Bad Move

I've seldom mentioned Ann Coulter, she isn't exactly my cup of tea. I laughed pretty hard at a massive putdown she landed on Alec Baldwin. But I also condemned her when she stepped over the line before. Pretty much the rest of the time I ignore her. But she crossed another line today, apparently.

Ann Coulter is speaking at CPAC as I write. As is typical, she gave a brief speech full of her usual witticisms, including a few brilliant attacks on Al Gore’s green hypocrisy. All was good. Until the last few seconds, when she launched into a joke about John Edwards.

Here’s what she said.

“I’d say something about John Edwards, but if you say ‘faggot’ you have to go to rehab.”

I don't think she needed to go there, regardless of her distaste of Edwards. Heck, I think Edwards is a political hack and completely unworthy of the office he is seeking. But I'm not about to cross the line Coulter crossed. She's using a very charged word that was simply not needed and will cause a backlash. It's a bald-faced provocation, unnecessary and almost certain to backfire. Heck, you can insult politicians more easily,  more humorously and better than that.

UPDATE: Others: The Moderate Voice, Jules Crittenden, The Volokh Conspiracy, QandO, Done With Mirrors, Right Wing News, The News Buckit, Right Voices, Sean Hackbarth,  Riehl World View, Ace of Spades, Captain's Quarters,  A Second Hand Conjecture, Ankle Biting Pundits, Winds of Change, OTB, Fausta, Flopping Aces,

Paint Drying, Grass Growing And Valerie Plame

Good Lord. Hollywood is planning a blockbuster sequel to Ishtar. The Warner Brothers studio is "developing" a movie based on the life of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. I realize "Plamegate" is endlessly fascinating to the left wing, but this is seriously silly.

Warner Bros. is developing a feature on the lives of Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the married couple drawn into a D.C. firestorm.

Plame's status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The film is a co-production between Weed Road's Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker of Zucker Productions.

Jez and John Butterworth are writing the screenplay.

WB has secured the life rights of Plame and Wilson. Studio also will use Plame's memoir, "Fair Game," if the CIA permits her to publish it. Plame made a reported publishing deal in the $2.5 million range last year, and Simon & Schuster is expected to publish late this year. While it would be ironic for Plame's story to be illegally leaked by the White House, only to have another government branch deny her the right to tell it herself, the CIA has the latitude to silence Plame.

Ah, the old "silencing" routine. Which Joe Wilson is making how much money off of on the lecture circuit? Although that may have dropped off a bit lately. Look, I thought the whole Clinton Whitewater investigation was a waste of time and money, but that is a blockbuster compared to the idiocy that is surrounding the Plame matter. This movie won't be worth a darn thing - except as a really great sleep aid.

Water Song And David Bromberg

David Bromberg, one of my favorite musicians who a lot of people have never heard of, has released a new album, Try Me One More Time,  after a really, really, really long hiatus. Like about 18 years. In honor of that occasion, here's a YouTube video of him as a sideman for Jorma Kaukonen performing Water Song. Here's Dave Bromberg's website. Enjoy some really great guitar work.

Interesting Things You Find…..

…..When fighting with computers. How about a Firefox-based web browser compiled specifically for your microprocessor? It's called Swiftfox and is available here. It appears to run a bit faster (so far at least), something that is particularly evident on the old/new Linux box that uses an old Pentium II running at 333MHz. The Hot Rod Yugo surfs! (Sorry, folks, it is for Linux users.) Bonus, it has an installer script that is simple, effective and (they say) platform neutral. I've obviously only tried it in Ubuntu, but it ran like a champ and had itself up and running faster than Firefox in a very short time. It also acquired all the Firefox plugins I had installed all by itself.

(I still can't get the secondary hard disk mounted in Ubuntu though. That is frustrating me right now.)

Dutch Police Contribute To Global Mellowing

The police in the Netherlands have made a major contribution toward mellowing the world. The unleashed the smoke from three tons of Hashish on the world. People downwind are reporting severe cases of the munchies.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Three tons of hashish went up in smoke Friday, incinerated by Dutch authorities after a van carrying the illicit cargo crashed and scattered it across the road.

Detectives were hunting the van's driver and a passenger who fled the scene, leaving behind the wrecked vehicle and its $20 million cargo.

"It's not something you see every day," police spokesman Hielke Vogelzang said, adding that police were tracing the owner of the van, but "it may be stolen or leased."

The crash happened during the morning commute on a highway outside the town of Avenhorn, about 20 miles north of Amsterdam, police said.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard would like to ask if an environmental impact statement was submitted prior to the incineration. After all, this might lead to a global chilling out.

He Put What Where?

A prisoner in El Salvador was searched during a prison security clampdown. They found a grenade hidden in a, ahem, rather unusual place. (You should be able to figure that one out.)

Guards at the San Francisco Gotera prison outside the capital San Salvador found the V40 grenade, about the size of a golf ball, lodged up the man's rectum during a security clampdown, a prison spokesman said on Thursday.

They also caught another 16 inmates who each swallowed a mobile phone.

"We'll have to expel the objects and if they won't come out we'll have to perform surgery in hospital," said Alberto Uribe, a spokesman for the El Salvador prison service.

He's lucky the pin stayed in. Otherwise it would have done more than rectum. It would have killed him.

Frozen Flamingo After The Cold Rush

Ginormously Fat Rodents

Dallas, Texas has reported the first sighting of really rotund rodents in the area. Unfortunately, they also rescued the obese squirrel, freeing it to continue its mission for the Animal Uprising™.

When Ms. Bradshaw dispatched senior wildlife technician Joe Warner to the scene in the 1700 block of East Elmore Avenue in East Oak Cliff, he expected to find a squirrel sitting in a hole with “its head poking out, watching the goofy people.”

Mr. Warner, who has been with the company for about a year, said he responds to squirrel calls on an almost daily basis. But no description had been this bizarre.

Sure enough, there was the squirrel, or half of a squirrel, with its bushy tail and hind legs poking from a hole about 8 feet off the ground.

Mr. Warner got a ladder and a handsaw and began to work. For the next 45 minutes, he carefully sawed around the squirrel, picking away at the tree to create enough room to ease out the critter. (Ed Note: Picture at link is hysterical.) 

Warner says that he thinks the squirrel was pregnant, hence the cork-in-bottle effect. Our informant tell us that the squirrel was carrying the next generation of oversized tree rats that will soon be loosed on Texas. Then the nice men came to take him away before he could tell us the rest. (They were looking at us funny, too. We're not sure what that was all about.)

Swiss Respond To Agression By Liechtenstein

The Swiss, angered by the aggressive expansion of their sub-miniature neighbor, Liechtenstein, have finally responded forcefully. They invaded the offending nation.

ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

They are trying to shrug it off, of course. The overwhelming show of force - an entire company of Swiss troops outnumbers the Liectensteinian military by a ratio of 100 to 0. Because all they have in Liechtenstein is a small force of attack goats. But the Swiss are taking the long view here. They are not going to wait 132,000 years for the real crisis to develop.

From The Earth To The Moon

Charles Krauthammer examines whether a moon mission is a worthwhile pursuit in the Washington Post today. He concludes that it certainly is. He points out that the space shuttles were a diversion. He's both right and wrong on that, I think.

You might not have noticed, but we broke another U.S. space record last month when astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria logged his 67th hour of spacewalking. If you consider that the equivalent of the Guinness record for pogo-stick bouncing (23.11 miles in 12 hours and 27 minutes) — amazing but pointless — I agree with you. There's nothing quite as beautiful as the space station and the shuttle that services it, and nothing quite as useless.

Now, that can be said of many things: a balance-beam dismount, a Shakespeare sonnet, a chess problem by Nabokov. But none of these is financed by taxpayers, and none makes a claim to utility. They are there for reasons of aesthetics, and perhaps amusement……

…….The Luddites have long opposed manned exploration as a waste of resources when, as the mantra goes, we have so many problems here on Earth.

I find this objection incomprehensible. When will we stop having problems here on Earth? In a fallen world of endless troubles, that does not stop us from allocating resources to endeavors we find beautiful, exciting and elevating — opera, alpine skiing, feature films — yet solve no social problems.

Moreover, the moon base is not pointless. The shuttles were on an endless trip to the nowhere of low Earth orbit. The moon is a destination. The idea this time is not to go to plant a flag, take a golf shot and leave, but to stay and form a real self-sustaining, extraterrestrial human colony.

Sure, Mars would be better. It holds open the possibility of life and might even have water on its surface today. But the best should not be the enemy of the good. Mars is simply too far, too dangerous, too difficult, too expensive. We won't go there for a hundred years.

Unlike Krauthammer, I think the shuttle program has accomplished a number of things. One of those has been to keep a space program functioning, even if it was on a stunted basis that stayed in low orbit. But we should have been on the moon to stay by this time, too. There is absolutely no way to tell what a moon base will actually accomplish. But the possibilities are endless. If we get there and stay there, we will find ways to exploit it fully. Entrepreneurs are already - finally - stepping in to take up the low orbital stuff. Let NASA pioneer again with a moon colony and those businessmen will surely follow on and make the venture pay.

Card (Reality) Check

The Opinion Journal takes the Democrats to the woodshed - hard - over the passage yesterday by the House of the "card check" legislation. The vote - which will go nowhere as a law - was a payback to the unions that invested so much time and money in the elections. Kimberly Strassel points out that this is a major problem for the Democrats.

Up to now, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had kept her troops in line and her party's liberal wing in check. The vaunted first "100 hours" was run like a military operation, and revolved around a carefully chosen legislative agenda that would unify every faction in her party. It was small potatoes, but it worked, and it was a lesson in how Democrats can practice smart politics.

The card check, in contrast, is a lesson in how the party's liberal base forces Democrats to back political losers. The legislation's only purpose is to give unions an unfair advantage in organizing, namely by eliminating the secret ballot in union elections and instead allowing thugs to openly bully workers into joining up. Americans understand and despise this, with polls showing 90% of the public thinks card check is a racket.

Democrats therefore left themselves wide open for their first public drubbing. The card check gave Republicans a rare opening to beat the daylights out of the new majority, successfully accusing it of trashing democratic elections and shutting down free speech. It unified the business community, which put aside its disagreements on health care and immigration to instead team up to make the vote as painful as possible for Ms. Pelosi's moderate wing. Even the liberal press jumped ship.

And all this, meanwhile, for a vote that was largely symbolic. President Bush has vowed that a card check law is dead on arrival. And that assumes the legislation could even make it through a Senate filibuster–which it can't. As low points go, this was the lowest the new majority has had so far.

Most Americans are going to see the card check as anti-democratic and very, very likely to lead to intimidation and abuse. Big labor may have scored with the Democrats in Congress, but they may have actually damaged the party in the next election. Pelosi handed the Republicans the club with which to beat her.

The Ten Million Dollar Dolphin

Ok, strictly speaking it was "yen" not "dollars". But there is more than enough reason to be afraid. The Japanese are turning their backs on the human race and are joining up with the Animal Uprising™. They are assisting in the creation of bionic dolphins!

Fuji's handlers at the Churaumi Aquarium in Japan's southern most island of Okinawa say the fake tail may have saved her life as she had put on dangerous amounts of weight from being inactive after she lost her tail.

"Because she was not exercising enough (after her tail was amputated) she gained weight and from blood samples we took we realized that her cholesterol levels were too high. We then were afraid that this might trigger other diseases so we had to come up with something," handler Masaya Koami said.

The tail was custom made for Fuji by a friend of the handler who works at Japan's leading tire company Bridgestone.

The rubber prosthetic device is slightly smaller than the tail of a dolphin of Fuji's size. It is made of material used for Formula One race car tires and the black silicon rubber was reinforced with artificial bone made of carbon-fiber.

Bridgestone spent ¥10 million on the the thing. So next time you go for a swim in the ocean, if an overweight semi-mechanical dolphin gets you, don't say we didn't warn you.