Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

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This post is a BizzyBlog Christmas Eve tradition.

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‘Twas the Night Before Christmas
by Clement Clarke Moore

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads.
And Mama in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out on the roof there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
tore open the shutter, and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
gave the lustre of midday to objects below,
when, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles, his coursers they came,
and he whistled and shouted and called them by name:

“Now Dasher! Now Dancer!
Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid!
On, Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch!
To the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away!
Dash away all!”

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky
so up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
the prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head and was turning around,
down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
and he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes–how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
and the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
and the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
and I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
and filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
and giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

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This post is a BizzyBlog Christmas Eve tradition.

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The malls and the Main Streets will soon fall silent. The ringing cash registers, the happy cries of children, the hearty greetings of a thousand fraudulent Santas will soon be ghostly echoes in shuttered shops and across silent streets.

But the Christ born in a manger 2,000 years ago yet lives. The story of Christmas continues to quicken the hearts of sinners and transform the lives of the wicked, and nothing illustrates the redeeming power of the authentic message of Christmas with greater clarity than the story of a wastrel English slaver named John Newton.

Newton was born 300 years ago into a seafaring family in England. His mother was a godly woman whose faith gave her life meaning, and he recalled as the sweetest remembrance of childhood the soft and tender voice of his mother at prayer. She died when John was 7.

His father soon married again, and John left school four years later to go to sea with him. He easily adopted the vulgar life of common seamen, though the memory of his mother’s faith remained. “I saw the necessity of religion as a means of escaping hell,” he would recall many years later, “but I loved sin.”

On shore leave, he was kidnaped by a press gang and taken aboard HMS Harwich. Life grew coarser. He ran away, was captured and taken back to the Harwich and put in chains, stripped before the mast, and flogged. “The Lord had by all appearances given me up to judicial hardness,” he recalled. “I was capable of anything. I had not the least fear of God, nor the least sensibility of conscience.”

The captain of the Harwich traded him to the skipper of a slaving ship, bound for West Africa to take aboard wretched cargo. “At this period of my life,” he later reflected, “I was big with mischief and, like one afflicted with a pestilence, was capable of spreading a taint wherever I went.” John’s new captain favored him, however, and invited him to his island plantation off the African coast, where he had taken as his wife a beautiful but cruel African princess. She grew jealous of John, and was pleased when it was time for them to sail. But John fell ill and was left in the care of the captain’s wife.

The ship was hardly over the horizon when she ordered him from her house and thrown into a pigsty. She gave him a board for a bed and a log for a pillow. He was left in delirium to die. Miraculously, he did not die. He was blinded, kept in chains in a cage like an animal, and fed swill from her table. Word spread through the district that a black woman was keeping a white slave, and many came to taunt him. They threw limes and stones at him, mocking his misery. He would have starved if other slaves, waiting for a ship to take them to the Americas, had not shared their meager scraps of food. Five years passed, and the captain returned. When John told him how he had been treated, he branded John a thief and a liar. When they sailed again, John was treated ever more harshly.

“The voyage quite broke my constitution,” he would recall, “and the effects would always remain with me as a needful memento of the service of wages and sin.”

Like Job, he became a magnet for adversity. He was shipwrecked in a storm, and despaired that God had mercy left for him after his life of hostile indifference to the Gospel. “During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple to its lawfulness.” Yet the wanton sinner, the arrogant blasphemer, the mocker of the faith of others, was finally driven to his knees: “My prayer was like the cry of ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear.”

Rescued, he made his way back to England, to reflect on the mercies God had shown him in his awful life. He fell under the influence of George Whitefield and John Wesley, and was wondrously born again into a new life in Jesus Christ. He spent the rest of his life preaching of God’s mercies.

Two days short of Christmas 1807, he died at the age of 82, and left a dazzling testimony to the amazing grace of the Christmas story. “I commit my soul to my gracious God and Savior, who mercifully spared and preserved me, when I was an apostate, a blasphemer and an infidel, and delivered me from that state on the coast of Africa into which my obstinate wickedness had plunged me.” Set to music, his testimony became the most beloved hymn of Christendom.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
and grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear,
the hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come.
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
and grace will lead me home.

Note: This post is a BizzyBlog Christmas Eve morning tradition.

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Posted by kmunchausen at YouTube (also at his National Institute of Prevarication), narrated by Bill Osborne (Merry Christmas, Bill):

Full text:

The embers glowed softly and in their dim light,
I gazed ’round the room and I cherished the sight.

My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
transforming the yard to a wintry delight.

The sparkling lights in the tree, I believe,
completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.

My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment or so it would seem,
So I slumbered. Perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t too near.
But it opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn’t quite know.
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.

Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood his faith weary and tight.
A soldier, I puzzled, some 20 years old.
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and he smiled,
Standing watch over me and wife and my child.

“What are you doing?” I asked without fear.
“Come in this moment, it’s freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve.”

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts.
To the window that danced with the warm fire’s light.
Then he sighed and he said, “It’s really all right.”

“I’m out here by choice, I’m here every night,
It’s my duty to stand in the front of the line
That separates you from the darkest of times.”

“No one had to ask or beg or implore me.
I’m proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My gramps died at Pearl on then day in December.
Then sighed, “That’s a Christmas gra’m always remembers.”

“My dad stood his watch in the jungles of ‘Nam.
And now it’s my turn. And so here I am.
I’ve not seen my own son in more than a while.
But my wife send me pictures. He’s sure got her smile.”

Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white and blue, the American flag.

“I can live through the cold and being alone,
Away from my family, my house, and my home.
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet.
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.
I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother,
Who stand at the front against any and all,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall.”

“So go back inside,” he said. “Harbor no fright.
Your family is waiting, and I’ll be all right.”

“But isn’t there something I can do?
At the least give you money?” I asked.
“Or prepare you a feast.
It seems all too little for all that you’ve done.
For being away from your wife and your son.”

Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret.
“Just tell us you love us, and never forget
To fight for your rights back at home while we’re gone,
To stand your own watch no matter how long.”

“And when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled
Is payment enough. And with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us.”

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Since the founding of our country, brave soldiers have always left their homes and families to fight and to protect the freedom that we enjoy.

All too many have willingly given their very lives to ensure that their families and their posterity will be able to enjoy peace and prosperity.

Wherever our soldiers have fought, they have established freedom. No lands were conquered, no people subjugated. After every conflict, each soldier quietly returned home, leaving behind only freedom in place of the conflict which cost so many of their lives.

Wherever there is freedom, it has always won by the shedding of blood.

Can we at home do any less than fight for our freedom? Can we stand idly by as our Constitution is being trampled on by those who seek power over us?

We owe it to our Founding Fathers to stand up, take notice, and take action. We must ensure that our rights and freedom are preserved for future generations.

To arms, to arms! The war cry sounds again. Now is the time for each of us to do our part.

It is time for a new generation to rise, to recognize the gifts of freedom, and to fight for freedom now at home.

Eye-opening:

A 2008 OECD study of leading economies found that “taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States.” More so than Sweden or France.

A 2008 study of 24 leading economies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concludes that, “Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States, probably reflecting the greater role played there by refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. . . . Taxes tend to be least progressive in the Nordic countries (notably, Sweden), France and Switzerland.”

The OECD study—titled “Growing Unequal?”—also found that the ratio of taxes paid to income received by the top 10% was by far the highest in the U.S., at 1.35, compared to 1.1 for France, 1.07 for Germany, 1.01 for Japan and 1.0 for Sweden (i.e., the top decile’s share of Swedish taxes is the same as their share of income).

That’s because the those with the highest incomes in the U.S. pay less of a penalty for creating reporable income and redeploying assets than those in the other countries named.

That thought leads to Reynolds’ wrap:

Once higher tax rates cause the top 1% to report less income, then top taxpayers would likely pay a much smaller share of taxes, just as they do in, say, France or Sweden. That would be an ironic consequence of listening to economists and journalists who form strong opinions about tax policy on the basis of an essentially irrelevant statistic about what the top 1%’s share might be if there were not taxes or transfers.

This would inevitably lead to the call for more across-the-board tax increases on everyone — not exactly what the Left wants … or claims not to want.

Current headlines at Drudge:

Actually, the “focus” goes back 2-1/2 years to the beginning of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy — and that “focus” has been on remaking and ruining the economy. Whether the attempted ruination has been deliberate or not is the only item up for debate.

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In the Christmas Spirit: “Salon Publishes Call for Torture, Murder of Sarah Palin.”

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It’s time to dust off the Darth Dilbert-created graphic for this item out of Providence, RI:

… dozens of children yesterday (were) at the annual Toy Gun Bash in the gymnasium of Pleasant View Elementary School. There, they lined up to toss their toy guns, from dainty purple water guns to camouflage-painted pistols, inside the Bash-O-Matic, a large black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.

Prodded by Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who wore a fuzzy Santa hat, the children stared curiously as the Bash-O-Matic mashed up their guns and digested them into a plastic bin near its tail.

… ’Tis the season for joy, peace, and grinding up plastic, orange-tipped AK-47s.

For seven years, Providence municipal and law enforcement officials have organized the event around Christmastime as a way to raise awareness of the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake.

As Darth would say, another in a long line of reasons to homeschool:

HT to Instapundit, who carries several readers’ outraged comments.

Another reason to homeschool, from the same article:

In kindergarten, he (6 year-old Malik Hall) brought a pop gun to school and shot at a classmate when the child refused to return his toy truck.

The police and representatives of the state’s children services department rushed to the school, and the boy was expelled.

“He had it in his pants like a gangster,’’ (Malik’s mother Amanda) Hall said.

Expelling a 6 year-old for “shooting” a pop gun. A pop gun.

Re-run that reason-to-homeschool graphic:

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The Revenge of Arthur Laffer, now playing in Oregon:

Oregon raised its income tax on the richest 2% of its residents last year to fix its budget hole, but now the state treasury admits it collected nearly one-third less revenue than the bean counters projected.

… In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City’s rate is higher. Oregon’s liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their “shared sacrifice.”

Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.”

One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens.

… If Salem officials want to find where the millionaires went, they might start the search in Texas, the state that leads the nation in job creation—and has a top income and capital gains tax rate 11 percentage points lower than Oregon’s.

That rate would be zero.

Having a couple of million people vote on whether or not to impose a new tax on only about 2% of the population pretty much meets the definition of “theft” (“the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny”). Just because a majority of those not paying the tax said it was okay to compel the other 2% to pay doesn’t magically make it not wrongful.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that so many of those who were targeted decided not to hang around for the stickup.

From Konlgstein, Germany:

Dec 22, 2010 / 09:24 pm

Aid to the Church in Need’s Christmas-time grants will assist persecuted and suffering Christians in countries around the world.

The Catholic charity has reserved funds for 18 aid programs to help dioceses in Haiti recover from the devastating January earthquake.

Its largest grants include $106,000 to help 270 students for the priesthood whose seminary buildings were destroyed by the quake. Another $65,400 will help repair a religious sisters’ convent which temporarily houses more than 50 women after the congregation lost most of its houses in Port-au-Prince.

In Pakistan, the Catholic Church will receive five aid packages including a $32,700 grant for a boy’s hostel in Hyderabad Diocese and a multi-purpose community center in Yohannabad, outside Lahore.

A grant will also go to Christ the King Seminary in Karachi, where up to 40 theology students are preparing for the priesthood. The grant will be used for library books and new air conditioning units, the latter being especially vital in a hot region where electricity is rationed.

Aid to the Church in Need will also provide emergency aid packages for Christians fleeing persecution. Seminarians from the Syrian Catholic Archdiocese of Mosul, which has seen some of the country’s worst anti-Christian violence, will receive $26,200. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The START treaty, which should be rejected, probably won’t be. Investors Business Daily outs some of the betrayers, and outlines the dangers:

The heirs of Ronald Reagan abandon his legacy and dream of defending America from nuclear attack. Our security will rest on ambiguous language and vague assurances, not on the genius of U.S. technology.

Peace in our time, or should we say appeasement in our time, as a sufficient number of GOP senators signed on the New START treaty to give the Democrats and President Obama the 67 votes needed for ratification.

The Hill reported that Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., became the 10th Republican to support the treaty on Monday. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was No. 9, saying on Monday afternoon, “I believe it’s something important for our country and I believe it’s a good move forward.”

Outgoing Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, says he supports the treaty as does another lame duck, Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Ohio (actually Utah–Ed.), who said a letter from President Obama brought him on board.

Obama sent a letter to Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday assuring him that we “will continue to develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect the United States.”

That letter needs to be sent to Medvedev and Putin, not to the U.S. Senate, for that is not the Russian understanding. “Russia will have the right to opt out of the treaty if … the U.S. strategic missile defense begins to significantly affect the efficiency of Russian strategic nuclear forces,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on April 6.

This effectively gives Russia a veto over the defense of the American people against nuclear attack.

… Missile defense is useful not only against those who have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, but also in dissuading ambitious tyrants from pursuing them. Russia is not the only possible threat. China is building and deploying road-mobile ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines that can target the U.S. from coastal waters.

What about North Korea, Iran, or even a future Pakistan fallen into jihadist hands? START is a Cold War relic, a bilateral treaty in a multilateral world. It legitimizes the bogus Russian argument that defending ourselves is destabilizing and the threat comes from the weapons themselves, not those nations willing to use them.

… This treaty is a monument to President Obama’s naive dream of a “world without nuclear weapons.”

The problem is not nukes but who has them. We don’t fear Britain and France. We should fear, and defend ourselves against, those who dream of a world without the United States.

Here’s a reminder from May 2008 as to what our President’s real goals are, and why no treaty “negotiated by his administration deserves any attention, let alone ratification:

Obama’s Blueprint for Surrendering in the War on Terror, Unilateral Disarmament, and Endangering National Security

(Direct YouTube link)

First, I’ll stop spending $9 billion a month in Iraq. I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning. As President, I will end it.

Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. And I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the quadrennial defense review is not used to justify unnecessary spending.

Third, I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons. I will seek a global on the production of fissile material, and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off of hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.

If the missile defense systems are so “unproven,” why is Russia so determined to prevent their further development and to ultimately eliminate them?

If his goal is “a world without nuclear weapons,” why the timid responses to North Korea and Iran?

If he/we won’t “weaponize space,” what will we do when others do, as they inevitably will?

Appeasing our enemies will never make them our friends.

The world will become more dangerous once we agree to START.

… both forms of commenting are operational.

Thanks to web genius Charles for dealing with a pesky problem that traces back intruder-inserted code a while ago.

Both the pop-up comment form and the form below each post now work.

Michael Barone:

the great engine of growth in America is not the Northeast Megalopolis, which was growing faster than average in the mid-20th century, or California, which grew lustily in the succeeding half-century. It is Texas.

Its population grew 21 percent in the past decade, from nearly 21 million to more than 25 million. That was more rapid growth than in any states except for four much smaller ones (Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho).

Texas’ diversified economy, business-friendly regulations and low taxes have attracted not only immigrants but substantial inflow from the other 49 states. As a result, the 2010 reapportionment gives Texas four additional House seats. In contrast, California gets no new House seats, for the first time since it was admitted to the Union in 1850.

There’s a similar lesson in the fact that Florida gains two seats in the reapportionment and New York loses two.

This leads to a second point, which is that growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation’s total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

Though it remains to be seen how much he really, really means it when opposed by the knee-jerkers, John Kasich wants to phase out the income tax. The unanswered question remains (because there is no good answer): If these nine states can survive and thrive without an income tax, why can’t Ohio?

One can only conclude based on the real-world results that those who oppose gradual income-tax elimination in Ohio aren’t really interested in seeing the Buckeye State grow. They would apparently prefer stagnation. If that continues, many Buckeye States residents will vote on that choice well before the next elections for statewide office. They’ll vote with their feet, and become ex-Ohioans.

Predictably, it’s the left — particularly our Leftist in Chief — imposing by bureaucratic fiat what it can’t accomplish and could never accomplish through the democratic process:

There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

… some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the “media reform” movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That’s quite a coup.

Fund’s work demonstrates that the net neutrality gambit is far more than a bureaucracy run wild. It is the culmination of a presidential strategy to defy public will and even the courts — the same courts leftists love to use to impose their will when judges render unconstitutional decisions they like — to impose authoritarian controls on what has become the backbone of free speech and expression here and around the world, with the clear intent to change its very nature.

As has been the usual case with this administration, it’s another action fitting the definition of “tyranny” (“arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority”). And in this case, based on his clear personal involvement, it is an action sanctioned and supported by a president who thinks like and acts like a tyrant (“any person in a position of authority who exercises power oppressively or despotically”).

From Baltimore:

Dec 21, 2010 / 11:57 am

Catholic sisters in Baltimore auctioning off a rare baseball card to support their mission work, hit a snag recently as the winning bidder failed to come through with the promised $220,000.

The bleak situation brightened, however, when an avid card collector – a Catholic doctor from Philadelphia – wired the funds after the original bidder missed the 30-day deadline to purchase the card.

The mission work of the School Sisters of Notre Dame will receive a big financial boost from the sale of one of the most prized baseball cards in the world. One of the sisters received the highly valued collector’s item featuring Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner in her deceased brother’s will.

Sr. Virginia Muller told the Associated Press in October that the slightly damaged card of Wagner, one of only 60 that exist, was bequeathed to one of the sisters in a safety deposit box with a typewritten note explaining its value.

When Heritage Auction Galleries put the card up for auction last month, it eventually garnered $220,000. However, the original bidder failed to provide the money within the 30-day span following his winning bid.

Yet on Dec. 20 – much to the delight of the sisters – Dr. Nicholas DePace, a Catholic cardiologist from Philadelphia, wired the the money and now owns the card. An avid collector for 30 years, he immediately agreed to purchase the card after a staff member at the auction house told him it was available again.

“I’m ecstatic about it. … I will argue that this Wagner card is the most significant Wagner card because it’s the American story about how people just get a baseball card and they hide it in the safe,” DePace told the Associated Press. “There’s a treasure there, and the treasure comes out, and now the treasure’s going to be shared with tens of thousands of people.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Eric Holder recently had what he wants to be perceived as a really important interview about the domestic terror threat with Pierre Thomas of ABC News.

In the video at the ABC link, George Stephanopoulos’s intro at Good Morning America describes Holder as “a pretty circumspect man,” but that on the subject of domestic terror threats, “he doesn’t seem to be pulling any punches.”

Really? If that’s the case, Holder must have said a lot of things which got left on ABC’s cutting-room floor. That’s because in the entire three-page story at ABC (it’s easiest to prove the following by looking at the print version, which can only be obtained at the link), the following words never appear:

• any form of “Islam”
• “Muslim”
• “Jihad”
• “Hood,” as in Ft. Hood, the site of a jihad-inspired terrorist attack “allegedly” by a U.S. soldier who “just happened” to be Muslim, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others.
• even “fundamentalist,” a term the establishment press frequently and often recklessly hurls at Christians who have believes in scary things like the right of a pre-born baby to live.

It seems virtually impossible that anyone who is serious about domestic terror threats could “successfully” avoid all of these words and still accurately and completely communicate the true nature of the threat we face. Thus, either Eric Holder wasn’t as forthcoming as Stephanopoulos claims, or ABC put a great deal of effort into scrubbing his words.

The best clue that it’s that latter is that the Attorney General still appears to be bitterly clinging to the notion that terrorists should have all the legal-defense rights of U.S. citizens. That’s what I get from the last sentence in the following passage of ABC’s report:

Turning to how terror suspects are tried, Holder said he still believes the “decision as to how people get prosecuted, where they get prosecuted, is an executive branch function. Even if those suspects are being held now at Guantanamo Bay. Holder said Congress should not be interfering with that.

“It’s — from my perspective — a constitutional issue,” he said.

That brings to mind another word that didn’t come up in ABC’s report: “Ghailani,” as in Ahmed Ghailani, “the al Qaeda operative accused of playing a key role in the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.” Holder’s attempt to try Ghailani in the American court system ended in mid-November, when a jury “acquitted Ghailani on 285 counts — including … (224) murder counts — while convicting him on a single count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property.”

In the third paragraph of ABC’s report, Holder says, “What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant.” With all due respect, Mr. Holder, it would be helpful if you “made people aware of the threat” by actually naming it.

As to ABC’s video coverage, the network played its politically correct part. Watch in amazement as ABC repeatedly refers to ridiculously vague “homegrown radicals.” “Radical cleric” Anwar Al Awlaki is never described as a believer in Islam or jihad. The ABC video does describe Awlaki as a possible influence on the Fort Hood murderer — something that “somehow” didn’t get into the print description of the interview. Why not?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.