Thursday Mashup (5/1/08)

I really don’t have much else for today but just a lot of stuff to throw together here; probably a good time to shut things down until early next week, which I plan to do after today.

Did you know that John W. McBush supports a plan to allow people to bring loaded weapons into our national parks? And this tells us that he’s finally responded against Sen. Jim Webb’s idea of a new G.I. bill; see, McBush opposes “a new bureaucracy,” of course, and the bill McBush supports (didn’t know there was one) offers scaled benefits inclined to make our people re-enlist, which they’re doing anyway because decent jobs are ever more scarce because of Dubya’s recession.

Update 5/2/08: What Kagro X sez (and a typically sleazy Inhofe move)...

Here’s the latest from Walt Sherman and Shut The Duck Up! via Philebrity…it turns out that those ridiculous duck boats used for Philly tourism (making the noise of real ducks, along with the duck noises from the boat patrons), are causing an ecological problem, as follows…

The popular “quackers” distributed to Duck Boat riders are indistinguishable from call of a real Mallard hen. World Champion Waterfowl Caller and Call-Maker Sean Mann corroborated the effectiveness of these souvenir quackers stating that “very lonely ducks” are likely to be drawn to the alluring snare of the Duck Boat calls. Philadelphia neighborhoods affected by the Duck Boat tour route have experienced a spike in traffic incidents involving duped loner ducks, who have become disoriented by the imitation calls and inadvertently cause automotive accidents.

The growing congregation of deluded ducks has also attracted the attention of the waterfowl’s natural predators. Recent sightings of fox, raccoons, and stray dogs patrolling the route of the Duck Boats has neighborhoods up in arms over the increased disappearances of family cats, and daily nuisance of having to manage overturned trash cans and recycling bins.

I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine that these tours are bringing in enough dough to set off all the other damage done to the area through noise and other types of pollution (not that money could really offset that anyway, I realize).

This tells us that another Bush operative has departed, and that would be Lurita Doan (a related post is here).

This tells us that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, he who once vowed not to have sex until after the election he eventually lost to former prime minister Romano Prodi, is now interested in another “f” word, and that would be fascism (oh, joy).

Berlusconi would do well to remember the last leader of his country who trod that political path (pictured); he ended up summarily shot and then hung upside down from a hook so he could be pelted with rocks to make sure he was dead.

Just sayin...

And in today’s animal news wrap-up (aside from the story of the lonely Philly ducks), an African lion was caught near Ottawa, Canada, a cougar was shot hear Chicago, the Japanese panda Ling Ling has died (pictured - a gift to that country from China, with the bear’s passing taking place as Hu Jintao is scheduled to visit; bad luck there), and Roger Waters’ pig that escaped from the Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival was found in tatters (as the song goes, “that’s what he gets for pretending the danger’s not real” – wonder if Smerky will heckle Waters over it as he did here?).