Dueling Protests

Michelle Malkin has a post up that reports on the counter-protest of veterans and supporters of the war in Iraq against the much-ballyhooed antiwar protest today in Washington. The media is not reporting this at all. But witnesses who were there say the numbers were very close to equal.

It was a breath-taking, historic, and emotional day in Washington, D.C. You won't know it if you tune in to the usual MSM channels. But new media–bloggers, conservative documentarians, Internet activists, FReepers (giant thread here), citizen journalists, photojournalists, and talk radio hosts–turned out in full force to participate and cover the Gathering of Eagles counter-protest. Thousands upon thousands turned out despite freezing temperatures and hairy travel conditions. We met bikers who drove up all night from Huntsville, Alabama; a retired NYC firefighter who arrived here at 2am; college students who traveled from Massachusetts; a Vietnam veteran's wife who bought plane tickets at the last minute from San Francisco; and countless participants who arrived as part of Move America Forward's cross-country caravan.

A pure, grass-roots effort, the Gathering of Eagles' volunteers matched the massive Soros-funded anti-war machine sign for sign, chant for chant, and marcher for marcher. The contrast was most stark right before the entrance to the Memorial Bridge, where Eagles gathered with a field of American flags–while anti-Bush, 9/11 conspiracy nuts wrapped themselves in a figurative blanket of yellow "Out of Iraq" placards. Several of the vets shouted, "Yellow! How appropriate!" in between spirited chants of "U.S.A! U.S.A!" While the classless Cindy Sheehan ranted profanely, the Eagles raised their voices in polite, but roaring disapproval and raised their American flags in answer to the ANSWER socialists' Che banners and peace pennants.

Why did the Eagles come? One common refrain: Vietnam veterans, some fighting back tears, told us they came to show the kind of support for the troops that they did not receive when the surrender lobby marched on the Pentagon 40 years ago today.

The Sheehan rant - in its full and complete dementia - can be seen over at Gateway Pundit. He also has more pictures from the "Gathering of Eagles" counter-protest. There really were a lot of people there. The media is only covering the anti-war crowd. But there are a lot of people out there who are not among that group. The anti-war movement from the Vietnam era has buckets - hell, supertankers - of blood on its hands as a result of forcing the US out of that country. I'd rather not see that happen again. Especially since they will follow us home this time.

Go You Chicken Fat, Go

Touch down
Every morning
Ten times!
Not just
Now and then.
Give that chicken fat
Back to the chicken,
And don't be chicken again.
No, don't be chicken again.

Push up
Every morning
Ten times.
Push up
Starting low.
Once more on the rise.
Nuts to the flabby guys!
Go, you chicken fat, go away!
Go, you chicken fat, go!
(Meredith Wilson, Chicken Fat: The Youth Fitness Song)

Raise your hand if you actually remember being tortured in gym class with that song! Now imagine it's all these years later and you're driving along a highway in Monroe, Louisiana, minding your own business. And suddenly, all that chicken fat that kids shed to that tune is now spread all over the highway. Well, ok. It didn't come from kids being whupped on by sadistic, demented gym teachers. It came from actual chickens. But it was there for all the world to see. And smell.

MONROE, La. (AP) — Chicken fat, chicken parts, used frying grease and other yucky gunk sucked out of restaurant grease traps clogged a major traffic artery Tuesday, a day after a leaky truck left a nasty trail on an Interstate 20 bridge.

The stinky, slippery spill was first reported as chicken fat, but the vacuum truck had cleaned grease traps for numerous area restaurants and was hauling the stuff to a disposal site, said Rodney Mallett, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Quality.

The vacuum truck crossed the Ouachita River before it was pulled over about 3:30 p.m. Monday.

The truck's owner, Dixie Hydro-vac Specialist Co., an industrial cleaning company from West Monroe, tried to clean up the mess with a chemical, but then it started to rain, said John Kelly, district administrator for the state Department of Transportation and Development.

I'll bet at least one or two members of the cleanup crew were busily humming that long-ago school gym class song while they were working on containing the slimy mess.

And I'll bet some of their co-workers were about ready to kill the folks who were humming it in a very short time.

Poisoning Pets On The Patio

Look, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard have labored long and hard to warn people about the Animal Uprising™. That does not, however, mean that we are in favor of poisoning the family pet, most of whom have not joined the animal overlord's attempt to take over the planet. So we are warning all our readers about the recall of many, many, many brands of cat and dog foods. Because there are numerous reports of pets being poisoned by the food. The manufacturer has issued a very large recall of the foods. The entire lists of dog and cat foods can be found here on the manufacturer's website.

</joking off> This is serious, folks. If you have purchased any of the listed brands of pet food, stop feeding them to your pet at once and go get something else for them. What this inadvertently shows, however, is the fact that all of these brands of pet food are essentially the same. So, have you been buying "premium" pet food for your animals instead of that store brand? Is your regular brand on the list? Feel like you've maybe been scammed a bit by clever advertising?

Just asking. Go buy something else for Fido or Fluffy right now.

Buffalo Invade Denver!

And turncoats among the human race are the ones enabling it! Yes, the Animal Uprising™ has sent a platoon of bison right to Denver's doorstep.

COMMERCE CITY, Colo. - After an absence of more than a century, wild bison were returned to Colorado's Front Range on Saturday in full view of Denver's skyline.

Sixteen buffalo from the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana were released in an enclosed 1,400-acre section of a wildlife refuge that formerly was the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where nerve gas and other chemical weapons were manufactured.

"The release went very smoothly. We would say this was a tremendous success," said Matt Kales, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He said the animals were released in an area that had never been used for the manufacture of weapons…..

….."We are not only giving the bison a chance, but giving the people of Denver a chance to connect with them," Kales said.

Let's hope the humans in Denver are ready for this. Just wait until a Honda connects with a full grown buffalo. That will not be pretty. Oh, sure the people doing this say they have the bison under lock and key and are ready for a jailbreak:

Kales said Fish and Wildlife officials don't believe the bison will try to get out of their enclosure, but employees will have tranquilizer guns and escape plans ready as a precaution.

Longtime readers know that bison who want to leave simply do so. And, as that last link points out, shooting them with tranquilizers only makes them angry. Much like Mongo in Blazing Saddles.

Catch A Double Feature

Now playing! The comedy Wild Hogs with a second feature, a live performance of Ben! They know how to get patrons excited in Nashville, Tennessee!

Jennifer Harris loves the movies and the Regal Cinemas 16 in Green Hills is her favorite place to go.

Wednesday afternoon, she and a friend were enjoying the movie ''Wild Hogs'' when she saw something even more wild in the seat right next to her.

She took a double take, saw a rat and high tailed out of the theater.

Harris said, “I turned and looked again and I saw a tail… so I ran over my friend and she said what's wrong?  There is rats over there, so we ran on down.”

Harris claims she talked with two managers and said both admitted the theater has a mouse problem.

She said, “He went inside and saw the rat, I said, ‘did you see the rat?’ and he said, ‘yes ma'am.’ And then their whole attitude changed at that point.”

No we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are not surprised by this at all. After all, the rodent regiments of the Animal Uprising™ are known to want a little R&R time, just like any other troops. Our informants also tell us that rats, in general, are huge John Travolta fans and actually have their own fan club chapter. We note that our informants are not always correct, especially if they forgot their medication. Or when they're on it.

Terabyte Dells

Dell is going to start shipping consumer PCs with terabyte hard disk drives.

Dell vice president, Neil Hand said: "This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we're now able to bring it to consumers."

The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. XPS systems will then follow suit. A check on the US Alienware site shows four 1TB drives can be shipped. The drives are not mentioned on the UK site yet.

Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.

If I add up all the disk drives I have in various computers I can't reach a terabyte. Egads. I remember when a 20 gigabyte drive was considered enormous. It wasn't all that long ago, either. HAL 9000 is just on the horizon. I'm sorry, Dave.

Medieval Corruption

Wow, Charles Krauthammer pulls out all the stops to whip on the "Limousine Liberals" and their ostentatiously pretentious posturing on the subject of global warming. Their purchase of indulgences - er - carbon credits - to "offset" their voracious usage of energy is the subject of this blistering column in Time Magazine.

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was "Ride mass transit." This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent–in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity–Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

A very few of the very rich have some awareness of the emptiness–if not the medieval corruption–of ransoming one's sins. Sergey Brin, zillionaire founder of Google, buys carbon credits to offset the ghastly amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Google's private Boeing 767 but confesses he's not sure if it really does anything.

Which puts him one step ahead of most other eco-preeners who actually pretend that it does–the Goracle himself, for example. His Tennessee mansion consumes 20 times the electricity used by the average American home. Last August alone it consumed twice as much power as the average home consumes in a year. Gore buys absolution, however. He spends pocket change on carbon credits, which then allow him to pollute conscience-free.

This one is a must read. Especially the description of what is happening in Uganda as a direct result of the Gorezilla Memorial Carbon Trading Racket™, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming®. The "little people" who are falling for the Gorezilla spiel simply do not understand that they are being used and will be kicked aside when no longer needed.

But they'll get to stand by the roadside, no longer able to drive their own vehicles and watch the limousines roll by. Gorezilla won't wave, however.

Soulless Evil

Michael Moore once called them "Minutemen". He was referring to the so-called insurgents in Iraq. (The correct term being 'terrorist'). Today they gassed a total of 350 people, including children, in several suicide bombings. These are acts of soulless, evil performed for propaganda purposes. The media cheerfully cooperates.

The violence started Friday afternoon when a driver detonated the explosives in a pickup truck northeast of Ramadi, wounding one U.S. service member and one Iraqi civilian, the military said in a statement.

That was followed by a similar explosion involving a dump truck south of Fallujah in Amiriyah that killed two policemen and left as many as 100 residents showing signs of chlorine exposure, with symptoms ranging from minor skin and lung irritations to vomiting, the military said.

Another suicide bomber detonated a dump truck containing a 200-gallon chlorine tank rigged with explosives Friday evening, also south of Fallujah in the Albu Issa tribal region, the military said. U.S. forces responded to the attack and found about 250 local civilians, including seven children, suffering from symptoms related to chlorine exposure, according to the statement.

These are what would be following us from from Iraq if we precipitously pull out. Because they most assuredly will follow us back here. The Democrats would be wise to keep in mind how much blame they will get for that if they force a Murtha-Pelosi cut and run strategy.