Thanks for saving my season

At the bottom of yesterday's rant was a plea to hear my favorite seasonal number, "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer."

I'm happy to say I've spent a good part of today listening to that song, thanks to Dr. Elmo Shropshire. Dr. Elmo, as he's known to his millions of fans, is the man who recorded this wonderful song in 1979.

I got a note from Nancy at his organization with a link to his Web site (www.drelmo.com), which had a couple of links to the song, as well as other You Tube versions. It's lots of fun and thanks to Nancy for making my day.

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There's a great group called Honest Reporting (www.Honestreporting.com) to whom I give a few dollars when I can. It's dedicated to keeping the reporting about Israel honest. For example, there is a trial going on now in France on an appeal of a decision by the French judicial system that French television channel France 2 was defamed by a man named Philippe Karsenty, who said the al-Dura coverage was a fake.

On Sept. 30, 2000, a man named al-Dura and his son, Mohammed, were supposedly shot by Israeli troops in the West Bank. The boy was supposedly killed and his father severely wounded. The French channel, relying on film shot by a Palestinian cameraman, aired the episode and blamed Israeli troops for firing on the pair.

Over the past seven years, doubt has crept into the conclusion that Israeli did anything wrong, and now it seems the tape was doctored. A French court has finally ordered the raw tape to be shown and a decision on the tape's legitimacy is expected in February. It may be that nobody shot the boy, that he is alive and well and that the father's wounds were also only in some propagandist's imagination.

There was a photograph published by Reuters Ltd. that supposedly showed a mass of smoke over Lebanon during the was there, a photo that Reuters quickly admitted was doctored and withdrawn from publication.

The group has given its dishonest reporter of the year award to CNN's Christiane Amanpour for her awful three-part series God's Warriors in which she pilloried Christian and Jewish attempts to defend themselves from Islamic terrorists and puff-balled the Arabs.

Good for you, Honest Reporting. If you have few extra dollars, this is a good place to give them.

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Things you couldn't make up: According to the Web site GalleyCat, as reported by mediabistro.com,, Lynn Spears' parenting guide book has been put on indefinite hold after her second daughter got herself knocked up. Lindsey Nobles, a spokeswoman for Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., said the book written by the mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn won't be published now, but hasn't been canceled. Lynne's parenting advice book was to have been called Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, according to the New York Daily News..

Wait, it gets better. Jamie Lynn is the star of kids' television network Nickelodeon's "Zoey 101" . Sigh.

Until next time...