Author: Brian J. Noggle

Since I don’t have anything witty or insightful to say today, perhaps you should just go read the Chicago Tribune‘s Steve Chapman in his column "The illusions of the minimum wage", which begins:

Asking Democrats if they favor an increase in the minimum wage is like asking Martha Stewart if she’d mind sharing some decorating ideas. There are few things they’d rather do, and Sen. Ted Kennedy thinks it is high time.

The Massachusetts Democrat is offering a measure that would boost the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. He notes that it has not been lifted since 1997, during which time senators have gotten seven pay raises. “If the Senate is serious about an anti-poverty agenda,” he said, “let’s start by raising the minimum wage.” Republicans, meanwhile, might accept an increase of $1.10, as proposed by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

It may seem like an inescapable truth that if you increase the amount employers pay their lowest-wage workers, you will have fewer poor people. Money, after all, is what they lack, and a higher minimum wage means more money to those in the worst-paying jobs.

In fact, this is one of those obvious facts that turns out not to be a fact at all. The available evidence suggests that raising the minimum wage doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

You see, the gentleman can sound kinda smart about things when he’s not la-dee-dah about foreign policy.

Norville to Anchor From ‘Home Confinement’:

Now HERE’S a good excuse for working at home. Deborah Norville will anchor Monday’s program of “Inside Edition” from her home on Long Island, N.Y., to try to give viewers a taste of what Martha Stewart’s home confinement is like.

Muhahahaha! I laugh with almost hysterical tears. I work from home, so I sometimes don’t leave the house for weeks. You want to know what it’s like?

It’s maddening, but I like madness. It keeps me company and walks on cats’ paws.

Seriously, what’s next? Deborah Norville drives her own car so viewers know what commuting is like?

(Link seen on Tim Blair’s site.)

If I were a cynic, or a hopeful writer of suspense fiction, I might make something different of this story: Italian Journalist Rejects U.S. Account.

Okay, we have these salient events:

1. Sympathetic “journalist” disappears, “kidnapped” by “insurgents.”
2. Releases a tape making normal coerced political demands, which doesn’t differ from her normal uncoerced political demands.
3. Her government “negotiates” her release, which involves paying ransom money.
4. Upon her release, she claims the United States military “targeted her”–but missed–with 300 or 400 shots–after which her car looks like this, but
5. The only casualty is the Italian intelligence officer that acted as the bag man, who took one round to the temple, almost execution style; everyone else in the car miraculously survived.

And when the heat cools off and the journalist “recovered,” she would retire to Switzerland with her Iraqi lover on their ill-gotten loot.

I would title the book Ill Manifest.

Update: Real-life mystery writer Roger L. Simon offers a plot.

Update II: Baldilocks, who deploys a Ludlumian title for a post in The Sgrena Gambit, indicates that the car depicted above might not be the car alledgedly shot 300-400 times.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch waxes romantic about homelessness in its Metro section today: For two men, it was a place to call home.

Even now, more than a month later, the discarded bits of their lives litter the ground around the little green bench — a few twist-off beer caps, a couple of dozen cigarette butts and some scraps of candy wrappers half-buried in the March mud.

For the better part of a year it had been their bench, and even on those rainy nights when they would leave to take shelter under the roof of a nearby bus stop, they would always return. There was no address, not in the strict sense of the word, but for Morris White and Kerry Smith, it was the closest thing to a home they would know for much of 2004.

They arrived for the first time in the late spring, when the city air was warm and clean, and the sweetgum trees were heavy with new leaves.

I don’t understand. I thought homelessness was bad, but here the Post-Dispatch sepia-tones the story of two men who preferred to live on the streets to living with their families or in homeless shelters with their pissant regulations.

If these homeless people don’t care to change their condition, why should I? Why should tax money be spent on them, other than it’s free?

I doubt the Post-Dispatch wanted to raise these questions.

Well, that’ how I would have titled this story, which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “St. Louis County lures 300 jobs from Alton”:

Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. will move 300 jobs from Alton to Creve Coeur as part of a deal with St. Louis County that could net the company up to $4.2 million in tax breaks.

Those workers will move into a new 10-story headquarters building just off Interstate 270 and Olive Boulevard, where they’ll be joined by 200 employees from Clayton and a dozen or so from Chesterfield, under the deal unveiled Friday.

You see, the corporation is getting $4,200,000 in tax breaks, but the St. Louis County Executive says:

“Of course I’m excited,” said County Executive Charlie Dooley. “When someone tells you they’re going to move jobs someplace else, you take it very seriously. We need to do this to expand our tax base and keep our tax burden low.”

That expanded tax base isn’t coming from the company, dear friends. It’s coming from the employees who will have to travel further to work but will have to buy lunch in Missouri instead of Illinois, expanding the St. Louis County sales tax base. It will help, too, when they gas up here, since they can pay for our roads more cheaply than they can pay for Illinois roads.

Remember, St. Louis County government serves itself and its corporate juicers, not the residents. If you don’t believe it, buy a house where developers will want to build a strip mall in 2014.

Another coming of age story for young men results in charges: Teacher Accused of Sex Abuse:

A Braxton County middle school teacher is in police custody after allegedly confessing to sexual misconduct with five of her students.

The number could increase, as she could not be sure of an exact number because she was wearing a bag at the time.

Archaelogists uncover three coffins, mummies behind a secret door:

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered three coffins containing mummies behind a secret door that was hidden behind 42-hundred-year-old statues.

They didn’t even need an elf with them, werd.

A review of the Lincoln Town Car BPS, courtesy of Business 2.0:

When choosing an armored vehicle, it’s important to keep in mind how badly someone wants you dead. This will affect your purchase. If your assassin is an amateur — perhaps some punk with a .38, which fires a 158-grain, round-nose lead bullet at a velocity of 850 feet per second — you’ll probably be just fine in an aftermarket armored sedan or the one offered by Cadillac. In fact, even if your enemy comes at you with a .357 Magnum — a serious weapon capable of spitting metal-ripping charges at up to 1,395 feet per second — you’ll probably escape without a scratch in one of those sedans. But if someone really wants to kill you, you’d better be riding in the 2005 Lincoln Town Car Ballistic Protection Series.

Excellent.

In a story entitled "Between a rock and a hard place", the St. Louis Post-Dispatch must choose between tax spending government bureaucrats and senior citizens. And it chooses the government spenders:

Two changes in tax exemptions offered to Illinois taxpayers will mean a decrease in local funding for school districts.

Districts rely on property taxes for a significant part of their budgets.

For the Collinsville School District, that decrease is expected to total close to a $800,000 revenue shortfall for next year.

“We’re not alone with this. All school districts are affected – some more and some less,” said Superintendent Dennis Craft. “But we did not expect this (cut in funding) to this extent.”

The decrease stems from two exemptions. One, called the Homestead Exemption, is offered to senior citizens. The program increased the reduction amount from $2,500 to $3,000 on property assessments.

Another program, called Senate bill 1790, or owner-occupied exemption, increases what can be omitted from property assessments by as much as $1,500 from what was originally set at $3,500. This means that homeowners can potentially pay less in taxes because their property assessments are decreased. Seniors who own a home can take advantage of both exemption programs, saving as much as $8,000 from their home’s assessed value.