Happy holidays to all.
Luke 2: 1-20 (N.I.V.):

The Birth of Jesus
1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.
2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)
3 And everyone went to his own town to register.
4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born,
7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
The Shepherds and the Angels
8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.
9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.
12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.
17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child,
18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.
19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

They probably don’t get into the holiday spirit much, anyway:

Alarming messages published on known al Qaeda Web sites are claiming the terror network is about to launch its biggest strikes ever – and are warning Muslims to leave the cities of New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
. . .
[Counterterrorism expert Rita] Katz said a posting two weeks ago quoted an al Qaeda spokesman identified as Abu Issam al-Yamani as saying, “The next al Qaeda attacks will be most violent and will target the U.S.” and urged Muslims “to leave the country if they don’t wish to die as a result of a Jihadist operation.”
A second message was posted on the same Web site last Thursday, from a group calling itself the Islamic Bayan Movement.
“Our Muslim brothers in America, this is our final warning. We ask you, as fast as you can, to leave the following cities immediately: Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles,” the message said.

Doesn’t sound good. On the other hand, I could post a bunch of scary stuff on a web site too, and it wouldn’t mean anyone was actually in danger.

“Good times” not necessarily here to stay:

America’s factories saw orders for big-ticket goods drop by 3.1 percent in November, the largest decline in more than a year, raising new questions about how firm a grip manufacturers have on their own fragile recovery.
The drop reported by the Commerce Department Wednesday in orders for “durable goods” costly manufactured items expected to last at least three years came after a brisk 4 percent advance in October and a solid 2.2 percent increase in September.
The 3.1 percent decrease was the first decline since August and the largest since September 2002, when durable-goods orders plunged by 6 percent.
The performance in November was considerably weaker than economists were expecting. They were forecasting a 0.6 percent rise. The weakness was broadbased, with cars, communications equipment, computers and machinery among the categories showing a drop in orders last month.

A one month drop isn’t a huge news item. But another month or two like it and it will be.

Via Drudge, this story says the USDA isn’t being forthcoming with its mad cow testing:

Although the United States Department of Agriculture insisted the U.S. beef supply is safe Tuesday after announcing the first documented case of mad cow disease in the United States, the agency for six months repeatedly refused to release its tests for mad cow to United Press International.
The USDA claims to have tested approximately 20,000 cows for the disease in 2002 and 2003, but has been unable to provide any documentation in support of this to UPI, which first requested the information in July.
In addition, former USDA veterinarians tell UPI they have long suspected the disease was in U.S herds and there are probably additional infected animals.
. . .
USDA officials told UPI as recently as Dec. 17 the agency still is searching for documentation of its mad cow testing results from 2002 and 2003.
UPI initially requested the documents on July 10, and the agency sent a response letter dated July 24, saying it had launched a search for any documents pertaining to mad cow tests from 2002 and 2003.
“If any documents exist, they will be forwarded,” USDA official Michael Marquis wrote in the letter.
Despite this and a 30-day limit under the Freedom of Information Act on responding to such a request, the USDA never sent any corresponding documents. The agency’s FOI office also did not return several calls from UPI placed over a series of months.

Clearly, the USDA wants to minimize the impact this scare has on the beef industry. If it’s as claimed, this refusal to release records seems suspicious.

Perhaps Americans have something common with Saddam Hussein:

British officials are circulating a story that Saddam Hussein may have been hoodwinked into believing that Iraq really did possess weapons of mass destruction.
The theory, which is doing the rounds in the upper reaches of Whitehall, is the result of an attempt to find what one official source called a “logical reason” why no chemical and biological weapons had been found in Iraq.
According to the theory, Saddam and his senior advisers and commanders were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.
The officers did not want to tell their superiors that the weapons were either destroyed or no longer usable.

Only in our case, we pay billions of dollars for our senior commanders to trick us.
Then there’s also this:

Hans Blix, the former US weapons inspector in Iraq, said yesterday that most experts on Iraq now believed Saddam almost certainly destroyed his weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War in 1991.
“I think the vast majority of people are feeling there is very little likelihood that they [the Iraqis] had anything, and the biggest chance is that they destroyed them in 1991,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

If Americans believed in holding government officials accountable, some people would be in serious trouble these days.