What's Up With Will Breazeale?

This email from the Breazeale campaign arrived today. Read it for yourself, but this looks to me like a hint at a third party run.

Dear Friends,

Allow me to take a moment to say thank you for everything you have done. Not just in 2010, but for the past three years. I am so blessed to have had the support of so many kind and wonderful people during my two runs for Congress. For everyone that has helped along the way, my deepest and heartfelt thanks. Running for office is not easy. I could have never done it without you.

Over the past week there has been a lot of speculation as to my political future. I remain amazed at the innuendo people have been able to invent between their ears. Rumors in politics are like peanut butter and jelly. They just go together. Perhaps it is because our party's nominee and leadership spends so much time focusing on how to keep others from running and not on their own candidacy, that this seat has not gone Republican in more than 100 years?

Buyers remorse is a tough pill to swallow. I cannot help but think that perhaps many who voted for Ilario Pantano are now realizing their nominee's claim to fame is the execution of two unarmed Iraqis? In turn, they are already attempting to set up a scapegoat (me) in order to justify his inevitable, massive failure in November.

With that in mind, allow me to set the record straight: I will formally announce my future political intentions on Tuesday, May 18th, at 10 a.m. I will hold a press conference at the New Hanover County Government Center, 230 Government Center Drive in Wilmington. Members of the public and press are invited to attend. I am pleased to announce that I will be joined at that time by my fellow primary opponent, Randy Crow. I look forward to seeing you all then.

Will Breazeale

That would be an incredibly stupid and damaging move, both for Mr. Breazeale, who would seal the end of his politcal career, and for the people of the NC 7th Congressional District, who in Ilario Pantano have a shot at being represented by a good, solid Republican for the first time in a century.

We'll wait and see what Mr. Breazeale has to say next Tuesday, but this doesn't look good.

Is This What It Looked Like Just Before The Boston Massacre?

I'm thinking not quite. This is a modern day Tea Party Rally in Quincy, Illinois. Seems someone was worried the grannies would riot and ruin President Obama's speech, so the boys in blue (or is that black) were called in to keep the peace.

The video at the bottom of this page (under more pictures) is a riot, pardon the pun.

First Global Warming, Now Recycling?!?!

Could reason and logic finally be creeping into the most hallowed halls of the Church of Environmentalism? It looks like some governments may be carrying the recycling thing a bit too far.

From The Examiner in Washington, DC....

But some national recycling experts have begun calling for government restraint in trash recycling, which can be more costly and environmentally damaging than dumping.

"We just assume recycling is always better," said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization. "But there's a point at which you shouldn't just recycle for recycling's sake."

Porter is a former policy administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency who helped set the federal government's first nationwide recycling targets.

I've always enjoyed telling my son and his friends when they come home from school all fired up about recycling, that paper recycling is one of the most polluting industrial processes out there. It's fine to recycle, and it usually makes perfect economic sense to do so, but nothing is ever that simple and it's great to see that maybe that point is being made by an environmentalist, too.

May 20th----It's Everyone Draw Mohammed Day!!!

If Earth Day made you want to throw up as much as it did me, maybe here's a "protest holiday" you can sink your teeth into. It was started by some blog posters as a response to the death threats made against the creators of South Park by some wonderful adherents to the peaceful religion of Islam. Seems all you need to do to participate is get your creative juices flowing and draw your very own picture of Mohammed, then send it in where it can be shared with the world, and you too can be threatened with a violent death.

This sounds like great fun. And don't worry if your art skills are a tad lacking, I don't think Mohammed will mind. He founded the great religion of tolerance, right?

Penn State's Whiteout

It seems someone has to rain on every parade. This time they've attacked the "Whiteout" T-shirts being sold for Penn State's home football games. It seems the design, the words "Penn State" horizontally and a blue stripe vertically, comes too close to resembling a Christian cross. Good God, give me a break! The Anti-Defamation league of Philadelphia has filed a complaint with school officials. If the school remains at all as it was when I attended in the early 90's, the shirts will be pulled from the racks very soon.

Sigh.

To Boldly Go Where No College Has Gone Before

Yes, this is a real bill. It's funding for a technical campus, but they're naming it the Star Fleet Academy, because, well, because they're idiots. The Civitas institute mocks them nicely in this video.

From the Under the Dome blog:

Rep. Earl Jones's bill to provide funding for a technology research center on N.C. A&T State University's campus was a YouTube parody waiting to happen.

Fortunately for all of us, the conservative-leaning Civitas Institute accepted the challenge with a parody video.

Jones' bill would establish "The Star Fleet Academy Complex" on campus. Yes, THAT Star Fleet.

Jones, who co-sponsored the bill in May, said the campus approached him about the idea of creating a world-class technology research center that carried a recognizable brand name.

"Scientists and engineers and people like that, they're pretty straight-laced," Jones said. "It's something that brings attention to the center."

Constitution 101

A quick Constitutional Law lecture from a veteran. I couldn't embed the video, so PLEASE follow this link

Imagine someone mentioning enumerated powers in this day and age.

The Tide Is High....

It seems the east coast of the US has been experiencing higher than normal high tides this summer. It's a bit of a mystery to scientists, but what struck me about this news story was that it specifically DID NOT blame global warming! Wow! Hats off to the Raleigh News and Observer. I added the boldface.

Since June, tides have been running from 6 inches to 2 feet above what would normally be expected, even considering seasonal and lunar fluctuations. While local tidal changes are not uncommon, researchers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aren't sure they have ever recorded an event like this one, which is showing up all the way from Maine to Florida. In North Carolina, tides have been about a foot above normal predictions.

"Right now we're trying to get a better understanding of what's the cause," said Mike Szabados, director of NOAA's tide and current program in Silver Spring, Md.

Global warming isn't to blame, scientists say, as the rise was too sudden. Possibly, Szabados said, the explanation lies in something called the North Atlantic oscillation, a disturbance in the atmospheric pressure in the area of the North Atlantic Ocean between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High.

A Missing Link Found

It's a misnomer that there is such a thing as a single missing link. Any gap in the fossil record is a missing link, and there are lots of them. Here, though, is an important find that places a new species at the bottom of the primate family tree.

This is one cool website, too.

Down With Newspeak

While Peggy Noonan doesn't reference Orwell in her excellent piece at the Wall Street Journal, she very well could have. Noonan is noticing the increasing use of arcane and bizarre government-invented phraseology to explain important policies to the American people. As she points out, it has the effect of making the average citizen tune out the static and ignore something, like health-care reform, that could very well change his or her life. It's dangerous and anti-democratic. Here's the end of Noonan's column:

Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can't help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren't all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They're not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own. After all, it's not their health-care system they're reforming, it is America's. It would be nice if America were allowed to know what exactly the plan is, and how it would work, and who would pay, and how.

As for the Republicans, the administration is giving them an opening. There could be gain in becoming the party that speaks with concrete honesty, and in a known human language, on the great issues of the day. The GOP could become the party that doesn't make you translate, and doesn't leave you giving up. I wonder if the party right now, for all the battering it's experienced the past few years, is still quick enough to see an opening like this.