Happy New Year!

We wish for you and all our readers the broad, sunlit uplands of Christ's love and peace.  May God richly bless you in the year ahead.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In Memoriam A.H.H.

President and Family on Another Multi-Million Dollar Vacation

From The Examiner

By Mark Tapscott

President Obama and his family are enjoying a delightful Christmas vacation with friends and family in the chief executive's home state of Hawaii.

Nobody questions a president's right or need to take take away from the White House, but an investigation by Hawaii Reporter has turned up some eye-opening information about the costs and other aspects of the Obama get-away.

Just consider these estimates on part of the costs of the latest Obama Hawaii trip:

Al Gore Set To Become First “Carbon Billionaire”

CO2 tax agenda front man lining his pockets on the back of global warming fearmongering

From Prison Planet

Paul Joseph Watson

The New York Times has lifted the lid on how Al Gore stands to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars if the carbon tax proposals he is pushing come to fruition in the United States, while documenting how he has already lined his pockets on the back of exaggerated fearmongering about global warming.

As is to be expected, the article is largely a whitewash and takes an apologist stance in defense of Gore.

However, the NY Times‘ John M. Broder does reveal how one of the companies Gore invested in, Silver Spring Networks, recently received a contract worth $560 million dollars from the Energy Department to install “smart meters” in people’s homes that record (and critics fear could eventually regulate) energy usage.

Popes, Atheists and Freedom

Secularists should recognize that the pope's fight is their fight.

From The Wall Street Journal

By Daniel Henninger

This being the season of hope, Islamic extremists of course have been engaged in their annual tradition of blowing up Christian churches. 

An attack by a radical Muslim sect on two churches in northern Nigeria killed six people on Christmas Eve. On the Philippines' Jolo Island, home to al Qaeda-linked terrorists, a chapel bombing during Christmas Mass injured 11. 

One of the central public events during these days at year's end is the Pope's midnight Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In his homily the pope invariably pleads for peace, but on Friday evening a viewer could not have missed the meaning when Benedict XVI twice mentioned "garments rolled in blood," from Isaiah 9:5.

The image, as befits Isaiah, is poetic and disturbing. Benedict surely intended it so: "It is true," he said, "that the 'rod of his oppressor' is not yet broken, the boots of warriors continue to tramp and the 'garment rolled in blood' still remains." He was of course referring to the sustained violence against Christian minorities by Islamic fundamentalists.

EU Abolishes Christmas

From Cranmer

You might think this to be one of the ‘Euromyths’ – right up there with straight bananas, the re-classification of the carrot as a fruit and the EU-wide harmonisation of condom size.

Except that the European Commission really have produced a new religiously-correct daily planner (aimed, naturally, at school children) in which it really is always winter but never Christmas.

Or always Diwali, Hanukkah and Eid but never Christmas, to be precise.

His Grace is loath to exaggerate or distort this story in any way, lest it be classified as just another Euromyth.

These daily planners, of which three million have produced (courtesy of the taxpayer), include the holidays of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, but there is not one mention of Christian holidays.

Despite Christians manifestly constituting the vast majority of the European Union.

You might expect them to omit Ascension Sunday, Lent and the Feast Day of the Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman.

But Christmas and Easter?

The page for December 25th is completely empty, and at the bottom is the following message:

"A true friend is someone who shares your worries and your joy.”

That’s nice.

And evidence, if any were needed, that Christians have no true friends in the inner sanctuaries of the European Union.

It is even more astonishing that this planner not only includes the holy days of just about every religion except Christianity: it also mentions the secular key dates of significance to the European Union, like ‘Europe Day’.

Johanna Touzel, spokesperson for COMECE (the pathologically-federalist Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union) found the planner ‘unbelievable’.

It is even more incroyable when you consider that our President is a devout Roman Catholic who sees the EU as a ‘Christian club’.

Doubtless he will gloss over this a typo.

To omit one Christian festival may be regarded as an error; to omit two looks like carelessness.

But to omit all of them looks like conspiracy.

Or at least incontrovertible corroborative evidence that the EU is a God-less, Marxist, secular, religiously and politically-correct, totalitarian, omnipotent beast quite antithetical to Christians, Christianity and the message of Christ

Celtic Thunder - 'Christmas 1915'

Before anyone leaves a comment to tell us that the Christmas Truce took place in 1914, we know.  There were sporadic events like this throughout the war, at Christmas and Easter.

Happy Sixth Day of Christmas to all!

Bloomberg's Snow Job

"Our city is doing exactly what you'd want it to do -- having government provide the services that people want."

Michael R. Bloomberg

Michael Rubens Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and 10th richest U.S. citizen, is second to none when it comes to big government, high tax, nanny statism.  This is a Mayor who holds news conferences to tell New York parents how to dress their children on particularly frigid days, and tells restaurateurs what the salt content should be in their food.  As with most liberals, his cause is mankind; individuals get in the way.  

The following video offers a perfect metaphor for Bloomberg's kind of nanny statism, the streets will be cleared even if the vehicles that use them are destroyed in the process.