Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

"In the last [Bush] budget, we cut housing again, and that was Jesus' dilemma. In Bethlehem, his family ended up homeless," Jackson told MSNBC's Campbell Brown.

"Rome was a wealthy country that left Jesus and Mary and Joseph, in a sense, homeless," he complained. "He was born an at-risk baby."

The new leader of the ruling Fatah movement said the Palestinians want to replace Israel with a state of their own.

Fatah chief Farouk Khaddoumi [also spelled "Kaddoumi" - AKH] said the Palestinian strategy toward Israel was two-fold. In the first stage, he said, the Palestinians would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In the second stage, the Palestinians would seek to eliminate the Jewish state.

In November, Khaddoumi replaced the late Yasser Arafat as leader of Fatah, Middle East Newsline reported.

"At this stage there will be two states," Khaddoumi told Iran's Al Aram television last week. "Many years from now, there will be only one."

The reporter who managed to get a National Guardsman serving in Iraq to question Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about why his unit's vehicles lacked sufficient armor coached the soldier using false information.

In fact, by the time Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts rehearsed Spc. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson on what to say to Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had already up-armored 97 percent of the vehicles in Thomas' 278th Regimental Combat Team, senior members of the Army's combat systems development and acquisition team said Thursday.

Further undermining the premise of Pitts' question, orders to up-armor the last 20 of the 278th's 830 vehicles were already in the pipeline when he engineered the bogus inquiry.

Yes, it's the pundit equivalent of the Iraq-Iran war. David Brock calls out Bill O'Reilly.

The free market is not an impersonal force; it is simply the sum total of all the choices to buy and sell made by a society's individuals. It defines the individual's means to determine how he or she will and will not interact with other individuals - economically, culturally, and otherwise. The free market is the cornerstone of harmonious coexistence between diverse individuals and diverse groups; people are content when they are not forced from engaging in peaceable interactions they desire and forced into dealings they find objectionable. Public education empowers government to arbitrate the trade of information and culture within the schools; it is the enemy of individual liberty and social harmony.

In its latest world atlas, National Geographic added "Arabian Gulf" in parentheses beneath "Persian Gulf" to label the body of water that cuts along the coasts of Iran and its Arab neighbors.

"Under the influence of the U.S. Zionist lobby and the oil dollars of certain Arab governments, the society has distorted an undeniable historical reality," wrote Hassan Hanizadeh in Tehran Times, a leading daily newspaper...From the left to the right to the disaffected, Iranians rallied against the offending American magazine. They blamed the "Zionists," accused the Arabs and lambasted the Americans.

The fearless stand of Rev. Tökés and his church came to a climax the weekend of December 15-17, and to the amazement of all concerned triggered massive sympathy demonstrations first in Timisoara, then in Bucharest, toppling the Ceausescu regime in a matter of days. It all started on Friday, December 15, with a moving truck pulling up in front of the parsonage of the Reformed Church of Timisoara. In the words of Peter Dugulescu, pastor of the Timisoara First Baptist Church, "First the believers from his (Reformed) churches and then, believers from other denominations and many other people . . . came out to support him. The truck remained unloaded . . . Tökés addressed the people from a window, asking them to trust God, to be peaceful. . . . The mayor of the town also addressed the people that had gathered (Reformed, Baptist, Catholic, and Orthodox; Hungarian and Romanian) . . . asking them to disperse, but the crowd would not."

On Saturday evening, December 16, Rev. Dugulescu drove by the Reformed church meeting Daniel Gavra, a twenty-four-year-old railway worker from his church who told his pastor that he and other young people were there to defend Tökés. He showed me that he brought with him (hidden under his coat) a bundle of candles, and he told me that after it got dark, he was going to distribute them to the young people, to keep them burning in front of Pastor Tökés’ house." Badly wounded in subsequent fighting Gavra had to have a leg, amputated. His words to his pastor from his hospital bed were that he had lost a leg but he had lit the first candle.

On Saturday evening, December 16, the crowds surrounding the Reformed church came under attack by the police and were sprayed with foam and water from first engines. "People were running, others were forced into buses and later that evening many were arrested." Tökés himself was arrested on Sunday, December 17, while about 5:00 p.m. that evening, Dugulescu reports, "the first shootings were heard in the city. . . . In the square between the opera house and the cathedral, people stayed the whole night . . . among them there was a girl from our church near the opera house, and she hid and saw how armed terrorists, dressed in army uniforms, fire machine-guns at the crowds of people." Afterwards she counted 382 dead bodies between the opera and the cathedral.

But the international battle is just starting. There was first the need to vote the law, even Spanish premier was rumored to have asked Chavez to desist. But now that the law is voted, the fun starts. Chavez openly defied the first international criticism

I wonder if he realizes how fascist is that language.