What?  Does this have to be about something?

First rule of Pony Party-  Never recommend it.

As it slides down the Recent Diaries list it will fill up with comments just like an Open Thread.  People will chat and have a good time.

When it is full up, either with unbearable traffic or aged out by time…

Another Pony Party!

How often will depend on traffic, but this is kind of where I was going with the site allocated time slots.  It is a technique totally stolen from Booman’s Froggy Bottom Cafe.

Morning, Noon, and Night.  This is when people check in.  They will come here first, because the traffic is slower and then go sip from the orange fire hose.

And to remind all y’all just how silly I can be-

Hat tip Sydney Indymedia

MakePovertyHistory Australia carted ice sculptures of George Bush and John Howard around Sydney to melt today to highlight their alternative vision for APEC: Building a Sustainable Future Free from Extreme Poverty: Priorities for APEC (40-page pdf)

Make Poverty History co-chair, Andrew Hewett, makes the connection:

It is a moral challenge, because those least responsible for causing the problem – the poorest people in the poorest countries of the world – will overwhelmingly pay the highest price as climate change begins to bite. If Australia is serious about being a global leader as chair of APEC, we must do three things. First, join the rest of the international community in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Second, commit to deep cuts in greenhouse pollution. And third, support the efforts of our neighbours and developing country partners in APEC to adapt to climate change and reduce poverty in an environmentally sustainable way.

It is clear that climate change is affecting the lives of the poorest people in our world. The monsoon season in our region and in South Asia has become shorter and more intense over the last decade, and so we can expect to see more people displaced by the kind of flooding we see right now in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Crops are failing in the face of increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. Millions of the poorest people in sub-Saharan Africa
face water shortages. And sea level rise could potentially displace millions of people from small island nations in the Pacific, and low-lying coastal countries, over the next few decades.

If we don’t get serious about tackling climate change, we won’t be talking about making poverty history, we’ll be making it permanent.

In other news from Sydney, surprise! W doesn’t even know where he is. In front of business leaders on Friday:

Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit . . . .

His recovery was lamer still, if that is possible.

As I type this, Radio Australia is playing Pink’s Dear Mr. President, something I have never heard them play before.

(A Beautiful Diary, and you make quote me on that – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Not sure if there’s really a “Foghorn Leghorn” coral, but the other two appear to have just paved a path for the few remaining penguins and the polar bears.  The Christian Science Monitor reports: New tool to fight global warming: Endangered Species Act?  A recent deal to protect the habitat of endangered coral may offer US environmentalists new leverage.

The elkhorn and staghorn coral won protected status under the ESA in May 2006. But it took a second legal battle to win a preservation of the corals’ “critical habitat,” part of last week’s settlement between environmentalists and the US fisheries service.

The act’s leverage will grow, environmentalists say, as climate change becomes recognized as a factor in species’ decline. The number of species-recovery plans that cite global warming as a damaging factor has gone from zero as recently as 1990 to 141 today – with most of the growth since 2000.

While that’s still just 9 percent of the 1,494 species listed at one time or another, the increase suggests that a large group of species still awaiting listing will have global warming cited as a major cause in their decline. The polar bear, 12 species of penguins, and the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, an Alaskan bird that nests on the edges of glaciers, are all candidates, Mr. Suckling says.

Note: You may recall Mr. Suckling’s work from melvin’s writing recently about a mother of a lawsuit v. Interior ahead.  Rest up Mr. Suckling! 

Those of us who care can certainly use all of the tools made available, however blunt, as our tool box has been robbed blind over the past seven years.  No doubt, we can all certainly use a little good news now and then too.  But what drove me to blog this article is the punchline at the end:

“It’s pretty exciting to find that a lowly marine invertebrate might actually someday be the legal catalyst for rulings against greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Andrew Baker, a University of Miami marine biologist specializing on climate change impact on coral. “It’s like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.”

Have you hugged a lowly marine invertebrate today?

(Hugs from Truth & Progress)

(Too funny – promoted by ek hornbeck)

A tip has appeared in my inbox that’s just to durned good to pass up.  Remember bad ol’ Richard Pombo?  Well, it seems his pals at the American Land Rights Association are OUTRAGED!!!

The Battle Ground (Washington) based association says airport police who arrested the senator [Larry Craig] in a men’s room sex sting are responsible for weakening private property rights in the West. Craig is a Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

They’re calling for a boycott of the Minneapolis airport. Could be an interesting sidebar for next year’s Republican Presidential Convention in the Twin Cities, eh?

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

Former Nixon staffer, and small-time game show host, comedian Ben Stein, has joined Arlen Specter in speaking out on behalf of the beleaguered Idaho Senator.  In his own words:

“On trumped up charges, they bring down the legislator and change the balance of power within the United States generally,” he says.  “This is a really serious case of police overreaching and the victim here is Larry Craig and the Constitution of the United States.”

That’s the complaint, and here’s the call for the boycott.

By ambushing Senator Larry Craig, the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport Police have effectively declared war on the west.  They are primarily responsible for greatly weakening private property rights and Federal land use advocates in the Senate…

We are urging you to make all your flight arrangemets avoiding the Mnneapolis-St Paul Airport for at least the next year and probably longer.  We’ll keep you posted as the boycott develops.
…
We must inflict economic pain on the airport authorities to get them to change their behavior.

—And they must apologize to Senator Larry Craig.

You can’t make this stuff up!!

Nevermind that the cop didn’t even know Craig was a Senator until after he apprehended him.  Or rather, in the course of apprehending him.  One can certainly make a case for lightening up on these poor repressed, closeted homosexuals, desperately seeking to sneak a bit of satisfaction into their mixed-up existence.  That there’s better things for those airport cops to do than hound people engaging in consentual acts between adults.

But to argue that the airport cops’ motive was to change the balance of the Senate?  Gimme a break!!  Are these people morphed out of something that landed in Roswell nearly 60 years ago, or what?  Unbelievable!!