When I was News Director at a radio station in Lakeland, Florida a few years ago, there was a talk show hostess who was so conservative I do believe she would refuse to eat the left wing of a fried chicken.  I mean, she would make Rush appear moderate by comparison.

     Anyway, she liked to take on those environmentalists she considered to be on the cutting edge of extremism.  She particularly had it in for PETA but that’s another story.  There was one issue she jumped on that I had to agree with.

     A quarter-section of land near where I now reside is banned from any development–not because of an eagle’s nest thereon but because someone, I think from the Nature Conservancy, spotted an endangered plant there.

     This hunk of flora is a zizizfus celadada–not a species of grass, not a flower, not a tree.  It is a weed.    An endangered weed.

     For more years than I can count farmers and homeowners have been attempting to eradicate noxious weeds from their fields and lawns.  In Indiana, perhaps elsewhere, farmers can be fined for harboring a Canadian thistle no matter how lovely its blossom.  Now a 60-acre plot of valuable land is worthless so a weed can flourish and, I suppose, multiply.

Pass the Roundup, please.