Pundits

I have got to kill that webcam.

Damn you, Pam. You are not supposed to let the secret out. You double-pinky swore.

Mississippi Down Under

US 90 in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi has been the site of multiple reports of kangaroos in recent days. The marsupial hordes have been running amok all along the highway, causing great consternation for the local police.

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. - Animal-control officers here said there have been several reports in the past few days of a kangaroo hopping along U.S. 90.

"I've heard reports of people seeing it four or five different times and at first I wondered if someone was just joking around," Mayor Eddie Favre said. "It could be someone had the kangaroo and it got loose or it may be a case where the kangaroo came in with Katrina and has been here ever since."

Some officials suspect the animal was someone's pet that may have escaped.

Based on eyewitness accounts, the kangaroo is about four feet tall.

While police are not aware of the animal's favorite snacks, kangaroos usually feed on fruits and vegetables, according to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. Most are nocturnal, but some are active in the early morning and late afternoon.

Blue Crab Boulevard, being somewhat more familiar with the Animal Uprising™ than the MSM is, is trying to ascertain whether Gabriel Byrne might be in the area right now. Kangaroos having a well-known penchant for killing Irish actors. On the other hand, the sightings may, in fact, be of a giant mouse. Which, in Indiana, is a common misidentification.

Rights And Wrongs

85-year old Alton Tillman of Clovis, New Mexico had been the victim of burglaries three times in the past week. He'd had quite enough of that, thank you, and decided to do something about it. So on Tuesday, he left his home at his usual time, then quietly circled back. When he entered the house, he found drawers opened and things in disarray - oh, and the burglar's feet sticking out from under his bed.

Tillman ordered him out, then called 911.

When officers arrived, they found Tillman pointing a handgun at a 16-year-old boy standing against a wall, they said.

Officers said they found several items belonging to Tillman in the boy's pockets and other items of the man's at the youth's home a block away.

The teenager was charged with felony burglary and larceny.

The police are not particularly happy with Mr. Tillman, saying they should have been called. Mr. Tillman did pretty well for himself, however, didn't he? Contrast this story with this one from Britain, however. A man there surprised a burglar rifling through his apartment and took exception to that. When the burglar was confronted by the homeowner, some sort of altercation occurred (nobody is sure what at this point.) But the would-be burglar ended up falling off a balcony. The British police have charged the homeowner for the robber's death.

Patrick Walsh, 56, awoke to find an intruder in his flat on Corkland Road in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester.

Police say "following an exchange of words" the 43-year-old suspect fell 35ft from the fourth floor window on to the pavement below. He suffered massive injuries from the fall, at around 6.10am on Monday, and died in hospital.

It is thought the pair got into an argument. A neighbour from a nearby property, who asked not to be named, said: "I was up at around that time, and I did hear a noise like a window being broken."

Another local said: "If the guy who fell out of the window was breaking into the property then why was the homeowner arrested?"

Good question. The criminal had no business whatsoever being inside a taxpaying citizen's home. It should be a right to defend your home - it still is in America - at least for now. Britain? Not so much.

Woman Of Action

Back in June, we brought you the story of Dale Rippy of Wesley Chapel, Florida. He is the guy who was viciously attacked by a rabid bobcat. Rippy, with no weapons or means of self defense, kept his cool and did the exact right thing - he strangled the animal before it could hurt others. Well, Rippy is not alone on the hero bench. A Connecticut woman (not identified by name, unfortunately) pulled a rabid raccoon off of a five-year old child and strangled it with her bare hands.

CHESHIRE, Conn. - A woman killed a raccoon with her bare hands Thursday when the animal attacked a young boy. Officials with Cheshire animal control say the woman was walking in the woods around 11 a.m. with a group of children when the animal bit the 5-year-old son of a friend.

She pulled the raccoon off the child, told the children to run home and strangled the animal, authorities said.

The animal tested positive for rabies; both the woman and the child are undergoing treatment for exposure to rabies. But she did - without hesitation - the exactly right thing in a very bad situation. Had the animal escaped, it could have - actually probably would have - spread the disease further and may have caused more death and injury. A tip of the Crabihat to the unidentified woman - you did real good in a bad situation.

Big Ben Swears Off Bongs

Big Ben, the famous bell that strikes the hours in the clock tower that stands at the northeastern end of the Houses of Parliament in London has sworn off bongs - for a month or so. (Big Ben is not the clock itself, incidentally, it is the largest of the bells inside the tower.)

The "bongs" of Big Ben will be heard for the last time at 8am on Saturday before Britain's most famous clock falls silent for a month.

Maintenance work will mean the hourly chimes and quarter bells will cease to ring until September.

The work will include the replacement of the bearings on the strike train which operates the hour bell (Big Ben) and the going train which controls the clock itself.

While the clock will continue to work, those who set their watch by it should be warned - on Saturday it will be stopped for several hours while an alternative system is installed to keep it working while the maintenance work to the bells is carried out.

What, you thought the clock was on drugs?

Libya Tortured “HIV Medics”

Five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor were imprisoned by Libya for eight years on charges that they had infected more than 400 children with AIDS. They were convicted in a Libyan court based on their "confessions". The son of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi has admitted that those confessions were obtained by torture. Like strapping electrodes to the victim's genitals.

The Gaddafi regime in Libya has admitted torturing confessions from five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of infecting Libyan children with HIV.

Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Muammar Gaddafi's son, said the medics, who were freed last month after an eight year ordeal, were subjected to electric shocks.

State officials also made threats against the detainees families, he said.

Col Gaddafi's son was responding to claims by the doctor, Ashraf al-Hazouz, that Libyan authorities used drugs and attached electrodes to his feet and genitals in a bid to extract a confession.

He added the authorities set dogs on the prisoners, tied him to a bar and spun him repeatedly, like a chicken on a rotisserie.

That would be what real torture looks like.

This Is Huge

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Power and Control is reporting that Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre's blog, has been hit with what appears to be a DDOS attack. The true believers must not allow anyone to dispute them, apparently. (Via Clayton Cramer). Everyone posting on this should be aware that this is happening.

UPDATE: Climate Audit may have been taken down by excessive traffic - But another odd thing: Suface Stations is now also down.

I got sidetracked yesterday when I saw something about this. Crosspatch, blogging over at Mac's Mind, caught this yesterday. The man that the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming® love to hate, Steve McIntyre, caught an enormous error in NASA temperature data as published by Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). This has seriously re-ranked the warmest years ever. (At least for the US.) Will the MSM ignore this? Very likely. But this is not a small matter.

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000. 

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

How badly has this changed things? Well the "warmest year on record" is not 1998 as was originally claimed. The warmest year was 1934. In fact the ranks have really changed a lot. This site has tabulated everything. Here's the $64,000 question: how many dire forecasts published in the past few years have been based on the badly skewed data? How many of the temperature monitoring stations are in improper places where things like A/C units impact the readings? (See picture on linked site). The true believers will really get het up about this, but NASA has changed the data - this is very real and it is a very real blow to the religion of global warming.

UPDATE: The right is running with this, the left is silent (while they develop their talking points via secret mailing lists, I'm sure.): Coyote Blog (great post, btw),  A Blog For All, American Thinker, QandO, NewsBusters, Small Dead Animals, Wake up America , The Astute Bloggers,  TigerHawk, Hot Air, Moonbattery, Just Barking Mad, Flopping Aces, Secular Blasphemy,  Sister Toldjah,  The Daily Gut, Biased BBC,  Tim Blair, Newsbusters,

Zombie Snake Attacks Man

And not just any zombie snake. A beheaded zombie rattlesnake very nearly claimed a human victim. Danny Anderson and his son, Benjamin, pinned a rattlesnake with a length of pipe, then beheaded it with a shovel. Then beat heck out of the head for good measure. But when Anderson reached for the severed head, all hell broke loose.

"When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger," Anderson said. "I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose."

The snake head ended up in the bed of his pickup and Anderson landed in Kadlec Medical Center until Wednesday afternoon.

"I was mad that he scooped that out with his hand, and I was scared because I didn't know what to do," said his wife, Linda Anderson.

At first, Danny Anderson didn't want to go to a hospital but his wife insisted.

And by the time they raced the 10 minutes to Prosser Memorial Hospital, his tongue was swollen, and the venom was spreading from his index finger to the rest of his body.

"It felt like someone was holding my hand in a fire pit," said the repairman for Rowand Machinery. "It was one of the worst pains I ever had."

But it didn't end there.

After finding that Prosser didn't have the full series of six antivenin shots he needed, an ambulance rushed him the 30 miles to the Richland hospital.

Anderson spent some time in the hospital, but will make a full recovery. As to the headless rattler, he probably won't. But you never know. Zombies are terribly hard to keep down. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard strongly recommend the use of flamethrowers when dealing with rattlesnakes. They don't move very fast if they're extra crispy.

Unbearable News

We regret to inform our readers that Franska has be transformed from a "conservation scheme" into what is sometimes called truck-tenderized cutlets. (Less refined people call it "roadkill".)

A Slovenian bear whose introduction into the French Pyrenees as part of a controversial conservation scheme infuriated local farmers has died in a car accident.

The bear, named Franska, was killed near the shrine of Lourdes in a dawn collision with a car on a mountain motorway.

The animal was one of five bears, four female and one male, let loose in the mountains in south-west France last year to boost the native bear population, which had dwindled to around 18 from several hundred over the past century.

Franska was wildly unpopular with the farmers in the area. It seems that Franska had a real sweet tooth for the local sheep. This dispute has been raging ever since the Slovenian bear arrived.

Last month more than 100 farmers dumped the carcasses of seven sheep they claimed had been killed by the animal outside the local government offices.

There was further controversy when it emerged that Franska, who was supposed to be six years old, was closer to 17 and possibly too old to reproduce.

According to witnesses, the bear was hit by a vehicle and thrown into the path of a second. She was the second of the five Slovenian bears to die of unnatural causes. The first fell from a cliff a year ago.

Now this leads us to suspect several things. First, the local sheep were extremely unhappy with the bear. Slovenian brown bears have a disconcerting habit of dropping on their prey from a height. So, did the first bear fall, or was he butted over the cliff by an angry ram? Secondly why hasn't the first car that supposedly hit Franska been found? Is anyone looking for a ram? And we don't mean a Dodge.

This leads us right into our next item. A bear has been captured in Fort Collins, Colorado right near an elementary school. The bear was hiding in a tree attempting to look like a walnut and waiting for school kids to walk under the tree.

CBS4) FORT COLLINS, Colo. A bear found napping in a tree in Fort Collins was tranquilized and returned to the foothills Wednesday afternoon.

The bear was found in a tree near Putnam Elementary School.

A large crowd gathered to see the wildlife before wildlife officers decided to knock the bear out and slowly lower it from the tree for everyone's safety.

Experts said the bear probably wandered into the city in search of food.

We told you bears like to drop on their victims from a height, didn't we?

Progressing To What?

The left in America no longer wants to use the label 'liberal' to describe itself. They much prefer to be called 'progressives' these days. Apparently they think that word has had enough rest that people will forget that it used to mean 'Stalinist'. (Incidentally, searching 'progressive' + 'soviet' on Google yields a bumper crop of references to the term in all its former glory. But we digress.) Ed Morrisey has uncovered the latest in progressive progress. That would be progress toward the fraudulent racial smearing of candidates.

It doesn't take long for provocateurs to crawl out of the woodwork to attack candidates, especially in stealth attacks. With Fred Thompson, they've apparently started before he officially enters the race — and in one case, race is the operative word. Apparently hoping to confuse web surfers looking for Fred's website at [removed], a new site has appeared at [removed] — only this site welcomes people to the Ku Klux Klan, "Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!" It includes links to a variety of disgusting racist sites.

Who would post something like this as a smear on Fred Thompson? Someone a little too stupid to cover his tracks, possibly? A DNS search gives us an answer. The domain name, registered through GoDaddy (no great shock there), belongs to:

Henry Reynolds
500 California Ave. #5
Santa Monica, California 90403
United States

I pulled the urls for the two websites, you can get them over at Ed's place. And you can go over to GoDaddy and pull the whois for yourself. (The registration is on the restricted list which means it is very new and cannot be transferred just yet.) The good captain also uncovers campaign contributions from a man with the same name and occupation (lawyer of all things) to various 'progressive' groups. Ed is waiting for a return call from Reynolds. We'll see if he actually gets one.

UPDATE: You simply must see Ed's updates. He's been getting good old progressive Henry's attention all day. And Henry is happy, you betcha. And he's learning how to do redirects! Isn't it nice when everything is a learning opportunity? Others getting on this subject: Hot Air, Riehl World View, Israpundit, Lonewacko, Public Secrets, Redstate, Iowa Voice, QandO, Middle Earth Journal, Siste Toldjah,

Skyrocketing Food Prices

A global think tank is issuing extremely dire warnings about food prices. The International Food Policy Research Institute is predicting prices across the globe for food will jump by 40 to 80 percent as more and more food is diverted to biofuel production.

Joachim von Braun, director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said further crop yield improvements and increased efficiency of these alternative fuels were required if a global price shock were to be avoided.

Unless governments invest to improve farm productivity "so that we can cope with the increased demand for biofuels, the (food) prices may come up between 40 and 80 percent on top of what you can see," he told reporters on the sidelines of an agriculture and poverty conference here.

"If it's well managed and we have more investment in research and technology to bring up yield levels in the crops and improve the efficiency of biofuels, these price effects may only be between five and 15 percent. So it depends on government policy," he added.

Von Braun said that "globally, many countries have plans to scale up biofuel production in the order of covering 10-20 percent of their transport fuel," chiefly ethanol and biodiesel.

Brazil has committed to 25 percent while Europe plans to use biofuels for 10 percent of the countries' needs by 2020, he added.

In Asia, he said the picture was mixed, which China having announced plans to shut down some of its ethanol plants "because of the concern for using too much grain for them."

And counting on massive increases in crop yields and big advances in technology frankly fall into the "and then a miracle happens" school of science. In other words, it is a stupid way to try and manage change. China has already realized that they have a problem when their pork prices shot to record levels. Wait until this starts to bite the rest of the world.

Monkey Mayhem In Madison

The Animal Uprising™ has taken an ugly turn in Madison, Wisconsin. Brain-sucking monkeys are now disguising themselves as human babies to camouflage their mind-control of victims. And they're chewing on bystanders, too.

MADISON, Wis. - Authorities captured a diaper-wearing monkey who led them on a downtown search after biting a woman.

The 20-year-old woman reported being bitten on the thumb as she tried to pet the animal early Wednesday.

The woman was walking by State Street Brats, a popular nightclub, where a man had the monkey on a leash inside its beer garden. People walking by were petting the monkey, who was wearing a white diaper.

Obviously, the hat disguise wasn't working for the monkeys, so they're trying the diaper routine instead. When police tried to take the monkey into custody, the miscreant puppetmaster pulled an Oliver and went on the lam.

By 7:15 a.m., police found the man and the monkey. But the man lost the handle on the monkey before an animal control officer arrived and it got loose.

Police issued a warning to the public of the foot-tall monkey with a long prehensile tail: "It is now on the lam, presumably still in the State Street area."

They issued an APB on the monkey? Note the odd wording: "the man lost the handle on the monkey". Who, exactly, had who on a handle? We here at Blue Crab Boulevard urge people to look very, very closely at any babies you see. They may not be babies at all. They may be mind-controlling beings that utterly control the adults they are with. Um. That describes babies, doesn't it? Hmm. It's going to be very hard to tell them apart.

The System Unraveling

The South Carolina Republican party is moving its primary up in response to Florida's move to change its primary. Other states will now have to move their dates as a result. Iowa and New Hampshire have state laws in effect that require them to have primaries scheduled before other states (strictly speaking, Iowa uses a caucus, not a primary). The entire primary system is unraveling and forcing candidates into making some tough choices.

South Carolina's Republican Party will move its 2008 presidential primary forward to Jan. 19, sources said yesterday, a decision almost certain to spark a cascade of calendar changes that could push the start of voting to New Year's Day or even to before Christmas.

The move, set to be announced today, is likely to cause the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses to be shifted at least to early January, and other states are actively angling to stake out spots earlier in the process. The maneuvering has injected a new note of uncertainty into what is already the earliest-starting presidential campaign in history, and top strategists for the candidates said it would force them to revise their carefully worked out plans……..

…….Under some scenarios, the decision could lead Iowa to hold its caucuses in mid-December, creating an unprecedented situation in which convention delegates are selected in the calendar year before a presidential election……

…….The calendar changes are infuriating senior strategists for presidential candidates in both parties, who say it is forcing them to plot a path to the nomination through quicksand. The uncertainty is holding up decisions about where to campaign and to devote resources.

"If you're facing a moving chessboard, it's pretty difficult to know where to make your first move," said Allan J. Lichtman, a history professor at American University. "Imagine playing chess if the board keeps changing."

Lichtman said earlier voting could create the longest-ever general election campaign if the two party nominees are largely decided by mid-January. That would leave almost 10 months for the candidates — and any third-party entrant — to battle for the presidency before Election Day on Nov. 4, 2008.

This is stupid. Both parties are being foolish here and the states that are playing around here are risking serious damage to the system. In an attempt to gain influence in the primary process, they risk losing all relevance to that process.

Cracks - Yet Again

This is almost stunning. But given recent poll numbers, I guess it should not be. A number of Democrats have openly come out and acknowledged that American troops are making real progress in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (AP) - One senator said U.S. troops are routing out al-Qaida in parts of Iraq. Another insisted President Bush's plan to increase troops has caused tactical momentum.

One even went so far on Wednesday as to say the argument could be made that U.S. troops are winning.

These are not Bush-backing GOP die-hards, but Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed. Even Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, said progress was being made by soldiers.

The suggestions by them and other Democrats in recent days that at least a portion of Bush's strategy in Iraq is working is somewhat surprising, considering the bitter exchanges on Capitol Hill between the Democratic majority and Republicans and Bush. Democrats have long said Bush's policies have been nothing more than a complete failure.

The Democrats' choice to acknowledge the military's progress in Iraq signals support for the troops, a message that voters want to hear. But they still heap criticism on Bush and his Iraq strategy, which promises to be a prominent issue in next year's presidential election.

All of Washington is waiting for the September assessment from Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Bush administration strategy. Bush has called the plan a "surge" because it poured thousands more troops into the country.

You knew there had to be a 'but' in that support. But this is yet another indicator that there are serious cracks developing in the Democratic-Controlled Congress. The Reid-Pelosi strategy has backed moderates and those from closely divided districts into a bad spot and it is now coming on election season. Expect more shattering of the facade.

You knew there had to be a 'but' in that support. But this is yet another indicator that there are serious cracks developing in the Democratic-Controlled Congress. The Reid-Pelosi strategy has backed moderates and those from closely divided districts into a bad spot and it is now coming on election season. Expect more shattering of the facade.

Fairly Unbalanced

Brian Wesbury, chief economist for First Trust Portfolios, LP and a regular on talking head television about the economy, has an interesting op-ed in today's Opinion Journal. He looks at how talking head television tries to balance debates when talking about the economy, pairing an economic bull with an economic bear. That makes for a livelier debate. Unfortunately, it also badly skews the public's perception of how the economy is really doing.

For example, the most recent Wall Street Journal economic forecasting survey, from July, shows that 49 out of 60 forecasters expect real GDP to grow at an average annual rate of 2%, or faster, in 2007. Of the remaining 11 forecasters, only two expect growth of less than 1%, and only one expects a recession. For 2008, the forecasters are even more optimistic, with none expecting recession.

There are at least a half-dozen other institutions publishing surveys, and all of them report very similar results among the 100 or so active professional forecasters. Except for two well-known economists (Nouriel Roubini at New York University, and Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co.), who are not in many surveys, a super-duper majority of professional forecasting economists believe the economy will continue to expand during the next year and have believed so for the past four or five years.

Despite this, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in late July found that 68% of Americans thought that the economy either was in recession already, or would experience a recession sometime during the next 12 months. Interestingly, this is not much of a change from the past. This same survey question has been polled at least five times since September 2002. Each time a robust majority of between 65% and 85% of respondents thought a recession either was under way or would occur within the year. Americans have been bearish on the economy for quite some time.

When television producers book guests they want tension between the people appearing. Because there actually is a high level of agreement between the leading forecasters, the producers are forced to bring in what might be called second stringers (I'm sure those people would take exception to that description.) All this is giving the average person a distorted view of what real experts are thinking, though.

While this is entertaining, and may bring in eyeballs, which sell commercials, this idea of "fair and balanced" debates leaves an impression that the experts are split 50/50, when in reality it's more like 80/20, or 90/10.

After all, the economy is closing in on six straight years of growth and the stock market is up more than 80% since its bottom in October 2002. It is true that the number of shares sold short on the Nasdaq rose to a record of 9.3 billion last week, but this only equals the number of shares that change hands on the Nasdaq (on average) every 4.9 days. There are way more bulls than bears. It's not a 50/50 world.

But if all the public sees is an endless stream of 50/50 debates, then it is really not that much of a surprise that people think the future is basically a coin toss. And a coin toss, especially in a time of war and terrorism, is not very good odds.

What a fascinating insight. Many of us have long wondered how the public can completely ignore some stunningly good economic data - record low unemployment, etc. and still believe the economy is tanking. This goes a long way to explaining that. Wesbury is not arguing that forecasters are always right. He actually pokes fun at the entire profession about accuracy. But if the public always sees everything as a 50-50 situation, is it any wonder they form the opinions that they do? Here's a thought experiment: how much does this same phenomenon impact political opinions? Interesting, no?