You can thank this cute little piece-of-shit polar bear for $3 gas.

This just in from the Congress of Racial Equality: If you save the polar bears, you’ll kill the poor! The civil rights movement has officially taken up the pathetically false conflict between environmentalism and affordable energy. A snip from the release:

NEW YORK (March 6, 2008) - Congress of Racial Equality Chairman Roy Innis is promising to sue the Bush Administration if it lists the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because such a listing will drive up energy prices and hurt America’s working poor more than any other element of society.

Speaking this week at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City, Innis said an ESA listing of the polar bear would give environmental extremists a powerful weapon with which to stop energy development in the Lower 48 — from oil and natural gas production to construction of needed coal-fired and other power plants to even renewable fuels facilities.

Innis said that this will “result in higher energy prices across the board which will disproportionately be borne by minorities. It will cause countless families in our country in winters ahead to choose between food on the table and fuel in the furnace.”

Wait … he hasn’t rolled out the corpse of Martin Luther King Jr. yet … oh, wait!

“Laws and policies that restrict access to America’s abundant energy drive up the price of energy and consumer goods. They cause widespread layoffs, leaving unemployed workers and families struggling to survive, as the cost of everything they eat, drive, wear and do spirals out of control. They could roll back some of the civil rights progress for which civil rights revolutionaries and Dr. (Martin Luther) King died.”

An ESA listing for the polar bear — which could come in the next few weeks — has been pushed by environmental elitist groups as a means of slowing economic growth and forcing climate change regulation onto the American people through the Endangered Species Act.

Hard as it is to believe that the George W. Bush presidential library would need more than one shelf, the damn thing — to be built at Southern Methodist University — reportedly might cost upwards of $500 million. (Lots of pricey bulletproof glass in the Cheney Room?) It’ll be designed by blue-chip CAD jockey Robert A.M. Stern and will no doubt be suitably grandiose. Still, opinions, shall we say, vary on the quality and meaning of Bush’s presidency, and in a gesture of interactive political/architectural critique, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked readers to submit their own designs on the backs of envelopes. Bitter ironies abound.

Summer Glau

Tomorrow, March 7, Tao Nightclub has a guest host we CityLifers actually care about, instead of the oh-so-typical Vegas choice of a gang-banging porno starlet or crappy reality TV show “actress.”

At first I wasn’t sold on the made-for-TV version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which thankfully, does not star the Governor of California) until I saw Glau as Cameron, the super-waif “good” robot who emotionlessly intones “that’s tight” while attempting to blend into high school through teen slang. Now that we are waiting with great anticipation for the second season.

Hopefully the sci-fi cult heroine of Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity will stick around the club for a while, allowing fans more than just a brief glimpse of her petite, ass-kicking bod as she’s escorted to her VIP booth by a platoon of bodyguards.

Friday, March 7, 10 p.m.
Tao Nightclub
Venetian hotel-casino
388-8588
$20, free for ladies with local ID

Remember your little Strawberry Shortcake driveway cruiser with the banana seat and sparkly tassles on the handlegrips? Um, yeah … sorry … personal recollection there.

Anyway, track bikes are nothing like that. By comparison, track bikes are like sleek cyborgs sent from the future to kill your dreams — stripped-down machines with no brakes and no gears. You stop, go and slow down simply by virtue of your muscles. Once the sole province of cultish bike messengers and hardcore bike-archists, track bikes and fixed-gear bikes seem to be catching on with a wider audience. Some Vegas cyclists got the fever, and they’re putting on a street race dubbed “Sprint and Destroy” 7 p.m. March 15 in front of Planet Hollywood. And you’re invited to watch people trying to slow down on bicycles with no brakes!

Here’s a vid of a race last year in L.A. You can practically feel the potassium searing their calves:

Jesus, it’s about time Sue Lowden commented publicly on the race for the White House.

In a release today, Lowden, chair of the Nevada Republican Party, lauded U.S. Sen. John McCain for clinching his party’s nomination before warning her fellow GOP’ers to gird their loins for “a classic barn-burner contest of liberal vs. conservative … against what is now likely to be an Obama/Clinton ticket.”

Lady, we know how convoluted this whole election balderdash might get for you. Especially with a woman and a (gasp!) black man running for office. But there’s a better chance of John McCain winning the presidency than there is of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton playing second fiddle on the ticket of the junior senator from Illinois. Do you … ever read a newspaper?

Investigative speculation on the epidermis of a man beset.

The red eyes and hoarse voices of those 2 a.m. talks. The recriminations, the tears, the rancid talk of lawyers. This, though, this could be a telegraph to her, soul to soul: Honey, enough, please, let’s not do this. See? I got one, too, just like yours.