Something that’s been getting more airplay on pro-life websites today has been this Mexico City policy thing.  Apparently, boiled down, it’s this policy that the groups receiving tax money to provide family planning services in other countries must not use that tax money to fund abortions.  Predictably, this policy was expected to be ended with the new presidential administration; our friend  the Curt Jester, in fact, mentions that it has already ended – and this was expected to happen today.  But LifeNews.com is reporting that it didn’t.  It probably will by the end of the week, but for now, it’s still in effect.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, let’s elaborate.  My money, which I earn by the sweat of my brow and the pain of my carpal tunnels, taken from me at the point of a gun by the government (as in, pay your taxes under pain of prosecution) and used to pay to rip foreign babies into tiny pieces.

Which brings us to the question: Does Obama not realize that by the standards of the eugenics he advocates, he should have been aborted?  CatholicVote.org figured this out and aired a PSA during the coronation yesterday, right on BET.  Check it out.

Here’s a piece sure to be buried.

In a personal commentary published in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Mr. Djerassi, 85, said that in most of Europe there was now “no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction.” He said: “This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete.”

He described families who decided to use the pill rather than reproduce as “wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it.”

Mr. Djerassi called the subsequent declining birth rate an “epidemic” far worse, but given much less attention, than obesity. He said young Austrians were committing “national suicide” if they failed to procreate.

Could we be headed the same way?  Cardinal Schonborn weighs in also:

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the head of Austrian Catholics, reminded the press that the much maligned encyclical forbidding the use of artificial contraception, Humanae Vitae, warned the world 40 years ago that the pill would lead to a dramatic fall in the birth rate in the West.

“Somebody above suspicion  … is saying that each family has to produce three children to maintain population levels, but we’re far away from that,” he said.

Cardinal Schonborn said when he first read Humanae Vitae he viewed it negatively as a “cold shower.” However, his views were altered over time as the document  proved to be “prophetic.”

Full article

It’s a new year and it’s time for California to regulate something new!  The newest offender to the state’s sensibilities?  Plasma and LCD television sets, which use substantially more power than CRT televisions.

State regulators are getting ready to curb the growing power gluttony of TV sets by drafting the nation’s first rules requiring retailers to sell only the most energy-efficient models, starting in 2011.
The consumer electronics industry opposes the regulations, expected to pass in mid-2009, and claims that they could remove some TVs from store shelves and slightly boost sticker prices.

But the California Energy Commission is looking for ways to relieve the strain on the power grid. Officials say the standards, once fully in place, would reduce the state’s annual energy needs by an amount equivalent to the power consumed by 86,400 homes.

During a peak viewing time when most sets are on, such as the Super Bowl, TVs in the state collectively suck up the equivalent of 40% of the power generated by the San Onofre nuclear power station running at full capacity. Televisions account for about 10% of the average Californian’s monthly household electricity bill.

More

Merry Christmas to all my regular (and irregular) blog readers.

Today’s assignment: take 25 minutes and watch the Dragnet Christmas episode, starring the great Jack Webb.  They did this episode twice – once in 1953 and again in 1967, with a nearly identical script, and many of the same actors.  I watched both last night and I think I like the 1953 version better.  The situation?  It’s Christmas Eve, and the statue of the child Jesus has been stolen from the creche.  Father Rojas calls in Seargent Friday to find the statue; the search begins, and ends at the Old Mission Plaza Church in downtown Los Angeles.  Let’s watch, won’t we?

Act I
Act II
Act III

Folks, this happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to bring you into the loop…now all that’s left is a hearty prayer of Thanksgiving.

Last week, a friend from our parish notified my wife and several other friends that she was in the extremely early stages of pregnancy; then on Friday, she let us know that no heartbeat had been detected at her initial obstetrical visit; the assumption was that essentially the egg was defective and the few cells of baby which had started to grow had stopped.  On Saturday evening, our parish prayer chain email asked for prayers for a young mother, that a heartbeat would be heard….we assumed it to be our friend.

Y’know, sometimes prayers are answered in loud, obvious ways.  Thanks be to God, this one was.  No one…not the mother, the father, or the doctor were expecting to hear a heartbeat on the Doptone today, but they did.  A loud, strong heartbeat.

Special thanks to the Atlanta Catholic Homeschool discussion group on Yahoo for tipping my wife off on this.  Over at Nick Jr.’s website, they’ve got a “game” called FreeDraw….and guess what.  It’s anything but “free.”  You see, like many paint/draw programs, there’s a text tool.  But the text tool features friendly, built-in CENSORSHIP!!!  This is very disturbing.  When you use the text tool to type certain words, and then click outside the text area, your word will change to “sorry, word blocked.”  Here’s a screen shot:

Here are words my wife and I have tried so far that have been blocked:

Christmas
Jesus
Pope
Mass
Christian
Jew
George Bush
President Bush
Dick Cheney
Mother of God
God
Virgin Mary
Allah
Merry Christmas
Rosh Hashanah
Buddha
War on Terror
Laura Bush
in fact, no matter the context, “bush” is blocked…

On the not blocked list, we have:
Islam
Muslim
Yom Kippur
Hannukah
Mohammed
Ramadan
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
Planned Parenthood

We could go on, but you get the idea.  For fun, feel free to type into the comment box anything else you might find to be blocked.  Someone with an anti-Christian / left-wing political agenda got in there and set up the filtering tools to meet his opinions.  Nickelodeon is owned by Viacom, so, some underling has set this up.  The big wigs will appreciate knowing about it.

Bill Donohue will also appreciate knowing about it…and I will be passing it along to him as well.

The links are there for a reason folks…don’t sit and stew, do something!!

Here’s the opening of a typical global climate change alarmist piece from the AP:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

“The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

Notice how much of the editorializing is not in quotation marks? Ok, so you drop all the way down to the next to last paragraph and you see this gem:

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

Whoah…a cooling trend illustrates how fast the world is warming.  My head just exploded.

The average global temperature in 2008 is likely to wind up slightly under 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about a tenth of a degree cooler than last year. When Clinton was inaugurated, 57.9 easily would have been the warmest year on record. Now, that temperature would qualify as the ninth warmest year.

So in other words, because it was cooler in 1992 than it is now, even though the average temperature has been warmer during 9 years other than this one, it’s an illustration of how fast the earth is warming.  My head just exploded!  Notice how our intrepid AP reporter figured all this out on his own as he doesn’t attribute this thinking to any famous scientist or even to the Father of the Internet?  I think it’s also funny that they picked out the Clinton inauguration as their milepost by which everything else is judged.  Objectivity?  Who needs it?

I particularly enjoyed what Glenn Beck did with this headline this morning (actually, his compadre Stu came up with this:)  So, the drop in the Dow Jones Average really just illustrates how fast the economy is growing.  The rate of home foreclosures is an illustration of how fast home ownership is rising.  The extreme unattractiveness of Helen Thomas actually shows how hot she really is.  I didn’t make any of those up, by the way.

Full article

Add to the growing chorus of those who say the Big 3 are “too big to fail” the Bishops of Detroit and surrounding areas:

Cardinal Maida said both business and labor leaders had expressed fear of what could happen if there is no government action. “The alternative is not only unwise; it is unthinkable. If nothing is done, one can only imagine what would happen to all of us who call this corner of Michigan home,” he added.

I just don’t get this line of thinking.  If the automakers go bankrupt, they will be forced to restructure without the hand of unions sitting on top of them.  They won’t go away, they will just restructure and keep building cars.  Delta Airlines went bankrupt just a couple of years ago, and they’ve emerged leaner and meaner, and are now the biggest in the country (maybe the world also?)  I would think the same will happen in Detroit…after restructuring, they’ll be able to be non-union or at least renegotiate the union contracts that are killing them, and they’ll be forced to move into more efficient practices.

But what do I know?  They’re too big to fail.

More…

This apparently surfaced a while back, but it’s the first I have heard of it.  The largest poinsettia farm in the USA donates a big chunk of money to Planned Parenthood.  Go figure.

The Ecke Ranch in Encinitas, California, supplies 70% of all of the poinsettias sold in the United States and the Ecke family is among the most generous supporters of Planned Parenthood and long-time political activists for the abortion movement. The Ecke family features prominently in the major donors list in the fall 2005 edition of the San Diego/Riverside County Planned Parenthood Newsletter.

That was originally posted in 2006…I found it on Free Republic, referencing a LifeSiteNews item.

Some good news upon further searching, in 11/07:

According to an article in the San Diego Tribune Review, the Ecke Ranch has decided to license Armstrong Garden Centers to both grow and sell poinsettias under the Paul Ecke Ranch name.  According to ranch officials, the change is not expected to cause any great diminution to the ranch’s overall income since they assert that selling the full-grown plants does not constitute the bulk of their business.  However, according to the Tribune Review, the ranch typically grows and sells anywhere between 300,000 to 400,000 full-grown poinsettias each Christmas season.  This year, they will produce only 6,000 to be used for promotional purposes.

While the Tribune Review article makes no mention of the pro-life boycott, Hartline is convinced that it has affected the Ecke business.  “It is clear that our boycott will continue to hurt the Ecke name and their poinsettia sales.  I fully believe that the Eckes know that their name is bad news among pro-lifers.  I believe their decision to license out their name is, in part, due to our ongoing boycott.”

So that means, if you buy a full grown poinsettia bearing the Ecke Ranch name, you are not supporting them, except through whatever they’ve been paid for their naming rights.

Well, here’s a cheerful piece of news (from the Drudge Report).

A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all." Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare.

So, let’s all enjoy the simple things for a few days.  Counting our blessigns, family love, and time together.  It may be all we have someday.