The last round-up for 2005 – UPDATED

****Updates near top****

Sad, ain’t it, pardners? One last round-up of the li’l doggies and then we movesie on, as they say in the Western part of Brooklyn.

Ed Morrissey shouts it loud, because the NY Sun’s piece on it got ignored: CIA Renditions began under Clinton. No, the NY Times and the WaPo do not find this interesting.

The American Thinker looks at the 5 stories the press and liberals hated…and of course, didn’t really cover or, as with the war and the economy, if they did cover them, it was to distort.

Jeans against Jesus:
“It is an active statement against Christianity,” Atldax told The Associated Press. “I’m not a Satanist myself, but I have a great dislike for organized religion.”

Try that with Mohammed, buddy. Gonna be an interesting year.

Ed Morrissey on the latest security leak from the press.

Apparently, except for the fact that there was a storm and the levees broke, almost everything reported about Hurricane Katrina was wrong. Remember how the press patted themselves on the back after that story?

Four months after Hurricane Katrina, analyses of data suggest that some widely reported assumptions about the storm’s victims were incorrect.
For example, a comparison of locations where 874 bodies were recovered with U.S. Census tract data indicates that the victims weren’t disproportionately poor. Another database, compiled by Knight Ridder of 486 Katrina victims from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, suggests they also weren’t disproportionately African-American.

…Lack of transportation was assumed to be a key reason that many people stayed behind and died, but at many addresses where the dead were found, their cars remained in their driveways, flood-ruined symbols of fatal miscalculation.
Betsy has some thoughts and links.

Don Surber has a list of all the white collar criminals prosecuted under President Bush. Yeah, I know, it didn’t get any headlines or Newsweek covers, and Bush is in a bubble…

I wish my elder son had thought of this. The site is here.

An Iraqi baby named for the Georgia National Guard. Heh.

GATEWAY PUNDIT points out that civilian Iraqi casualties are way down a story you won’t see on Hardball, I’m thinkin’. Gateway also suggests that there may be some frog marching but not the kind Joe Wilson expected. He also notes a Rockefeller flip-flop.

Shrinkwrapped’s Top 10 Ways to stay Sane in ’06.

Laura Bush and Disco pants? Victoria takes a look at the phenomenon of First Lady makeovers.

Senators Clinton and Schumer are playing games with federal monies to the benefit of their backers. Kinda funny, innit, how the NY Times is so disinterested in this story?

Okay, can we now, offically admit The Plame Story has Jumped the Shark?

CIA renditions began under Clinton? Hmmm…awfully quiet out there…

Ed Driscoll reports on a Brit woman who has…married her dolphin?

Looking for a patron for 2006? A Catholic Life will pick a card-any card – for you!

Charlotte at IWF links to a post by Jane Smiley that is so astonishingly bigoted and strange (we conservatives like to murder folks “for their own good…”) as to leave one speechless.

More on how to push a Democrat out of the party. Hint: you don’t, if you act sensibly!

I’ve decided that my personal must-read blog every day really is Dr. Sanity. This is not to put down any other blogger – a glance at my blogroll is more than indication that I have lots of blogs I call “favorite” and I mean it. If they’re in my blogroll, I read them and like them. Indeed, some of the blogs in my blogroll I WISH I could imitate! But Dr. Sanity is prolific without being overwhelming, and always interesting, in a unique and edgy way.

Jeff Jacoby has his annual year end review of lefty hate speech.

Julie at Happy Catholic has been linking to some of her favorite posts of ’05 – something I wish I had the memory to do – and she’s got to keepers today, from Luminous Mysteries and Dr. Bob. She’s also linked to Kobayashi Maru on the death of his brother, and Sigmund on the battle for your soul, and Rick Lugari on the Devil’s influence and others. All great reads. If you read nothing else I linked to, read these – you’ll like!

Sigmund has a round up of his own.

Kathleen Parker seems to have a bee up her butt about bloggers. I frankly don’t care, but a few bloggers have written on it, including John Hawkins, DJ Drummond and LaShawn Barber. Me? I wonder if a blogger criticized Parker personally, or if she is playing up to someone for a gig somewhere. The point can be made that some blogs are better than others, and some bloggers more temperate and serious than others, but so what? That’s just life. Whether intentional or not Ms. Parker (whose work I have usually liked) seems a bit sour-grapesish to me. At one point she takes pains to reassure those whom, I guess, she calls her peers:

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there – professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

Yeah, whatever. Get back to me when you can find a Maureen Dowd or Molly Ivens or Frank Rich, or Paul Krugman or EJ Dionne column that contributes more than snark, sass and destruction, would you? Meantime, I’ll just accept as normal and human the fact that blogs, like newspapers, like all manner of media, can span a broad range of excellence and interest, from what is exceedingly well-done to what is only dreary. Seems the sensible take on it.

Amy Welborn, still good and mad about the way the HuffPo folks willfully misconstrued Benedict, goes lengthy and informative on Catholicism and education and science

RightwingNuthouse was shaken from his blogging ennui thanks to Craig Crawford at MSNBC, who suggested that George W. Bush is Secret Agent Jack Bauer, never thinking about the constitution as he runs around securing America! A funny must-read. ABP also has some fun at Crawford’s expense

Confederate Yankee isn’t talking Jack Bauer, but he is keeping an eye on the story, too.

Jim at Gateway, again is keeping track of all the ways the ACLU has made fighting terror a little more difficult, and Michelle Malkin is keeping track of the ACLU’s double standards.

Sixth Circuit Court says there is no wall between Church and State. The Cap’n is on it.

AJ Strata is all over the FISA/NSA story and if we know him, he will stay on it brilliantly – don’t forget to check in on him!

Betsy wonders about the French

Michelle points out a horrible story of a so-called honor killing

Jason Smith says the Abramoff story, being framed as a GOP scandal, is catching more and more Democrats in its net.

Jeff Miller on Pope Fiction

Powerline points out economic news of the early 21st century:
Arnold Kling reports that the average productivity growth from 2000-2005 is 50 percent higher than it was from 1995-2000, and about twice as high as during the previous ten years. Indeed, the average productivity growth rate in the last five years is the highest over the past half century. This means, in Kling’s words, that “the economy today is in great shape.” By one measure, at least.