AP is reporting that a Cuero, Texas woman believes she has found a specimen of the legendary chupacabra in the form of roadkill.

It is one ugly creature,” (Phylis) Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.

“I’ve seen a lot of nasty stuff. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren’t eaten or carried off — all the blood was drained from them, she said.

Chupacabra means “goat sucker” in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.

This legendary monster of the Hispanic New World must have arisen in recent stories as the result of vague memories, featuring only the name itself, of medieval legends of the Caprimulgidae, i.e. “goatsuckers”, birds of the category including Whip-Poor-Wills, Nightjars, and Nighthawks, nocturnal insectivores with wide and hairy mouths, supposedly making nightly visits to drink surreptitiously the milk of farmers’ goats. The modern Spanish goatsucker is a more alarming creature, not merely an economic menace stealing milk, but a vampiric drinker of blood.

Follow-up (11/6): DNA Testing Shows That It Was a Coyote.

The London Times reports:

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said. …

We’ve seen US action against Iran predicted a number of times previously.

Here’s a nice leftwing 3:00 video to put us all in the right mood.

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a defeated liberal. No one has explained what the politician was seeking at that altitude.

Diagnosing Al Gore:

The shrinking of the snows of Kilimanjaro is another dramatic example. Scientists have noted this phenomenon for over a hundred years. A search of the scholarly literature immediately produced Georg Kaser’s 2004 article in The International Journal of Climatology on the subject. He states that all three of the major East African glaciers have seen significant retreat since the late 1800s. Kaser writes, “The dominant reasons for this strong recession in modern times are reduced precipitation and increased availability of shortwave radiation due to decreases in cloudiness”. This dryness began relatively abruptly around 1880. “In contrast to this ‘switch’ in moisture conditions, there is no evidence of an abrupt change in air temperature…. Temperature increases in the tropics on the surface and in the troposphere have been little in recent decades compared with the global trend.” The very shape of the glacier speaks out against Gore’s theory: melting from temperature rise “would round-off and destroy the observed features within a very short time, ranging from hours to days”. Indeed, a year and a half record from 2000-2002 showed that air temperatures never exceeded minus 1.6 degrees C (in fact, Gore’s friend Lonnie Thompson reports that the temperatures never rose above minus 2 degrees C during his research there), and permafrost extends far below the edge of the glacier. (Kaser et al, Int. J. Climatol. 24: 329-339 (2004)) In other words, not only is the recession of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s snowy peak probably not due to CO2-induced temperature rise, it isn’t even driven by temperature rise at all.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Ben Stein had some sensible remarks, which I quite agree with, on Fox News with Neil Cavuto. The clip is, unfortunately, derisively linked by the left, so please ignore the monkey noises and watch out for thrown feces as you approach the cage.

John Cole believes that Senator Craig really was sexually soliciting, which I do not. But if John Cole was right, I would agree that his proposed speech is nearly exactly what Larry Craig ought to have said.

Good afternoon, citizens of Idaho. Good afternoon, friends.

I have an important announcement to make, although it is not the announcement many of you think it will be. I am here to announce to you that yes, I did attempt to solicit sex in that bathroom, and that no, I am not going to resign. I made a mistake. I have some personal issues that are my business, and my business alone, and I will work to resolve them.

I am sorry if I embarrassed you, but I fail to see how a personal transgression somehow makes me unable to fulfill my duties in the Senate. I will not run again in 2008, but let me be clear- I will not resign.

As to my ‘alleged’ friends in the Senate and elsewhere in Washington, let me extend a large and erect middle finger to each and everyone of you. To all of you who came to me privately as a friend over the past few days and told me it was best for the nation and Idaho if I resign, but who did not have the courage to stand up for your friend when a camera was on, let me say this: “GO TO HELL.” Each and every one of you.

Read the whole thing.

The Confederate battle flag may be an objectionable symbol to our domestic forces of political correctness, but it apparently has at least one supporter in the Punjab near Islamabad, Pakistan as this photo by Aurangzeb Khan attests.

Via Pakistaniat.com and Matthew MacLean.

I know a black sheep old-time member of the Conservative Movement, who would often complain lugubriously over his cups (in relation to the unhappy consequences to his conservative career of his own pecadillos) that “the Conservative Movement does not know how to tend its wounded or bury its dead.”

I was tempted to apply that observation to the behavior of Republicans in the case of Senator Larry Craig, but listening to the 8:23 Minneapolis police tape (NY Times transcript) it isn’t even obvious to me that Senator Craig was genuinely wounded.

In the first place, it is perfectly clear that no sex, not even any explicit sexual proposition, ever actually occurred. It is also clear that the covert signals Senator Craig supposedly made were in dispute between himself and Sergeant Karsnia, the arresting officer, and that Karsnia’s version features at least one very major implausibility. Karsnia claims that, as a signal, Craig reached below the divider between his bathroom stall and the stall to his right, with his left hand palm down, and rubbed the bottom of the divider. How could anyone possibly physically do that in the cramped confines of a typical public bathroom stall?

It is also quite apparent, listening to the tape, that Karsnia is artfully and intensely manipulating Craig. He is continuing to sell Craig on the plea deal, and he is also doing his level best to persuade Craig to assent to his own preferred version of the facts. The tape does not contain the whole of their conversation, and the portion released was clearly made in order to support the guilty plea which had been previously negotiated.

Common sense tells us that Karsnia must have threatened Craig with far more serious charges, charges involving the possibility of felony convictions, life-time sex offender status, public scandal and personal ruin, then offered a deal. In Karsnia’s deal, Craig would plead guilty only to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. It would be like a speeding ticket. Craig would simply plead guilty to disorderly conduct, pay $575 in fine and court fees, and walk away a free man. He would even be able to catch his original flight. And, best of all, there would be no publicity, no scandal, no ruinous sexual charges.

We can see just how well the Minneapolis Police Department kept its side of that plea bargain. So why should we believe one of its members’ allegations of about intrinsically ambiguous signals?

Just how plausible is it that a married 62-year-old Senator is in the habit of passing the time between changing planes by finding himself some sort of awkward and unseemly sexual encounter featuring heaven-only-knows whatever precise activity which may be conducted beneath the divider between two lavatory stalls?

As Eric at Classical Values observes, that this is the second major national sex scandal involving a Congressional Republican with no actual sex.

The problem is not one of Republicans not knowing how to tend their wounded. The problem is that Republicans don’t know how to handle scandals, either defensively or offensively.

The Administration’s opponents leak the highest level National Security secrets to the Press, and only one single Intelligence Community official is ever accused, no trial ever takes place. There are no convictions and no punishments. On the other hand, the mere identification of Ambassador Wilson’s wife’s role in assisting his trying to impeach British Intelligence reports of Saddam’s efforts to secure uranium (for a second time) from Niger, in democrat hands, shook the Bush Administration right down to its timid and quivering foundations.

Barney Frank survived a gay prostitution ring being run from his Washington apartment by a gay prostitute he himself had previously hired. But, in the case of a Republican, it only takes a mere accusation for the Party leadership to run for cover, our own editorialists to demand summary execution, and the accused to slink away, his career permanently destroyed.

Bill Clinton sexually exploited a 22-year-old White house intern, and the democrats persuaded a substantial portion of the public that it was downright evil of Republicans to pry into the President’s private sex life.

Republicans need to develop the capacity both to take the heat of the unfair accusations of their adversaries without flinching and to fight back.

Larry Craig has one of the best voting records in the Congress. I don’t personally care if he has a habit of enjoying relations with Idaho sheep by the light of the full moon, and I’m skeptical that he is guilty of anything in Minneapolis. I hope that he will tough it out, and not resign.