And so far, Humanity isn’t winning this battle:

Overpopulation hysteria has real world consequences. One of these is a United Nations population control agency that goes by the name of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

Started in 1969 following a massive lobbying effort by billionaire John D. Rockefeller III, the UNFPA claims to work to “reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.” In fact, the UNFPA, like its founder, believes that the way to reduce poverty is to reduce the numbers of the poor through sterilization, contraception, and abortion campaigns.

We know.We have conducted repeated investigations of UNFPA operations around the world. We have found that, despite its soothing rhetoric about improving “reproductive health,” and “safe motherhood”—the UNFPA spends a huge chunk of its budget on soporific propaganda–the agency continues to be fixated on the numbers. We have documented its involvement in coercive population control policies in countries like China, Vietnam, Peru, and North Korea, as well as in refugee camps around the world.

Its intimate connection to China’s brutal one-child policy merits special attention. For three long decades, the Chinese government has aborted and sterilized millions of women each year. For three long decades, the UNFPA has provided financial aid, ideological encouragement, and international sanction to these abuses through its offices in Beijing and around the Chinese countryside. This shameless pattern of complicity in some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet is the chief reason why the Bush Administration, for seven years running, has refused to fund the UN agency.

We at PRI have hard evidence on the UNFPA’s involvement in coercion—videotapes, cassette tapes, written and spoken testimony from dozens of witnesses. Our information was verified by the U.S. State Department, and is accessible on our web site, as well as in our new video series: Exposure: Investigative Realism from PRI. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who in the past has been friendly towards the UNFPA, declared the UNFPA ineligible for U.S. funding because of its complicity in forced abortion and forced sterilization.

And now Obama, Hillary and the pro-abortion crowd will get the United States firmly behind the process of reducing the number of people in the world. Forty years after the population hysteria and with abundant evidence that the whole concept of “over-population” was non-existent and with birth rates declining towards catastrophic levels in many places, we’re still following the model of killing the unborn and discouraging parenthood. Why?

It could just be the enforced, leftwing stupidity so prevalent in our society. Once the left latches on to an idea and calls it dogma, to dissent from it in any way, shape or form means ostracism from the left and a campaign of slanders against you – so, most lefties just keep at it, no matter how far leftist theory diverges from obvious reality. The fact that if the United States were as densely populated as Japan it would have half the world’s population in it doesn’t seem to impress itself upon the mind of the left – we’re “overpopulated” and there’s an end on it. And China is, too – for crying out loud, they’ve got a billion people, so they must be overpopulated…and as Leon Trotsky once said, “we have to get over this Papistical-Quaker nonsense about the sanctity of human life”. Can’t everyone see that China is poor and it must be because of overpopulation? And except for the fact that China has far less than half the population density of Japan – which is rich, while China is poor – also doesn’t seem to break into leftwing population thinking.

There are about 57.5 million square miles of land area in the world – lets take 25% of that as absolutely uninhabitable by humans and call it 43 million square miles of land human beings could be on at any given time. If the whole world became as densely populated as Japan – where people live well and there is countryside and farmland, etc – then the population of the world would be 35,948,000,000. We’re a long way from that – and, in fact, there is no rational argument to be made that human population would ever rise that high. In other word’s, there never has been and never will be a problem with the number of human beings on the planet – there has been, on the other hand, a problem with how human beings are governed, and how they govern themselves. Had China been governed on the Japanese model there is every reason to expect that China would be as prosperous as Japan, and probably more prosperous as China has vastly more natural resources and arable land than Japan.

Greed, servility, selfishness, cowardice, tyranny – this explains poverty. But our leftists aren’t buying it. To them, its just us and if there were less of us then we’d all have more. Its either this sort of idiocy or we’ll have to fall back on the original reason for population control – getting rid of the “lesser” breeds of people via abortion and euthanasia, as Sanger’s Planned Parenthood wanted at the start (and given that PP takes donations from people saying they want black kids aborted, its not too farfetched to think that PP is still on the eugenics track). What all of this means is that those of us on the side of life have quite a battle on our hands over the next four to eight years.

A man of great faith and great intellect has gone home to Our Lord:

The death of Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, “brings home to God a great theologian and a totally dedicated servant of the Church,” Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said of the cardinal who died December 12 at Fordham University at the age of 90.

“His wise counsel will be missed; his personal witness to the pursuit of holiness of life as a priest, a Jesuit and a Cardinal of the Church will be remembered and will encourage the Church to remain ever faithful to her Lord and his mission,” Cardinal George said.

“I am deeply saddened at the loss of a personal friend; but I rejoice in the hope that now he sees clearly what he explored so well in his studies on revelation, on grace and on the nature of the Church and the papal office. May he rest in peace.”

Cardinal Dulles, who served as a professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America and later as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, assisted the USCCB as a key contributor to the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue and to the committee on doctrine.

“For a generation of priests, scholars and faithful, Cardinal Avery Dulles has been a reliable and faithful interpreter of the Second Vatican Council. A number of his books have become classics in theological education, such as Models of the Church,” said Father James Massa, executive director of the Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the USCCB and a student of Cardinal Dulles. “In some ways, his life bears comparison with another great cardinal-theologian, John Henry Newman, on whose birthday, 200 years later, Avery Dulles was created a cardinal of the Catholic Church.” The first U.S. theologian and U.S. Jesuit to be elevated to the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Dulles was, at his own request, not consecrated a bishop, a rare distinction for a cardinal.

I’ve read a bit of Cardinal Dulles’ work, and I stand amazed that he was 90 – as recently as February of this year he was writing this:

Nothing is more striking in the New Testament than the confidence with which it proclaims the saving power of belief in Christ. Almost every page confronts us with a decision of eternal consequence: Will we follow Christ or the rulers of this world? The gospel is, according to Paul, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” (Rom. 1:16). The apostles and their associates are convinced that in Jesus they have encountered the Lord of Life and that he has brought them into the way that leads to everlasting blessedness. By personal faith in him and by baptism in his name, Christians have passed from darkness to light, from error to truth, and from sin to holiness.

That is the faith of a man fresh to Christianity, and Cardinal Dulles kept it right up to the end, it would seem. No worries about Cardinal Dulles – if faith in Christ brings one to salvation, then I know precisely where he is.

From Britain:

A school choir was forced to withdraw from a Christmas event because organisers branded its carols ‘too religious’.

Around 60 children aged between seven and 11 had spent six weeks practising favourites including Once In Royal David’s City and Silent Night for the Corringham Winter Festival.

But they were let down at the last minute when their headteacher was informed their programme did not ‘dovetail’ with the festival’s theme.

Nothing to see here, just move along…no war on Christmas.

What will hurt Obama more, Blago or Rangel? Time will tell:

It certainly didn’t take long for scandal to rear its ugly head in the new era of Democratic control. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich saw to that, and in spectacular fashion.

But while most attention is fixed on the Blagojevich scandal — coming as it does in President-elect Barack Obama’s home state and replete as it is with enough tape-recorded talk of peddling a Senate seat, shaking down contributors and blackmailing journalists to make even FBI agents blush — it may not be the most troublesome one for the new president.

His more vexing problem could turn out to be that other, quieter scandal dogging Democrats. That’s the one involving Rep. Charles Rangel, head of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Rangel is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for failing to pay taxes on $75,000 in income on a vacation home in the Dominican Republic, for controlling multiple rent-controlled apartments in a Harlem apartment building, for using congressional stationery to raise money for a center named in his honor and, most recently and seriously, for helping a donor to his center win a tax loophole in return for a contribution.

Rep. Rangel has repeatedly and vociferously denied any wrongdoing, and he actually sought the Ethics Committee inquiry initially to clear his name.

Without doubt, the Blagojevich scandal is more audacious, and, because it involves the filling of Mr. Obama’s own Senate seat, might seem more potentially damaging to the new president. More broadly, it’s possibly a sign that Illinois could become to President Obama what Arkansas was to President Bill Clinton: a source of continuing political headaches back home.

Yet in many ways, the very fact that Gov. Blagojevich’s behavior seems so over the top makes it easier for Mr. Obama to deal with it. He can simply ask, as he has, that the governor quit and go away. It helps the Obama cause enormously, of course, that Gov. Blagojevich is on tape cursing the president-elect’s team for failing to go along with his pay-to-play scheme for filling the Senate seat, and that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald virtually cleared the Obama team in his public remarks on the case.

More than that, whatever ties Gov. Blagojevich and his cohorts may have had to Mr. Obama in the past, they will have little to do with his future in Washington.

Not so Rep. Rangel. For Mr. Obama, the Blagojevich investigation and prosecution soon will be something going on back home. The Rangel drama will play out right in the president-elect’s new front yard.

This is the result of years of Democrats covering for their own. Now, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Rangel…sure, he’s a pinko and a pain in the you-know-what, but he’s a Marine and a genuine political character. But he’s also never been called to account by his own side, and now it appears that decades of un-watched power has slowly moved Rangel from a hard-fighting man of the people into yet another money-grubbing political hack.

We’ve always had corruption in government, but I don’t think America has ever seen the breathtaking scale of corruption the Democrats have engaged in over the past couple decades. Sure, there have been plenty of corrupt GOPers, too, but those GOPers – even one of relatively minor sins like Foley – are out or isolated…corrupt Democrats tend to either go on as if nothing ever happened, or are found safe havens by the party after surrendering their seat to avoid losing it to the GOP. Several decades of hardly ever getting caught and special favors for those who get caught have bred in Democratic leaders the presumption that they can do whatever they please. Rangel has fallen victim to this mindset.

But not just Rangel – one only has to consider the fact that Blagojevich (as of this writing) still hasn’t resigned to understand that, for Democrats, corruption is something which can be worked out. Blago seems to be holding out in the expectation that the Democrat party will fix things up for him, as it has in the past. Alas, he doesn’t understand that he’s committing the one sin recognized in the Democratic party – he’s placing Democrat control of the Illinois governorship at risk. Such a thing cannot be tolerated – and so Blago is going to shorty find out a life times worth of effort on behalf of Democratic party is good for. Nothing.

For Obama, the problem is that he will be the head of this party of corruption – this Caucus of Corruption, as it were – and the people are expecting Obama to clean house…but giving somone a shovel and actually getting a hole dug are two different things. Obama has to go after corruption, but this will largely entail going after Democrats as the GOP has been repeatedly purged of corruption over the past four years or so. Will Obama show the courage of his convictions, or will he roll over to the Democrat powers that be?

If we are to have real change we can beleive in, then the best place to stop is on Barack Obama – all corrupt and corrupting elements have to be removed from positions of authority, and Obama must lead the charge, or be shown to be a mere political hack with a slick speaking style.

The scandal swirls around, and I think none of us know where it will all wind up – though I think it now very unwise that we elected someone from this political sewer known as Chicago:

As Gov. Rod Blagojevich was trying to pick Illinois’ next U.S. senator, businessmen with ties to both the governor and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed raising at least $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign as a way to encourage him to pick Jackson for the job, the Tribune has learned.

Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich supporter who also has fundraising and business ties to the Jackson family, according to several attendees and public records.

Two businessmen who attended the meeting and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson’s bid for the Senate.

I had been thinking that Rep. Jackson was a bit of an innocent bystander in this, but now I’m coming ’round to the view that we should consider everyone even remotely connected with Blago to be under a cloud until the whole thing is cleared up. At bottom, a lot of people should be resigning their positions, starting with Blago, but including anyone who was involved in picking or canvassing for the next Senator from Illinois. We can’t afford to have such people close to the seat of power, and we can’t rely upon basic decency for those who are deep in this corruption.

UPDATE: Iowahawk strikes again (language warning):

BREAKING: Feds Seize Blagojevich eBay Account

As noted by Reason:

Che director Steven Soderbergh tells Politico why his new four-hour, two-part epic about Ernesto Guevara is relevant in 2008:

“We’re certainly seeing the result of what happens when you make profit the point of everything, where money that’s being earned doesn’t represent any particular product or labor on anybody’s part. That can’t sustain, because it’s magical thinking. It can’t go on indefinitely, because eventually it crashes. Che’s dream of a classless society, a society that isn’t built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology.”

…

Aye caramba. Yes, the real lesson to be drawn from a man who oversaw summary executions and ran Cuba’s economy 20,000 leagues under the sea is that profits and capitalism are evil.

Amazing what you can accomplish if you die young after having a cool picture taken of you in romantic revolutionary pose…you can, for instance, get people who don’t know anything to gloss over your mass murdering ways.

Byron York notes the sorry tale:

…hroughout the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich, there are references to unnamed individuals who play important roles in the scandal — and who know a lot about what went on and who was involved. None of those intermediaries is more intriguing than the person referred to as “Advisor B.”

We first learn about Advisor B in the complaint’s description of a November 7 three-way telephone call between Blagojevich, his chief of staff John Harris, and “Advisor B, a Washington D.C.-based consultant.” It was during this call that the participants talked about a “three-way deal for the open Senate seat,” involving the Service Employees International Union and its affiliated group “Change to Win.” The idea was that Blagojevich would appoint Obama favorite Valerie Jarrett to the seat, and in return, SEIU would make Blagojevich head of “Change to Win,” and then Obama would perform some unspecified act to help “Change to Win.” Harris said such a deal would give Obama a “buffer so there is no obvious quid pro quo for [Senate Candidate One],” according to the complaint. (“Senate Candidate One,” we now know, refers to Jarrett.) “Advisor B said that he liked the idea of the three-way deal,” the complaint says. “Advisor B said they should leverage the president-elect’s desire to have [Jarrett] appointed to the Senate seat in order to get a head position with Change to Win and a salary.”

Do read the whole thing, if you can stomach it. This is change we can believe in? I guess no one in Chicago or Team Obama figured that what the people of Illinois need is someone who will ably represent their interests in the United States Senate…someone, that is, who is pretty much unlike Obama who spent most of the last two years advancing himself while Illinois was left to shift for itself. Do keep in mind that Obama had no legal part to play here – he has resigned his Senate seat and bears no legal authority in the matter of who will be appointed to fill his place. But there go Obama advisers – and perhaps Obama, himself – cutting deals as if a US Senate seat is a mere political plaything.

This, liberals, is what you backed – what you said would change America; what you said would be far better than President Bush; what you said was the historic birth of a new era in America and the world. Too bad your standard bearer is a substandard, Chicago political hack who looks good and can give a good speech…this is just the foretaste of what we’re in for over the next four to eight years.

A hard fight, but well won:

A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year’s end.

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.

This is what we should have been doing for years now – the Democrats wish to use the taxpayer’s money to help their friends and over the next two years they will be able to do a lot of it, but there’s no reason for we GOPers to be stampeded in to helping the Democrats swindle the American people. When it comes time to pay the piper, lets not have our Republican party picking up the Democrat’s check.

As an aside, its gotta hurt to be a Democrat just now – Obama can’t even get in to office without scandal dogging him, Democrats lose in Georgia and Louisiana and now their corrupt union buddies are hanging by a thread. It wasn’t supposed to be like this is The One Era. Guess Democrats still haven’t realized that they’ve got no ideas, are mired in corruption and are generally just barnacles on the ship of State. It was going to be a long four years for Republicans, but I’m feeling very jazzed up right now.

Now, Rod Blagojevich has been under a dark ethical cloud for a long time now.  He was corrupt enough that Mark and I gave him a dishonorable mention in our book, but that didn’t stop Barrack Obama from associating with him for the past few years. 

But, now that Blagojevich is on the verge of going down, Obama is trying to claim he had “no contact” with the disgraced governor — who would choose his successor in the Senate. 

Of course since his claim, various sources have revealed the opposite.  David Axelrod had said last month that they had in fact met and discussed who would replace him — only to claim this week he “misspoke.” Then woe found that it was reported the day after the election that Obama and Blagojevich had a meeting.

To be honest, I did not originally think Obama had any knowledge or involvement in the auctioning off of his Senate seat to the highest bidder. But, there is no point pretending that he never had any contact with him about who would replace him.

So why not be honest about the contact they did have, if the corrupt dealings weren’t a part of their conversations, Obama has nothing to hide. 

Well, apparently the reason why Obama is lying about having no contact with Blagojevich is that he may have had knowledge of Blagojevich’s pay to play scheme:

Barack Obama insists that he and his staff were not involved in the alleged schemes Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich cooked up to sell off the president-elect’s vacant Senate seat. 

But the timeline of activity outlined in the FBI’s 76-page complaint against Blagojevich suggests Obama’s team was aware that his home-state governor was playing political hardball in the weeks before his arrest.

That’s because shortly after Blagojevich allegedly told his advisers, in an expletive-laced conference call, that he would not appoint Obama’s pick to the Senate absent huge favors in return, Obama’s apparent pick promptly dropped out of the running for the Senate and joined the new White House staff. 

“Reading between the lines … clearly somebody from (Obama’s) operation did have a conversation with Blagojevich,” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel told FOX News. He added that Obama’s representative evidently wasn’t trying to cut a deal since Blagojevich indicated he was “getting nothing out of the Obama people.” 

FOX News has confirmed that Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, is the individual identified in the Blagojevich affidavit as Senate Candidate 1. 

The affidavit states that Senate Candidate 1 was likely to be supported by Obama for the seat, and that the Illinois governor was mulling a variety of ways to capitalize on such an appointment. Blagojevich allegedly wanted a corporate board appointment for his wife or millions in donations to a non-profit organization for his benefit, or even an appointment as secretary of health and human services, in exchange for appointing Senate Candidate 1. (Obama nominated former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle for the Cabinet post Blagojevich wanted on Thursday.)

But in the series of wiretapped conversations detailed in the complaint, Blagojevich and his advisers made clear that Obama was not willing to trade anything for the appointment of Senate Candidate 1. 

Corrupt to the core. If Obama was in the dark about Blagojevich’s scheme, he wouldn’t have lied about the contact he did have with Blagojevich that was so quickly determined to be lies.

So, Obama, what are you hiding?

One does wonder what really motivates these people:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue explains how the anti-Christmas agenda has changed:

“There was no anti-Christmas agenda until the 1980s, and at that time it was led by the ACLU. The strategy of choice was to ban the display of religious symbols, especially the crèche, on public property. This legal strategy, which worked relatively well, has been superseded by a cultural strategy. The goal now is to dilute the significance of Christmas via contrived competition. To wit: every religious, racial and ethnic heritage—including invented ones like Kwanzaa—is now celebrated in December.

“It is important to note that the agenda is not a positive one; it is not designed to honor world traditions. No, the agenda is negative—it is designed to combat Christmas. Here’s a splendid example.

“Margaret Downey, founder of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, sued Chester County in 2001 because a large Ten Commandments plaque was displayed at the Chester County Courthouse. After winding its way through the courts, Downey lost. Chester County, however, decided that the courthouse lawn should be open to all seasonal displays. The crèche and menorah were quickly displayed and now the lawn is adorned with Downey’s ‘Godless Holiday Tree’; it is decorated with the book covers of atheist tracts.

On some show or other I heard an atheist state that they are trying to reclaim Christmas from we Christians who usurped it – as if we would hold a celebration at this time just to annoy atheists of 2,000 years ago, supposing any such really existed back then. In actuality, of course, Christmas is held on December 25th due to various calculations of time designed to fit the story of salvation in to one calendar year. No one was trying to hijack a pagan holiday – its just that December 25th is approximately 9 months after Christians celebrate the Annunciation when the Word was made flesh in the womb of Mary. And the Annunciation, in turn, is observed in its turn due to calculations on the birth of John the Baptist, who was a little older than Jesus and who first came into contact with Our Lord on the Visitation. And so on and on. If you’re terribly interested in the whole Liturgical Year, go here.

There are approximately two billion Christians of various denominations in the world, with half of them being Catholic of various rites. In other words, one in three human beings believes in some measure that on Christmas day the only begotten Son of God was born to the Virgin Mary. As far as human activities go, this is as close to a universal thing as you can get. It is a tremendously important holy day – and the celebrations around it are entirely Christian. Were it not for Jesus and the Church he founded, December 25th would be just a day of the year. The basic desire of Christians is to celebrate this overwhelmingly important event in public and private – to which celebrations all are invited, but which must remain Christian because it is a Christian event. To try and de-Christianize it would be akin to trying to de-Americanize the Fourth of July – you might be able to do it, but what would be the point of observing it, once you had done so?

Its time for pernicious atheists and other busy bodies to keep their hands off Christmas – its none of anyone’s business what we do in our celebrations and, additionally, as we make up the very large majority of the population we’ll take no back chat about using the public square we largely pay for to celebrate our great holy day. If you don’t like Christmas being celebrated by Christians, then I suggest moving to a country with a smaller Christian tradition.

If you believe, then this is the second most important day of the year (the first would be Easter); if you don’t believe, then kindly observe your Christian brothers and sisters and join in any part of the celebration which tickles your fancy – but lay off absurd attempts to take Christ out of Christmas, or to exile Christians from their own public square.