Category: News

It’s hard to believe that a grown-up wrote this column with Bill McClellan’s byline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

A young woman left a message on my voice mail. She said she was driving on Highway 40 when she noticed an SUV practically on her bumper. The driver flashed his lights at her and then pulled up next to her. He was a middle-aged man, and he snarled and yelled something she couldn’t make out. When he finally pulled ahead, she realized what the incident had been about. She has an anti-Bush bumper sticker, and the SUV had one of those “W-04” stickers.

“I have a question,” the young woman said. “The conservatives won. Why are they still so angry?”

If only he had left it alone with the mindreading, wherein he could tell from his desk at the Post Dispatch downtown that the other driver was not, in fact, upset because the woman who called Bill McClellan obeying the unwritten Missouri traffic standards and driving in the passing lane while doing about or below the speed limit.

No, then McClellan has to explain how conservatives are the dweebs, geeks, and nerds from high school while liberals were the cool kids, the cheerleaders, and the athletes.

The man’s next step is fingerpainting his columns, folks, I kid you not.

CNN Headline: Explosion targets Spanish hotel.

I’m not a physicist, so take what I am about to say with a grain of sodium chloride, but

Explosions don’t target things; people do

Headline writers use this cheap personification when they want to hide appropriate subject of the sentence, the actor who made the typically bad thing happen. To say “Basque Terrorists Target Hotel” makes the Spanish separatists sound just a little mean, doesn’t it? Better the explosion itself –an act of nature that just happens under just the right circumstances, such a combination of Semtex and detonator– take the rap than to single out the people who actually performed the deed.

Headline writers also use this when they want to emphasize an inanimate object’s role in the event, especially when the prevailing windsom indicates that the object itself is bad. That’s why you get SUVs running down grandmothers and guns killing innocent bystanders.

Personification is a nice device in fiction or creative non-fiction. Journalists should probably avoid it, except when their journalism is fiction or creative non-fiction. Come to think of it, perhaps journalists are already adhering to this maxim.

Story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Critics say that Jim Brown isn’t worth millions:

The city of St. Louis, the St. Louis Airport Authority and the transit agency Metro have paid more than $3 million over the past five years to a Washington lobbyist to be their chief advocate with Congress and federal agencies and to steer federal money back home.

The lead to this story highlights the fundamental inefficiency in the current system of government funding and its built-in waste.

The Federal government makes its sweeping national mandates that it wants states and communities to implement. To help the smaller government units handle the demands from above, the federal government passes on grants and whatnot.

So the Federal government collects the taxes, takes its percentage from the top, and hands the money to lower governments. The lower governments spend money from their general funds to employ grant writers and lobbyists to get the diminished revenue pool passed on by the Federal government. Meanwhile, government departments, advisors, and lobbyists get their points from the money passing through their hands from the citizen to the highest level of organization and then back down to the local governments who actually do the work.

So does the Post-Dispatch point out the inherent inefficiencies of the system and argue that the Federal government could scale back its centralization and allow local communities to use local tax revenue for local projects directly and that local communities wouldn’t have to waste existing tax revenue pursuing other tax revenue?

Of course not. They’re upset that the lobbyist isn’t efficient bringing the slop from the Federal trough:

But the lobbyist, Jim Brown, has a mixed record at best, according to interviews with two dozen members of Congress, aides and local officials.

From the LA Times story about a man in last week’s train crash in LA who

As he lay wedged under a train seat and metal debris, with whatever energy he could summon and a heartbreaking economy of words, he scrawled a farewell in blood on the seat. “I {heart} my kids. I {heart} Leslie,” he printed.

Some people are inspired by the story and want to find him, but he wants to remain anonymous:

“I’m a private person,” he said in a statement the hospital released for him, “and the message that I wrote was a private message to my wife and my kids because I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Ann Althouse comments:

The extraordinary thing is that this man with an opportunity to be paraded about in the public eye has chosen to remain private.

Perhaps his wife’s name isn’t Leslie. That would explain it, ainna?

Story: Sharon Stone steals charity limelight at poverty debate:

Hollywood siren Sharon Stone, more used to the film studio than the business stage, stole the limelight with an impromptu fundraiser at the World Economic Forum that secured one million dollars in aid to Africa.

Seizing her chance during a heavyweight debate on how to tackle poverty in Africa, Stone stood up in the middle of the crowded hall to offer an immediate personal pledge of 10,000 dollars — then challenged others to follow suit.

It rather undercut the big-name panelists, who included Britain’s finance minister Gordon Brown, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the billionaire Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

That won’t even buy a whole Land Rover for the do-spenders who distribute aid in Africa.

It’s also disingenuous of this journalist to say Sharon Stone upstaged Bill Gates. Let’s write it out with zeros:

750,000,000	Bill Gates donation to Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation
10,000,000	Bill Gates donation to UN for polio vaccines
3,000,000	Bill Gates donation to tsunami relief
10,000	Sharon Stone’s donation to poverty relief in Africa

But Bill Gates is an evil capitalist, and Sharon Stone is a feeling artist out of Hollywood with a good pair of legs and, as some lizards would atest, tasty feet, so of course she upstaged Bill Gates by promising an amount equal to 1% of what Sandra Bullock gave to tsunami relief.

But at least Sharon Stone was dressed appropriately, eh, Robin Givhen?

Virginia Postrel, who lives in Texas, concurs with a Washington Post fashionista who dings Vice President Cheney for dressing warmly for an outdoor ceremony in January:

You don’t dress for a solemn state ceremony as though you were going for a hike.

You know, Postrel and Robin Givhen might have approved of William Henry Harrison’s attire for his first inauguration speech. The sartorial splendor killed him.

Listen to this Wisconsin boy: if you’re going to be outside for a long period of time, you dress warmly and let the other people keep themselves warm giggling at your attire or expressing their outrage. That way everyone is comfortable.

Update: James Joyner agrees.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the best argument I can think of for term limits:

Kennedy Calls for Troop Withdrawal in Iraq:

The American military’s continued presence in Iraq is fanning the flames of conflict, and signals the need for a new detailed timeline to bring the troops home, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said Thursday.

Just three days before the Iraqi people go to the polls to elect a new government, the Massachusetts Democrat said America must give Iraq back to its people rather than continue an occupation that parallels the failed politics of the Vietnam war.

If we limited our senators to two terms, like we do our presidents, they would only have 12 years to turn into bloviating goofballs, would only have one re-election for which they needed to raise funds, and would not accrue valuable soft power that leads them right into lobbying.

Also, Teddy Kennedy would have just been another quiet lush in an expansive family compound after losing a presidential election in 1976.

I have, from time to time, also received a FEDERAL INCOME TAX REFUND, which is a greyer area. Depending upon your point of view, it’s either my money or money from the government, either an increase or decrease or I have somehow precipitated a cut in federal revenue.

Regardless, you should assume then, gentle reader, that I am withholding too much from my paychecks every week, and I think you would be right.

Johnny Carson has inspired John Kass to quit smoking.

Good luck, Kass.

These reporters don’t want information. They want to catch the President.

I know, that’s obvious, but I notice it most acutely when I actually listen to it.

Headline: Rural counties keep afloat with tape and bubble gum:

Weaverville, Trinity County — Supervisors in this 13,000-resident county the size of Rhode Island are postponing $3 million in road repairs to keep Trinity’s debt-ridden hospital afloat.

You mean Trinity County, which owns and operates five public use general aviation airports located throughout the County?

Trinity County, which gives out grants according to the directives of the its Trinity County Children and Families First Commission’s Strategic Plan [to spend money]?

Which has its own Department of Tobacco Education?

Which has its own Department of Risk Management?

Which has a number of parks and its own Library System?

Although money might be scarce, I think that these municipalities, like most other governments, lack clear priorities. They run out of money before they run out of ideas, but they don’t put the ideas on hold or examine their feasibility; instead, they get more money.

After an embezzler with the county government pilfered funds and overbilled a title company to cover the shortcoming, the county government says, too bad, so sad, we’re not recompensing the title company. Story:

When a St. Louis County employee stole $727,215 from a cash drawer over about six years, she covered it up by overbilling Investors Title Co. to balance the books in the Recorder of Deeds office. That means the county should bear the loss, company President Joseph Crutchfield told a jury Monday.

But Investors Title had the paperwork it needed to discover the crime from the start, and thus should accept responsibility, a lawyer for the county countered in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

The message, of course, is that you should just assume that your government is composed of felons out to rip you off.

It’s a good message. Thank you, St. Louis County, for stating it clearly and loudly.

Christian Slater explains why he loves London in a story in the Times of London, December 12, 2004:

I like the fact that there’s no gun culture here but I don’t necessarily feel safer. There’s a frisson in London that’s similar to Los Angeles or New York, a sense that something might happen at any moment, and I really appreciate that. If I was moving for safety’s sake, I’d head for somewhere like Vancouver, but I enjoy living in a country that’s a bit raw. In America there’s a real sense of danger right now, a sense that lightning might strike at any time; it’s not attractive. I prefer the edginess I find in London.

Christian Slater is attack with an edgy weapon in London, January 2005:

American actor Christian Slater has escaped a knife attack after a performance of his show in London’s West End.

Well, at least he’s safe from George W. Bush’s America and its gun culture.