If you’re tired of mowing your lawn, the Humane Society has some tips. You get to put away the lawnmower—or at least mow a smaller area—wildlife gets a friendly alternative.
Of course this assumes that you want a smaller lawn, and don’t mind having wildlife around.
Here are the tips:
Plants beds of native nectar, berry and seed-producing plants favored by wildlife
Create a meadow on a portion of your property
Install a small pond or some other water feature.
Build shelter for wildlife, such as brush or rock piles in a corner of your yard

Here’s a photo by Bill Cary, who writes The Journal News’ In the Garden blog, of wildflowers at the Butterfly Garden in Lenoir Preserve in Yonkers.

The easiest way to create a natural landscape, according to the Humane Society, is simply to stop mowing it and let native plants gradually take over. Start by limiting your no-mow zones to the corners or less-trafficked areas. Continue to mow around them to create a neat island look—presumably so that your neighbors won’t complain.

Another easy approach is to extend the size of existing beds when edging them – even an inch or two a year is a contribution.
And you may end up with fewer Canada geese.

The other day my colleague, Swapna Venugopal, noticed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s photos on Sen. John McCain’s Web site. Was this a hint? we wondered.

Perhaps.

Today The Washington Post’s blog, The Fix, by Chris Cillizza had this:

McCain To Meet With Jindal

John McCain will huddle with vice presidential aspirant Bobby Jindal during a trip to New Orleans later this week, sources close to the campaign confirm to The Fix.

VP Watch

McCain’s trip to Louisiana on Wednesday was the cause of much head scratching in the political world as it was not in keeping with a week of planned stops in battleground states.

But, the meeting with Jindal, who has been the state’s governor since 2007, suggests that McCain himself is deeply engaged in the process of picking his second-in-command and that the youthful Jindal is under serious consideration.

PHOTO: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal last month in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Bill Haber)

Today, I wrote about Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and Iraq and mentioned the flap over Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in which he agreed with Obama’s timetable for withdrawing American troops.

Asked when the troops should leave, al Maliki responded:

“As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Was he endorsing Obama? he was asked.

“Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business. But it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want.”

Afterward a spokesman for al Maliki, in a statement distributed by the American military, tried to say the prime minister’s comments had been mistranslated.

But, according to The New York Times, it turns that the translator was al Maliki’s own. And the Times was given a tape of the interview and translated it independently. Al Maliki indeed said 16 months.

After a meeting between Obama and al Maliki on Monday, the same spokesman, Ali al Dabbagh, said, according to Reuters:

“We cannot give any timetables or dates but the Iraqi government believes the end of 2010 is the appropriate time for the withdrawal.”

Obama first visited Iraq in 2006.

PHOTO: In this photo released by the U.S. army, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, left, top U.S. military commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, center, and U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, ride inside a helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 21, 2008. Iraq’s government welcomed Obama on Monday with a message of apparent common ground on American troop withdrawal goals: expressing hopes that combat forces could leave by 2010. (AP Photo/Ssg. Lorie Jewell, HO)

Two years ago, when Israel invaded Lebanon, I wrote about the exchanges across the border via blogs.

This week, when the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers were exchanged for Samir Kuntar and other prisoners, I thought I would check back with one of the Lebanese bloggers. What did Charles Malik think of what had taken place?

Here’s what part of what he wrote. (Qantar is variation of Kuntar, the way the Arabic name has been spelled in the American media):

“Regarding Samir Qantar, the crime is evident. Qantar killed Israeli government personnel and civilians during a raid in the middle of a war. However, he also killed a four year old girl by smashing a rock into her head. There is no excuse on Earth to justify that action, and there is no way that I can ever say that this man is a hero. Any man willing to smash in the head of a 4 year old child with a rock should remain in prison for the rest of his life.

My disgust has no words… My tears…”

You can find more of his posting, and comments from Lebanese and Israelis, here.

PHOTO from AFP

Take a look at John McCain’s Web site.

There is he pictured with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

And there he is again with Jindal.

As my colleague Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy noticed, Jindal is the only politician reportedly on one vice presidential short-list to get photographs on Web site. They are in the photo gallery in the About section.

Jindal was one of three men who met with McCain for a weekend barbecue in May. The others were Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—and I don’t see either of them on the site. Do you?

Is this a hint?

PHOTO: John McCain toured New Orleans with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal raising speculation about a McCain/Jindal ticket. Bobby Jindal downplayed talk of running with McCain. Like a reliable VP, he declined the chance to draw attention to himself. The Advertiser

Adding to the notion that Sen. Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, he is already the subject of a coffee-table book.”

The Rise of Barack Obama” is 150 pages of quite remarkable photographs by former White House photographer Pete Souza that show Obama in private and public moments.

Souza captures Obama opening Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell in South Africa and Obama conferring with Sen. John McCain on the immigration bill and such behind-the-scene snaps as Obama and his wife, Michelle, waiting to be introduced at Iowa State University.

Souza was an official photographer for President Ronald Reagan and is now an assistant professor of photojournalism at Ohio University. He is the author of two photographic books on Reagan’s term in office: “Unguarded Moments: Behind-the -Scenes Photographs of President Reagan” (1992) and “Images of Greatness: An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan (2004).

Souza began with Obama’s first day in the U.S. Senate and continued on to the campaign trail before the spring primaries. He accompanied him to seven countries, including Kenya, South Africa and Russia.

“Early into that first year, I began to believe that I was photographing a future president of the United States, and that my pictures might become a historic look at the rise of Sen. Obama’s political career,” Souza wrote in his introduction. “That may sound like an easy statement to make now, but that’s really how I felt at the time.”

Which photo(s) provided the most surprising result and why? Souza was asked in material distributed by his publisher, Triumph Books.

“One of the things that has been fascinating for me to observe during the last three years is how other people react to Obama. Early on, there was this curiosity, where people had heard so much about him but were now checking him out to see if he was for real. You can see that in their faces.

“Then, in Africa, the response to him was overwhelming. He gave a speech in Nairobi, and they couldn’t fit everyone inside the auditorium. So they set up these loudspeakers outside, and I decided to stay outside to photograph the people that were listening to the speech on these loudspeakers. There were hundreds gathered and you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening in rapt attention. One man took notes on his hand in blue ink.”

The New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a gun-toting militant will probably play into all of the misconceptions he has had to fight during his presidential campaign, Obama told CNN’s Larry King last night.

But according to CNN, he downplayed the cartoon.

“It’s a cartoon … and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment,” Obama said. “And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market, and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

“I’ve seen and heard worse,” he said. “I do think that in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But that was their editorial judgment.”

Watch Obama on Larry King.

JibJab and its animated satire is back with a prod at Obama, McCain, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the 2008 elections.

You can watch Time for Some Campaignin on YouTube.

Plus American Public Radio’s Marketplace has a segment on JibJab’s marketing strategy: Online humor is a serious business.

Greg Spiridellis, a company co-founder, tells Marketplace: “The real focus for us with these big election video tent poles is to get our brand out there and also to make people aware of the other premium services that we offer.”

For $14 a year, customers can cut and paste their own digital photos into electronic cards and JibJab videos, according to Marketplace.

Today the talk is of the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas in the White House, a satirical look at all the fear tactics used against them by the right wing.

Barack Obama is wearing a turban and is in Muslim dress—reminiscent of the photo showing him in Somali tribal clothes. Michelle Obama has combed out her hair, has a rifle slung over her shoulder and is giving her husband what Fox News called a “terrorist fist-jab.”

For the finishing touches, there’s an American flag burning in the fireplace, Osama bin Laden’s portrait hangs over the mantle.

The Obama campaign does not like it.

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the cariacture Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” his spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

I’m not sure about tasteless and offensive. I think it does exactly what the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, says it does: It skewers Obama’s supposed lack of patriotism and being soft on terrorism, his wife’s alleged radicalism.

I think it’s funny. But of course, there’s a stubborn group of people who insist on believing Barack Obama is Muslim no matter what. A Newsweek poll released on Friday found that 12 percent of the people say he was sworn in as a U.S. senator on a Quran. Twenty-six percent continue to say he was raised as a Muslim.

So you can understand why the Obama camp might not like this cover.

Scrawled in the grime on the back of a truck on the Major Deegan Expressway:

“Honk for Obama 08”

Photo from Getty  Images