 1970s, typified by gas lines and stagflation. But the median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1964, so he or she never sat in those gas lines or struggled to pay rising bills with a paycheck eroded by inflation. That demographic factor helps explain why Democrats today are promising big-government programs, unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, when the median-age voter remembered the 1970s very well.
America has enjoyed low-inflation economic growth for 95 percent of the 2008 median-age voter’s adult life. This is a record unique in history, which neither party is addressing particularly well. Democrats promise tax increases on at least some high earners (by not extending the Bush tax cuts past 2010), though tax increases are not the usual prescription for an economy that may be headed toward recession.
Republicans, facing an electorate half of which doesn’t remember the 1970s and most of which has not appreciated the generally good economy we’ve had since 2001, have yet to muster persuasive arguments for their policies.
WSJ op-ed explains why all the religious stuff is poaching on this week’s celebrations.
Christmas famously “comes but once a year.” In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, “Silent Night” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Jingle Bells” is quite another.
But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused. Religious Christians condemn taking “the Christ out of Christmas,” while First Amendment absolutists see a threat to the separation of church and state in every poinsettia on public property and school dramatization of “A Christmas Carol.”
A little history can clear things up. …
Fluorescent foolishness from feds.
A New Yorker cartoon from several years ago shows a vast, cubicle-filled office, with a manager explaining that the “dim fluorescent lighting is meant to emphasize the general absence of hope.”
Fluorescents aren’t all that bad. In fact, they’ve steadily gained market share in recent years. But from now on their popularity will rest not on consumer preferences, but on the force of law. If there’s anything about fluorescents that involves the general absence of hope, it’s that Congress has been able to mandate them with so little opposition. …
NY Times says somethings are on the job keeping rodents away from delis and bodegas in NY. Or course the government creeps are not happy.
Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.
Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.
When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish. …
… But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses. …
Country Store posts on inconvenient incandescent illumination.
The last time the Donks controlled Congress we got the Gore-Toilet, the wimp flusher that saved no water because it required extra flushes and led to toilet smuggling. Well, the Donks are back in control of Congress and guess what? Now it’s Gore-bulbs: …