Category: News

From the New York Times: Red-Footed Falcon Debuts in Western Hemisphere:

So Mr. Laux, an ornithologist who has led birding trips all over the world, recruited island friends with telescopes and digital cameras to send images of the bird to Jeremiah Trimble, an expert birder and curatorial assistant at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. When Mr. Trimble arrived at his office on Tuesday, he looked at the photos, consulted his reference materials and left immediately for Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. Laux had spotted a red-footed falcon – Falco vespertinus – the first reported in the Western Hemisphere. And now birders from all over are arriving to see it.

Undoubtedly, this single bird will eat all the tasty small rodents and will mate with the local falcons to spawn a new race of super falcons with European accents. We cannot allow this to happen. We must kill it now, and we can grill it later!

Unless it eats snakehead fish, in which case we should bring a dozen over from its native habitat so it can eat all the tasty snakehead fish and mate with local falcons to spawn a new race of snakehead-eating super falcons.

Man, I am glad I am a Republican, because being environmentally sensitive is confusing and tiring. One snakehead fish is bad, because making the local ecosystem more diverse with token representatives of outside species can ruin the delicate balance of a natural system which has survived for aeons, but a single red-headed stepchild falcon is a tourist attraction, good for the local economy.

As the partially-educated like to quote, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Here’s the teaser for Bill McClellan’s latest column in the St. Louis Post-Distpatch: After 30 years, he’s faced with life on the outside. So I started to read it.

Here’s the heart-rending:

“I’m about ready to give up,” he told me Tuesday afternoon, and I thought for a moment that he was going to cry. I asked if he were happy to be out of prison, and he shook his head.

His story was front-page stuff 30 years ago. He was 36 years old, and by all accounts, a simple man. He had a seventh-grade education. He had never been in trouble.

Man, that does sound like a rough bit. He’s been in prison for a long time, and a lot of the world undoubtedly must seem strange to someone who flashed forward three particularly changing decades. I sympathized with him. Hey, armed robbery, drug dealing, maybe a repeat offense for burglary, and suddenly you’re in a time warp.

Except this guy:

In November 1973, his wife left him and took their young son. Epps went to the police and filed a missing person report. He said he thought his wife’s family knew where she was. A patrolman drove him to his in-laws’ house, but they said they had not seen her. The patrolman took Epps back to the station, but he returned to the house and shot and killed his wife’s mother and her grandparents.

End of sympathy, and shame on you, McClellan, for presenting him as a tragic figure. Yes, I see he’s only had a seventh grade education and thus missed the Don’t Kill Your Inlaws unit in eighth grade social studies, but I am not sparing any of my compassion on him.

Couldn’t you have written about another little man who needed defending from the iniquities of the real world, McClellan?

Rush Limbaugh’s going off on Steve Chapman’s column in the Chicago Tribune today, wherein Chapman goes off on Kerry’s new hawkishness.

Limbaugh offers this column as a sign of the left’s solidarity fraying. Limbaugh calls Chapman a liberal. Perhaps his imagination cannot fathom an isolationalist libertarian.

Poor form, Rush. Read a little more, and don’t oversimplify it for your radio audience. We’re not as dumb as you think we look.

So authorities investigate a burglary in Georgia and bust the homeowner and his son for having an AT-4 anti-tank missile and some other things that they apparently picked up hiking (illegally, of course) on the ranges at Fort Stewart. They’ve even been arrested on the base before. But the best part of the story is the charges levied against the pair:

The charges included illegally possessing automatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines, as well as harassing an endangered gopher tortoise with a Rottweiler, said Steve Hart, spokesman for Hunter Army Airfield.

Apparently, the pair had not parked illegally while conducting their expeditions onto the gunnery range.

Will Smith explains to a Frankfurt (Germany) newspaper:

When asked if 9/11 had changed anything for him personally, Smith answered:

“No. Absolutely not. When you grow up black in America you have a completely different view of the world than white Americans. We blacks live with a constant feeling of unease. And whether you are wounded in an attack by a racist cop or in a terrorist attack, I’m sorry, it makes no difference.”

I’m not going to write off Will Smith movies because he’s an enjoyable actor, and although Hindrocket from Powerline doesn’t remember, he started out as an amusing rapper.

I don’t think I’ll look to him for political insight, though. Or judgment, really, for joining the cavalcade of stars who make their politics known in Europe but wouldn’t poke their American audiences in the eye directly.

Apparently, having solved all other problems, the Federal government can turn its focus to guaranteeing car loans to sub-prime consumers:

Dubbed “Ways to Work,” the program is run through Provident Counseling Inc., a 145-year-old St. Louis nonprofit agency involved in a wide range of social service work, from afterschool children’s programs to anti-drug and alcohol counseling.

In many ways, the car program offers a “last hope” for working St. Louisans who otherwise might not be able to buy and drive their own cars, said Karen Jackson, loan coordinator for the program.

Provident is scheduled to officially kick off its “Ways to Work” program today, in festivities at its offices at 2650 Olive Street.

…

Money to kick start the program – $345,000 – came this year from the Department of Transportation and is expected to help St. Louis-area residents buy 50 to 60 cars the first year. Jackson said the federal grant requires that Provident obtain matching “dollar-for-dollar” support from the community, either in cash or in-kind donations.

The headline? Carless can now get federal help in securing a new ride.

Make that a free ride.

Hostage situation in Tosa: Parents protest class sizes in Tosa:

Parents and educators warned School Board members Thursday night that kindergarten teachers at several schools will be overwhelmed and children will suffer if kindergarten classes with as many as 27 students aren’t reduced before school starts.

They will make the children suffer unless they get their way? What?

Neil Steinberg continues kicking Bob Greene:

There are honors I covet, as befitting the pie-pan depths of my soul. Not the standard newspaper milestones — not the Pulitzer, God knows, not since they nearly gave it to Bob Greene.

Jeez, Louise, this absurd envy thing can only merit one response: I must quote the wise and beautiful Jem of Jem and the Holograms:

Every place you go, everywhere you turn
Someone else is movin’ in,
And they’re makin’ time
And it’s gettin’ underneath your skin,
Whoa, whoa!

Doesn’t it hurt?
Jealousy, baby!
Doesn’t it burn?
Jealousy?
Doesn’t it consume your soul?
Makin you lose control,
Jealousy!

Nothing to be said,
Nothing to be done
Someone else is in your place,
And you won’t forget it
And it’s hittin’ you right where you live
Whoa, whoa!

Doesn’t it hurt?
Jealousy, baby!
Doesn’t it burn?
Jealousy!
Doesn’t it grab hold of you?
Breakin’ your heart in two
Jealousy!

All at once, you’re wild and runnin’,
Runnin’ blind
Revenge, revenge, revenge
Is the one thing on your mind,
Whoa, whoa!

Doesn’t it hurt?
Jealousy, baby!
Doesn’t it burn?
Jealousy !
Doesn’t it consume your soul
Makin’ you lose control
Jealousy, jealousy, jealousy,
Jealousy!

It takes cartoonishness to fight cartoonishness.

Headline at Command Post: General Assembly President appeals for States to observe Olympic Truce.

With less than 10 days to go before the start of the Olympic Games, the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Julian R. Hunte, today appealed to all States to demonstrate their commitment to peace by observing the traditional truce during the quadrennial competition.

Fans of blowing random things up, such as Palestinians, Al Qaeda, and other non-State groups, rejoice at their apparent exemption from another UN call to action.

Two lawyers play around in their office building by shooting BBs at each other, someone in another office sees and calls the cops from beneath her desk, and now they’re going to get it:

Police said they discovered that two lawyers who work in the building apparently had engaged in a BB gun fight with each other. Police arrested one of them, Gary K. Burger, 37, and booked him on suspicion of flourishing a dangerous and deadly weapon, a felony. Police have not yet sought formal charges from the prosecutor’s office.

It would take a greater legal scholar than I to sort through the byzantine implications of this law, such as whether brandishing a dangerous and deadly weapon is a worse crime, or whether this law covers holding ceremonial muskets or sabres over one’s head when presented with it, although one suspects it could at NRA rallies.

Once more, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski opens her mouth and shows more of her Peter Principle qualifications:

Karpinski told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that she had information suggesting officials took action to keep her in the dark about the mistreatment.

“I have been told there’s a reliable witness who’s made a statement … indicating that not only was I not included in any of the meetings discussing interrogation operations, but specific measures were taken to ensure I would not have access to those facilities, that information or any of the details of interrogations at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else,” Karpinski said. She didn’t identify the witness.

“Correct,” Karpinski responded when asked if she thought there was a conspiracy at senior level to stop her knowing what was going on.

“From what I understand … it was people that had full knowledge of what was going on out at Abu Ghraib who knew that they had to keep Janis Karpinski from discovering any of those activities,” she added.

Asked whether she thought the conspiracy reached up to the Pentagon or the White House, she said: “The indication is that it may have.”

So she’s telling foreign news services that her underlings, and maybe those shadowy administration figures, conspired to make her a poor leader.

Mark Steyn writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“I’ve seen it in the people I’ve met and their desire to take our country back for the American people. I saw it in a college student in Pennsylvania who sold her bicycle and sent us a check for $100 with a note that said, ‘I sold my bicycle for democracy.’ “

Really? John F. Kerry’s bicycle cost $8,000. Why doesn’t he sell his for democracy? If you throw in the designer French T-shirt and buttock-hugging lemon-hued lycra shorts, you’d probably be up around an even ten grand. When Howard Dean and John Kerry and John Edwards talk about “change,” what they mean is you send these bazillionaire grandees the hundred-dollar bill and they’ll keep the change.

What did that co-ed cutie get for her hundred bucks? Presumably she sent it to Governor Dean because he was anti-war. He lost to Senator Kerry, who at that time was for-and-against the war, in the same way that he’s for-and-against abortion and for-and-against gay marriage. But he seems to have come down, Iraq-wise, on the “for” side of the ledger. He’ll be spending a little more time ineffectually chit-chatting with Kofi and Jacques and Gerhard, but other than that his Iraq policy is sounding more like Bush’s every day. That college kid ponied up her $100 and isn’t getting a lot of “change.” I wonder if she’s missing her bicycle this summer.

Ouch.

From the Fox News Transcript of Bush’s remarks at SMS in Springfield, Missouri:

I can’t help but notice my friend Johnny Morris is here. Gosh, I wish we were fishing. I was in the bass tracker (ph), I want you to know, over the weekend in Crawford. It didn’t sink.

The transcriptionist doesn’t intuitively know a bass tracker boat and can only guess at the spelling. Probably more Hollywood than Springfield.

Because someone from Springfield (or someone married to a smoking-hottie from Springfield) knows Tracker Boats is based in Springfield.

Hey, FCC, I am offended this got broadcast:

‘Go balloons, go balloons! Go balloons! I don’t see anything happening. Go balloons! Go balloons! Go balloons! Standby confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring it- balloons, balloons, balloons! We want balloons, tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet.

‘No confetti. All right, go balloons, go balloons. We need more balloons. All balloons! All balloons! Keep going! Come on, guys, lets move it. Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddammit. Go confetti. Go confetti. More confetti. I want more balloons. What’s happening to the balloons? We need more balloons.

‘We need all of them coming down. Go balloons- balloons? What’s happening balloons? There’s not enough coming down! All balloons, what the hell! There’s nothing falling! What the fuck are you guys doing up there? We want more balloons coming down, more balloons. More balloons. More balloons’…

I demand that DNC convention director Don Mischer be fined several hundred thousand dollars for offending my tender sensibilities.

Okay, J. Eddie, we know what you mean you say:

And we, John and I, we will have one clear unmistakable message for al Qaeda and these terrorists: You cannot run. You cannot hide. We will destroy you.

John² is tougher than Ronald Reagan, who said to terrorists, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

This is why children should be seen and not heard. Now you go wash behind your ears, and make sure to dry them. You look a little damp there.

The Smoking Gun has the police report about the police pepperspray incident about which I wrote yesterday.

As always, remember to be snarky with an open mind.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, an officer pepper sprays a college student and her boyfriend for taking a call in a movie theater. A witness recounts:

“The man turned and asked the officer why he was making them leave and the cop just maced him in the face,” Gray said. “They weren’t yelling or touching him. The man bent over and the girl asked why he maced her boyfriend. Then the cop maced her, and she dropped her soda.”

Would the officer have shot them down for the offense? No, but since pepper spray is nonlethal, you see, he can do it with aplomb.