…But now Peta – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is itself on the receiving end of angry words over its own treatment of animals after it emerged that the organisation put down 96 per cent of the animals handed into its American headquarters. Of 2,216 animals taken to its premises in Norfolk, Virginia, last year, 2,124 were put to sleep – almost six per day. Homes were found for just seven.

The high-profile charity, famous for its “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaigns, has euthanised more than 20,000 pets in the last decade, according to figures it has supplied to Virginia state officials.

But the organisation, which does not run its own animal adoption programme and does not accept animals into its care elsewhere, admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that some treatable and adoptable animals were also among those killed by lethal injection.

…Now critics of the group are accusing it of being more interested in using its $32 million annual budget to fund its campaigns against the fur and meat industries than helping the cats and dogs in its backyard.

Steve Chapman points out why this research should horrify even those who are not part of the pro-life movement:

What this mandate means is simple: It may be permissible for scientists to create cloned embryos and kill them. It’s not permissible to create cloned embryos and let them live. Their cells may be used for our benefit, but not for their own.

There lies the reality of embryonic stem cell research: It turns incipient human beings into commodities to be exploited for the sake of people who are safely past that defenseless stage of their lives.

It’s a change that poses risks not just to days-old human embryos. The rest of us may one day reap important medical benefits from this research. But we may lose something even more vital.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

More Scrutiny Needed

On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

For as long as anyone can remember, Christmas trees adorned with lights and ornaments have greeted holiday season visitors to UNC Chapel Hill’s two main libraries.

Not this year.

The trees, which have stood in the lobby areas of Wilson and Davis libraries each December, were kept in storage this year at the behest of Sarah Michalak, the associate provost for university libraries.

“For as long as anyone can remember…” it starts out. It’s sad, really, that the rights of the majority are so often trampled by the minority in the US. Every year another business or institution decides that they’re not going to use the word “Christmas” in their advertising or allow their employees to say “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone. Offending someone is, of course, the only sin still recognized as such in the US of A, the Land of the Easily Offended and the Home of the Hypersensitive. Yet here in Japan, a country that is predominantly Buddhist/agnostic, no one thinks twice about it. All the stores play traditional Christmas hymns, and the word “Christmas” is up everywhere. People who aren’t Christians tell each other “Merry Christmas,” and they’ve even got their own original Japanese tradition of having a Christmas cake, which looks a whole lot like a birthday cake (sounds like a good idea to me, by the way). They do this because it’s fun. Plain and simple.

The point is, if you don’t like Christmas, then don’t celebrate it. Why do you want to ruin it for everyone else? As a Christian in Japan, I’m a part of a minority. It has never occurred to me nor to any of my friends, however, that we should protest the Buddhist and Shintoist festivals that the municipalities here hold. I don’t participate in them, but I’m not going to go out and tell everyone else that they can’t because I don’t. Why would I? Because the message at these events “offends” me? Boo hoo. Suck it up, people.

Hamas is ready to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders but “it will not recognise Israel,” the Islamist movement’s exiled chief Khaled Meshaal told a news conference Monday.

“We accept a Palestinian state within the June 4 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital — a sovereign state without settlements — as well as the right of Palestinian refugees to return, but without recognition of Israel,” he said.

Isn’t that nice? So they’re willing to negotiate with Israel as long as Israel agrees to cease to exist. Yep, all this violence, it’s Israel’s fault.

Meshaal was making his first public comment following two meetings in Damascus with former US president Jimmy Carter, who said earlier Monday Hamas told him it would accept the right of Israel “to live as a neighbour” if a peace deal was approved by a Palestinian referendum.

Jimmy Carter is an embarassment to the United States and a useful idiot to terrorists.

Threats force website to pull Quran video 

On Dec. 22, the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record published an article summarizing an interview its reporter Siobhan Synnot had with the superstar actor Will Smith. Near the end of the highly laudatory piece, the reporter wrote: “Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good” and immediately cited the actor saying: “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today,’” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and, using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’”…Every Hollywood and celebrities Internet site I checked – about 30 – headlined that “Will Smith thinks Hitler was a ‘good’ person” (note that ‘good’ was put in quotation marks as if the headline was accurately quoting Smith).

And most then opened their phony report with this: “U.S. actor Will Smith has stunned fans by reportedly declaring that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was essentially a ‘good’ person.”

A complete fabrication.

…Smith reacted to what he correctly called “an awful and disgusting lie” and denounced Hitler as “a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.” At that point, Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, announced, “We welcome and accept Will Smith’s statement that Hitler was a ‘vicious killer’ and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise.” That was good and necessary. But, like the irresponsible blogs, the ADL leader characterized Smith’s original statement this way: “Unfortunately, in citing Hitler in what appears to be a positive context, Smith stirred up a hornet’s nest on the Internet, where hate groups and anti-Semites latched on to the remark and praised it.”

But Will Smith never cited Hitler in “a positive context,” and Foxman should never have said that Smith did. By doing so, Foxman preserved the original lie. A group dedicated to opposing defamation should have opposed the defamation of Will Smith, not subtly contributed to it. (emphasis mine)

I think it’s time for Foxman to step down before the ADL becomes completely irrelevant–if it hasn’t already.

Twelve village churches were burned and ransacked in eastern India over Christmas as Hindu extremists clashed with members of the Christian minority.

One person died and more than 25 were injured in the violence in Orissa state.

It was sparked after Hindu hard-liners objected to the scale of a Christmas Eve prayer vigil, according to the Catholic Bishops Conference in New Delhi.

More than 450 police had to be deployed to quell the violence, which saw groups of Hindus rampaging through villages in the Kandhamal district, burning the mud and thatch village churches.

By yesterday afternoon police said the worst of the violence appeared to have subsided.

However, local Christian leaders accused the state authorities of failing to intervene quickly enough, drawing comparison with the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, which left more than 1,000 dead and were state-sponsored according to human rights groups.

Now, why would they do that? Why would the UN overestimate the AIDS epidemic? Can anybody say money? Same reason Ted Danson overestimated the death of the oceans. Can anybody ask the same question about global warming? Why would the UN be overestimating the destruction from global warming?

…Just take the AIDS epidemic outta here and put global warming in it and you’ve got an identical story in about ten years.

“Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.” Oooh, okay, so they did it strategically. They were smart. They lied on purpose to get our attention, to make sure we knew just how rotten it was going to be, and to make sure that governments around the world and individuals threw money at AIDS programs all over the world, administered by the United Nations.

Can anybody say, global warming overestimated? Same bunch of people…

…Now, remember what is fundamentally involved in all this: science. Science told us it was going to spread; it was going to spread to the heterosexual community. Science told us it was going to spread at geometric rates. It was a consensus of scientists. Scientists, scientists, scientists told us that this was all going to be one of the most devastating things around the world. It was time to cough up money for education, and condoms, and cucumbers and all that, and we had rock stars like Bono establish philanthropic careers on the basis of all this, all based on science.