Monica Crowley

Gone Fishin'

I'm going to take some time off this week, but I'll try to post occasionally. This weekend and next, we've got some really fun end-of-year award shows on "The McLaughlin Group," so please tune in for those. In the meantime, enjoy the week and the last days of 2010.

Merry Christmas, 2010

Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew 1:23

For Kids of All Ages: Track Santa

Have you been naughty or nice? You'll soon find out! How close is Santa Claus to your home? The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has a day job: monitoring American and Canadian airspace for unauthorized airborne objects. But on Christmas Eve, they watch an airborne object that is most certainly authorized: Santa.

NORAD tracks him as he travels around the world. They show where he's been, where he is at this very moment, and where he's going next.

To track Santa around the globe, check out NORAD:

www.NORADSanta.org

You can also follow NORAD on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/noradsanta

And on Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/noradsanta

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

Lumps of Coal for the Pols

I saw this on Politico.com today and thought it was too good not to pass along:

"We all know the tradition - if someone's been bad, put a lump of coal in their stocking - and now you can do just that for your (least) favorite politician.

CoalGram.com is a new website that allows you to let your elected representatives know just how much you *didn't* appreciate their work this past year by mailing them an actual lump of coal.

"With the whole political landscape this year, why not offer people a way to send coal to politicians?" CoalGram Co-Founder Donnie Franzen told POLITICO. "We could have gone into different subsets of government, but we decided that the Senate, the House of Representatives and the president were the three areas where people would get a kick out of sending coal to those people."

Franzen says that the product is selling quite well and luckily hasn't gotten any nasty phone calls from any of the recipients. Their website allows visitors to see who's getting the most coal in their stockings and, thus far, Democrats are in the lead. And, as for individual politicians, Obama is the #1 pick."

We know they've been very naughty. We spanked them at the ballot box in November. Now we can send 'em lumps of coal. I just wish we could also send them to their rooms without supper...for like two years.

Larry, Mo, and Curly

It's Christmastime, which is a time for joy and celebration---and for stepped up Islamic terror plots against the United States. Last Christmas Day, a Nigerian Muslim tried to detonate an explosive in his skivvies onboard an aircraft that would have rained down 300 dead bodies over Detroit. Terrorist chatter always increases this time of year. Everybody knows it.

Except, apparently, the folks in charge of counterterrorism.

It was bad enough when Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was asked this week what the DHS was doing to keep us safe this holiday season, and she replied that they were hard at work "24/7, 364 days a year." Perhaps she was absent from school the day they taught how many days there are in a year.

But then, it got worse. Early yesterday morning, British authorities arrested 12 terror suspects in London on suspicion that they were in the final planning stages of a large-scale attack. Napolitano, White House Counterterrorism Chief John Brennan, and the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sat down with ABC's Diane Sawyer, who asked specifically about the British arrests. Clapper---the head of national intelligence---had no idea what she was talking about it. She asked for his reaction to the arrests, and all we heard were crickets. See it here:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/national-security-leaders-discuss-ongoing-terror-janet-napolitano-dhs-homeland-politics-12453917

Crickets and tumbleweeds from one of the top people responsible for keeping us safe. This is an outrageous lapse. By the time he did the interview with Sawyer, news of the arrests had rocketed around the world a gazillion times. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri certainly knew about them. But our DNI did not? If this had been a Republican DNI, there would be screams of "incompetence" followed by howling demands for his resignation. And rightly so.

Clapper needs to offer a better explanation than he has given so far (that he was otherwise engaged over North Korea). And the Commander in Chief had better reassure us himself over the intelligence and security measures his administration is taking, because his top people are clearly nincompoops.

This is life and death. There is no time for excuses or room for error.

308,745,538

The results of the 2010 Census are in, and as of April 1, the official population of the United States was 308,745,538. Over the past decade, we grew by 9.7%, slower than the 13.2% growth rate of the previous decade. But the growth didn't happen equally across America. Some parts of the country lost people; other parts gained them. Interestingly, deep blue (that is, heavily taxed and unionized) states lost big numbers of folks. Red states picked them up. This means that when congressional districts are reapportioned based on the new population numbers, GOP-leaning states will pick up more seats. According to the Associated Press:

"Texas will gain four new House seats, and Florida will gain two. Gaining one each are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

Ohio and New York will lose two House seats each. Losing one House seat are Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Florida will now have as many U.S. House members as New York: 27. California will still have 53 seats, and Texas will climb to 36.

In 2008, President Barack Obama lost in Texas and most of the other states that are gaining House seats. He carried most of the states that are losing House seats, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. Each House district represents an electoral vote in the presidential election process, meaning the political map for the 2012 election will tilt somewhat more Republican."

And further: "White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sought Monday to downplay the possibility that 2010 census results would be a boon for Republicans. "I don't think shifting some seats from one area of the country to another necessarily marks a concern that you can't make a politically potent argument in those new places," he said."

Not a concern! Nothing to worry about! Move along!

Perhaps Americans are leaving the blue states in droves because the taxes, public debts, and union obligations are so out of control. Perhaps instead of worrying about Obama's re-election in 2012, the White House should take a closer look at the economic reality now creating its political reality.

The O'Reilly Factor---TONIGHT!

I'll be a guest with Bill O'Reilly tonight at 8pm and 11pm ET on the Fox News Channel. Please tune in.

Don't Get Us STARTed

The nuclear arms deal with Russia that's currently pending in the Senate, known as New START, is a bad deal for us for a number of reasons, but primarily because it links offensive, strategic weapons with defensive systems. In other words, it may prohibit us from moving on missile defense systems. Since President Reagan met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, we have taken missile defense off the table. Made it non-negotiable. It was one of the biggest reasons we were able to persuade Moscow that it couldn't keep up with our military technology and certainly couldn't beat us. That reality, of course, helped to lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (at least technical) end of the Cold War.

Stunningly (but I guess not surprisingly), President Obama not only put missile defense on the table, but he made it part of this dangerous deal. Well, it MAY be part of the deal. We don't know for sure, because the preamble to the treaty leaves it deliberately vague. The Russians seem to think that it prohibits us from developing missile defense systems. Obama says it doesn't. Trust me, he says. He even wrote to members of the Senate yesterday to reassure them that there's no problem with missile defense, and that they should just shut up and ratify this thing already.

Instead of writing to Senator John Kyl, perhaps he should be writing to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, both of whom seem to think U.S. missile defense would be strictly limited under the treaty. Today, the Russians warned that no changes to the treaty would be accepted. That tells you what their assumptions are about this deal: good for them, bad for us.

Never before has an international treaty involving nuclear weapons been passed during a lame-duck session. Previous arms control agreements were negotiated over years, with protracted periods of public and congressional debate. New START has had none of that, and the Democrats have, as usual, pushed it to the last minute.

This treaty needs to be held until the new Congress can be sworn in in two weeks, when the newly elected Senators can weigh it, and it can have the debate and discussion it deserves.

Harry Reid is planning the vote either tomorrow or Wednesday. Please call your Senator (and others) and urge them to vote "no" on START:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

The McLaughlin Group

Please join us for another fascinating edition of "The McLaughlin Group" this weekend. Check your local listings for time and channel, or visit www.McLaughlin.com for more information.

The Criminal Class

After the chaos that has unfolded in Congress this week over the whole range of destructive absurdity---the $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill, the tax rate legislation, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the New START Treaty, and the Dream Act---consider the words of Mark Twain:

"There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."