Klavan explains how the financial crisis was & still is all the Dems fault

Its not funny & yep, the financial crisis was and continues to be the COMPLETE fault of the Democrats ... Neat-o! (hat tip Paul over at Mean ol' Meany)

Pukekos should be the NZ national bird

Pukeko

I think the NZ national bird should be the Pukeko instead of the Kiwi.

Image above from FotoNewZealand

Kiwis: small, nocturnal flightless birds, are almost extinct in NZ having been decimated by cats, stoats, rats and other small carnivores (like possums) brought to the islands by man. They can't defend themselves and while unusual looking, they just aren't very cute. (sorry!) I have seen Kiwis at the zoo in a nocturnal exhibit. With a few faint green lights, you could barely see the slow moving Kiwi foraging around. Whoopee. The exhibit is boring and so are Kiwis. New Zealand people are far from boring. New Zealanders are competitive, tough, independent and self reliant. They deserve a better national symbol...

I see daring Pukekos, daily, around grassy fields and at the edges of the motorways. They are out there, living, breeding and surviving despite cars and despite man's impact on their environment.

Kiwis? Will not make it without man to rescue it, breed it and put it on little islands - free from any predators - to survive. Without man: kiwis will go extinct soon.

Pukekos? Adapt and thrive - without man's interventions: they just get on with it. Now THAT is independent spirit of New Zealanders I know!

Sanctuary Wine, NZ

What qualities should be revered in a national bird?

The U.S.A. has the beatiful, fierce bald eagle. (picked a good one)

India: the peacock. (beautiful, but not much for fighting I think)

South Africa: blue crane. (large, blue, aloof...)

Canada: haven't decided between a loon & red tailed hawk. (right)

Australia: defiantly have NO national bird (ok...)

Mexico and Romania: both have golden eagle (is that allowed?)

Poland: white eagle (eagles are popular bird for a symbol, eh)

Nicaraqua: the turquoise browed motmot (points for interesting name)

Other countries pick animals (more on Wikipedia here)

Why have a symbol?

I adore Pukekos: they are featured in all sorts of artwork everywhere in NZ, so I'm not alone.

The gorgeous and cheeky Pukekos are flourishing alongside man.
The Pukeko is smart, brave and adapts to the ever changing NZ environment.

What is a Pukeko?
"The Pukeko, or New Zealand Swamp Hen is a member of the rail family, and is similar to other species found all over the world. It is one of the few New Zealand native birds to have flourished since the arrival of man, and can be found in almost any grassland area, especially in swampy locations. Groups will often be seen foraging for food in road-side areas.

With their bright blue plumage and red beaks, they easily stand out against the New Zealand greenery, particularly when their white tail feathers begin flashing in alarm. Just why they have struck a chord with the Kiwi psyche is hard to say, but you'll find their images on all manner of art and craft works. Ask any visitor to New Zealand what bird they remember most, and they will more than likely answer, "The Pukeko!" "

Bit of footage of Pukekos in the NZ wild:

Expert NZ animal trainer Mark Vette shows how his smart Pukekos were trained as stars for the Genesis Energy commercials:

Check out how the finished ad turned out:

Some observations from a NZ historical (1800s) journal:

"The Swamp-hen may fairly be considered one of the best of our native birds. The brightness of its plumage and the extreme elegance of its movements at once arrest and please the eye, while, on the other hand, it is in very good repute as a game bird. It is interesting to watch it as it strides proudly about, balancing its body with ease on its long slender legs, jerking its head gracefully, and flirting its tail with every movement."

Maybe when Kiwis becomes extinct in the NZ wild (and they will) yet Pukekos still remain, NZ can adopt them as the national bird. They deserve a bit of respect and admiration. Despite the odds and predators; they have adapted to the changing environment on their own and live happily alongside man in NZ. That represents what NZ is about.

Will someone send Beck a constitution-for-dummies already? thanks

Lots of conservative blogs quote Beck. His show video clips are posted like they are gospel. Beck said this. Beck said that. Cool. Great. Neat-o-keen.

Umm... pssssst, in case you forgot: Mr. Beck gets paid a looooot of money to entertain you...

He is an entertainer.

He is not a legal scholar.

He is not a USA constitutional expert.

(hello, before FOX his prior employer was CNN? nope, nope, no liberal bias there at allllll...)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE DISINFORMATION people!

While you are admiring his whiz bang TV show and top notch chalk board skills, please start paying attention to what Beck DOES NOT talk about, OK? (yep, what the constitution actually says and means about POTUS eligibility is a big f**g deal)

Recent example: Miranda Rights are not in the constitution. Daniel Greenfield has a good column about this at his site Sultan Knish. If you haven't read any of Daniel's analysis, I recommend it. He is good. From the Constitution and the Times Square Car Bomber :

"Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Car Bombing suspect, has been caught and will predictably enough be routed through all the formal legalities reserved for Islamic terrorists trying to kill Americans. He will get a criminal trial, a lawyer and a jail sentence after which he, like so many of his compatriots will be released to try and kill again. And quite possibly sooner than anyone might think.

Meanwhile on FOX, Glenn Beck protested the idea of denying a Miranda Warning to Shahzad because he is a US citizen and "you don't shred the constitution." Obviously Beck isn't very familiar with the Constitution, because at no point in time does it mandate a Miranda warning, or compel civil trials for armed insurgents. Instead Beck has confused the Miranda Warning, one of the Warren court's judicial innovations with the Constitution. This is a mistake commonly made by liberals and those who have not educated themselves regarding what the Constitution actually says.

The Warren court pursued its radical agenda of judicial activism by creating an entire spectrum of "rights" based on spurious readings of the Constitution. Warren's technique was simple enough. He would take the actual Constitution and reinterpret the text to suit his political agenda. The actual ruling was not anything that the Framers had ever intended, and had nothing to do with the actual purpose the text was meant to serve. It was just a convenient hook to hang his ruling on.

Take Cruel and Unusual Punishment, which had been meant to ban all sorts of hideous executions and tortures that had been practiced in Europe. The Warren court used it to ban the denaturalization of a army deserter and to rule that imprisoning heroin addicts is illegal, because their addiction is a sickness, not a crime. This had nothing to do with the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution which was meant to ban certain painful physical punishments, not to control whether junkies could be taken off the street or defectors could be deprived of citizenship. Instead it was used by the court to ban the death penalty for rape, to ban the death penalty for 17 year old murderers, and temporarily the idea of the death penalty itself.

The Miranda Warning that Beck insists is in the Constitution is based on a similarly spurious reading which made the leap to arguing that questioning a suspect without informing him of his rights, such as the aforementioned Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a serial rapist, was the equivalent of denying him those rights. The court's argument in Miranda was that being taken into custody is so intimidating that it is essentially a form of compulsory self-incrimination.

For Beck to argue that a failure to Mirandize "shreds the Constitution" would mean that he seriously believes that the Constitution had been shredded all along until 1966 when Earl Warren fixed it by adding the requirement of a Miranda Warning. This is a belief widely held on the liberal side of the aisle, but I don't think Beck believes that. He is simply following the widely held liberal indoctrination which treats the rulings made through Judicial Activism as equivalent to the actual text of the Constitution." ... Read the rest here

Someone... Anyone... [of course this person has to be someone Beck-the-know-it-all will actually LISTEN to], please send Beck a flippin' copy of the United States constitution and perhaps a team of constitutional experts to advise him.

You may need to clear it with the Saudi investor-part-owners of Fox though... so good luck with that.

TGIF ... dance party

Tired of the anger and need to blow off steam? DANCE!

NOTE TO ILLEGALS: We don't owe you a thing!

SUPPORT ARIZONA! from Freedoms Wings and

buy products from them as discussed at iOwnTheWorld:
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Make sure to contact Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and let her know that you support her:
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In case you are still listening to race hate baiters like Al f**ktard Sharpton...

think again...

Most of America feels EXACTLY like this lady:

Glass windows, cats & wind turbines kill thousands of birds, too

brave cat?

Yes, oil spills kill wildlife.

So does glass windows, cats & wind turbines... apparently all over the world.

From Jan 2005: Wind turbines taking toll on birds of prey - By John Ritter, USA TODAY

"ALTAMONT PASS, Calif. — The big turbines that stretch for miles along these rolling, grassy hills have churned out clean, renewable electricity for two decades in one of the nation's first big wind-power projects.

But for just as long, massive fiberglass blades on the more than 4,000 windmills have been chopping up tens of thousands of birds that fly into them, including golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls and other raptors."

From May 2008 a Canadian blogger asks which is more important "500 dead ducks vs 30,000 dead birds"?

"Why do 500 ducks killed by the oil industry cause such an outrage and the death of thousands of birds and bats killed by wind turbines have no impact on the public.

Is it because the ducks were killed by the oil industry?

If the environmentalists are outraged over the duck kill they should be outraged over the thousands of birds and bats killed by wind turbines."

April 2010 another Canadian asks is 1 dead bald eagle in Norfolk county from wind turbines too many? "One healthy eagle out of a total of only nine nesting pairs in Norfolk County may be unsustainable. This wind facility has been operating only a year. Thousands more turbines are proposed along the north shore of Lake Erie and the number of deaths can only increase. Why are we experimenting with an endangered species?"

Italy is losing birds of prey to wind farms using outdated technology: "A much safer and more efficient alternative to those guillotine-like propeller turbines which mangle wildlife, the vertical shaft turbine, is already available. Producing twice the energy, they have a smaller profile and no spinning blades. Birds and bats are not at risk with this design.

So why aren’t vertical-shaft turbines the industry norm?

The biggest obstacle to switching to this superior technology is greed. There is a lot of money at stake for the manufacturers of the archaic and lethal prop-style turbines. When there are large investments involved, business people can turn a blind eye to ethical or moral considerations."

From 2006 Europe bird groups are concerned about eagles "Wind farm turbine blades are killing a key population of Europe's largest bird of prey, UK wildlife campaigners warn - Britain`s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says a wind farm off the Norwegian coast has reduced the population of Europe`s largest eagle. The society says only one white-tailed eagle is expected to fledge from the site on the bird`s former stronghold of Smola islands."

This 2004 blog thinks deaths from turbines are A-OK compared to other bird deaths: "Summary of bird loss due to collisions.
400,000,000 by collisions with buildings and windows
85,000,000 by collisions with power lines.
70,000,000 by collisions with vehicles
20,000,000 by collisions with TV and radio towers
45,000 by collisions with the 15,000 wind turbines
If we eventually had a million turbines, they would account for only 1.5% of all the casualties that birds now undergo to live with we humans. Just for comparison, the Audubon Society estimates that about 100,000,00 birds are killed by house cats each year. "

SO I'VE GOT IT NOW.... REALLY, we need to get rid of the old wind turbines, CATS and WINDOWS to save birds!!

From May 2010 at HotAir's green room "Even those who say that wind farms don’t really put a dent in the bird population point out that domestic cats kill as many as “hundreds of millions of birds” every year. That’s why, beginning this week, Bill Maher and I will be kicking off a grassroots movement pushing Congress to introduce the American Defelinization Act of 2010. These cats must be found and eliminated. And don’t start crying to me now, cat lovers. (I have three cats myself.) It’s for the good of the birds.

Sadly, that’s not going to solve the problem either. A 2006 report from NPR estimates that glass windows in buildings – particularly high rise skyscrapers – kill as many as one billion birds per year, which accounts for roughly 5% of the total bird population. That number sounds a bit high to me, but even if the real total is only ten percent of that, we’re losing 100 million birds annually to glass panes. We must move immediately to eliminate glass windows from all buildings. Of course, that’s going to make the offices quite a bit harder to heat in the winter, so we’re probably going to be needing more … ummmm… oil….

We don’t want to see oil spills, either from drilling or shipping, so we constantly work to improve the technology and reduce the risks. And we will no doubt learn from this sad event and continue to improve safety precautions and procedures. But we don’t throw the baby bird out with the bath water, either. Let’s see… Exxon Valdez was in 1989. This spill is in 2010. If oil exploration, production and shipping continues with major accidents at that rate, it could cost us roughly a half a million birds every twenty years. How many will wind farms, windows and cats rack up in that time?

The sad fact is that birds and technology don’t mix very well. That doesn’t mean that we turn our backs on technology and return to cave dwelling. And let’s face it here… you birds really only have yourselves to blame."

Oil spill crisis? Just an opportunity for O to stop drilling 'n' stuff

Pix from Australian news site

Some comments from 30-Apr-2010 lead me to think the Obumbles regime thought this week's Gulf 'oil spill crisis' was merely a great opportunity to promote their alternative 'green' energy & bulls**t technology... like wind farms!

Per law, Federal Government was SUPPOSED to ACT and help OVERSEE CLEANUPS in any large oil spill. Did they act right away? It appears they DIDN'T.

From PowerLine: "Is it Obama's fault?"

"The Obama administration failed to respond promptly to the oil spill in the Gulf, and that its belated response was inadequate.

Is that a fair charge? Normally, I would be slow to blame government at any level for a natural (or, as here, man-made) disaster. But the basic facts are curious: the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 21, nine days ago. This was no minor event; at least 11 workers were killed. The resulting oil slick has been evident, covering many miles, for some days now. Yet the federal response lagged.

There is a basic difference between this incident and Hurricane Katrina, to which it is being compared. In the case of Katrina, the primary responsibility for disaster response lay with the local and state governments. The local response was very poor; among other things, the governor of Louisiana was slow to call out the National Guard. Here, responsibility lay with the Obama administration from the beginning. State and local governments have no jurisdiction and no ability to deal with an oil spill miles out to sea. Only the federal government can act. It didn't, until, perhaps, it was too late.

Should more have been done, sooner? It is way too early to tell. The facts will emerge over the next several years. But the Obama administration's response does seem to have been oddly slow."

From the New York Times 30-Apr-10 "BP Is Criticized Over Oil Spill, but U.S. Missed Chances to Act":

"The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was “a spill of national significance,” and then set up a second command center in Mobile. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.

The delay meant that the Homeland Security Department waited until late this week to formally request a more robust response from the Department of Defense, with Ms. Napolitano acknowledging even as late as Thursday afternoon that she did not know if the Defense Department even had equipment that might be helpful.

By Friday afternoon, she said, the Defense Department had agreed to send two large military transport planes to spray chemicals that can disperse the oil while it is still in the Gulf.

HERE'S THE KICKER:

...But it is still the government, in this case the Coast Guard, that has the final say. A law passed a year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster makes the owner of a rig or vessel responsible for cleaning up a spill. But oversight of the cleanup is designated to the Coast Guard, with advice from other federal agencies."

From Rush Limbaugh "Obama Pays Oil Slick Lip Service; He's Interested in His Agenda, Not His Job":

"What a teachable moment! Obama had a press conference today, the original purpose of the press conference -- not a press conference, he had a ceremony outside the Oval Office in the Rose Garden -- and the purpose of it was to tout a nonexisting economic growth rate. The actual growth rate's about 1.6%. I'll explain how that happens in mere moments. But something got in the way of this. That damn oil slick. Obama's Katrina. That damn oil slick just got in the way so he had to give some lip service to the oil slick, (imitating Obama) "It's all British Petroleum's fault, they gotta clean it up, I'm sending some czars down there. Now let me tell you what I really came out here for," and look at these people, and he had seven or eight props up there disguised as human beings to tout new jobs in the so-called clean energy sector and so forth.

It is clear this guy does not really want to be president. He doesn't want to deal with the country's problems. He does not have any desire to manage. He can't be bothered with the responsibilities of his office. He simply is wanting and is imposing his ideology without distraction. He wants to make sure that he gets this transformation of the country done. That's what he's doing. He's getting even with his country for all of its transgressions in the past. So we got an oil slick, added benefit, now he can cancel offshore drilling. It's an amazing thing to watch. The amount of time he spent on the oil slick today versus the amount of time he spent on those props disguised as human beings and their jobs was fascinating. So there you have it."