This afternoon while I was on my lunch, I happened to flip through the latest issue of the left-wing rag Artvoice. I’m not sure why I bother looking at it. The writing is horrible and unbalanced. 

That aside, I didn’t read any articles, but there was an ad that caught my eye almost immediately. It was an ad for Lebro’s Restaurant. 

I have no idea what to make of this ad, or if there’s really anything to make of it. Artvoice is undeniably a left-wing paper, so I was rather shocked to see the Palin’s family portrait being used in an ad. Now, I don’t usually read Artvoice, so I don’t know if this is something Lebro’s Restaurant typically does — use topical photos in their advertisements — or if this is a unique ad.

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Buffalo’s premier liberal rag, Artvoice, asks the question, “Who shrank the Peace Bridge?” It’s a question we all know the answer to: environmentalists.

“In Melbourne Florida,” notes one of the letters, “a very tall bridge presented a fatal obstacle to bird flight, and studies from 1989 to 1992 found 11 Brown Pelicans, 84 Royal Terns, 2 Sandwich Terns and 2 Black Skimmers were hit and killed by vehicles on the Bridge. Undoubtedly birds hit the bridge as well, however these would not have been recoverable…The Common Terns, Double-crested Cormorants, Black-crowned Night Herons, and Great-Blue Herons could easily have the same problems with bridge height that the birds encountered with the bridge in Melbourne, Florida.”

But by their own admission there is no evidence at all of bridge height being an issue in Melbourne, Florida. All the dead birds, in that area with vastly more bird traffic than Buffalo, were road kill—birds that landed on the bridge and were walking around when a car or truck came along. That could happen with a bridge of any height, or just a road near a waterway. The letter speculated that birds killed by collision with the bridge fell into the water, so no one ever knew about them. How can the PBA possibly respond to that?

All of the reports refer to Menn’s bridge as 590 feet, as if it were 590 feet high from shore to shore. But it’s only 590 feet high at the top of the pylons. Between the pylons, it’s not much higher than the current bridge. Watch birds fly over any cable stay bridge: Some go over the pylons, some fly between them. If 590 feet is an issue (none of the birds mentioned is incapable of flying above 590 feet), why wouldn’t the birds fly between the pylons, as they do everywhere else? (If the 590-foot rule obtained, we wouldn’t have the Golden Gate Bridge, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge or George Washington Bridge, all of which are taller and are in busier bird routes.)

Spend an afternoon searching Google for reports of birds flying into the wires of cable-stay bridges and you’ll come up empty. When Hong Kong wanted to build a new bridge, they did a search of 1,500 bridge projects and found nothing. None of the dozens of cable-stay bridges built in the US in recent years have resulted in any significant bird homicides.

What amazes me is why it took the potential scrapping of Christian Menn’s design for so many people, particularly those on the left, to suddenly wake up to the fact that environmental concerns are sometimes hogwash.

So many have accepted global warming as fact, without giving any consideration to scientific evidence that either contradicts that global warming is occuring, or that while climate change is occuring that it is not caused by man. No, when it comes that issue, the environmentalists aren’t challenged as they have been with this Peace Bridge nonsense.

The challenging of the environmentalists over the Peace Bridge design should have people asking whether they’ve been duped by them before. True enough, environmentalists and their Democrat minions in Congress have prevented drilling in ANWR and the building of new refineries in the United States. The end result? Gas prices nearing $4.00/gallon. There’s no way to calculate what kind of negative impact alleged environmental concerns (especial ones that result in governmental regulations of all kinds) have on our economy.

If Artvoice can question the environmentalists assessment of the Menn Peace Bridge design, perhaps they (and others) can take the next step and start to question other potentially bogus claims they make.

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I still can’t help myself from perusing the nonsensical diatribe in Artvoice. And this week’s Earth Day edition (which bears no sign of being printed on recycled paper) features a real gem from Michael Niman, a recovering victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Niman, who still thinks Al Gore won Florida in 2000, despite all the recounts that proved the contrary, is hellbent on equating President Bush with Big Brother. The whole article is ludicrous but this part really got to me:

The problem is that during the course of this administration, government as we know it, on all levels, has lost whatever credibility it has had with the American people. We have a generation of college students, for example, that has lived their entire adult life under President George W. Bush. We are now hiring police officers from a demographic cohort that has grown up with “indefinite detention,” “coercive interrogation,” “preemptive” violence, “free speech zones,” and a comatose Bill of Rights. We have a new generation of voters that take as normal warrantless wiretaps and surveillance cameras at the end of their streets. Our journalists have become a spineless pack of mortgage-saddled career stenographers living under the thumb of a military entertainment complex, seduced by consumerism and terrified of jail. As a society we’ve come to value civic sterility more than civic engagement.

As of this moment, the only person in government found guilty of breaking federal wiretap laws is Democrat Jim McDermott, who violated the civil rights Republican Congressman John Boehner. I’m sure Artvoice would only have been outraged by that incident had McDermott leaked a tape terrorists plotting to attack America.

And then there’s Niman’s insinuation that so-called “free-speech zones” are the result of a Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfield/Fill-In-The-Blank-Member-of-The-Bush-Administration plot to stifle dissent. Now there’s a laugh. In recent years, the freedom of speech of pro-life activists has been gradually limited to larger and larger distances from abortion clinics… Deval Patrick, the Democrat Governor of Massachusetts, signed legislation last year that restricted freedom of speech within 35 feet of abortion clinics. Did Karl Rove make him do it?

But my favorite was during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, held in Boston, MA. I was there, and all protesters were literally put in a cage. A cage!
This so-called “free-speech zone” kept us protesters out of sight and out of mind from Democrats who have continually accused President Bush of trampling on the Bill of Rights. Had there been an abortion clinic in the neighborhood, they probably would have shipped all protestors to New Hampshire for the duration of the convention.

While the folks at Artvoice think up new imaginary ways that the Bush Administration has turned the Land of the Free to an Orwellian Dystopia, they ought to care more about real instances where the first amendment rights of myself and others have actually been infringed by Bush’s biggest critics.

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I have to admit that I occasionally will pick up a copy of Artvoice, I can’t help myself sometimes. I pick up the horribly liberal rag to see just how nonsensical their political commentaries are. Last week’s issue certainly lived up to expectations with this article by Bruce Fisher.

Hillary Clinton bravely accepted Geraldine Ferraro’s resignation after the woman from the first Mondale campaign said some no-no’s about race.

Barack Obama bravely accepted his preacher’s resignation after the learned reverend was revealed as a paranoid who believes that AIDS was invented by the government to kill black people.

Nobody has yet heard “Straight Talk Express” John McCain denounce his Texas preacher, the one who calls the Catholic Church “whore” and “beast” and who instructs us that a unilateral declaration of war against Iran is divinely ordained. But given time, the bravest candidate of all will, one presumes, gird his loins and say “Go.”

Actually, John McCain did denounce John Hagee’s anti-Catholic comments earlier this month.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday repudiated any views of a prominent televangelist who endorsed him last month “if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics.”

McCain has come under fire since televangelist John Hagee endorsed him on Feb. 27, but until Friday his response had been tepid. The Arizona senator merely said he doesn’t agree with everyone who endorses him. He said Friday he had been hearing from Catholics who find Hagee’s comments offensive.

What Fisher also fails to realize (or chooses to ignore in order to make a political attack) is Geraldine Ferraro had an official position with Hillary’s campaign. Jeremiah Wright not only had an official position in Barack Obama’s campaign, but was also Obama’s pastor for twenty years, officiated his wedding, and baptized his kids. Ferraro resigned to protect Hillary’s campaign. Wright resigned to protect Obama’s campaign. Those were not acts of bravery. They were done out of political necessity. Contrary to Fisher’s claim, Hagee is not McCain’s pastor. Hagee may have endorsed McCain, but he held no position in the campaign, so there was no resignation to accept. And McCain certainly didn’t have a 20-year relationship with Hagee as Barack Obama did with Jeremiah Wright (though Obama did conveniently and coincidentally did not attend church every single time Wright made an anti-American, anti-Semitic, or anti-white sermon.)

Jeremiah Wright was (and still is) a legitimate problem for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Fisher may be disappointed that Hagee endorsing McCain isn’t hurting him as much as Obama’s long time association with a black supremacist, anti-American and anti-semitic preacher is hurting him… but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for him to lie about McCain’s denunciation of Hagee, or to falsely claim that Hagee is McCain’s pastor.

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