Author: Brian J. Noggle

In this piece about Obamalove in the media, the professional journalist/writer fumbles:

If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days?[Emphasis added]

The examples cited, as you well know, gentle reader, are not gerunds at all, but rather are examples of the present progressive tense (often with the form of to be omitted).

Unless, of course, the author truly means that Hillary becomes talkin’ with guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal and that these gerunds are supposed to be used in the predicate nominative sense. However, that does not appear to be the case. But I just wanted to throw in another esoteric grammar term to show that I know what a gerund is.

But we cannot expect our snobbish elites to know their grammar, can we?

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Let me know if you’ve heard this before: Government meddles in free market because it can. Prices rise. Government investigates price gouging:

St. Louis County officials plan to ask the state attorney general to investigate whether some trash haulers have gouged residents by drastically raising rates in recent weeks.

The county’s chief operating officer, Garry Earls, said some residents in the county’s unincorporated areas have received bills that are almost double their previous rates.

“This price gouging is tantamount to unscrupulous contractors ripping people off after a major storm,” he said.

The county is moving ahead with plans to divide its unincorporated areas into eight trash collection districts. Through competitive bidding, it would hire a single hauler for each district, except in subdivisions that opt out of the program.

The government’s action leads to a rise in prices that justifies, in the government’s mind, more government action.

The commanders of the economy are at it again:

A bill before the Missouri House would prohibit doctors from marking up the cost of certain anatomical laboratory work — such as skin biopsies and Pap tests — that are performed by outside laboratories.

The bill, which has been approved by the Senate and is awaiting floor debate in the House, would prohibit what’s known as “pass-through” billing.

That’s when a doctor sends a patient’s test sample to an outside laboratory for analysis. The lab charges the doctor a discounted price for the work, but the doctor bills the patient’s insurance or the patient a higher amount.

No word on whether the Missouri state legislature will go after mechanics, computer repair shops, construction people, and every other business that uses subcontracting. It’s doubtful, though, because these people are not the current boogeyman that the medical industry is.

However, once that particular Gulliver is bound to earth, watch out.

UPDATE: Legislator corrected to legislature in title and body. Now that someone’s reading it, I suppose I should make it correcter.

A “memorial” park in Lake St. Louis is surprised by criticism that its memorial plaques include sections on “mistakes” and “consequences” of the wars in which the dead fought:

Plaques citing “mistakes” in U.S.-fought wars have been removed from a new Veterans Memorial Park after veterans complained.

Ralph Barrale, head of the veterans group behind the park, said he’s sorry if the plaques upset anyone.

“We don’t want to disgrace the city or anyone else,” he said. “If we offended anyone, I am personally sorry.”

At issue is information on small metal plaques that had been glued atop stone pedestals. The plaques summarized the nation’s wars, with the information divided into sections, including “mistakes” and “consequences.”

In another story, Barrale is quoted as saying:

World War II veteran Ralph Barrale, who is 84, says it upsets him that some in his St. Louis suburb don’t want to read “the good and the bad” of America’s wars. He says they are historically accurate.

However, here’s some of the meat on the plaques:

For example, the “mistakes” portion of the plaque titled “Global War on Terror, 1997-Present” read, in part: “As of 2007, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars failed to enable viable governments leading to continued guerrilla fighting. The Iraqi Army was quickly crushed but the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army and removed civilian government employees belonging to the ruling political party leaving no one to help maintain security or run the country, which was contrary to policy used after WWII in Germany and Japan.”

Under “consequences,” it stated: “U.S. was accused of a Crusade against Muslims which caused riots all over the Muslim world. Pakistan became an opportunistic ally of the U.S. in its Afghanistan war. U.S. lost prestige around the world.”

That’s not historically accurate, that’s historical interpretation. The sort of thing that’s up for discussion and controversy. If Mr. Barrale wants to put those interpretation into government-sanctioned metal in a park, he wants them to be known as fact instead of what he and his other elegy composers think.