Merry Christmas!

Mia just told us this was the best Christmas ever. Of course, her standards are pretty low. Every time we have pizza she says that was the best pizza ever. Hamburgers - same thing. But still, I think it went well. She's painting on her new easel right now.

This was the first Christmas that she could grasp the concept of Santa and I think we pulled it off. She was really excited when she went to bed last night.

Well, we still have lots of family to visit so I probably won't be blogging until after New Year's.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Manners

Since I explained to her that she gets presents from Santa and her family, Mia has been talking non-stop about who is giving her presents. Is oma? Yes. Is Aunt Kelley? Yes. Is Santa? Yes. Is Grandma? Yes.

Well, we're going to see grandma today, so I told her not to ask for a present right when we walk in the door:

Me: Grandma will give you a present. But don't ask for it.

Mia: Why?

Me: It's not polite to ask people for presents.

Mia: I asked Santa.

Me: Uh, yes, well, uh it's OK to ask Santa, but no one else.

Discrimination or Common Sense?

Seems that Qantas and Air New Zealand have caused quite a ruckus down-under. Both airlines have a policy of not seating an unaccompanied child next to an adult male. This strikes me as a common sense precaution. Some 95% of child molesters are male. If you're rolling the dice by sending a child on a long journey alone, why not up the odds of a safe arrival by seating the kid next to a woman?

But no. Mark Worsley was offended. Now right-wing politicians are up in arms about the "war on men" and left-wing politicians are in a tizzy about equal rights violations. Since this is one thing the two sides can agree on, odds are this policy has seen it's last days.

Sure, the vast majority of men aren't dangerous to children. Of course, it's even less likely that a man will blow up the airplane he's riding in, yet he still has to submit his shoes to a search. On the off chance. Can't be too careful. Better safe than sorry. And so forth. Was Mr. Worsley just as horrified that he was considered a potential terrorist?

Can't this guy just suck it up and switch seats? You know... for the children.

Oh, Fetus Tree, Oh Fetus Tree

Okay, is it stranger to decorate a Christmas tree with baby dolls representing 11-12 week old fetuses, or to be shocked and offended by said baby dolls? Perhaps the strangest thing of all is to run a new segment on the "Fetus Ornaments Controversy."

A Major, Major Turn

John Burns of the NY Times tells The Newshour:

They want an American military withdrawal, but as I heard it expressed today they don't want it to be precipitous, I'm talking about the Sunni Arabs now. They want it to be staged so that political stability here is created.

I said to one man, it sounds very much as though you have been listening to President Bush. And he laughed and he said, Bush's formula would be fine with us -- so a major, major turn here.

And this:

My reading amongst the mood of the Sunnis who voted was that what they want is well within the reach of what the American command here, the American diplomats, feel should be offered to them over the next several months as a new government is formed.

Does Carl "The Sunni's aren't on board" Levin know about this?

(Via Tim Blair)

Participatory Dictatorship

From Jay Nordlinger:

Okay, I’m holding in my hands a new book, about East Germany. The author is Mary Fulbrook, a history professor at University College London. The book is called The People’s State: East Germany from Hitler to Honecker. (So far, so unpromising.) And here’s how the text on the jacket ends: “Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of ‘totalitarianism’ by the notion of a ‘participatory dictatorship’, this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.”

We like to say that Reagan won, but did he? In the universities, never! “Participatory dictatorship”! The cake is taken. Congratulations, Professor Fulbrook. Comrade Honecker would be so pleased.

I used to think communists and their fellow traveler's felt that they just needed one more chance (and one more, and one more) to get communism right. Apparently, many of them thought they had it right all along. (Via Betsy's Page)

Bush on the latest breach of national security

(Via LGF) Byron York posts the text of Bush's radio address in The Corner:

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.

I must say that whenever I bother to check into one of these "disturbing allegations", it turns out there's no there there. Turns out the "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States" being surveiled are those with "known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations". And it turns out that our rouge president and his NSA have briefed Congressional leaders "more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it".

Munich

Jason at Libertas has a post about Spielberg's latest. He includes the full text of David Brooks' op-ed on the movie:

This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent.

But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.

There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg’s fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.

Which is odd, since those murderous fanatics work so hard to get noticed. Yet, so many in the West work over-time to excuse or ignore them.

Yet more sickness

My Mia, not Ahmadinejad. I'm trying not to turn this into the Vomit Blog, but... I lost my second bedspread in a week last night at midnight. So, today has been all laundry, no bloggy.

We know that Bush is extending his fascist empire

across the globe through the use of America's Imperial War Machine. So, why can't anyone seem to get a decent picture of American soldiers? According to John Kerry, any Iraqi child could snap a picture of one, what with them constantly rampaging through Iraqi houses.

Update: Great comment at Medienkritik: "Spiegel's mistake is certainly understandable. The United States takes all its actions unilaterally. Therefore every soldier you see in a picture by definition has to be American."

analogy with the word woo

That's what someone from Poland was Googling when they found my blog. Somehow, I don't think they found satisfaction.

But on the bright side: Someone from Poland visited my blog. Cool.

Viva La Merchandise...

To rip off a great T-shirt slogan. I get why Che sells T-shirts. Most kids wearing the shirts are way too young to remember his crimes and way too vacuous to care. Long wavy hair. Stickin' it to the man. What more can you ask for in teenage rebellion-wear?

But Erich Honecker? Selling shower gel?














Yeah, that was gonna work.

(Via Observing Hermann, great German culture blog)

Charles Crawford: Closet Anti-Idiotarian

Charles Crawford, British Ambassador to Poland, was exposed, through a leaked e-mail, as an intelligent man with a good sense of humor. He calls the Common Agricultural Policy:

...a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

Ouch. (via The Corner)

Perry DeHavilland is outraged: "Yes, this guy should indeed be fired from his job as an ambassador... he belongs in 10 Downing Street doing Tony Blair's job!"

Nick Schultz to Jonah Goldberg: "There’s a lot of blame to go around in the trade game (and developing countries have their own harmful protectionist policies). But France is risking scuttling the entire poverty-alleviating global trade system to protect 1% of its total wealth. It is one of the most evil government policies known in the history of man. Your ambassador friend is right." More on that 1% figure here.

German-American Relations

The Carnival of German-American Relations is up and it's full of good stuff.

Priorities

I like this from Ace:

Bush demands objective goals be met, and then he hopes for a fairly quick withdrawal. While the Democrats demand a fairly quick withdrawal, and hope that objective military goals will be achieved by the Iraqis.

That seems accurate, at least as it describes the Dean-Murtha-Pelosi-Kerry contingent. Even though the Dem leadership claims their position isn't that different from Bush's every time they're called on it, this seems like a pretty big difference to me.

Making Children's Lit Safe For Children

We've all heard about HarperCollins airbrushing the cigarette from the phots of the illustrator in a new edition of Goodnight Moon. Karen Karbo suggests ways to make this classic even safer for the kiddos.

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

I thought It Was Just Me...

who was unimpressed by the new pseudoephedrine-free decongestants. But Rob at Fortress of Solitude has a low opinion of the new NyQuil. (Via The Consumerist)

The other day, I got carded at Wal-Mart buying cold medicine for Mia. The computer made the cashier verify that I was over 18. What? From what I pick up watching the news, most meth makers are well over 18. And don't they just steal the stuff anyway? Keeping it in the pharmacy at least makes sense as a theft control measure.

I've posted before on the silliness of these laws that only inconvenience the law-abiding. Criminals are all about ignoring the law, after all.

Update: Stephen Green, also not happy to loose Nyquil.

Snow Day!

There's at least a foot of snow out there. And let me tell you, snow is much more beautiful when you don't have to drive anywhere in it. Mia's home from school today because of the weather. That's no surprise. They close the schools around here for a few inches of snow. The big news is that the university is closed. When I worked there, we joked that they only closed up when the chancellor couldn't make it to campus. (The chancellor lives on campus.)

The Perfect Democrat Movie

Jason at Libertas fisks a review of the Showtime movie Homecoming, where the dead rise to vote Democrat. No, really.

Joe Leiberman keeps reminding my why I left the Democrats

By that I mean that every time he speaks, like in his recent WSJ editorial, he reminds me of what I thought the Democrats were, back when I considered myself one. And then via Instapundit, I see that the arbiter of all things leftist thinks Lieberman is "corrossive to Democratic unity" and can't wait to rid the Democratic party of him.

And that is when I switched sides. When I realized that Joe Lieberman was the only person in the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic party. That the party base actively wants to get rid of him tells me I was right. He's waaaay in the minority over there.

Update: As if on cue, here comes Chairman of the DNC, Howard Dean, saying we cannot win in Iraq. Of course, it's all about Vietnam. Then he gets clever:

He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.

Redeployment to where? Seems he didn't say. I thought Murtha was just confused when I heard him with Katie Couric this morning. For awhile, I thought Katie had him on the ropes, but now I suspect that his argument is so weak that Katie couldn't help but poke holes in it. He seems to be saying "There's lots of trouble in Iraq. We should move our boys out of the way, to a neighboring country. Then they could go back in if there were trouble." Umm, the kind of trouble you want to run from now, or some other kind of trouble that would be worth fighting.

But apparently this is Democratic foreign policy. Dean again:

And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion.

So, it's all our fault that Zarqawi is in Iraq, so we need to move our troops out of Iraq...to fight Zarqawi.

And then they wonder why no one takes them seriously.

(Via Ace)

What is it about Asian Women...

that drives lefties nuts? From Derbyshire:

Since one of the lefty bloggers posted that picture of my wife & I on our wedding day -- Rosie at that point a 23-yr-old working professional woman with a university degree -- you'd be surprised how many mocking, scornful, and downright rude e-mails I have had from sensitive lefty feminist anti-racist souls. Keywords: "mail-order bride," "jailbait," "cradle robber," etc. etc.

The Holiday Tree

Bookworm makes a good point about the concept of a "Holdiay" Tree:

What I also found entirely silly is the ignorance behind the holiday tree. No other winter religious celebration (Hannukah, Kwanzaa) has a tree as its centerpiece. The only one that does is Christmas, which celebrates, yes, Christ's birth. That is, it's a Christian holiday. To take a tree whose only symbolism is manifestly Christian, and to pretend it's just a holiday tree when no other holidays include the tree is so ill-informed.

Is this like what the early Catholic Church did when they co-opted pagan customs and mixed them in with Christian celebrations? Have we gone from "See, you can have all your old pagan fun and still be Christians" to "See you can still have all you Christian imagery without all that pesky religion?"