No Joke This Time

I got caught by an April Fool article on April 5th. I linked an article with a dateline of April 3rd - which turned out to have been originally published on April 1st and was a hoax. It involved a supposed ban on outdoor grilling unless you got a very pricey permit to address global warming. It was a fake.

This is not.

When the Mail on Sunday wanted an April Fool spoof last month, we hit upon the ridiculous notion that bureaucrats would be cracking down on the humble barbecue for its supposed contribution to global warming.

While most of our readers quickly saw through the preposterous idea, one politically-correct local authority didn't seem to get the joke.

Camden Council is insisting that a neighbourhood group agrees to a string of health and safety restrictions for its long-running summer fair, which include using a less environmentally damaging barbecue.

The Primrose Hill Community Association, in Labour's North London heartland, has been running a successful event for 29 years, but now it has been told it should:

… Ditch its traditional charcoal barbecue for a cleaner gas-powered one.

… Do more to celebrate ethnic diversity, and include under-represented groups.

… Not allow just any volunteer to cook the sausages and burgers; they must be a registered, professional caterer or someone with a food hygiene diploma.

… Conduct a customer-satisfaction survey among those attending the fair.

The residents' group must comply with all the restrictions in order to receive a grant of just £400 from the Liberal Democrat-dominated council.

Organiser Mick Hudspeth was also told there were vague 'local issues', concerning the use of the green in the middle of Chalcot Square, where the event is traditionally held, and that his application for the grant 'did not demonstrate clear evidence of how the festival celebrates the area's diversity'.

The red tape could embarrass Environment Secretary David Miliband, who lives in a £1.5million house in the square and regularly attends the event. His brother Ed, a Cabinet Office Minister, often goes along too.

Organisers have accepted the £400 from the council's community festivals grants panel, and must now meet the conditions, including the requirement that at least five per cent of those attending the Primrose Hill Goes Tropical event on June 16 fill in questionnaires.

Keith Bird, 73, who has helped run the barbecue there for the past 20 years, said the restrictions threatened the fair's survival.

Which is why I fell for the first hoax. Because it is not - at all - far fetched. As has been proven here. After all, mince pies are a serious danger in Britain, right? Britain is rapidly sinking under the really, really stupid ideas of the nanny statism of the left. 

Tornado Alley: “Another Long Night”

Yet another series of tornadoes has ripped through Kansas with still more on the way. Weathermen are predicting another long night. The number of tornadoes reported so far are "well into the double digits."

The National Weather Service said it had received reports "well into the double digits" of twisters touching down in six counties.

Among them were a series of half-mile wide "wedge" tornadoes — similar to the one that devastated Greensburg on Friday night, meteorologist Mike Umscheid said.

"We're going to expect quite a lot of damage," he said.

Earlier, emergency crews called off the search in Greensburg for victims as the weather deteriorated again.

Umscheid said the slow-moving storm system would likely to spawn severe weather early into Sunday morning.

"It looks like it's going to be another long night," he said.

Rescuers had spent the day hurrying through the wreckage from Friday night's giant tornado, which left little standing beyond the local pub.

Friday's weather was blamed for nine deaths in the region, a figure authorities feared could rise even before the latest twisters.

City Administrator Steve Hewitt estimated 95 percent of the town of 1,500 was destroyed and predicted rescue efforts could take days as survivors could be trapped in basements and under rubble.

Our local television stations are on the air with live warnings almost continuously. Whenever they go back to regular programming, it is only a short time until they break in again. This is a really bad one and there will be a lot of damage through the Heartland by morning.

Message Received: Loud And Clear

Any doubt - whatsoever - about the message Congressional Democrats sent to the enemies of the United States has been removed by one of America's enemies. Ayman al-Zawahri, al Qaeda's number two has flat out told the world what the Democrat's partisan posturing means: defeat.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri said a U.S. congressional bill calling for a troop withdrawal from Iraq was proof of Washington's defeat, according to a Web video posted on Saturday.

"This bill reflects American failure and frustration," Zawahri said. "But this bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap."

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the video, which comes four days after U.S. President George W. Bush vetoed a $124 billion congressional war-spending measure that would have required a troop pullout from Iraq to begin by October 1.

"We ask Allah that they only get out after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, so that we give the blood spillers in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson to motivate them to review their entire doctrinal and moral system," Zawahri said on the video, posted on Web sites used by Islamists.

Not "redeployment." Not "a new direction." Not any other euphemism. Defeat. The rest of the world - and especially this nation's enemies - can see clearly what the posturing, pandering to the left politicians won't. And they have no problem ignoring the false nuance the Democratic leadership wants to paint. The Democratic "leadership" of Reid and Pelosi will be remembered for a long time.

But it will not be remembered fondly - except by those who hate this nation.

Battle Badgers Use Biological Warfare

The British, finally awakening to the dangers of the Animal Uprising™, are coming to the conclusion that they are being badgered. By real badgers using real biological agents. They are spreading bovine tuberculosis and the government is planning to fight back. They are going to OK the culling of infected badgers before they spread the disease to humans (which appears to be close to happening). Animal "rights" activists are, naturally, going ballistic.

The culls could start within weeks after the completion of a Government report into the role that badgers play in spreading the infectious disease bovine tuberculosis among cattle.

In the expectation of an imminent end to the moratorium on licences to kill badgers, farmers have earmarked areas of the country where the cull could begin, while the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is conducting four secret trials to find which is the most effective ways of killing badgers - snaring, trapping, shooting or gassing.

A move to permit culling, however, would be certain to provoke ferocious opposition from animal welfare groups, who insist it is not necessary and believe the spread of the disease is due to bad husbandry by farmers.

The Government research, by the Independent Scientific Group (ISG), began in 1998 and was accompanied by the moratorium on licences……..

…….TB in cattle cost the taxpayer more than £99 million last year, £40 million of which went to compensate farmers whose animals were slaughtered.

The disease is spreading fast along the "cattle belt", which runs from Cornwall, up the west of the country, to Cheshire. Most outbreaks have been in the southwest and the West Midlands, but there have been others in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Sussex and Wales.

There were 788 new suspected outbreaks in January and February compared with 703 in the same period of last year. There are reports of the disease spreading to domestic cats, which has provoked fears that this could lead to infections among humans. (Emphasis added)

The expected fierce opposition says rather a lot about the real drivers for the animal right folks, which is really a loathing for humans. Let's get serious for a moment, shall we? If you have a known disease carrier and the disease is spreading into animals which are in very close contact to humans, do you really think it is a bad idea to thin the population of the disease carrying animals? Will rat rights be the next frontier for the activists? Flea rights? amoeba rights? Where does it end? Seriously. Will antibiotics be banned because they are cruel to the bacteria?

Live From Tornado Alley

We are in the middle of a series of very powerful thunderstorms and at least one tornado has touched down briefly less than a mile from our house. That happened just to the west of our house. This is what happened just east of us. It's a bit jerky since it is spliced together stills, but it shows the wall cloud trying to form to spawn a new tornado. This one, fortunately did not become a tornado.

Common Sense

Fred Thompson has released part of the text of the speech have delivered at the Lincoln Club dinner in Orange County, California last night. It's worth reading. It sounds very, very much like a campaign speech and it is, I suspect, why the character assassins are so busy in advance of him announcing whether he will enter the contest for the nomination.

These are challenges. But how we react to them is more important than the challenges themselves. Some want us, to the extent possible, to withdraw from the world that presents us with so many problems, in the hope they will go away. Some would push us towards protectionist trade policies. Others see a solution in raising taxes and redistributing the income among our citizens.

Wrong on all counts. These are defensive, defeatist policies that have consistently been proven wrong. They are not what America is all about.

Let's talk about the issues here at home, first. A lot of folks in Washington suffer from a big misconception about our economy. They confuse the well-being of our government with the wealth of our nation. Adam Smith pointed out the same problem in his day, when many governments mixed up how much money the king had with how well-off the country was.

Taxes are necessary. But they don't make the country any better off. At best they simply move money from the private sector to the government. But taxes are also a burden on production, because they discourage people from working, saving, investing, and taking risks. Some economists have calculated that today each additional dollar collected by the government, by raising income-tax rates, makes the private sector as much as two dollars worse off.

To me this means one simple thing: tax rates should be as low as possible. This isn't anything ideological, and it really isn't some great insight. It's common sense arithmetic.

That's why the economy booms when taxes are cut. When the Kennedy tax cuts were passed in the 1960s, the economy boomed. When Reagan cut taxes in 1981, we went from economic malaise to a new morning in America. And when George Bush cut taxes in 2001, he took a declining economy he inherited to an economic expansion — despite 9-11, the NASDAQ bubble and corporate scandals.

The Democrats, of course, want to raise taxes. They only want to target the rich, they say. A word of advice to anyone in the middle class — don't stand anywhere near that target. Wouldn't it be great if, instead of worrying so much about how to divide the pie, we could work together on how to make the pie bigger?

Read the whole thing. One thing for sure, he is either himself a great speech writer or has someone who is. (I rather suspect that a lot of this is his own work, just because that is actually part of what he is doing for a living these days at ABC Radio. The speech is also consistent with other work he has written that I have read.) I would have loved to hear this live. (Here's the Lincoln Club's website with their review of Thompson's speech.) This is the kind of speech that can make a career. No wonder they're so desperate to go after Thompson by trying to smear him with characters he's played in the past.

Tornado Levels Kansas Town

Seven people are known to have been killed so far in Greensburg, Kansas by a powerful tornado. Or what's left of it. Officials describe the town as mostly leveled right now.

The dead include six in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is located, and one in nearby Stafford County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General's Department.

The tornado that struck Greensburg late Friday damaged about 90 percent of the town about 110 miles west of Wichita, City Administrator Steve Hewitt said Saturday.

This is a breaking news update. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

This is a bad one. I expect there will be more bad news today as there is a powerful storm system roaring through the midsection of the country.

Studious Snakes

A public library in Cedar Falls, Iowa is battling snakes among the stacks as scholars scramble. Wow. That sounded really dramatic. More dramatic than what really happened!

CEDAR FALL, Iowa - Time flies when you're curled up with a good book. Maybe that's what happened to Skeeze, a pet corn snake who escaped from his cage at the Cedar Falls library more than a month ago and hadn't been seen until this week when he turned up near the adult fiction section.

"Everyone had been looking for him," said Dick VanBesien, a library janitor. "I was just the lucky one to find him."

VanBesien said he doesn't mind snakes, but he was a bit surprised when he stumbled upon the 2-foot-long Skeeze.

"It shocked me at first," VanBesien said. "I thought it was a piece of paper, but when I went to pick it up, it jumped. I jumped, too."

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long documented the depredations of snakes all around the world. Snakes are among the most unreliable minions of the warlords of the Animal Uprising because of their weird fascination with shoes. A pair of pumps can completely distract them from their assignments. So we're pretty sure that Skeeze the scholarly snake was actually conducting research in the library into the abnormal, Imelda Marcos-like behavior of the reptiles. Here's hoping he hasn't found a cure.

The Knives Come Out

I have pointed out numerous warnings that the media has telegraphed to the Democrats that their leftward push by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi was not going to garner positive press. The party's leadership in Congress just kept right on charging boldly left. Now the Washington Post flat out drops the hammer on Reid and Pelosi. The Post points out that nothing - not one thing - that the Democrats promised to get elected has been enacted. Some centrist Democrats are becoming very worried about what that means for the party in 2008.

In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats' domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol: Homeland security upgrades, a higher minimum wage and student loan interest rate cuts all passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats' agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the "do nothing" tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them.

"We cannot be a one-trick pony," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who helped engineer his party's takeover of Congress as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "People voted for change, but Iraq, the economy and Washington, D.C., [corruption] all tied for first place. We need to do them all."

The "Six for '06" policy agenda on which Democrats campaigned last year was supposed to consist of low-hanging fruit, plucked and put in the basket to allow Congress to move on to tougher targets. House Democrats took just 10 days to pass a minimum-wage increase, a bill to implement most of the homeland security recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, a measure allowing federal funding for stem cell research, another to cut student-loan rates, a bill allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices under Medicare, and a rollback of tax breaks for oil and gas companies to finance alternative-energy research.

The Senate struck out on its own, with a broad overhaul of the rules on lobbying Congress.

Not one of those bills has been signed into law.

As has been pointed out in comments, the WaPo is known as Pravda on the Potomac locally. For them to attack the Democrats - and give a strong voice to a critic of the Reid-Pelosi regime - is telling. There is going to be trouble for the one-trick pony crowd. (Palomino pony?) This kind of coverage is going to get much, much worse in the near future. Expect an outright power struggle for control of the Democrat's agenda to break out. (Not that it isn't going on behind the scenes already).