Saturday, June 10, 2006

Best BBQ

The Big Apple Barbeque is in Madison Square Park this weekend. If you use your American Express card you can get $135 of value on your $125 Fast Pass. Word is, even with the Fast Pass the lines were 30 minutes or longer.

I loved Barbeque in New York, but it’s better here. They know me by name, know my order by heart, put extra on my plate and I don’t wait. I’ll have to talk to them about heading north next year to wow y’all for the Fifth Annual Big Apple Barbeque.

The gay animal kingdom

Giraffes, dolphins, gray whales & manatees:

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection-she’s no bible-toting creationist-but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality-long disparaged as a quirk of human culture-is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality. [Read on]

Via PageOneQ.

Finders weepers

Do: use flash drives. Don’t: use the ones you find on the street.

Endgadget:

If you picked up a USB flash drive off the street, you wouldn’t risk compromising your machine, network, or employer’s network by just plugging it in willy nilly, would you? Well, if only the rest of the world were as smart as you, friend; according to a recent Secure Network Technologies Inc. audit of a client credit union, 100% of the trojan-laden, password-collecting, network-compromising USB flash drives they planted outside the client’s building were unwittingly plugged in, used, and infected their respective host machines.

Ann & Tom & God & history

It looks to me like this is where Ann Coulter gets her gumption:

REP. TOM DELAY (R-TX), Former House Majority Leader, farewell speech on the floor of the House: In preparing for today, I found that it is customary in speeches such as these to reminisce about the good, old days of political harmony and across-the-aisle camaraderie and to lament the bitter, divisive partisan rancor that supposedly now weakens our democracy.

Well, I can’t do that, because partisanship, Mr. Speaker, properly understood, is not a symptom of democracy’s weakness but of its health and its strength, especially from the perspective of a political conservative.

Nice qualifiers, “properly understood” and “especially from the perspective of a political conservative.” But the clincher, the thing that connects to Ann Coulters particular brand of widow-bashing (my qualifier is because, you see, I do completely agree with NOT letting widows be the determining factor in setting policy) is not just that she never says she’s sorry, it’s that she follows so closely from DeLay’s playbook and would do it all again. More from Tom’s speech:

I have scraped and clawed for every vote, every amendment, for every word of every bill that I believed in my heart would protect human freedom and defend human dignity. I have done so at all times honorably and honestly, Mr. Speaker, as God is my witness and history is my judge.

And if given the chance to do it all again, there’s only one thing I would change: I would fight even harder.

Yes, we’ll see how history judges this:

DAVID BROOKS: A remorse-free zone. You can give him credit for honesty. [Huh???] He believed in partisanship. And to some extent, I have no problem with partisanship. My problem with Tom DeLay was sometimes he could be partisan at the expense of conservatism. And especially on matters of spending. What he did was he turned the majority into a fundraising and spending machine in order to get more Republican fannies in those seats.

Um, pardon me? What he did was:

MARK SHIELDS: He ran a corrupt political operation. Two of his top staff aides have already confessed to major crimes involving lobbyists and political corruption and payoffs and are turning state’s evidence.

This is a man who obliterated the difference, the walls between public interest and private interest. He brought private interests in from K Street to write legislation. It’s never been done before. It was sort of a, “What do you want? What do you need? Here’s the money it’s going to cost you,” and that’s what it was.

But back to Ann. In that Today Show interview she said Democrats celebrate abortion. We do not.

How about conservatives? Here Atrios points us to grumpy Byron York running away from refusing to discuss abortion. Mike Stark:

I really don’t understand why one of the intellectual heirs of the modern conservative movement would be so quick to chicken out of what should be a thoroughly prepared and well-rehearsed debate subject for Republicans, but he did.

For a final God point, I’ll mention again that Coulter’s unknown at the church she claims to attend:

“Our database shows that she is not a member.”

[Redeemer Presbyterian’s Communications and Media Director Cregan Cooke] added that wealthy celebrities routinely asserted a dubious connection to his congregation. “People from Robin Williams to Diane Sawyer have claimed to attend services here but don’t actually know if they have. And I don’t know anybody that would have seen Ann Coulter. We don’t really know her.”