Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

A CANADA LYNX

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found the actions were tainted by political pressure from a former senior Interior Department official.

In a letter to Rep. Nick Rahall, D-West Virginia., the agency acknowledged that the actions had been “inappropriately influenced” and that "revising the seven identified decisions is supported by scientific evidence and the proper legal standards." The reversal affects the protection for species including the white-tailed prairie dog, the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse and the Canada lynx.

The rulings came under scrutiny last spring after an Interior Department inspector general concluded that agency scientists were being pressured to alter their findings on endangered species by Julie MacDonald, then a deputy assistant secretary overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service.

MacDonald resigned her position last May.

Rahall in a statement said that MacDonald, who was a civil engineer, "should never have been allowed near the endangered species program." He called MacDonald's involvement in species protection cases over her three-year tenure as an example of "this administration's penchant for torpedoing science."

-- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The plain truth is that the [Republican] party faces a cataclysm, a rout that would give Democrats control of the White House and enhanced majorities in the House and the Senate. That defeat would, in turn, guarantee the confirmation of a couple of young, liberal Supreme Court nominees, putting the goal of moving the Court in a more constitutionalist direction out of reach for another generation. It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.

-- RAMESH PONNURU and RICHARD LOWRY

In a political maneuver designed to block my ability to make recess appointments, congressional leaders arranged for a senator to come in every three days or so, bang a gavel, wait for about 30 seconds, bang a gavel again, and then leave. Under the Senate rules, this counts as a full day. If 30 seconds is a full day, no wonder Congress has got a lot of work to do.

-- GEORGE BUSH

In a new encyclical, the Pope declares atheism has led to the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" as clerics incite mobs in Khartoum demanding death for a teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, the faithful in Iraq behead children of the wrong religious sect and eight Americans who want the most powerful position in the world express their faith in the Bible and their passion to punish people who were born in the wrong place or make them feel uncomfortable.

-- ROBERT STEIN

It's great to be an old white man in A-merry-ca isn't it Mr. Imus? Here we are just eight months after your little, ahem, slip of the tongue, and you are back on the air with a new five year deal. And this after settling for millions with your former employer under the terms of your previous contract. So back to WABC radio you go. And you will even have a simulcast TV deal with RFD-TV, who is owned by the Rural Group. How fitting.

I would say something like I hope you learned your lesson, but why should you have? Hell, you made out better now than you were before Nappyheadedhogate. We should all be so lucky after being fired from our jobs.

-- THE FIELD NEGRO

Since when did the Congress have the right to micro-manage what school-kids get from snack machines?

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

In yet more evidence that the Left suffers from a terrible hack gap, I just can't get myself worked into a braying frenzy over the fact that some self-styled cowboy has been lying to The National Review about the situation in Beirut. But I should be able to! After all, the magazine was made aware of these lies abut six weeks ago, did nothing, but continued to assail The New Republic over the Scott Beauchamp. More upsetting is the magazine's decisions to explain their errors by saying, basically, "Arabs are crafty." Lopez quotes one of her sources saying, "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.”

-- EZRA KLEIN