Iceland’s government approved on Monday the commercial hunting of whales this year, a move that drew quick criticism from conservationists. ********* Iceland is the best place to live in the world, a study has found. Measuring aspects of wellbeing such as life-expectancy, education and living standards puts the country top of the international happiness scale . . . . The inalienable right to hunt whales, despite the Bjorkness.  Hunting whales? 

The “Worst Person in the World”! Every day, I will choose the person who is most harmful to humanity at large, as determined by how much that person bothers me, which is the best index available. Today’s Worst Person in the World is my wife, Mary, who wouldn’t go buy me another six-pack of beer. But only because semanticleo didn’t hang around for long.

That is one of the new names bestowed on Barack Obama by the Crow tribe today.  The name means “one who helps people throughout the land.” Obama became the first American presidential candidate to visit the reservation of the Crow Nation. The other new name is “Barack Black Eagle.”  Presumably, the new middle name is as off-limits as the old one. The Obama campaign clearly went into rapid response mode

Can the woman largely responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s success do the same for Obama’s campaign? McCain has his fingers crossed. “Misogyny!” (h/t Memeorandum) Baby Contest Photo Winner on CBS exposes the materialist flaw in Bakhtinian theoretics (or, “the story was like, totally in the air, you dig…?”) You’re too late

Because Republican attacks are tackier: “But I do want to say this to the GOP. If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful. Because that I find unacceptable,” he said. Obama praised his wife’s patriotism and said that for Republicans “to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her

“You know what really irks me, counterculture icon Billy Jack? The fact that there are those who still question my ‘authenticity’ as a Black man. This despite the color of my skin — a burden with which I was born and, through hard work and some Great Society mau-mauing, I have since overcome. Then there’s the inconvenient fact that my father was a bona fide Black man, something that those

At HotAir, Ed Morrissey has the video of Barack Obama declaring that Iran, Venezuela and Cuba do not pose a “serious” threat to the US because they are “tiny countries,” much smaller than the Soviet Union.  Morrissey and Jennifer Rubin note that the USSR did not lose the Cold War because of diplomacy, but because diplomacy was backed up by Reagan’s largely successful economic war against the Evil Empire.  Morrissey seems to be

Last week Jeff finished up an analysis of Obama’s radical ties, filtered through some of Jonah Goldberg’s observations, this way: Today’s battle for the Democratic nomination is between two heirs of the New Left. What makes Clinton different, I believe, is that she is even more calculating, and as such, a worry to progressives who fear she might outmaneuver them, once she gains power. Whereas Obama is an unproven politician

Some 75,000 people turned out in Portland on Sunday to hear Barack Obama preach change, hope and malaise to the masses. I was reminded of a recent comment from Michael Burleigh — the acclaimed author of books like The Third Reich: A New History, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, and Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism — in an interview with London’s Guardian: “Historians have widely ignored the impact of man’s need for something

Barack Obama can add the Christian Science Monitor to the Fox News Channel on his list of media outlets “pumping up rumors” about him (ABC News and the New York Times should be there also): Osama bin Laden must be chuckling in his safe house. After all, the 2008 campaign could very well give Al Qaeda the ultimate propaganda tool: President Barack Hussein Obama, Muslim apostate. The fact that Senator Obama –