Author: Brian J. Noggle

Geez, you lonely municipalities, so busy courting developers that you’re okay when those same developers refer to your relationship as one of employee-employer?

A last-minute change to a proposed tax deal has kept alive plans for a housing development on the polluted site of a former trailer park.

Under the change, University City-based Highland Homes will get 13 years of tax abatement, not 20 as originally requested.

The city “thought they were going to get pimped for 20 years,” said Bob Shallenberger, co-owner of Highland Homes. “They’re not.”

After the change was made, the O’Fallon City Council voted 7-1 to create a “community improvement district” to reimburse Highland Homes an estimated $2.2 million in property and sales taxes to clean up asbestos dumped at the site.

He only talks like that because he loves you, unlike the other municipalities.

Although I wouldn’t say the description isn’t entirely unfair; after all, through a CID, you’re going to take money from the johns, formerly called “citizens,” and give them to him.

Auto companies are studying alternative fuel vehicles, but an author apparently wants them rushed to market without thorough study:

“They’re totally just dipping their toes in the water,” said Sherry Boschert, author of the book “Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that Will Recharge America.”

“It’s good they’re doing something, but it’s the automotive form of greenwashing,” she said. “They could be mass-producing these things.”

Whereas this person thinks that Mother Gaia will only take those whom she wants due to poorly engineered accidents and defects, the trial attorneys across the country agree with her. “The faster these things are on the market, the sooner we can begin litigating,” a spokesman said.

Additionally, Ralph Nader has dusted his consumer product deathtrap Mad Libs off of his shelf and licked his pencil. “Indeed, the sooner that big corporations begin rushing hastily engineered solutions to market, the better it will be for all of us.”

I recently got into an IM discussion with an old friend who’s taken the blue pill. We were talking about how the United States coerces the world to watching Dallas and makes the world hate us with our aggressive military posture. He held up the fact that diplomacy worked in North Korea as an instance where the military didn’t have to invade, and everyone loved the United States.

Yeah, it’s a good example: build nukes, and the United States will give you things.

Looks like the diplomacy ain’t working all that well either:

North Korea underscored its anger over South Korea’s tough new stance toward the communist country with the test-firing of short-range missiles.

The launches Thursday night also came as the North issued a stern rebuke to Washington over an impasse at nuclear disarmament talks, warning the Americans’ attitude could “seriously” affect the continuing disablement of Pyongyang’s atomic facilities.

On the other hand, it did go about as well as the conversation, which included casting US soldiers as rapists, too, in all earnestness and intellectual rigor. That is about where the philosophical inquiry ended.

Sorry, it’s a fishing expedition of another sort:

They say it was the town’s worst kept secret.

“People were always saying, ‘We saw them here. We saw them there,'” said Florence Streeter, who owns several rental properties in Valley Park.

And Mayor Jeffery Whitteaker, people said, didn’t help himself by refusing to answer questions about his relationship to his secretary last year, during a deposition for a lawsuit over the town’s ordinances targeting illegal immigrants.

Did he have a “social relationship” with the secretary, a lawyer asked him.

So how does that have direct bearing on ordinances covering immigration? Oh, yeah, trying to shame the mayor so he will back down.

I’m not all of a sudden defending adultery, but I also don’t care for blackmail or extortion or public shaming for litigious advantage, which is what we’re talking here.

Of course, now the secretary’s suing for getting fired after the relationship ended, which is why the paper is covering it. But the leading anecdote really highlights shoddy legal work.

Mother of toddler found wandering lost husband to war:

A Belleville woman charged with letting her 2-year-old son wander alone in 40-degree weather wearing only a diaper is the widow of a man killed while serving in Iraq.

If you don’t have enough bad news to report about Iraq, it’s good to see the creative writers who run the newswires can tie so much bad news back to Iraq.

So we can see the real costs of war, of course.

Collinsville Holiday Inn up for sale:

The beleaguered Collinsville Holiday Inn will officially go on the auction block May 13 as officials hope to move the property off state books in time for summer.

The announcement Wednesday is likely one of the last in a tortured history. Part of a large economic development program in 1982, the hotel was built with more than $13 million in state loans that were never repaid. It has been a boondoggle for state treasurers ever since.

The owners repeatedly claimed financial hardship and refinanced their loans. In 1995, they had tried to buy the property outright for a negotiated sum of $6.3 million, but political infighting in Springfield killed that deal. The debt now has grown to more than $32 million.

That was 1982! Now, the governments who meddle in land use more aggressively 25 years later have just mandated failure right out of their 5- and 10-year plans.

Now, back to the normally scheduled borrowing to help private developers steal land from its rightful owners for another strip mall with promised chain stores designed to reflect and retain the neighborhood’s unique flavor.

If you tell a pollster that you feel pushed around by the world, you’re probably not much of a man to start with:

Many men believe the world is now dominated by women and that they have lost their role in society, fuelling feelings of depression and being undervalued.

Research shows the extent to which men have had to change within one or two generations, adapting to new rules and different expectations.

Asked what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, more than half thought society was turning them into “waxed and coiffed metrosexuals”, and 52 per cent say they had to live according to women’s rules.

Read the whole thing, and weep.

Reminds me of a story when I was a sophomore in college. My grandmother was getting married, and as an usher, I was expected to fit in with the wedding dress standards. Somehow, the color pink was involved. Instead, I decided to wear a white shirt, as I owned white shirts and I don’t think pink is my color anyway. So my stepmother, wretched woman that she is, told me that real men weren’t afraid to wear pink.

I guess our understanding of masculinity differs; mine doesn’t involve bending to the whims of the polls or those who would use the polls to manipulate weak men.

That being said, Winston Churchill was a tough man, regardless of whether your woman allows you to think so.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Headline on St. Louis Post-Dispatch story: Festus man killed in Iraq.

However, he was not just a man:

Habsieger, 22, of Festus, was one of four soldiers who were killed in the blast, according to the Department of Defense.

None of the stories identify his branch; to journalists fresh out of J-school, they all look alike, no doubt.

Does it matter? Well, it mattered to Habsieger, didn’t it?