I didn’t know until I got to the Losers’ Lounge tonight for unhappy hour that it was Earth Day. I want you to know that the Earth kicked our ass regularly and with great vigor until we figured out enough technology to tame it just a little bit.

Personally, I think we’ve still got a ways to go to make this damn rock dance the tango the way we want it to dance the tango. And we will, if everybody would quit acting like dipsticks. We don’t need much, and I don’t think an insentient bundle of minerals gives a fart in a whirlwind whether we live or die. Earth is going to keep on spinning ’round Sol whether we besmirch her or not. So let’s get to some besmirching.

THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER: San Jacinto Day…

Meanwhile, in a little irony, Mr. B.’s second grade class starts its “Mexico Week” this year on, wait for it, San Jacinto Day. Multiculturalism at work, I suppose. I wonder if the school system did it on purpose?

Mexico Week. Cogitate on that for a few minutes. Mexico. Week.

What do you think of? Nothing really, over here — fat cats getting rich off their citizens. Single-party hypocritical rulers. Outside of that, not a whole lot. Tequila, I guess. Thanks, Mexico!

As a sprout, I had a Mexico Week in kindergarten. As I recall, we spent a lot of time on Jim Bowie and Davie Crockett and the Alamo, and the Mexicans from whom we won our independence, and pinatas with candy in them. Hopefully, some of that seeps into Mr. B’s teacher’s agenda. It’s vital stuff.

ABC News: Dems Fight On; Hillary Clinton Wins Pennsylvania Primary

Sen. Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary vote as expected, ABC News has projected.

I gotta give it to her…once the old gal assured Iran that they would be toast, extra-glassy, if they even thought about nuking somebody, I knew she was in.

At least Barack NMI Obama is going to have to continue to prove his worthlessness for another week or month or whatever it is till the next primary/convention. Hopefully, he can sneak in a knackwurst or something to keep his strength up.

Don’t cry, Marxists - there’s always a fresh bunch of high-school graduates you can recruit…an empty suit is easy to make as your figurehead. A dime a dozen, as they say.

You know what I love — Our Progressive Betters are going to end up in a steel-cage death match fighting over Super Delegates, Star Chamber apparatchiks toeing the party line (like you could find one to pick up, anyway.) That would be the ones they just knew were going to prevent another Chicago ‘68. Let me do the math for you — 40 years is two generations. Do you really think these schmucks give a minute’s thought to what their grand-dad preferred? I say, most unlikely.

FT.com / In depth - Oil hits fresh high as biofuels rethink looms

Expectations rose on Tuesday that soaring food prices will provoke a rethink of support for biofuels in Europe and the US, as the price of oil hit a new high of almost $120 a barrel.

Biofuels produced from crops such as corn and soya provide a small but fast-growing share of road-fuel supplies, and had been expected to make an important contribution to meeting growing demand.

Gosh, really, ya think? Fucking morons. Fucking idiotic morons.

Don’t you dare blame anybody but yourself. You were too stupid to realize that running a tractor over the acres of corn necessary to fuel the tractor to run over the acres in the first place probably wasn’t the best idea ever. It is not within me to believe that all these assholes didn’t know precisely what they were doing, which is wreck not one, but two, commodity markets.

Can we just please get back to punching some holes in the ground and sucking out the go-juice? I’ve always been proud that we fed the world. I’m not going to be proud that we produced an endless loop of gigantic harvesters generating barely enough fuel to run gigantic harvesters. That’s a fool’s game, and you all should know better, you damn hippies.

Era of cheap food ends as prices surge - Times Online
My father and my grandfather and my uncles and my cousins worked their asses off to feed the world. Lots of geniuses worked really hard to create crops that you could grow in a goddamned desert. Yet, here we are. My grandsons are gonna have to beat this crap back into the hole from which it sprang.

I’ll tell you this — cheap food ain’t over. It’s just blocked. By governments and bureaucrats. Get them out of the way, and see how cheap you can feed yourself and your family.

The Swamp: Obama: ‘Why can’t I just eat my waffle?’

As Sen. Hillary Clinton was preparing to campaign here today, Sen. Barack Obama was meeting with voters at a diner and apparently pretty hungry.

“Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” he said, when asked a foreign policy question by a reporter at the Glider Diner.

Because it’s a staged photo-op with voters at a diner where you and your wife wouldn’t be caught dead in if you weren’t running for President?

As The Fat Guy, I was ready to launch into the necessity of allowing a man his waffle, as even a slightly pink American needs that start, and who knows, he might help us out by making us think harder — and then I read that it’s just another press setup.

Eat your waffle at home or in your hotel room, NMI. You can’t have it both ways.

I know none of you bottom-feeding sonsabitches will click, but this is a gorgeous piece of prose.

There is a symmetry to life on the plains – death gives life, and life ends in death. That is one constant that isn’t balanced out – everything dies in the end, no matter how strong the life force. Life on the prairie flows through cycles. Periods of draught, followed by rains. The season’s inexorable march to the next, year after year. Each season brings its own distinctive weather, snow and ice in the winter, rain, hail and tornadoes in the spring and summer. One constant is the wind.

I’ve never been a sodbuster, but I had family that was. Their grace always took me aback. This is good to know, in your heart, even thrice-removed.

Just a reminder that today is a day of celebration for us old-school Texans, for this is the day we defeated the Mexicans decisively at San Jacinto back in 1836.

The battle is notable for any number of other things, like Santa Anna neglecting to post lookouts, Houston destroying the bridge to prevent retreat by either army, the Texans attacking during the Mexicans’ siesta, “Remember the Alamo!”, and most hilarious, General Antonio López de Santa Anna slinking off from the battle to put on a private’s uniform and hide in the grass.

We should all be mindful of this, since that defeat set the stage for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave us most of the American West, no end of whining and moaning from modern-day Mexicans who regret their ancestors’ weakness, and most recently, a wishful-thinking ad campaign from Absolut.

Reading that link from the Handbook of Texas online is like reading a Texas almanac list of counties, towns, and cities.

Turns out the phone call that kicked over the FLDS - El Dorado - Texas Ranger - CPS anthill was…a hoax?

The calls to the former sect member, meanwhile, led the Rangers to Colorado Springs, Colo., where police Wednesday arrested Rozita Swinton, a 33-year-old black woman.

She was charged with falsely reporting abuse to authorities in connection with a separate incident in Colorado Springs two months ago.

Texas authorities say Swinton is a person of interest in their search for the girl whose call prompted them to raid the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

Crazy, man. Texas-sized Crazy.

I know this might be an unpopular suggestion, but can we at least let the mothers and their children get back together? I know their “prairie-style dresses”* and 1960s Pentecostal hairdos are off-putting to a world raised on Britney & Amy Winehouse, but those trappings are rightly none of our concern.

* ‘Journalist’-speak for any non-pants outfit that doesn’t expose your crotch while you get out of a limo.

Benedict becomes first pope to visit American synagogue - Yahoo! News

Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to visit an American synagogue Friday, bringing greetings for the Passover holiday and accepting gifts of matzo and a seder plate. Benedict, 81, stopped briefly at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, near the Vatican residence.

I’m not a Papist by any stretch, but I find this beautiful. I really do wish for myself this level of grace and peace.

U.S. streets could soon be overrun with cats if communities fail to get a handle on growing feline populations, a veterinary medicine researcher says.

Cats, they say. Get that? Cats.

I’ve got enough ammo in reach of my only moderately-long arms to wipe out the entire feline population of my mile-long block. If I walk to the garage, I think I would find enough to wipe out the entire population of stupid cats in all of Hollywood Park all by myself, and that’s before I get to the sniper ammo. Not that I want to, of course — in one sense, I like cats because they are killing machines, unbounded by our petty human concerns of the beauty of the bird or the mouse or the lizard. OK, that’s the only sense in which I like cats, but I do have a certain respect for their voracious zombie-like killing ability.

So, I think, without thinking too hard, that we can get a handle on the damn cats. If needed. At least here in Texas. You kids in DC, you’re on your own.

Alan Sullivan

Again we see China building its links to an ugly regime. Why? Zimbabwe is not a prospect for participation in a future Shanghai Cooperation Organization war against the West. This Chinese mischief is not calculated to tweak the US, or even Britain. It is part of a long-term plan to exploit Africa as an economic colony of China.

That surpasses all as the most interesting thing I read today. It’s about the ChiComms running guns to a African dictator. Sound the least bit familiar? The students of Mao learned well from his teacher.

Precisely nothing a Commie could do to coalesce power will ever really be surprising, I guess. One hopes for better, but one is regularly disappointed. No reason to stop hoping, though.

The self-important grandiosity of the press will never not stagger me, I guess:

“[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change,” Stengel said. “It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don’t understand why they don’t do that.”

Never mind all the science that shows that any warming stopped in 1998, and we’ve been getting cooler over the last ten years.
This will be one of those magazine covers our grandkids hold up while giggling about our stupidity.

Via FunAm, the self-deluding conservative. Tom, of course, is bothered mostly by Michael Savage re-run and the Iwo Jima veterans who are bothered by the use of an iconic image to promote junk science and sell a bit of paper and ink that’s mostly irrelevant anyway. Nothing like ridiculing angry old vets, right, Tom?

The Stars can eliminate the reigning Stanley Cup champions in Game 5 in Anaheim on Friday night. Dallas already is 2-0 in that building this series.

This is the biggest reason I hate being in South Texas. It’s stone-cold guaranteed that I won’t be able to watch this game.

…I am still desperately interested in a tablet or laptop that I can use outside that doesn’t cost my next year’s truck payments. I don’t need rain protection, so much as a G–D—– screen that doesn’t wash out to nada the second you turn on the floor lamp. It just needs to be able to run XP and WinExplorer and practically nothing else. Well, Wireshark would be nice, too. Handheld, UMPC, ultra-thin, what ever.

Don’t even start in on me with the Explorer business. I’m not the one writing the ActiveX controls these Swedes, Indians and Koreans demand. I just have to make the sonsabitches work for pay.

So, yeah — all you .mil types who get all the good shit — give a man a nice recommendation?