According to The Corner.

In a heretofore unseen two flashing gumball light announcement, Drudge adds, "SADDAM: THE END... Saddam Hussein executed by hanging, according to Iraqi media reports. More soon...."

As Mona Charen wrote when Saddam was captured by the US three years ago:

Adolf Hitler deprived the Allies of the satisfaction of executing him. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Pol Pot died of natural causes. But Saddam Hussein, that vicious, depraved worm of a man, was plucked from his rathole. Ah the great warrior. The author of the Mother of All Battles. The man who claimed he would drive the "invaders" from Iraq. The man who forced thousands of Iraqis to sacrifice their lives so he could continue his squalid and luxurious spree in his many palaces.
This modern-day Saladin (another of his conceits) didn't even have the courage to kill himself in the end, but submitted meekly, with an offer to "negotiate."

I'd say negotiations have successfully been concluded.

Ed Morrissey adds:

Three Arabic news stations and MS-NBC are broadcasting the report that Saddam Hussein has been executed this evening, right around 10 pm ET.

Right now, without any text reports, MS-NBC is telling viewers that a delegation of seven witnesses saw Saddam hung a few minutes ago. The witnesses included members of the tribunal that convicted and sentenced him as well as a doctor to declare him dead. They also report that the Iraqi government recorded the event, and that the images and/or video will eventually be released to demonstrate that the former dictator and genocidal monster has truly died.

For a brief overview of Saddam's blood-soaked curriculum vitae, click here and here.

Not surprisingly, Pajamas HQ has an extensive round-up of links.

Tim Blair notes that "Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Hassan and former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court Awad Bandar were also executed", and links to a quip by Mark Steyn:

“Just in time for Eid, the Iraqis decided Saddam Hussein was one old acquaintance who really should be forgot.”

But not by former Iraqis now living in Dearborn, Michigan, who are thrilled that their former tormentor is currently receiving his final judgment. As are Iraqis much closer to the situation, according to Ed Morrissey:

MSNBC, which I'm forced to watch in my hotel room, now reports that the Iraqi witnesses to the execution were cheering and dancing around the body of Saddam Hussein.

Can't say I blame them.

Michelle Malkin includes a screen-capture of the handsome send-off CNN is giving Saddam on their homepage, and writes:

Lots of readers are peeved by CNN's memorial tribute to Saddam. Reader Roger writes, "Did Gerald Ford get this much respect on CNN's home page?"

No, of course not. But Jerry just didn't have that radical chic joie de vivre that Hussein had amongst CNN and its own totalitarian-admiring founder, Ted Turner. As for the other American television networks and Saddam, for a flashback as to how ABC and NBC breathlessly covered Saddam's "elections" (in which he routinely received 99.9 percent of the vote), click here. As for CBS, who could forget Dan Rather's infamously cozy early 2003 interview with Saddam, only one month before Saddam was finally, mercifully driven out of power and into his spider hole, by the US.

Compare Michelle's screen capture of CNN's homepage with the graphic that populist champion Fox News is currently using on theirs. Meanwhile, Confederate Yankee explores "What Passes For Intellectual From--where else?--the Huffington Post".

Jules Crittenden, city editor at the Boston Herald, is that seemingly rare commodity these days--a newspaperman who gets it:

CNN reports a witness described "fear on his face." Good. We already knew he was a coward, and we know how many deaths a coward dies.

I've filled my shot brass and raised it. Don't be shy about raising a glass yourself. The world is a better place rid of this filthy murderer.

Indeed.

Hot Air dubs this "your quote of the year":

Witnesses to the execution told NBC News’ Richard Engel that they were cheering around the body of Saddam after the execution.

NBC could hear cheers and celebrations in the background while talking to an official in the prime minister’s office.

“This son of a bitch is lying under my feet...I can’t talk now because of all the cheers!" a witness said.

But, gosh, only four years ago, NBC and ABC told me Saddam was beloved by his people.

Heh--Hugh Hewitt adds that Saddam should have filed his appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Why didn't Ramsey "Jesus was a terrorist" Clark think of that?!

Last Update: "‘I Saw Fear, He Was Afraid’--In a NEWSWEEK exclusive, the man hired to videotape Saddam Hussein’s execution recalls the brutal dictator’s humble final moments", one of which is currently shown at the top of The Drudge Report.

Tammy Bruce writes that the networks are "wringing their [hands] over whether or not to show any part of the Saddam execution video. I find this sudden concern, on CNN and Viacom's part especially, about showing an execution to be slightly disingenuous":

Astounding, isn't it? Here's CNN, which had absolutely no problem airing terrorist propaganda featuring their murder of our troops, and yet they struggle with airing a hooded mass murderer being hung. Why is that? Because it will be an image which reminds Americans that progress has been made, and is an undeniable reminder that justice for Saddam's million-plus victims was made possible by the USA. Today's leftist media, CNN in particular, are loathe to resent it. It has nothing to do with decency, They've already exposed their inherent indecency when they worked with terrorists and aired our loved ones being murdered. This is about their deliberate agenda and how images of a dispatched Saddam does not help them.

Oh, I wonder if CNN struggled with it's Watch-the-Iraqi-Sniper-Kill-An-American on demand video. I'm guessing, probably not.

It's not the first time that they've demonstrated such a double-standard, (UPDATE: and here's a very similar double-standard by CBS in action) and it's a reminder of how politicized the news industry has come since the days of Ben Hecht's The Front Page, with a plot that hinged on reporters doing their damnedest to smuggle out a death-row interview of a soon-to-be executed convicted murderer.

The original "if it bleeds it leads" school of tabloid journalism that inspired Hecht's play (and its innumerable movie versions through the years) was at least far more honest with its objectives--selling newspapers, any way possible--than today's journalists. Or as James Lileks once wrote:

The first question in any J-school application ought to be “do you want to change the world?” And anyone who answers yes gets kindly turned away. Your job is to describe the way the world changes. Not pretend you’re there to nudge it along towards utopia.

Or to oppose change when you didn't vote for the man causing it.

Update: More on CNN and Saddam's execution in the next post.

It's apparently on for 10:00 PM EST tonight; Hot Air has the details as they emerge.

Elsewhere, Dean Barnett writes that the New York Times--surprise!--question its timing:

What’s especially odd about the Times’ editorial is that it doesn’t take issue with Saddam getting the death penalty. The Grey Lady’s only beef is the alleged haste with which the penalty is being meted out.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE that the Times’ editorialists are this obtuse. I’m sorry – while I have an appropriate and indeed awed respect for their determined imbecility, I can’t believe that they really think that this is all happening too fast. After all, there had to be a day of decision and a day of action. By any reasonable accounting, the appropriate moment for both such days is long overdue.

The Timesmen make their agenda clear in the editorial’s final paragraph:

Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.

So true. Executing Saddam also won’t “automatically create” a solvent Social Security System or a perpetual motion machine. So why bother?

The truth is this: If anything might create the appearance that the Bush administration actually accomplished something, the Times opposes it. Regardless of whether it’s just, right or fair.

How pathetic. And how sadly unsurprising.

As I said earlier today, Hypocrophobia strikes deep in the Victorian Gentleman.

While late-1960s milestones such as Walter Cronkite's calling the Tet Offensive an American loss, and Hollywood's shift towards nihilistic movies such as Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy were considered the early signs of a culture war between what was then called "the new left" and mainstream America, a significant moment also occurred on April 17th, 1976, when Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary, appeared on an episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the show's first season, to attempt to show that the Ford Administration had a sense of humor about itself, and the ribbing that SNL's Chevy Chase gave Ford about his occasional stumbles.

Nessen's appearance, along with a videotaped cameo of Ford saying, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night", marked perhaps the last time that most Republicans in office would ever fully trust the mainstream media. And even then, Nessen was concerned about being set-up by the show. What he didn't know was that the SNL production team had conceived a strategy of feinting left and running right, to paraphrase one of the show's then-writers, so that the sketches that Nessen appeared in were relatively tame. It was the rest of the show that was deliberately raunchy and over the top, even for SNL. Because, as Rosie Shuster, another of the show's writers, remarked, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

As Glenn Reynolds wrote earlier this week, "Personally, I think that Chevy Chase cost Ford the 1976 election. Well, part of it, anyway". But to understand exactly how badly SNL head-faked Nessen and Ford, here's the section devoted to Nessen's appearance of Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad's 1985 book on the early history of Saturday Night. (There's a lot of material below, which I scanned from my copy of Hill and Weingrad's book. I'm eschewing the usual block-texting so that it wouldn't all be in blue italics. And apologies in advance for any typos or missing words created by the OCR process.)

Read More »

Mary Katharine Ham takes a video tour of Things That Did Not Happen on the Duke Campus:

More thoughts from MKH on the Duke Lacrosse case, here.

What happens when the Victorian Gentleman gets a severe case of hypocrophobia? Diana West looks back at 2006:

Taking a whack at prognostication at the end of 2005, it wasn't hard to imagine, as I did, that 2006 would be a rotten year for freedom of speech. Both inside the Islamic world and, more alarmingly, outside the Islamic world, Shariah laws prohibiting criticism of Islam were already working smoothly. When in 2005 we watched the death-penalty-seeking prosecution of editor Ali Mohaqeq Nasab for "blasphemy" in U.S.-liberated Afghanistan, we could see we were dealing with a Shariah state. When in 2005 we watched the early stages of what later became known as "Cartoon Rage" in Denmark, we could see we were dealing with a Shariah state of mind. It wasn't exactly going out on a limb to predict things would only get worse.

And, of course, in 2006, they did.

Read the whole thing.

Stanley Kubrick bloopers, via Ann Althouse:

Libertas wonders why Mel Gibson's Apocalypto was singled out by Variety for its lack of box office "legs", when other, much more expensive productions aren't performing any better:

There are many disappointing box office stories to tell. Why this film (which exceeded expectations)? Why not the obvious ones? Variety can defend it’s choice by saying the article’s true. But that’s the last defense of the biased. Bias is more often found in what is and what is not covered. I’m no Gibson defender. I’m a bias hater. The real story this year is the poor box office results and audience rejection of left-leaning message films not disguised by animation.

I guess cocktail party invites are more important to Hollywood journalists than a real story.

Not to mention Hollywood entertainers versus actually producing entertaining movies.

This week, Austin Bay has an extended, one-on-one interview with Claudia Rosett on Kofi Anan, the Oil For Food Scandal, and the UN in general. It's great stuff, and very much worth a listen, particularly if you're not up to speed with incredible spadework that Claudia has performed to bring sunlight to the trainwreck that is the United Nations.

As this editorial in Opinion Journal notes, Gerald Ford arguably did as a good a job as possible, given the astonishingly weak hand he was dealt in the mid-1970s. As the Journal notes, the 1970s was the decade of "America's Suicide Attempt", as historian Paul Johnson dubbed it:

It is true that Ford was something of an accidental President, the only one in U.S. history never elected as either President or Vice President. Before Nixon picked him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as his Vice President, Ford had been contemplating retirement from his Grand Rapids, Michigan, House seat. But like another unlikely President from the Midwest, Harry Truman, he had reserves of honesty and fortitude that served him well.

He made a particular contribution in pardoning Nixon, though he knew Nixon's enemies would accuse him of a quid pro quo. The decision cost him dearly in the polls and may have cost him the election in 1976, but it also spared the country from years of division over a criminal trial that special prosecutor Leon Jaworski seemed determined to pursue.

Congress had trampled over a weakened Nixon, and another Ford contribution was restoring some measure of executive authority. Far more than Nixon, he used his veto pen (66 times in 895 days), blunting liberal excesses after Democrats picked up 46 House seats in 1974. He also deserves credit for resisting the isolationism that was rampant as the Vietnam War wound down. It was a rare period in postwar U.S. history when the public favored spending less on defense.

Democrats exploited the mood in early 1975 to block Ford's funding request for our allies in South Vietnam, as the North began its offensive. Ford pleaded with Congress that "American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally," but to no avail. Saigon fell by April, and the boat people and massacres in Southeast Asia soon followed. Thus one irony of this week's praise for Ford as a unifying President: At the time, he was mocked as clumsy and dull, and he was vilified for blocking Congressional priorities. Any of this sound familiar?

Yes--with the exception of villifying Richard Nixon (whose paranoia helped furnish his own noose), the playbook of the left for attacking Republican presidents has changed little since the days of Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, and certainly since Ike in the 1950s.

And incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is living up to it; apparently he'd rather be exploring Inca ruins in South America than attending a former president's funeral. And Jules Crittenden writes:

Last night we saw that Wonkette couldn't wait for the funeral to start bashing Gerald Ford.

Here comes Bob Woodward, who can't wait until Ford is cold to start using him to bash Bush.

Not entirely surprisingly, Thomas DeFrank of The NY Daily News has a different take on Ford's opinions of Bush and Iraq than "the boring fabulist", as Peggy Noonan recently dubbed Woodward.

Update: On the other hand, "Even if [Reid's absence during Ford's funeral] is deliberate, look at it this way — it gives Republicans cover to skip Dhimmi Jimmy’s canonization when that day finally rolls around".

More: And speaking of the seventies and suicide!

Meanwhile, it's probably time to call Ghostbusters--or at least Maceo Parker--as another seventies icon also disapproves of the Iraq War immediately after his death this week.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

My question is whether there is even one MSMer currently reporting from Iraq who was an Iraq or Afghan War veteran? Even one?

And why aren't there a hundred such veterans-turned-reporters?

And have the journalism schools bothered to track down the accomplished and returned warriors and ask them to lecture the journalists-in-the-making on how to cover the war?

One guest suggested MSM will not hire veterans because such a skills set will not produce the sorts of stories that advance the MSM's agenda, which is an anti-Administration, anti-war agenda. Perhaps he is correct.

But it is undeniably true that there are ways to cover the war well --to "flood the (war) zone"-- and to avoid the trap that that General Mattis describes the MSM as having fallen into.

There does not, however, seem to be the inclination. For in depth reporting on Iraq --and the war's many other fronts-- we will have to continue to rely on new media.

Absolutely. Only a stasist would say that information diversification is a bad thing.

He hits the beach--literally--in India!

Students join sand sculpture artists to create a 30-meter-long (100-foot-long) Santa Claus sculpture on the Puri golden beach, in the Indian state of Orissa on the eve of Christmas, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2006. Though Hindus and Muslims comprise the majority of the population in India, Christmas is celebrated with much fanfare.

As TigerHawk writes, "The photograph and official wire service caption below are additional evidence that India is the 'natural' ally of the United States in the war against radical Islam. Also, it's really cool".

Surf's up, Santa, Dude!

As always, Mark Steyn is spot-on:

So much of what ails us dates from the Seventies: It was the decade when the Continent fully embraced the social-democratic cosseting that's enfeebled its citizenry and the mass immigration necessary to keep it affordable, the decade when the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East realized the west would do anything to keep the oil flowing, and the decade which gave us the twin templates through which the media, the academy and the other American elites fit all major events, domestic and foreign - Watergate and Vietnam. Though it was a war he inherited from his three predecessors, it fell to Gerald Ford to preside over the final retreat from Vietnam and to bequeath to history the great emblematic image of American weakness and failure: the scrambling choppers over the US embassy in Saigon. As was plain then and is plainer now, the left saw American defeat as its own great victory. They enjoyed the pain the "long national nightmare" inflicted on national self-confidence, which is one reason they love to revive it at every opportunity. (See Pinch Sulzberger's pathetic self-regarding commencement address from last year.) Understanding the enduring damage Vietnam and Watergate would do to the body politic, Ford attempted to lance the boils. He failed, but it was an honorable effort by an honorable man. Rest in peace.

Update: Tammy Bruce looks at Ford through a gimlet eye: "yes, I know he died, and I'm sorry for him, and his family. But there will be no Love Letter here". Read the rest--while I do think Ford was a good man, he was an exceptionally weak president, and as Tammy writes, Ford's ineffectiveness led directly to Jimmy Carter's dire four years malaise.

Over 300,000 defy England's hunting ban; as Glenn Reynolds writes:

If that many British Muslims turned out to protest interference with their customs, the Blair government would be bending over backward to please them.

Heh, indeed.^TM Read the whole thing.

(Via Maggie's Farm.

Update: And speaking of Tony Blair....

If you haven't seen it already, don't miss this photo of Senator Kerry in Iraq (aka "Jon Carry N Irak"), an image you would have never seen if Rago's MSM was still at its full, 1972-era power.

I'm in the Admiral's Club at D-FW waiting for my flight back to San Jose, California; watch for regular blogging to resume tomorrow. In the meantime, Betsy Newmark and Pajamas have lots of thoughts and links regarding President Ford's death at age 93, and Hugh Hewitt has a devastating Socratic evisceration of the Wall Street Journal's anti-Blogosphere Joseph Rago, who fits Virginia Postrel's definition of a Stasist to a T.

Blogger "One Angry Christian" links to an AP photo with a caption that reads:

An Iranian student holds an anti-president placard, reading: 'Fascist President, Polytechnich is not your place', as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unseen, speaks at the Amir Kabir Technical University, in Tehran, Iran, Monday, Dec. 11, 2006. Iranian students staged a rare demonstration against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday, lighting a firecracker and burning his photograph in the audience as he delivered a speech at their university, the state news agency said.

Unlike America's "peace" (read: anti-Bush) protestors, there are real stakes involved for this fellow, as One Angry Christian writes:

This guy, hands down, gets my "Man of the Year" award. There isn't a person who is closer to the evil that is destroying western civilization who is risking more than this guy.

Apparently, about now there are some "vigilantes" looking for him. I'd be willing to bet my next check they're government agents. This is a far cry from the imagined "persecution" that so-called "peace protestors" get here in America. In Iran people who protest are actually hunted down and murdered along with members of their family.

But of course, this Iranian would never be considered by Time--he's protesting a leader that the magazine recently dubbed a beneficient "global Everyman" and "Champion of the disposessed".

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

England's Independent receives a letter from a reader:

Sir:

Your environment editor, Geoffrey Lean, recently informed us that the Indian island of Lohachara had been washed off the face of the earth by global warming. According to Mr. Lean, Lohachara’s vanishing “marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.”

When did this event occur, exactly? And why wasn’t that date included in Mr. Lean’s article?

Yours,

Tim Blair

Tim writes, "Any response will be published in full"; though I suspect that his letter will probably run about the same time that Cliff May's letter appears in the Washington Post.

It's not just for stockbrokers anymore! The all-seeing Allah catches an AFP (Agence France-Presse) reporter recycling her three-week old story, titled "Iraq Quagmire Erodes Bush Confidence And Power", right down the exact same headline, and with only minor phrasing changes in the body copy. As Allah writes, "They’ve been recycling this metaphor for 40 years, why not recycle stories about it too?"

Glenn Reynolds notes, "One might almost suspect that this story was timed for when it would get the least possible attention: Nonprofit Connects Murtha, Lobbyists". As Glenn writes, "Sounds like he needs to be spotlighted. And not just on Christmas Day", when the Washington Post ran their story.

In The Charleston Gazette, Don Surber writes, "Earth to Bush: We are winning".

John Hawkins' round-up is here.

Meanwhile, with plenty of material to choose from, Times Watch selects "The Worst Quotes of the Year from The New York Times".

Update: Speaking of worst quotes of the year, get a load of this AP piece from August:

When outsiders think of Cuba, it’s often the lack of political freedoms and economic power that comes to mind. Cubans who have chosen to stay on the island, however, are quick to point out the positives: safe streets, a rich and accessible cultural life, a leisurely lifestyle to enjoy with family and friends....For all its flaws, life in Castro’s Cuba has its comforts, and unknown alternatives are not automatically more attractive....Many foreigners consider it propaganda when Castro’s government enumerates its accomplishments, but many Cubans take pride in their free education system, high literacy rates and top-notch doctors. Ardent Castro supporters say life in the United States, in contrast, seems selfish, superficial, and — despite its riches — ultimately unsatisfying.

— Associated Press writer Vanessa Arrington in an August 4 dispatch, "Some Cubans enjoy comforts of communism.""

More 2006 MSM idiotarianism, here.

The Media Research Center has a pretty good scorecard for who stands where this year in the War For Christmas.

Michelle Malkin writes that 2006 was "The Year of Perpetual Outrage"; via Tim Blair, Gerard Henderson of The Sydney Morning Herald dubs it "the year of hyperbole".

I'd say they're both right.

Tammy Bruce writes, "On this Christmas day, send your prayers to the Christians of Ethiopia who are now alone in the Horn of Africa fighting the enemy of all civilization".

Related: "Yet Another Bethlehem Story".

While I was shopping for Christmas gifts on Amazon, I gave myself a James Brown greatest hits CD--Foundations Of Funk: A Brand New Bag: 1964-1969, which documented Brown's revolution in R&B, creating a stripped down modal sound, much the same as Miles Davis had created in the jazz world just a few years prior. (MIles in turn would be inspired by Brown's funk on 1969's Bitches Brew.)

I was actually listening to James Brown on my iRiver MP3 player on Satuday, driving around Texas. So I was doubly astonished to read that he passed away today at age 73.

Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Update:

Welcome, and Merry Christmas, to Hugh Hewitt and his listeners!

Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon looks back on "'The Blogger's Night Before Christmas".

More: Merry Insta-Christmas!

Out hunting today--photo here. That's me on the left, along with my guide and our prey.

Back in March, at the height of Yale's Taliban man debacle, blogger Penraker wrote:

We now have the first generation of college students who have learned NOT to think; they don't even allow certain thoughts in their heads.

Welcome to the class of '06, the first generation educated to become drones.

Don't believe him? Then listen to Mark Taylor, religion and humanities professor at Williams College, and "Gagdad Bob", who runs roughshod over his zen-like thought of no-thought:

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Via "Bird Dog" of Maggie's Farm, who asks:

America's first colleges: King's College (Columbia now), Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) - were all begun as places to mainly educate clergy, and/or religiously-interested lay people. Have they simply been co-opted by a new religion? Are colleges still doctrinal seminaries, with new doctrines?

Yes.

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

"A photo of a shop you wouldn’t have expected to find in Esfahan, Iran".

David Irving, the man who in many ways, created the modern public conception of the Dresden bombing, is pretty darn copacetic with the language of both Mel Gibson--and Michael Richards.

Surprisingly, having a Polaris Hawkeye four-wheel ATV land on you when you crash doesn't hurt all that much, provided (a) you land in soft dirt and (b) you're wearing a helmet.

Floyd Brown reminds us that the left's assault on Christmas isn't a new development.

Update: Via The Anchoress, here's the newest low in the War On Christmas, courtesy of, not surprisingly, CBS. Compare and contrast with CBS's mid-1960s Christmas fair.

The L.A. Times writes:

President Bush quietly appointed television sitcom producer Warren Bell to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this week, overriding opposition from public-broadcasting advocates who fear the outspoken conservative will politicize the post.

As opposed to its current state.

Pajamas Media has made public the Inspector General's Official Report regarding Sandy Berger and his theft and destruction of classified national security documents.

Last year at Thangsgiving, I posted some thoughts on Rough Creek Lodge, an upscale hunting lodge and resort on 11,000 acres in Glen Rose, Texas, about 90 minutes outside of Dallas.

As I was just telling Tammy Bruce and her radio listeners, my wife and I thought it would be a fun place to spend Christmas, and it certainly is--but blogging may be at a reduced pace over the weekend.

The two breaking stories today are this truck crash, made more suspicious because of its cargo, and the Duke lacrosse case, with the D.A. dropping the main charge of rape. As I mentioned to Tammy, the timing of it--on a Friday afternoon, the weekend before Christmas--seems to imply that his office was attempting to minimize the damage to Mike Nifong's reputation as much as they possibly could.

Will the remaining two charges against the Duke players be dropped during another quiet period in the news cycle--say, the weekend before New Years? Or will Nifong continue to try to string this out as long as possible?

Tough to argue with Pajamas HQ's assessment of this video captioned by Scrappleface's Scott Ott:

Flopping Aces writes that AP is touching up its articles referencing the world's most famous Iraqi police captain.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs spots the perfect gift for the hip, young wannabe terrorist whose Che or hammer and sickle T-shirt is looking particularly ratty--for sale at the Las Vegas Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has some very much related gift suggestions.