When righting yourself after a downturn in life, it is best to first take an honest inventory to understand how your own actions influenced the outcome. It may seem emotionally easier to blame outside influences, but professional victims do not expend any effort to improve their lot in life, expecting somebody else to straighten things out instead. This runs counter to liberty, where personal freedom is reflected by an equal amount of personal responsibility. So we need to see exactly where we stand before we plan our recovery from the 2006 elections.

When the Clouds Cleared…

In the House, 23 A-rated, NRA-endorsed representatives–17 of them incumbents–lost to F-rated challengers. (Assumes initial rating of “?” is really an “F”.) In the Senate, 5 endorsed candidates lost, four of them incumbents, for a 72% winning percentage.

It amazes me that this Kwanzaa business has been washed of the real life criminal activity of its creator. The man was a race monger, a violent thug, a rapist, a torturer... just a horrible human being.

Yet never a word of this man's evil is ever uttered when his pseudo holiday is discussed in the MSM.

And the Cox News Service did it again on Christmas in theirs titled Kwanzaa glows even brighter after 40 years.

Kwanzaa turns 40 today. The colorful holiday, invented by California professor Maulana Ron Karenga in 1966, is like a jazz musician who fuses bits and pieces of music into a vibrant mosaic of sound. Kwanzaa, "first fruit" in Swahili, is a fluent, nonreligious holiday that borrows liberally from a patchwork of cultures and traditions.

Karenga originally created the seven-day observance to empower black communities and uplift black culture and identity.

On December 24, in a unbylined report on the reaction of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (you know, Time' Magazine's "Champion of the dispossessed") to United Nations sanctions, The Associated Press told us:

Ahmadinejad: U.N. Will Regret Move

..... On Saturday, the Security Council voted unanimously to impose sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment, increasing international pressure on the government to prove that it is not trying to make nuclear weapons.

..... Iran insists its nuclear program is intended to produce energy, but the U.S. and European nations suspect its ultimate goal is the production of weapons.

That's "funny." Here's an AP story from December 11 by Alicia Chang, AP Science writer, about potential global cooling that might occur as the result of a nuclear war that says:

Despite all the proof, Paul Krugman and most of Old Media will probably never let go of the "stagnant wages" meme to describe the Bush 43 prosperity. Their failure to acknowledge the obvious becomes clearer with nearly each passing day.

Tuesday's OpinionJournal.com feature editorial (may require free e-mail registration) doesn't merely show that the favorite meme of Krugman and his economic brothers and sisters is a folk tale. It also reveals a completely unreported item about this prosperity compared to the 1990s that even yours truly was not prepared for -- a truth (in the third excerpted paragraph) that needs to be trotted out on a weekly basis for about the next year -- or ten (bolds are mine):

Discuss amongst yourselves...

Appearing on this Boxing Day edition of the Today show to plug tonight's airing of "In the Shadow of the American Dream," the latest in the “Tom Brokaw Reports” series, the former Nightly News anchor offered a variety of views on the subject of illegal immigration straight out of the amnesty-crowd playbook.

View video here.

Annotated excerpts:

• "It's not going to work to send everybody back."

Why not? And if sending illegals home isn't the solution, how about drying up the jobs here so they will have their own motivation to return home?

• "I don't think you can build the highest wall in the world and it will stop them from coming."

Really? How much would it cost to build, say, a high-tech, 20-foot tall/20-foot deep fence along the border, and how much of the illegal immigration would it stop? I'm guessing a lot.

The Washington Post had a light-hearted headline for the day after Christmas at the top left of the front page: "Democrats Pledge to Restrain Spending." Lori Montgomery's article reflects a talk to the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees. She reported they "said they will have little room in their budget blueprints for significant new domestic spending, such as closing a much-criticized gap in the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit that forces millions of seniors to pay 100 percent of drug costs for a few weeks or months each year."

But have no fear, Sen. Kent Conrad has an easy solution, as he emphasized war costs. "Raising taxes would certainly be an option...The President this is his policy. He's got an obligation to pay for it." So why isn't the headline "Democrats Say Raise Taxes"?

As Christmas Day approached, a host of cable television outlets were not afraid to take to the airwaves with "specials" that challenge conventional Christianity. Episodes from CNN, the History Channel, and National Geographic presented discredited and dubious information surrounding the life of Jesus and the history of early Christianity.

1. National Geographic took to the airwaves with "The Secret Lives of Jesus." The episode presented dramatized fables of Jesus as a mischievous youth who performs insidious acts and miracles. Jesus is also shown to have had a sensual relationship with Mary Magdalene. (Thankfully, the channel presented an expert who underscored that there is no evidence of any such intimacy.)