Moe Lane

And depending on your monitor, the picture (via Michelle Malkin) may be the actual size:

That’s the delta smelt – or, as Rep. George Radanovich (R, CA-19) likes to call it, “a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the dinosaur” – and it’s the reason why direct farm losses in California’s San Joaquin valley are being estimated at a high of 647 million (against a backdrop of a 3 billion agricultural loss in California generally).  Not to mention what could end up being 80,000 lost jobs.  Unfortunately, while the delta smelt is eligible for the Endangered Species Act, the Californian farmer is not.

Moe Lane (more…)

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I have a problem with this.

Germany will walk out of the U.N. General Assembly if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust in a speech he will give Wednesday, and it wants other European Union countries to do the same, the foreign ministry said.

My problem with this is that intolerance to Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism should be so instinctive and reflexive that nobody would have let Ahmadinejad talk at the UN in the first place. The Canadians aren’t bothering to wait for the inevitable vileness; they’re just going to walk out (via Instapundit).  So on that curve the German response gets down graded from its original A to a B-.

Mind you, that’s a heck of a lot better than the F that we’re getting. Did somebody at the UN with a malignant sense of humor schedule this one?  The President is going to speak the same day as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Gadhafi and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe; you have to wonder whether Syria’s al-Assad and/or North Korea’s Il-sung Jong-Il had scheduling conflicts.  Doesn’t anybody at the White House check people’s work before they send it out?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The full endorsement for Marco Rubio is from Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R, FL-05):

Brown-Waite, who has been critical of what she has said is Crist’s attempts “to be all things to all people,” said Monday she thinks the GOP tide is turning in favor of Rubio.

“He is picking up a lot of steam with the recent victories from the straw polls. It is great to see momentum building for him,” she said.

Rep. Brown-Waite joins Rep Jeff Miller (R, FL-01) in endorsing Rubio over Crist. (more…)

Via @cayankee:

Enjoy the earworm! And, remember:

http://www.amazon.com/

How the HELL did we get this far without the Safety Dance?

Safety Dance, Men Without Hats

Well. Fixed, that.

The problem with this essay on race by Texas Railroad Commissioner and Senatorial candidate Michael Williams is that you really need to read the whole thing: there are too many good bits to cram into just one snippet. But a taste:

What grieves me most, however, is not that false cries of racism shortcircuit our debate, but that it makes legitimate concern about pockets of racism impossible to hear among the majority of Americans where it truly exists. Racism does still exist in America today – on both sides of the political spectrum. Now it will be that much harder to expose because the real cry will be impossible to distinguish from the false one, much like the boy who cried, “wolf.” Racism exists, but so does opportunity, and I can personally attest to the fact that there is far more opportunity than racism.

We have rid our institutions of government of the practice of discrimination; if only we could rid our political discourse of the ugliness that ensues when we ascribe discriminatory motive to statements with no obvious discriminatory aspect. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd couldn’t help hearing a missing word in Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress. The Congressman yelled, “You lie.” Ms. Dowd couldn’t help hearing, “you lie, boy.”

While Congressman Wilson started a fire, Ms. Dowd poured fuel on it. The greater ugliness is not the inappropriate outburst, but Ms. Dowd intentionally injecting a word loaded with a history of racial condescension to label a whole movement of opposition.

(more…)

…(as can be found via here) is someone who has forgotten, or never knew, that the phrase “Not In Our Name” originated as a slogan against the liberation of Afghanistan.  in other words: I’ve known for half a decade that the antiwar movement lies when it suits them, so I was hardly surprised when the mask slipped on this one.

Contemptuous, but hardly surprised.

In other news, General McChrystal is possibly threatening to resign if the White House doesn’t start listening for his requests for more troops.  For the sake of pretty much… everybody… I hope to hell that’s a garbled report; mostly because I don’t think that the President has ever handled a situation like this before, and I have precisely zero respect for his ability to learn how to do things right on the first try.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, AoSHQ readers.

Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig being the Washington reporters who did their level best to make their story about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles racial:

Though O’Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

(Bolding mine) Well, guess who had to retract that passage by Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig*? (more…)

(Blame @baseballcrank) It’s a tossup between this one and the Paris Hilton energy proposal for the most memorable campaign ad of 2008.

…and, unlike Paris Hilton, I still don’t know what the hell Ralph Nader was trying to do there. That being said, remember:

http://www.amazon.com/

(Via AoSHQ Headlines) I know that I’ve made some pointed comments about Ailuropoda melanoleuca’s collective will to live, but I never dared take it to the next step. Chris Packham, on the other hand…

Giant pandas should be allowed to die out as they are stuck in an ‘evolutionary cul-de-sac’, according to BBC presenter Chris Packham.

The conservationist, 48, said the species was not strong enough to survive on its own and it would be better to let nature take its course.

This got a response from the WWF, once they could find a spokesman who didn’t have an aneurysm on the spot at the thought of letting their logo go extinct. Said response more or less boils down to this:

“See The Panda. It’s Our Fault. Love The Panda. We’re Taking Their Mountains Away. Protect The Panda. Give Us Money. Money For The Pandas.”

Well, at least they aren’t taking NEA payola.

Probably.

Moe Lane

PS: I wasn’t joking about the dignity thing, although I thought that I was. Packham, again:

‘I reckon we should pull the plug. Let them go, with a degree of dignity.’

These people are hard to parody, sometimes.

Bluntly?  Because they say stupid things like this.

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons.

Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” (In that case, the Energy Department has a few renegade teens of its own.)

(more…)

Do you believe that this exists?

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Congratulations: you’re a ‘Tenther,’ which is liberal Democrat for ‘annoyingly tiresome about us ignoring Constitutional clauses that we don’t like.’  The attempt here is equate federalism with conspiracy theorists*  – but like Radley Balko and Glenn Reynolds, I would like to note for the record that yes, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution actually exists.  I have even seen it, with my own two eyes.  In Washington, DC.  Admittedly, I didn’t take a picture of it at the time.

On the bright side, this attempted sneer, or smear, is about as likely to shut up the growing populist movement in this country as anything else did; which is to say, not at all.

Moe Lane

*Like, say, the approximately one-third of the Democratic party that believes that the US government was behind 9/11.

Crossposted to RedState.