1. Write a book
   
2. See that book published
   
3. Orbit the earth
   
4. See Clever Wife's business become a success
   
5. Hold a job that I really like
   
6. Spend a season on an archaeological dig
   
7. Leave the world, in some way, better than when I entered it

1. Catch... anything
   
2. Play a musical instrument
   
3. Talk sports
   
4. Walk past a construction site without looking into the hole in the ground
   
5. Touch typing
   
6. Finish... anything
   

1. I have lots of strong opinions, but I'm too shy to be a drunken pub boor
   
2. It makes me write
   
3. Pictures of kittens
   
4. The awe and respect I get when I tell people I have a blog
   
5. Hanging out (virtually) with smart people
   
6. Making fun of Bill O'Reilly
   
7. I get to talk about mammoths without boring my Clever Wife

1. "Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that."
   
2. "I dunno, what do you want for dinner?"
   
3. "Well, this certainly sucks."
   
4. "Oooooo, what a nice little cat."
   
5. "To understand that, you really need to know what happened before."
   
6. "So, are you ready to go?"
   
7. "I really love you, Babe."

1. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
   
2. Against the Fall of Night - Arthur C. Clarke
   
3. Land Without Justice - Milovan Djilas
   
4. Man in the High Castle - Phillip K. Dick
   
5. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller, Jr.
   
6. The Flashman series - George MacDonald Fraser
   
7. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

1. King Kong (1933)
   
2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
   
3. Casablanca (1943)
   
4. Sabrina (1954)
   
5. The Great Escape (1963)
   
6. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
   
7. Blade Runner (1982)

Les Eyzies is the capital of pre-history in France. In three of these caves we were escorted by tour guides, but when we entered the fourth we examined it closely without any authorities present. The first tree: Rouffignac, 14 km from Les Fyzies; Combarelles, 3 km from Les Byzies; and Font-de-Gaume, 2 km from Les Byzies, all had fees for entrance and tours of the long, selected routes in each cave. There were many public passageways in these first three caves and many that were blocked off to the public.

The standard evolutionary cave propaganda was preached by each of the tour guides in French, whether it was a walking tour or a miniature train tour. If you were a creationist, you needed a very thick skin and a lot of anti-acid medicine for your stomach when you visited these caves.

[...]

The fourth cave or "Grotte," as the French call it, was the very dark and extraordinary Bernifal. Bernifal is 5 km from Les Eyzies and required some real searching to discover its whereabouts. There were no signs in Les Eyzies or outside of town indicating where it was located.

[...]

I had previously purchased a small booklet at the Museum of Saint Germain-en-Laye which described this cave along with many others. It was a guide book which described the decorated caves "ouvertes au public" (open to the public).

[...]

In another book that I had taken with us, Ann Sieveking describes the important caves of the valley of the Petite Beune River. She says, "Eleven decorated shelters have been found in the valley of the Petite Beune, distributed on either side of the river over a distance of about seven kilometers. Only one of these, Bemifal, is a cave of major importance and it is a deep cave while the majority of the lessor sites are daylit shelters.

[...]

Another problem arose when we looked for this very important cave in the recent Michelin map of the Perigord. We had just purchased it in 1982, but it did not reveal the location of Bernifal, even though it did display all popular grottes (caves) and shelters. The little guide book from the museum was published in 1976 and Sieveking's book in 1979. Both had spoken about it in detail. It was strange that the Michelin map had completely left it out when it was of major importance. The guidebook advised bringing one's own light to see Bemifal. While it was open to the public, no light was provided for you to see the walls. I had never heard of a public cave with no lighting. It also said that the floor of the cave was very slippery and you just might fall without a "appui de la main" or cane. That, in itself, is enough to make one suspicious.

[...]

By the time we arrived in the summer of 1982 a decision was made to close Bemifal to the public. It didn't make too much sense since the caves are large tourist attractions and therefore sources of revenue. Bemifal was open at least from 1976 to 1979. So, with Bernifal not on the Michelin map, it became almost invisible. All we could conclude was that something was wrong with Bemifal and that tourists were not to be allowed inside anymore. After weighing all the previous knowledge, we became more determined to find it.

Apparently someone else thought that closing the cave was a bad idea, too. Whoever this was unofficially opened it to the public once again. This time the cave was not opened by a bureaucratic government agency, but by someone using a much more rapid method called "the axe or sledge hammer" technique, to bash in the front door. That's how we found it when we finally located the entrance.

[...]

We proceeded towards the farm house after we noticed that the only bridge across this stream was directly in front of the house. It was a small bridge which had a chain extending from one side of it to the other and a sign hanging from the middle of the chain. It read, "Passage interdite," meaning crossing was forbidden.

One of the last things an evolutionist will ever admit or believe is that Paleolithic man or woman saw a live dinosaur. This simply will not do. According to their theories, the age of man did not begin until some 2.5-3 million year ago with his predecessors in Africa, and certainly, they believe the men who decorated this cave existed within the last 200,000 years, most likely within the last 30,000 years. Dinosaurs, on the other hand died out at least 65 million year ago. This, to them, is fact.

Every cave that we visited and every decorated cave that the public is allowed to tour will "mammal" you to death. I mean all they will show you are mammals. This doesn't mean that down some other passageway reptiles can't be found. Where they take you there are no drawings or carvings of reptiles. It's as reptiles never existed. We know that this is not true because we still have reptiles today. Snakes, lizards, turtles, alligators, and tuataras are all part of our modern fauna, but conspicuously absent from cave drawings. The cave painters and engravers surely had reptiles in their age. Where were they? More specifically, we must make direct inquiry about cave evidence concerning the existence of those "terrible lizards" or dinosaurs. Are there dinosaurs depicted on cave walls?

[...]

One of the amazing things that happened inside the Bemifal Cave was that in the process of shooting pictures in all directions, I took a picture of an actual dinosaur carving. This could be the very reason why Bemifal was suddenly closed to the public when the creation movement of the seventies and eighties started to gain public acceptance. No dinosaurs ever existed with man, they said; therefore, no paintings and no carvings. The other caves must be neatly cordoned off so that no unjaundiced eye ever sees a reptile figure on a wall. We were never supposed to see this. It was mainly carved into the rock with only a little dab of paint on it, therefore not easy to see, especially with flashlights.

My photograph... actually shows a dinosaur-like creature in head-to-head combat with a mammoth. This, I believe, is the first time that this carving has ever been revealed to the public. These images were carved into the walls using some of the natural configurations of the limestone as part of the anatomy. What type of dinosaur is this?

There are two great orders of dinosaurs: the Saurischia (lizard-hipped) and the Ornithischia (bird-hipped). This division is based on the structure of the pelvis (hip). We can't see the pelvic (hip) structure in this sculpture so we have to classify it by some other means.

In the Saurischian dinosaurs the teeth of the jaws are set into the margins or only in the front. In this specimen, there are what appear to be teeth along the one side towards the front part of the snout, but not much is seen in the front of the snout. Ornithischia tended to be herbivorous while the Saurischians were carnivorous. This dinosaur is in a combative stance. Carnivores tend to be combative, but some herbivores are also combative. However, only Saurischians had a hollowed area in front of the eye. We may also infer from the short upper limbs that this was a bipedal dinosaur (walked on two hind legs).

From these features it seems possible to tentatively classify this dinosaur sculpture into the suborder Theropoda. These Saurischian creatures were almost exclusively carnivorous, bipedal, with strong hind legs and small forelimbs. They supposedly flourished during the entire Mesozoic era (230 to 62 million years ago). To go any further would be pure guesswork. To say it was a Teratosauris, Allosauris. Acrocanthosauris, or such would not be possible, given the limited data. However, to be very forthright, it must be stated that this is a dinosaur, period.

[...]

Regardless of whether this sculpture was done in the Upper or Middle Paleolithic, by either Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Magdelaine, or Gravettian people, it was still accomplished by a human. This human either saw a dinosaur and mammoth in battle or had a portable piece of artwork that contained this piece of information and had been handed down for several generations. Because I believe that we have rather good evidence for these caves being post-flood caves and for post-flood burials in other caves, I believe that the latter is true. It was accomplished by a person who had a piece of portable art, but a human saw it happen.

One other possibility exists and that is the post-Hood existence of both dinosaurs and mammoths originating from the ark. They both could have come off together, but because of unsuitable environmental conditions the dinosaurs became extinct while the mammoth and other mammals adapted to the harsher atmospheric and terrestrial surroundings.

IN the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it.

This wall paint was probably red ochre mixed with animal fat. It seems to allow the time frame of this cave to be in a Neanderthal period.

Keeping the red ochre and the dinosaur carving in mind, we must ask how does this fit in the modern scientific view of history? It really doesn't fit at all because the dinosaur eliminates approximately 62-65 million years and makes man, dinosaur, and mammoth (a mammal) contemporaries.'(4) The red ochre on the same cave walls as a dinosaur throws all the timetables off. No wonder the cave was closed.

[...]

Is it because no one has seen it, no one will admit to seeing it, or no one will dare go to see it? I think the latter two reasons are the most plausible. What we are dealing with is a monolithic structure in modern science where there is absolutely no evidence which could possibly shed some doubt on the evolutionary interpretation of life. According to them, it just doesn't exist. And if it did exist, it wouldn't be scientific. Therefore, why go see it? But she did say she had no doubt that the images were there. As I write this a number of years later, I can almost guarantee that those images don't exist anymore, or at least a padlocked steel door has replaced the broken wooden one.

Reagan was not mystical in a sacramental sense, but he had some woo-woo in him — a sense that a higher power was at work and operative and intervening in his life and history. John Paul thought the hand of the Blessed Mother deflected the bullet that was to kill him away from arteries and nerve clusters. Reagan felt God and his angels saved his life when he was shot. What extraordinary men.

Dec 27, 2005 -- CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush is spending part of his Christmas holiday reading about the post-presidential years of Theodore Roosevelt and the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Bush was reading "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House," by Patricia O'Toole, and "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground," by Robert Kaplan while on holiday at his Texas ranch, said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.[...]

Asked whether there was any significance that Bush, who has three years left in office, was reading a book about the post-White House years of a former president, Duffy replied that Bush is a "history buff" and "avid reader."

This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.

STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by order from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.

All right, "No Spin News" real quick. Transit strike hits New York City. New York says it's against the law. The transit people don't care, and da-da-da -- 33,000 transit employees, and they're gone, so everybody's walking around. There's price gouging. A friend of mine told me that his daughter had to go out to the airport, a run that would cost you 40 bucks, and then somebody wants $300 to take you out there, you know, that kind of thing. Immediately, that person should be shot dead. Did you get that, you left-wing smear sites who are listening? OK? Just pass that around -- "O'Reilly wants cab drivers shot dead" -- big headline on the left-wing website. You gotta give them something, ladies and gentlemen. [laughter] These little weasels.

Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was NSA director when the surveillance began and now serves as Bush's deputy director of national intelligence, said the secret- court process was intended for long-term surveillance of agents of an enemy power, not the current hunt for elusive terrorist cells.

"The whole key here is agility," he said at a White House briefing before Bush's news conference. According to Hayden, most warrantless surveillance conducted under Bush's authorization lasts just days or weeks, and requires only the approval of a shift supervisor.

Hayden said getting retroactive court approval is inefficient because it "involves marshaling arguments" and "looping paperwork around."

The terrorist menace, far from receding, grows every day. This is not only because al Qaeda likes to space its attacks, often by many years, but also because weapons of mass destruction are becoming ever more accessible to terrorist groups and individuals.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it difficult to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents unless they are suspected of being involved in terrorist or other hostile activities. That is too restrictive.

What we do know is that we have not suffered another attack on the Homeland since 9/11. That is a miraculous fact. And President Bush should be applauded for protecting the country rather than excoriated, to say nothing of impeachment which is on the lips of some Democrats.

President Bush defended using government wiretaps without court authorization to monitor terrorism suspects and urged the Senate to renew the USA Patriot Act during his year-end news conference Monday.

The president said he intends to continue using secret international wiretaps to monitor activities of people in the United States suspected of having connections to al Qaeda.

"To save American lives we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks."

I want my security first. I'll deal with all the details after that.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Scientists have pieced together part of the genetic recipe of the extinct woolly mammoth.

The 5,000 DNA letters spell out the genetic code of its mitochondria, the structures in the cell that generate energy.

The research, published in the online edition of Nature, gives an insight into the elephant family tree.

It shows that the mammoth was most closely related to the Asian rather than the African elephant.

The three groups split from a common ancestor about six million years ago, with Asian elephants and mammoths diverging about half a million years later.

"We have finally resolved the phylogeny of the mammoth which has been controversial for the last 10 years," lead author Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the BBC News website.

The two-thousandth death was similarly anticipated almost impatiently in the media and then made another big splash. But does media hype make 2,000 wartime fatalities in more than two years unusual?

The Marines lost more than 5,000 men taking one island in the Pacific during a three-month period in World War II. In the Civil War, the Confederates lost 5,000 men in one battle in one day.

Yet there was Jim Lehrer on the "News Hour" last week earnestly asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the ten Americans killed that day. It is hard to imagine anybody in any previous war asking any such question of anyone responsible for fighting a war.

We have lost more men than that in our most overwhelming and one-sided victories in previous wars. During an aerial battle over the Mariannas islands in World War II, Americans shot down hundreds of Japanese planes while losing about 30 of their own.

If the media of that era had been reporting the way the media report today, all we would have heard about would have been that more than two dozen Americans were killed that day.

Utter ignorance of history enables any war with any casualties to be depicted in the media as an unmitigated disaster.

Even after Nazi Germany surrendered at the end of World War II, die-hard Nazi guerrilla units terrorized and assassinated both German officials and German civilians who cooperated with Allied occupation authorities.

But nobody suggested that we abandon the country. Nobody was foolish enough to think that you could say in advance when you would pull out or that you should encourage your enemies by announcing a timetable.

There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in post-War Germany and see only the successes. But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers -- called "werewolves" -- engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them -- much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.

One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?

Before looking at the substance of her statement notice how [Rice} frames her parallel by anachronistically transferring modern terminology into the past. The Allies have become "coalition forces." By this rule I suppose we should start referring to John Wilkes Booth as a member of the Fedayeen Jefferson Davis.

[...]

There was some resistance by German soldiers behind the lines while the fighting was still going on at the end of WWII. Among these were the famous efforts by Otto Skorzeny in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the assassination of the collaborationist mayor of Aachen after the Americans occupied that town, and the less known efforts by Volkdeutsch leader Andreas Schmidt in Rumania against the Red Army. However, none of these were Werewolf activities in the sense that Rice and Rumsfeld mean. These were commando activities directed by Reich authorities in Berlin.

The real Operation Werewolf had a little reality and a lot of myth. The reality was a plan to train troops in guerilla tactics and sabotage, to create hidden supply depots in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, and to make Germany ungovernable for the Allied occupiers. The reality was more like an unfunded Bush social program; the supply depots never materialized and the troops were mostly Hitler Youth boys who, as soon as the command structure vanished, ditched their guns and cyanide capsules and went home. In an ugly sequel, the Soviets, who had some understanding of partisan warfare, used the Werewolf rumors as an excuse to execute German POWs while the restored national governments of continental Europe used those same rumors to justify their expulsion of 14 million ethnic Germans from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Werewolf has lived on as a great plot device for a hundred Ludlum wannabes and not much more.

This is not a matter of interpretation where one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. There was no one there to call a terrorist, freedom fighter, or ice-cream vendor for that matter. No one.

Now, you may remember this Saudi prince from the days after September 11, when Rudy Giuliani turned down his so-called gift of $10 million, because he said that the U.S. needed to, quote, “reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause,” unquote.

Well, Harvard and Georgetown universities are now accepting $20 million each from Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal for their Islamic studies programs. … This is a bad guy. Rudy was right to decline the money. Why would these universities take money from him?

Hannity conveniently forgot to mention that his own employer, Fox News, also accepts money from Talal; he owns 5.5% of Fox News.

"Several years ago, Holland became the first country to legalize the mercy killings of adults. Now, this European nation, known for its liberal ways, has announced that in 'certain circumstances' it will also allow babies to be euthanized."

They’ve crossed over the slippery slope. Like the Netherlands.

• Noachian flood - Regardless of religion or lack thereof, everyone in the English speaking world knows this story. In 2800 BC, God ordered Noah to take one pair (or seven) of every animal and bird onto his ark. God flooded the world and killed everything that wasn't on the ark. All current terrestrial life has spread from the ark's landing place in Armenia, and all known history is the story of the human passengers of that famous boat.
  
  Mammoths are not a separate species of elephant according to some Ark-eologists. They are a normal tropical elephant. During the Biblical flood, the elephants left behind were all drowned. Their carcasses were carried north by the flood waters and deposited in Siberia where they froze.
  
  
• Velikovsky - In historical times, the planets Venus and Mars ricocheted around the solar system like billiard balls. Whenever they passed by the Earth, their gravitational fields caused the disasters that are recorded in history as the Old Testament miracles (Noah's flood, the plagues of Egypt, the sun stopping in its tracks).
  
  Mammoths may or may not be a separate species of elephant. While disasters were happening in the Middle East, floods and freezes were happening in other parts of the world. Frozen mammoths are just one casualty of all this.
  
  
• Hapgood's polar shift - Ice collects at the poles every year. This weight makes the Earth unstable. Every couple thousand years, the centrifugal force of the spinning Earth on this weight causes the entire crust of the Earth to slip sideways. The heavier poles move to the equator and a previously temperate region moves to the pole where it begins to collect ice.
  
  Mammoths are not a separate species of elephant. They are a normal tropical elephant. When the poles shifted, their tropical home was moved north and they flash-froze in mid chew.
  
  
• Hollow Earth - The Earth is a hollow ball with openings at or near the poles. Life, similar to ours, lives on the inner surface of the sphere. A tiny sun at the center of the sphere lights this inner tropical world.
  
  Mammoths may or may not be a separate species of elephant. But they are a tropical animal. Periodically, one wanders too near the opening where it freezes to death, falls into the ocean, and is carried to Siberia by Arctic sea currents.
  
  
• WEL (Welteislehre) - Even though this one had the personal endorsement of Hitler, you don't see many WEL followers anymore. The entire universe, except the Earth and the sun, is made of ice. The Earth has had many ice moons. These spiral inward. When they get close to the Earth, tidal forces draw all of the water to the equator. Giant tides, miles high, sweep around the planet. Eventually the ice moon gets so close it explodes. As ice fragments crash to Earth, the seas resume their previous positions. Mars will be our next ice moon.
  
  Mammoths are not a separate species of elephant. They are a normal tropical elephant. When the last ice moon broke up and the seas swept north, destroying Atlantis, thousands of elephants were killed, frozen, and swept into Siberia.

Donald E. Wildmon, founder and chairman of the American Family Association (AFA), used the occasion of the December 5 broadcast (audio link) of AFA Report, his daily program on AFA-operated American Family Radio (AFR), to suggest that some members of the religious right would withdraw support for Israel if a prominent activist against anti-Semitism did not cease his criticism of it.

During the broadcast, Wildmon stated that Anti-Defamation League (ADL) President Abraham H. Foxman "got himself kind of in a bind" by criticizing the religious right. "[T]he strongest supporters Israel has are members of the religious right -- the people he's fighting," Wildmon said. "[T]he more he says that 'you people are destroying this country,' you know, some people are going to begin to get fed up with this and say, 'Well, all right then. If that's the way you feel, then we just won't support Israel anymore.'"

Throughout the last five years, as the Christian right has assumed ever greater power and prominence in America, the organized Jewish community has been remarkably quiescent. Traditionally, Jewish leaders have been among the most vigilant guardians of American secularism, seeing the separation of church and state as key to Jewish equality. But faced with an evangelical president who seemed inviolable and an alliance of convenience with the religious right over Israel, Jewish leaders didn't raise much of an outcry when billions of taxpayer dollars were diverted toward religious charities through Bush's faith-based initiative. They didn't make a fuss when the administration filled the bureaucracy with veterans of groups like the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition. As leaders of the religious right and their allies in the Republican Party trumpeted plans to "take America back," observers detected growing anxiety among ordinary American Jews, but there was little response from organized Jewry.

This month, that started to change. Two major Jewish figures -- Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism -- have taken on the religious right and, by extension, the Republican Party. By doing so, they have enraged some evangelicals and opened a fissure in the larger Jewish community. Some leaders are worried about provoking a conservative backlash and ushering in a new era of anti-Semitism. Others rejoice that someone has finally articulated what so many ordinary American Jews have been thinking. Either way, the culture wars have suddenly taken on an overtly sectarian cast.

On Nov. 3, Abraham Foxman gave a speech to an ADL meeting, calling attacks on church-state separation the "key domestic challenge to the American Jewish community and to our democratic values." "[T]oday we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized, and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before," he said. "Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!" Among the major players in this campaign, Foxman listed Focus on the Family, the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council.

[...]

With the America that Jews have prospered in threatening to disappear, Foxman called for a meeting of Jewish leadership to plan a coordinated strategy.

One person who plans to be there is Rabbi Eric Yoffie, whose group is the largest Jewish organization in the country, representing more than 900 congregations. Two weeks after Foxman's broadside, Yoffie blasted the religious right in a sermon delivered to around 5,000 people at the Union's biannual convention in Houston. Yoffie says he hadn't coordinated with Foxman, but the two share some of the same concerns -- though Yoffie approaches the issue from a religious rather than a political perspective.

"We are particularly offended by the suggestion that the opposite of the religious right is the voice of atheism," he told his audience. "We are appalled when 'people of faith' is used in such a way that it excludes us, as well as most Jews, Catholics and Muslims. What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God and that anyone who disagrees with you is not a person of faith?"

I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I'm gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that. And we have succeeded.

You know we've succeeded. They are on the run in corporations, in the media, everywhere. They are on the run, because I will put their face and their name on television, and I will talk about them on the radio if they do it.

There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together. There is no reason on the earth that we can't do that. So we are going to do it. And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me.

Michael Reagan, son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is blasting Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean for declaring that the U.S. won't be able to win the war in Iraq, saying Dean ought to be "hung for treason."

"Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!" Reagan told his Radio America audience on Monday.

ANNOUNCER: Is there a Grinch taking the holly-jolly out of Christmas? Why has this holy season become a target of the liberal media? Details next on Fox News Watch.

[Media writer Neil] GABLER: Michelle Goldberg had a great article, and anybody interested in this issue -- in Salon -- ought to read it, in which she said that Henry Ford, back in 1921, declared that there was a war on Christmas. Of course, he blamed Jews. She cites the John Birch Society -- the reactionary John Birch Society -- in the 1950s saying there's a war on Christmas in 1959 by secularists.

[News Watch host Eric] BURNS: All right. Listen, hold it. Let's not call it a war necessarily --

[crosstalk]

GABLER: No, it is being -- it is being called a war --

BURNS: It is.

GABLER: --in certain places.

BURNS: Well, let's not do it here. But let's just say, isn't it ridiculous, Jane, to want to get rid of the word "Christmas tree" and say "holiday tree." But wait -- let me just mention this before you answer. You know, a few years ago in Pittsburgh, there was an edict in one of the school districts that if you were an employee in that school district, you couldn't say "Merry Christmas" to a kid. A memo came down -- you had to say, "Happy Sparkle Season."

[laughter]

BURNS: Serious. Aren't we going too far?

HALL: Well, if you cite those examples, yes. But I think there's -- there's a real question that I have here. I mean, the last time I checked, Jesus was for tolerance. And to have -- Bill O'Reilly has made this a huge issue. He's obviously getting a lot of feedback. John Gibson has a book about it, another Fox anchor. I think this is largely a fund-raiser for Jerry Falwell to pick up on some run-amok PC. I think to talk about the corporations, as Bill O'Reilly has been doing, and what they do -- I mean, he's certainly within his rights. But I think, what are they saying? Boycott the corporations that have holiday wishes? What is the point of that?

[...]

JAMES P. PINKERTON (Newsday columnist): This story was ignored by the mainstream media for --

GABLER: Because it's not a story, and that's why it was ignored. And as I said, in 1921 this began.

[American University professor Jane] HALL: It's a fund-raiser.

GABLER: Now let's talk about the elephant in the room; let's talk about the media.

BURNS: Just a minute, Neal; if it started in 1921 --

GABLER: It's not a story.

BURNS: If I can just --

GABLER: It was a demagogic campaign.

BURNS: If I can just give three examples right now in different parts of the country --

GABLER: We're 300 million people. You know, I can give you --

BURNS: But there are -- just a minute, there are more than three examples to give --

GABLER: Three incidents of chicken pox doesn't make an epidemic.

HALL: But what is the media -- where is the media angle?

GABLER: The media angle right here -- Look, I want to talk about the media angle, because we've avoided it; it's the elephant in the room -- it's Fox News. Come on. It's O'Reilly; it's Hannity; it's Gibson. They're demagogues who realize that at Christmastime, you can -- you can --

[crosstalk]

GABLER: You rally the masses on this issue.

[crosstalk]

GABLER: They'll do it every Christmas. They did it last Christmas; they'll do it next Christmas.

BURNS: I spend this whole show sitting back most of the time. I don't think it is demagoguery to point out that there are people who are themselves being demagogues by trying to take away the worship terminology of 95 percent of Americans.

GABLER: Eric, we are at war. There's [the humanitarian crisis in] Darfur. There's an AIDS crisis. And you're worried about whether people are saying "Merry Christmas" or not?

BURNS: No.

GABLER: What world do you live in?

BURNS: Hey, Neal, it's one issue, and it's the issue that's the subject of this top -- that's the subject of this segment.

GABLER: And the media have been pumping it, and that's my point.

PINKERTON: All right.

GABLER: The media, particularly Fox media, has been pumping the hell out of this thing.

But the winner, and this one comes with great personal pain because we were friends when he worked here and thereafter: John Gibson. Selling his new book about this phony-baloney war on Christmas, John revealed a very ugly side to himself. He is one of those people who think all religions but his are mistaken. You know, the way a lot of these religious nutbag terrorists think. "I would think," Gibbie said on a syndicated radio show, "if somebody is going to be -- have to answer for following the wrong religion, they are not going to have to answer to me. We know who they're going to have to answer to."

I'd tell you which religion John thinks is the only one that's right, but what's the difference? It's not the faith that's the issue; it's the intolerance. John Gibson, today's "Worst Person in the World."

GIBSON: The whole point of this is that the tradition, the religious tradition of this country is tolerance, and that the same sense of tolerance that's been granted by the majority to the minority over the years ought to go the other way too. Minorities ought to have the same sense of tolerance about the majority religion -- Christianity -- that they've been granted about their religions over the years.

[...]

GIBSON: No, no, no. If you figure that -- listen, we get a little theological here, and it's probably a bit over my head, but I would think if somebody is going to be -- have to answer for following the wrong religion, they're not going to have to answer to me. We know who they're going to have to answer to.

PARSHALL: Right.

GIBSON: And that's fine. Let 'em. But in the meantime, as long as they're civil and behave, we tolerate the presence of other religions around us without causing trouble, and I think most Americans are fine with that tradition.

PARSHALL: I agree.

GIBSON: In other words, they'd like it in return.

Barry [Lynn] is -- Barry says that if a church is burning down, the local community could not send the fire engine to put the fire out because that would violate, quote, separation of church and state. He is fanatical.

I've seen both Robertson and his colleague Jerry Falwell take pot shots at me with information I have repeatedly told them is not true. Robert­son, for example, continues to tell national television audiences that I believe that a public fire department can't go to a burning church without violating the separation of church and state. He apparently uses this "anecdote" to demonstrate my radical, wacky beliefs.

Trouble is (for him), I never said it and don't believe it. Journalists who have heard the claim and bothered to research the point fail to find evidence of me saying it. The reason is that fictional attributions don't show up in Internet news databases.

[...]

Sometimes I write letters to these fellows to try to correct their declarations that are flatly false. Sometimes I send Federal Express-delivered packets of material to prove things they say are false. They never respond; they simply repeat the false statements. I doubt that there is any real way to get through to them. Maybe I should just put up signs outside their homes with the words: "We disagree about so many things that there is no reason for you to make up things you know are not true."

(Quoting from an AP report) "Aljazeera has broadcasted an insurgent video today, shows four peace activists taken hostage in Iraq, with a previously unknown group claiming responsibility for the kidnappings. The unknown group is the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, and they said the four were spies working undercover as Christian peace activists, according to Aljazeera. Aljazeera said that it could not verify any of the information on the tape. The aid group Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four of its members were taken hostage on Saturday...."

[P]art of me that likes this. And some of you might say, "Rush, that's horrible. Peace activists taken hostage." Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality. So here we have these peace activists over there. I don't care if they're Christian or not.

[...]

Yeah, as warped as these people are, you know they're going to blame Bush for this... They wouldn't have been kidnapped because they wouldn't have been there in the first place if Bush hadn't gone and caused the war and created all these terrorists. I mean, these people are liberals, they're warped. Well, I mean, that's why there's -- I'm telling you, folks, there's a part of me that likes this. Probably, even with this, though, you know, they're not going to see the light of day. They're not going to -- I know, let them take me out of context. I don't care anymore.

William C. Bradford has resigned as an associate professor at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, effective Jan. 1.

[...]

Bradford, 39, maintained that two left-leaning professors were leading the charge for political reasons. They disliked him because he was an Army veteran who supported the war, he said.

One of Bradford's allies, Professor Henry C. Karlson, pointed out that Bradford was the real deal -- awarded the Silver Star and a major in the Special Forces. Bradford said he was in the infantry and military intelligence. He fought in Desert Storm and Bosnia, he said.

On the law school's Web site and its Viewbook, Bradford was profiled as being in the Army infantry from 1990 to 2001. He wore a Silver Star lapel pin around campus. He had a major's gold-leaf insignia plate on his vehicle.

After my column ran portraying Bradford as a victim of a politically correct agenda, I was contacted by retired Army Lt. Col. Keith R. Donnelly, a recent law school graduate, West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran.

Donnelly had long been suspicious of Bradford's background, he said. What really piqued his attention was the Silver Star claim -- "it is a pretty high award for valor, and not many were awarded in Desert Storm."

Independently, Donnelly and I requested Bradford's service record from the Army. It showed he was in the Army Reserve from Sept. 30, 1995, to Oct 23, 2001. He was discharged as a second lieutenant. He had no active duty. He was in military intelligence, not infantry. He received no awards.

Meanwhile, Bradford promoted himself. He blogged on the law school's student Web site. He did radio interviews. He went national on "The O'Reilly Factor." David Horowitz, a champion for conservatives, took up his cause.

Predictably, some far-left Internet smear sites have launched a campaign to get me fired over my point of view. I believe they do this on a daily basis. This time, the theme is O'Reilly is encouraging terrorist attacks. Unbelievably stupid, but not unusual for these guttersnipes.

[...]

So I'm glad the smear site's made a big deal out of it, because now we can all know who was with the anti-military Internet crowd. We'll post the names of all who support the smear merchants on billoreilly.com. So check with us.

And the smear sites who kind of tried to use this issue to drive it are now on the defensive. And you know who they are, you know who they are. And only Kool-Aid zombies are going to get involved with them anyway. And it was good. I mean, I wanted to show our affiliated stations, all 400 of them, I wanted to show our sponsorship, all the people who buy time on The Radio Factor, I want to show everybody exactly where this was coming from, who these people are on the far-left smear sites.

And they are anti-American people. They hate this country. They do.

[...]

And you need to know they're out there, because what they do is they have minions in the elite media that they feed stuff to, and the minions run with it. And here's what I'm going to do, ladies and gentlemen, every minion that does that, every one is going to be exposed on The Radio Factor, the television Factor, and on our website, BillOReilly.com. Every one who carries their water, I'm going to put their face up there, their name up there, and tell you exactly what they're doing. So you know in your town who's doing it. Enough's enough.

In the past, the smear sites have been somewhat successful using these dishonest tactics, but now the game's up. Anyone, anyone who carries water for these far-left sites will be exposed on this broadcast. Your right to know. The Internet -- the intent, I should say, of the smear sites is to intimidate free speech. This is not what America is supposed to be about. So the smear sites must be exposed. They have hurt the country dramatically.

In the "Unresolved Problem" segment tonight, as we told you last week, we are closely watching the far-left smear websites to make sure they are held accountable for damaging people, something they do on a regular basis.

Now, our policy is to not name the websites, because, well, they're beneath contempt. They want that kind of publicity.

Ralph Reed is in deep shit.

It seems that while professional fundie flogger Ralph was sucking in $4.2 million in lobbyist fees from Jack Abramoff to whip the gun-rack-and-Gaither-set into a full-on anti-gambling lather that gave John Cornyn cover as Texas AG to shut down the Indian casinos competing with Abramoff's clients, he failed to register in the state of Texas as a lobbyist:

Under Texas law, Reed was required to register as a lobbyist and disclose his client and his fees if he was compensated more than $1,000 in a calendar quarter for lobbying Texas officials. Reed was reportedly paid many times that amount. Failure to register is a Class A misdemeanor and can bring a civil fine of up to three times the amount of unreported compensation.