Chalk Talk

The Moscow Chamber of Commerce announces:

Come to Moscow's first annual Oktoberfest and Chalk of the Town Competition. The fun starts September 6th, 7am with the Chalk of the Town chalk art competition. You can watch local artists create works of art out of chalk on Friendship Square in downtown Moscow. Oktoberfest will kickoff in Friendship Square at noon with sausages, beer, games and live music. The day will conclude with a community dance in the evening.

Brought to you by the Moscow Chamber of Commerce.

The last time there were chalk drawings in downtown Moscow was when "Hitler Youth" was scrawled in chalk in front of New Saint Andrews College back in August 2005. A prominent "tolerant" Moscow liberal later opined that this hate crime was a celebration of "free speech."

Here's hoping the worst thing that happens at Oktoberfest is that the beer gets warm.

Where in the World is Chuckie Sandiego?

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of worthless comparisons of exotic foreign locales to Pullman… the thrill of erudite cosmopolitanism… and the agony of plebeian Wal-Marts… the human drama of preening intellectualism… this is Chuck Pezeshki's's Wide World of Socialism!

Chuck "Mr. Civil Discourse" Pezeshki was back today in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News with another travelogue, informing us that

Only a couple of weekends ago, as I sat in my hotel in New Hampshire, next to the seacoast, drinking bottled water because of the salinity of the tap water, I couldn't help but think of this inherent blessing of our region.

Pezeshki then proceeds to skewer the Palouse Basin Aquifer Committee for not joining in the leftist hysteria about water on the Palouse and failing to implement a complete moratorium on growth. I knew it would too much for him to chide the greenies in Moscow on their latest stormwater hypocrisy.

I won't bore you with Pezeshki's standard arrogant, anti-growth drivel.

However, this paragraph is quite illuminating:

For many years, PBAC was led by Larry Kirkland, a nonlicensed geologist and self-proclaimed Young Earth Creationist. The water in the Grande Ronde aquifer is estimated to be somewhere between 23,000 and 12,000 years Before Present - a resource that exists totally out of Kirkland's viewpoint as someone who thinks the world is only 6,000 years old.

Now, that's what I call civil discourse. Impugn a man's professional credentials, and even better, his religious views. Pezeshki couldn't be bothered to provide facts or logic to support his allegation. He also didn't bother providing any proof on how Kirkland's beliefs have anything to do with the science of the aquifer or how they affected his perfomance at PBAC. Even Chuck said "it is estimated." It's the classic Straw Man Fallacy. For a liberal, if Kirkland's a Christian, he can't possibly know anything about science and all his views about water MUST be wrong..

Guess what, Chuck? You're not a licensed geologist either. And neither is Mark Solomon. Yet that doesn't stop Solomon from pontificating endlessly about water issues on the Palouse, heading his own little "water conservation metwork," being hired to conduct an aquifer study for Latah County, and trying to halt all development in the Pullman-Moscow Corridor. Your statement about Kirkland's beliefs are as disgusting and bigoted as if someone wrote that Mark Solomon was not qualified to speak about the aquifers because he is Jewish.

Gotta give Pezeshki some points for chutzpah though. As a professor and Past Chairman of the WSU Faculty Senate, he took a swipe at his employer's "monster golf course."