Father, Three Kids Rescued From California Snows

After becoming lost on Sunday, a father and his three children were rescued today from heavy snows in northern California. The helicopter that spotted them was making its last trip before returning to base before an even heavier snowstorm arrived. The family survived three days in the deep snow and bitter cold by huddling together in a culvert under a bridge.

PARADISE, Calif. - A father and three children who vanished on a Christmas tree-cutting trip in the Northern California mountains were found alive Wednesday after huddling in a culvert for warmth during three days of heavy snow.

A California Highway Patrol helicopter crew spotted Frederick Dominguez waving his arms atop a small bridge and landed nearby, sinking into 2 feet of snow, flight officer David White said. White said the crew found the family on their last pass over the area as snow from another storm, even bigger than the first, started to fall heavily.

"Our hearts are all full right now," said Cory Stahl, who closed his pest control business so his employees could help look for Dominguez, an employee. "It's a very merry Christmas now."

The helicopter ferried the family to safety in two trips; Alexis, 15, and Joshua, 12, were taken out of the woods first. Dominguez, 38, smiled at cheering family and friends as he and 18-year-old Christopher emerged from the helicopter a short time later.

"I'm just amazed how well they did," Lisa Sams said after seeing her children and ex-husband for the first time since they were rescued. "It was like butterflies in my stomach, like if you were going to go on a very first date."

All four were talking and drinking hot chocolate while being checked at Feather River Hospital for dehydration, hypothermia and frostbite, treating physician Kurt Bower said. He expected them to be released later in the day.

"I'm surprised how good they are," he said. "There's a miracle from God in there somewhere."

The new storm roaring in is expected to dump an additional two feet of snow. The earlier storms had dropped more than a foot and winds had whipped up drifts as high as seven feet. Jolly little December we're having so far, isn't it?

Thankfully, those folks made it out alive.

Bad Santas

The things I do for my readers…. (Thanks for the idea, NortonPete.)

UPDATE: Dan Riehl also notes the socialist Santa ad. So did John Hawkins. And now, Jim Lynch has Christmas holiday Shillary carols!

Ponies All Around

This is an absolutely appalling campaign commercial from camp Clinton that just illustrates how much of a tin ear Hillary actually has. She plays Santa, gladhanding away your tax money.

Hat Tip, Hot Air. Somebody with mad video skillz has got to be working on this already. I don't have those, but I did try to help out a bit:

UPDATE: Thanks to NortonPete in comments for the idea, we now have Bad Santas.

May We Suggest Some Cheese With That Whine?

The Clinton campaign is whining like mad about how unfair all the press coverage of Hillary is. There is just something hysterically funny about all this. Of all people to complain about the media, Hillary is about the least credible person I can think of.

DES MOINES, Dec. 18 — After weeks of bad news, Hillary Clinton and her strategists hoped that winning the endorsement of Iowa's largest newspaper last weekend might produce a modest bump in their media coverage.

But on Sunday morning, they awoke to upbeat headlines about their chief Democratic rival: "Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint," said the New York Times. "Obama Is Hitting His Stride in Iowa," said the Los Angeles Times. And on Monday, Clinton aides were so upset about a contentious "Today" show interview that one complained to the show's producer.

Clinton's senior advisers have grown convinced that the media deck is stacked against them, that their candidate is drawing far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama. And at least some journalists agree.

"She's just held to a different standard in every respect," says Mark Halperin, Time's editor at large. "The press rooted for Obama to go negative, and when he did he was applauded. When she does it, it's treated as this huge violation of propriety." While Clinton's mistakes deserve full coverage, Halperin says, "the press's flaws — wild swings, accentuating the negative — are magnified 50 times when it comes to her. It's not a level playing field."

Newsweek's Howard Fineman says Obama's coverage is the buzz of the presidential campaign. "While they don't say so publicly because it's risky to complain, a lot of operatives from other campaigns say he's getting a free ride, that people aren't tough enough on Obama," Fineman says. "There may be something to that. He's the new guy, an interesting guy, a pathbreaker and trendsetter perhaps."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton says the accusation of softer treatment is untrue but "the Clinton campaign whines about it so much, it becomes part of the chatter. No candidate in this race has undergone more investigations and examinations than Barack Obama has," he says, citing lengthy pieces in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. "As Obama says, running against the Clintons is not exactly a cakewalk. Their research operation has ensured that if there's any information about Obama to be had, it's been distributed to the media."

Yeah, its so unfair that they actually get some of the press to agree with them. Too funny. At least the Obama campaign is having non of this little whine-tasting. They call it for what it is. Frankly, I think the press has been unusually kind to Clinton in the way they have been reporting her problems. They played along with the fiction of Hillary 'apologizing' to Obama after Shaheen set the smear up - then ignored it when Mark Penn reemphasized it and amplified it. Clinton gets her talking points into the media so often, the press ought to be acknowledged as campaign sponsors.

Oh, for the cheese? We'd suggest Limburger. That's what this complaint smells like.

Nessie Does Hollywood

Well, at least an animated version. Benjamen Radford uses the new movie coming out for Christmas as a vehicle to look at the dubious "history" of Loch Ness monster sightings. The producers of the new movie, "The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep" probably should have looked into what, precisely, a "water horse" is in Scots legend. It isn't actually connected to Nessie at all, nor is particularly pleasant.

Stories and legends about "water horses" have been told in the Scottish highlands for centuries, though there's no clear link to the Loch Ness monster. According to George Eberhart's book "Mysterious Creatures," water horses are native to the British Isles and Europe. They sometimes graze with normal horses, but if anyone is foolish enough to try and mount a water horse, it will immediately gallop to a nearby lake or river, drown its rider, then eat the hapless person's flesh.

One type of water horse, the Kelpie, is also said to chase down young Scottish women and take sexual liberties with them; I suspect these parts of the water horse's legend will not be explored in the family film.

We do have an example of a more correct Hollywood-type version of a water horse.

We can but hope that this kind of historical accuracy is in the new film! We have no real hope of that, though, darn it. The site for the picture itself is here.

Midwest Braces For Next Wave Of Storms

Accuweather is predicting that a new storm system now hitting the Seattle area is going to pummel the Midwest by the weekend, bringing arctic temperatures with it. Separate storm activity in the northeast will also continue as two more storms will hit that region. It has already been a tough winter - and it is not even winter, yet.

The rain by tonight will reach central California and will extend into Southern California on Thursday.

The Severe Weather Center lists the widespread watches and warnings in effect across the West and the Intermountain West.

Before the storm emerges from the Rockies this weekend, a pair of storm systems will move across the eastern half of the country.

6-9 inches of snow will hit the New Hampshire-Maine area as well. Meanwhile, some people in Oklahoma still do not have power 10 days after the last blast downed lines all over that state.

SKIATOOK, Okla. - Huddled near her fireplace, Marla Carter wondered when Skiatook will be mentioned in news reports about the storm-related power outages that have left her without electricity for the past 10 days.

"It's kind of like we've been forgotten about out here," she said Tuesday. "There is life outside Tulsa."

Carter and thousands of other Oklahomans were still without power early Wednesday, more than a week after a massive storm coated the most populous regions of Oklahoma with ice.

Oklahoma's utility companies expect to restore service to most of their customers Wednesday or Thursday. The company that provides electricity to this town 30 miles north of Tulsa estimated that 99 percent of its customers would be back on line by Christmas.

Having been on both sides of this issue, I can sympathize with the folks who have no electricity, but at the same time, I also know those utility workers are working themselves to exhaustion trying their best to get everyone back on. The fact is that the damage was absolutely enormous. There is also the fact that the utilities have to prioritize the work - and rural customers are going to come in last due to the physical realities of the distribution systems. Rural customers are at the far end the distribution system and everything upstream of them has to be restored before it is physically possible to get those customers back on line. The small electric cooperative that serves that area had some 1,700 power poles broken in the storm. It just takes time to put all that infrastructure back together after nature takes it apart like this.

Fire In The Executive Office Building

Washington, DC firefighters are fighting a fire in the Executive Office Building near the White House. Reports say the fire may be located in or near the ceremonial office of Vice President Dick Cheney who was not in the building at the time.

The blaze appeared to be located near the ceremonial office of Vice President Dick Cheney on the second floor of the building. The vice president was across the street in his office in the West Wing of the White House.

Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford said the Old Executive Office building was evacuated as a precaution. District of Columbia firefighters poured water on the blaze and moved furniture from the building onto a balcony.

That would be what is referred to as the Old Executive Office Building, located to the west of the White House itself.

Please, Don’t Squeeze The ….. Bride?

A bride-to-be is about to tie the knot wearing a wedding dress made out of Charmin toilet paper. The wedding will be held - naturally - in a restroom.

NEW YORK - Here comes the bride, all dressed in white … two-ply, extra soft toilet paper. Lovebirds Jennifer Cannon and Doy Nichols of Lexington, Ky., plan to get hitched Wednesday in a public restroom. She'll be wearing a gown fashioned from glue, tape and Charmin Ultra Soft and Ultra Strong toilet tissue.

The intricately detailed dress was designed by Hanah Kim, winner of the 2007 Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, sponsored by Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com.

Ms. Kim must be flushed with success at her victory. The creation, which is actually quite nicely done, can be seen here. We're sure that Mr. Whipple would be very proud. One does, however, hope that the weather cooperates and there is no rain on the wedding day or the term 'blushing bride' will gain a whole new dimension.

Appetite All The Way Down

Jonah Goldberg looks at the leaks that have sprung in "HMS Hillary" and hopes that it means that the infamous Clinton triangulation has come full circle, like a torpedo that circles back and sinks the vessel that launched it. The title of this post comes from a line once delivered by Jesse Jackson about Bill Clinton, that Bill had no core beliefs, only appetite. Goldberg says that Clinton may have absorbed all of those lessons from her husband, but she can't pull it off successfully.

So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination — heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses — I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: "America to Clinton(s): We're Just Not That Into You."

The rush of schadenfreude would be so overwhelming, the entire Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy would have to hie itself to its fainting couch. For years now, the Clintons' defenders have claimed that the '90s were halcyon days, thanks to the deft statesmanship of the Clintons. Much of the liberal establishment has become wedded to protecting the memory of the Clintons' stewardship. David Brock's progressive outfit, Media Matters for America, is a prime example. It should be renamed "Hillary Matters for America," given that it is less a media watchdog and more an attack dog for Hillary Clinton.

But schadenfreude doesn't really do justice to Hillary's potential downfall. Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage. But for most of her life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that now seems to have gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new "politics of meaning" and sought to redefine "who we are as human beings in this postmodern age."

But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was supposed to be Bill's conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.

But now Hillary is the Democrats' establishment candidate, pitted against the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Obama. Even committed liberals tell focus groups she's too cold, too calculating.

I pointed out that even dedicated Democrats just plain do not like Hillary Clinton and they do not trust her. They see the blatant pandering, the shapeshifting of Clinton's "beliefs" depending on her audience and come to the conclusion that she is simply too calculating, too icy in her blind ambition. She is clumsy in her use of slime attacks and they seems to come back and hurt her worse than the intended targets. If the HMS Hillary does disappear into a sort of Bermuda Triangualtion, there would be a wave of schadenfreude, indeed. And it might finally be enough to put the Clinton years behind us.

Global Warming: Caused By Women Who Like Men With Sports Cars!

Well, thank heavens for Professor Sir David King, the British government's chief scientist. He has pinpointed that which must be taken away from society if global warming is to be addressed. So all you women who like men with sports cars have been the problem all along.

Professor Sir David King said governments could only do so much to control greenhouse gas emissions and it was time for a cultural change among the British public.

And he singled out women who find supercar drivers "sexy", adding that they should divert their affections to men who live more environmentally-friendly lives.

His comments were greeted with anger by sports car drivers who insisted that their vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions were tiny compared with those from four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Sir David, who is due to retire as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser at the end of the year, said individuals needed to change their behaviour.

"I was asked at a lecture by a young woman about what she could do and I told her to stop admiring young men in Ferraris," he said.

"What I was saying is that you have got to admire people who are conserving energy and not those wilfully using it."

This comes as rather a surprise to the people at Ferrari who only produce a worldwide annual total of fewer than 5,600 of their automobiles. It is probably for the best that Professor Sir David King is set to retire before his brain completely ossifies. He must be unaware that Ferrari passengers do their bit to cut carbon consumption in other ways. For instance, some wear no clothing.