Say Anything Blog

I am NOT making this up! From the BBC:

At least one of Britain’s birds appears to be coping well as climate change alters the availability of a key food.

Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars.

Writing in the journal Science, they point out that the same birds in the Netherlands have not managed to adjust.

Well? What did you think the story would be about?

(Just waiting for Rob to tell me the story just ain’t right without pictures!)

Hat tip to Mullings

Despite the lamentations of our resident military non-expert cut and paste specialist, it seems things are not so grim for the Armed Forces…

USMC Overrun By Recruits
By Jim Dunnigan
Strategy Page

May 7, 2008:  The U.S. Marine Corps has had more success than expected in attracting recruits, and has moved up the date for completing their current expansion. Last year, Congress ordered the marines to expand their strength from the current 181,000 to 202,000. At first, the marines thought it would take them four years to do it. But between the large number of recruits, and the many current marines who are staying in, the expansion will be accomplished by next year.

I’d not bet against Dunnigan…

...since their current leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, (who was what, the fourth or fifth so far to hold that title) has been captured by Coalition Forces.

Al-Masri the Egyptian falls
By Wretchard

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq was captured today in the northern city of Mosul according to the Iraqi ministry of defense. Al-Masri’s life parallels that of al-Qaeda itself. Born an Egyptian he followed al-Qaeda’s fortunes from the Middle East to Central Asia and back. According to US sources, Masri was born in 1967, “joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1982 ... joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which later became part of al-Qaeda. He went to Afghanistan in 1999, where he became an explosives expert. In 2004 he was put in charge of al-Qaeda’s overseas networks, and in 2006 he succeeded al-Zarqawi as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

Intrestingly enough, Masri was captured in Mosul. Bill Roggio says Al Qaeda’s senior leadership was thought “to be attempting to regroup in Mosul. US and Iraqi forces have killed several key al Qaeda leaders in Mosul over the past several months”. Mosul, you will recall, is the hub of one of the remaining al-Qaeda ratlines along the Euphrates. General Petraeus in testimony to Congress in early April, provided a interesting chart showing Mosul to be the hub of one of the remaining “ratlines” or infiltration routes stretching down from Syria. It was natural for al-Masri to be somewhere in the vicinity.

Read the whole thing, then spare a tear for the Defeat at any Cost coalition.  Or don’t.

Hat Tip: Instapundit

I do believe we’ll see a lot of this, as historians and serious analysts dig deeper into Feith’s book (War and Decision) and compare the source documentation it contains to the ”first draft of history” as presented by the MSM.

Rethinking the Iraq Critics
Opinion
By Michael Barone
U. S. News and World Report

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.

Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we’ve become familiar.

...

...the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem, rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.

Indeed.  False premises fed by selective leaks have calcified the thinking of the anti-war left.  A phenomenon we see here frequently.

Five surgeons from big cities are discussing who makes the best patients to operate on.

The first surgeon, from New York , says, ‘I like to see accountants on my operating table because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.’

The second, from Chicago , responds, ‘Yeah, but you should try electricians!  Everything inside them is color coded.’

The third surgeon, from Dallas , says, ‘No, I really think librarians are the best, everything inside them is in alphabetical order’.

The fourth surgeon, from Los Angeles chimes in: ‘You know, I like construction workers..  Those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over.’

But the fifth surgeon, from Washington, DC shut them all up when he observed: ‘You’re all wrong.  Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There’s no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains and no spine, and the head and the ass are interchangeable

You all are at least somewhat famllar with Gores film that predicted a huge increase in ocean levels flooding coastal cities and his other doomsday prophecies.  Well, the esteemed Walter Williams in Environmentalists’ wacky predictions writes that doomsday forecasts are nothing new.

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

It’s really amazing that these environmental alarmists have any credibility left at all.  With regard to how much concern the government have about Global Warming, Williams closes by writing.

Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? In 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken? Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to manmade global warming?

Read the whole thing.

A country legend died today just days short of his 90th birthday. He is more of my generation, but he was unfailingly kind, a real gentleman, he was married to one woman for a lifetime. Although, while he was still quite popular his wife was middle aged, with middle-aged spread, with grey hair and yet he still loved her deeply and I admired him as much for that as well as his music.

As I get older more of my family members and friends pass away and more of the people I admired, like Arnold, pass away and are not even known by most of the people alive today. That’s too bad, Arnold was worth knowing.

REP. FOSSELLA ADMITS TO AFFAIR, LOVE CHILD
WON’T RESIGN FROM POSITION

Rep. Vito Fossella, a married congressman from Staten Island, this morning admitted to having an out-of-wedlock child with a former Air Force officer with whom he carried on a longstanding extramarital affair.

The stunning admission comes exactly a week after the Republican politician was busted for drunk driving in Alexandria, Va. presumably on the way to visit his mistress and their young child.

“I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three-year-old daughter,” Fossella, 43, said in a statement.

Fay, 45, is a retired Air Force intelligence officer who may have met Fossella when she served as a congressional liaison from the Pentagon

..."While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind,” he said.

“Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused.”

Representative Vito J. Fossella was driving with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when he was pulled over and faces a mandatory five days in jail if convicted, a Virginia prosecutor said on Friday.

...The report said Mr. Fossella failed several sobriety tests on the street, including a preliminary breath test on which he registered a blood alcohol level of 0.133 percent. After he was arrested, he recorded a level of 0.17 percent on another machine. The legal limit in Virginia, as in most states, is 0.08 percent.

Find it here

The latest battle in the war on illegal immigration isn’t over the smuggling of undocumented workers, it’s over the trash they leave behind.

Government officials and border activists say the garbage dumped in the desert by illegal immigrants and their smugglers is staggering.

And the cleanup is costing taxpayers millions.

In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along southern Arizona border, many in the meeting spots where immigrants rest, change clothes and wait to hitch a ride further north with a smuggler.

“You can find everything,” said Shela McFarlin, special assistant for international programs at the Arizona Bureau of Land Management. “Blankets, airline tickets, Bibles, wedding pictures, photos of children, school reports, because clearly people don’t tend to throw away everything they’ve brought with them — they’re forced to.”

Arizona officials have spent approximately $4.4 million over five years to clean up the mess, that continues to build with each crossing. Nearly $1 million was spent for 2007 from a base BLM appropriation.

[...]

The trash is a problem that activist groups, like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, say will not stop until the nation’s southern border is secured.

“It’s just like a flood,” said Chris Simcox, the president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. “You can’t clean up the floodwaters until you stop the flood and fix the dam.”

[...]

Since 2003, the Arizona BLM has run a project to mitigate the damage caused by the migration of illegal immigrants along the state’s border with Mexico.

“What we’re beginning to wonder is how extensive is the problem?” McFarlin said. “How many millions of pounds of garbage? How many roads are really damaged? How many miles of illegal trails?”

McFarlin’s agency works with local government, student volunteers and civic groups to bag trash in wilderness areas frequented by immigrants. The BLM also disguises smuggling roads by planting new vegetation over the desert tracks carved by smugglers.

[...]

“We recently cleaned up one location with almost 4,000 backpacks left behind,” she said.

Simcox said his group cleans up the private lands of ranchers who help them on their quest to monitor the border.

“We’ve seen it time and time again, where we go in and clean up these areas and within months they’re just filled again with the same debris,” Simcox said.

The Arizona BLM and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps do not work together on cleanup efforts.

Both groups say it may take years to correct.

“Truly, it’s a national disaster of our cherished outdoor areas,” Simcox said.

Where is the environmental lobby on this?

Once one understands the MSM’s “Basra Narrative” and the assumption that if there is fighting going on, we (the United States) must be losing…

Big push coming in Sadr City
By Ed Morrissey
Hot Air

...

Since Sadr refused to disband the militia, Maliki has little choice but to root it out and destroy it. The US and Iraqi forces have already started doing that by building barriers to keep the Mahdis locked into known positions, with some skirmishes already taking place in Sadr City. Now that they have the battleground defined, the next step will be the military action that will end the Mahdi Army as an organization and establish lawful control over the last of the rebel ground Sadr controls.

This will likely take weeks to complete. Once the battle starts, expect to read and hear plenty of media reports emphasizing civilian deaths, setbacks in the battle, defections in the Iraqi Army, and statements of defiance from Sadr. What we won’t hear is progress by Maliki and the US in finishing off Sadr’s forces until it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore it — and then we will hear about how inept the Iraqi forces were in achieving victory.

Call it the Basra Narrative. Just because it failed in Basra doesn’t mean the defeatist media won’t use it again, and again, and again.

Damn the facts!  Let the narrative continue! /progressive_mode

Indeed.  Via Instapundit

Pressure mounted on embattled Rep. Vito Fossella Wednesday to walk away from his congressional seat in the wake of his drunken-driving bust and relationship with a single mom.

Fossella tried to project calm by attending his eldest son’s Confirmation on Staten Island, but some Republican campaign officials warned donors he was a “huge problem” going into the fall elections.

Some even told donors to withhold checks to Fossella, inside sources said.

Party officials were losing confidence Fossella could hold onto his seat even if he survived fallout from his drunken-driving arrest in Alexandria, Va., last week, the sources said.

The married congressman also faced questions over whether he had a 3-year-old love child with retired Lt. Col. Laura Fay, who rescued him from the drunk tank on Thursday, the sources and others familiar with the conversations said.

“That’s a huge problem for us,” a GOP official told representatives of political action committees who support Republican candidates.

by the Left.

Here is the map of change in delinquency rates (by quintiles) on a county by county basis:



Here is the map of the 2004 Presidential Election on a county by county basis:



Quite the interesting correlation there. I think my already tepid support for mortgage relief just cooled to well below freezing.

Hat Tip: Marginalizing Morons via Michelle Malkin (more...)

All the elements of a good story for...well, you know the guy! Heh.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A Democratic political consultant questions why two former U.S. House members who voted against impeaching President Clinton 10 years ago are now jumping on a bandwagon to force Ohio’s attorney general to resign or be forced from office.

Clinton’s case rings similar to that of Attorney General Marc Dann, a fellow Democrat from Youngstown who has admitted to an extramarital affair with a subordinate and is being challenged for inconsistent statements made under oath.

Congress impeached Clinton, as Democrats are now threatening to do to Dann. Yet Clinton, who was subsequently acquitted in the Senate, never resigned.

Governor Ted Strickland would like Marc Dann gone before the November elections, because he is a bright, glowing neon sign that political corruption is well and truly bipartisan!

Some pundits have opined that the Ohio AG could destroy the Potemkin village of “Democrat reformers” that swept Democrats into office two short years ago, and put Ohio back in play for the Republicans.

...Strickland and Brown are joined by nearly every Ohio political leader - both Democrats and Republicans - in wanting Dann to resign.

Ah! Bipartisanship, at last!

...Strickland (D) says Dann has clearly met the threshold for removal, in part due to his statements to investigators looking into complaints that an aide in his office sexually harassed subordinates.

``There were what I perceived to be some inconsistencies in the testimony, a failure to recognize the seriousness of some of the things that apparently had happened, failure to exercise proper oversight and management of the office,’’ the governor said after leading a Democratic charge Monday to get Dann out of office.

...Republican consultant Mark Weaver said transcripts of a sexual harassment probe at Dann’s office that concluded Friday refer to personal acts by Dann that call his judgment into question. Among them are allegations Dann served drinks to subordinates during off-work hours, made personal and suggestive statements in office e-mail and allowed the hiring of a friend as a section chief despite knowledge that he had a drunk driving conviction.

``With Taft, there was not the direct link back to his behavior that was creating the problems,’’ Weaver said. ``People who accuse Taft of wrongdoing ... said he wasn’t paying close enough attention to what was going on. The argument against Dann is that he was actually fomenting it, he was involved in it.’’

And a “golden oldie” at the end of the piece:

And Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Traficant, a nine-term congressman from Youngstown, never resigned before heading off to prison. He was convicted in 2002 of charges he received gifts and free labor from businessmen for his political help, and took cash kickbacks and free labor from staff.

``Richard Nixon and Jim Traficant are both infamous political figures,’’ Weaver said. ``At least give Nixon credit for not making the country go through an impeachment trial. Jim Traficant would not do that and had to be taken away in handcuffs.’’

Heh. Of course, you might want to check with Elliot Spitzer. They might like handcuffs! Heh. Heh.


Cross posted at Proof Positive

WASHINGTON — More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.

This reliance on troops found medically “nondeployable” is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million service members to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups said.

“It is a consequence of the consistent churning of our troops,” said Bobby Muller, president of Veterans For America. “They are repeatedly exposed to high-intensity combat with insufficient time at home to rest and heal before re-deploying.”