Author: Brian J. Noggle

Those of us who live in the St. Louis area can easily get inured to the absurdity that passes for politics in the area’s dozens of postage stamp municipalities, where high school drama kings and queens can ply their cliquish fantasies decades beyond graduation. The spectacles tend toward comedies, in the sense that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel or own land about to be eminent domained for a new Wal-Mart.

Typically, it’s the powerless home owners against the slightly less powerless municipal Powers-That-Pose-To-Be in their own government. However, the regularly-scheduled development brouhaha takes a novel twist when it’s the citizens of neighboring communities who try to dictate development in a neighboring community.

To sum it up in a nutshell for those of you who don’t want to click the link, a tony suburb called Town and Country (whose very name conjures up visions of failed Warren Beatty movies and Lincoln-Mercury minivans) wants to throw in one of those strip malls guaranteed to bring in $2.4 million in sales taxes every year until the next development siphons half or three quarters of the sales next year. However, residents in neighboring communities whose lots abut the development site have annointed themselves to determine what’s best for not their communities, but Town and Country. That land would be better used as a park to raise their property values than anything the duly elected government of Town and Country could approve.

That sets off my special Rant-Sense. You see, it’s bad enough when municipal governments and the fascist power of the majority gets to infringe on the property rights of owners, whether homeowners who don’t want to sell or developers who want to build, but for unelected and un-asked-for people from different communities to start their a-clamoring and a-litigating…. Well, it’s so very wrong and against many principles upon which this country was founded. Self rule. Property rights.

I wonder if these same “activists” think that the United States government should submit to the will of its neighbors before making decisions in Minnesota or Arizona. I’m not sure which would trouble me more: hypocrisy, in which they would say, “Of course not!” or eager belief that a single world government is a good idea, and that Luxembourgers could best determine where to put a Target.

Drudge links to this story in the Washington Post about the two soldiers who some Iraqis had claimed to have captured. The Pentagon, in this story, points out that the soldiers aren’t missing at all.

But the story points out:

LBC broadcast close-ups of the cards: one carrying the name of Capt. Katherine V. Rose of the 142nd Corps Support Battalion from Fort Polk, La., and a Pennsylvania driver’s license with the name Andrew C. Peters, 37. A call to the address on the driver’s license was answered by a person who hung up.

Why in the wide, wide world of sports did the reporter include that sentence? What sort of pavement-pounding (or Internet-searching-and telephoning) petulance prompts someone to point out that he or she got the abrupt brush off when he or she called the family of a serviceman reported as capture by probably psycho enemies? He or she’s probably lucky he or she only phoned; a slamming door might have bruised.

By putting the sentence in the story, the reporter wants our sympathy. He or she was trying to do his or her job, when this person out of Pennsylvania showed a lack of cosmopolitan sensibility and good breeding by refusing to emote publicly for Associated Press. Something our intrepid reporter thinks he or she has, and assumes we share.

Not likely.

Mark Steyn examines how a person’s views on homosexuality are often used to impugn the person’s rational capacity to do some job.

(Link seen via Tim Blair.)