Category: News

Thanks, Jon Dolan, Missouri State Senator from Lake St. Louis and an alleged “Republican,” for cooking up this stupid waste of tax money: “Visitors will know Miss USA is ours“:

Stan Musial hasn’t had one. Neither has Chuck Berry. In fact, no St. Louisan has been honored with his or her name posted on a state highway sign leading into Missouri. But that’s about to change.

Starting next year, motorists driving west over the Poplar, Jefferson Barracks and Interstate 270 bridges into Missouri will be greeted with this: “Welcome to Missouri. Home of Shandi Finnessey Miss USA 2004.”

Not to put too fine a point of it, but by that time, it will be that Miss USA was ours, once, sometime around the turn of the century, like the World’s Fair.

Jumping jesuits, but that’s a lot of money to laud a transitory and ultimately unimportant honor. For the love of peat, why?

“She’s a hottie, and she’s a smarty,” said state Sen. Jon Dolan, R-Lake Saint Louis, whose idea it was to put up the signs.

Dude, next time you try to impress a woman, how about you expend a little of your own money to send flowers?

Apparently, according to several unnamed sources, obese Americans are breaking cruise ships with their weight.

Not obese passengers, but obese Americans.

I’ve not seen that many unnamed sources since I read a the recap of a leaked story in the New York Times.

Undoubtedly, America is to blame for earwax, belly button lint, and static cling as well.

Apparently someone in New Hampshire has determined that online sex offender registries are one-stop shopping for his vigilantism: Man defends attacks on sex offenders:

Lawrence Trant sees himself as a righteous crusader who put muscle behind his boiling outrage against pedophiles.

The state of New Hampshire sees Trant differently. He is serving a 10- to 30-year sentence in New Hampshire State Prison after pleading guilty to attempting to murder two convicted sex offenders whose names and addresses he found on an Internet registry posted by the state.

Check out the subtitle of the article: Crusader gets jail term.

This attempted murderer, according to the Boston Globe, is a crusader. A veritable insurgent against the prevailing orthodoxy that these people retain a number of citizens’ rights to not getting shot arbitrarily by people with nothing better to do. A rebel against the system that thinks that incarceration, forced hospitalization beyond their sentences, and notoriety, and that capital punishment is too much for the crime.

I remember an outcry when a pro-dead-abortion provider Web site listed doctors who terminated pregnancy along with good stalking information for them. I imagine we’ll see less uproar over a government-funded registry that provides the same convenience for other Defenders of the Defenseless Children.

That’s what I make of this capitalization from this story about a drug bust in Wisconsin:

Along with the arrests, police seized powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy, seven handguns and ammunition, seven vehicles and $25,000 in cash. Police refused to give details.

However, if that’s the case, shouldn’t it be:

Along with the arrests, police seized powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy® 3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine, seven handguns and ammunition, seven vehicles and $25,000 in cash. Police refused to give details.

Ecstasy has been in the mainstream 20 years now. How long until we drop the capital E. (I mean that in the grammatical way, not as a slang for actually, you know, doing ecstasy.) No one calls white lady Heroin any more.

Those Bosnian peacekeepers will be home before Christmas.

This article about the serial killer in Kansas known as Blind, Torture, Kill, gives numerous details about the killer that he’s revealed about himself in new missives:

According to police, BTK claims to have been born in 1939, making the killer either 64 or 65 years old. The statement did not say where he was born or where he lived, but that his family moved frequently and always lived near railroad tracks.

BTK’s communications indicate a lifelong fascination with trains, police said.

…

Among other details provided by police:

BTK’s father was killed in World War II, and he was raised by his mother, with his grandparents caring for him while she was at work. When he was about 11, his mother began dating a railroad detective.

His grandfather played the fiddle and died of lung disease.

BTK’s communications include accounts of a cousin named Susan who moved to Missouri, and of a woman he knew named Petra who had a younger sister named Tina.

Unstated, but obvious to anyone who reads too much detective fiction and dabbles sometimes in the composition of same, is this unspoken but apparent klew:

Since he’s only now opening up to the police after apparently going without killing anyone for 18 years and he’s in his middle sixties and he’s got a history of lung disease in the family.

His final mockery comes as he reveals himself on his deathbed when we cannot punish him.

Blackfive speaks about ribbon magnets for your car and suggests you put that money somewhere where it will actually help troops. I concur.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expresses its continuing sympathy for illegal aliens with this story: Latvian family faces deportation threat:

Ofelia Boudaguian says she hoped for fair treatment when she and her family came to the United States in 1995, after years of suffering discrimination and violence in Latvia.

After nearly a decade in the St. Louis area, though, Boudaguian says she feels let down by the American legal system, which has denied the family political asylum and now threatens them with deportation at any moment.

“We live now day by day. It’s so scary,” she said. A knock on the door might mean that she and her husband, Vitalik Boudaguian, and their two children must gather their belongings, submit to arrest and go to a detention facility to await deportation.

Their one-year tourist visas expired May 18, 1996.

Because starting deportation precedings after these people overstayed their visa by nine years and exhausted all recourse through the system is just unfair!

The system is only fair when it does what I want it to do, regardless of the existing rules. Natch.

The headline, Report: Birth Rates for Older Women Rising, really just makes sense, especially when you consider the gist of the story:

U.S. women in their 30s and early 40s had higher birth rates in 2003, while births among teenagers fell for the 12th straight year, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

Well, of course they’re having higher birthrates. Come on, hasn’t anyone else noticed that women in their 30s and 40s have become smoking hotter in the last ten or fifteen years? I mean, when I was a young man, they looked okay, but now, dayumm. They look mighty appetizing for procreative activities and all drills thereof.

The fact that I am in my 30s or 40s is merely coincidental.

Important quote from this article about the author of Fast Food Nation‘s week performance at University of Wisconsin:

“I was looking for more of a venue for action,” said Kirsten Jordan, a UW-Madison student majoring in geography.

A major in geography? Ha-ha! That will prepare you for anything for any number of years until the Bush administration rewrites world maps and alters world climate. Also, clear-cuts and strip mines to alter topography. So in the next four years, about the time this kid is graduating, all that book-learning will be useless.

Hope she’s smart, like me, and picked up a useful second major like philosophy.

(Link seen on Ann Althouse. Well, not on Ann Althouse, but on her blog.)

In a move that reminds me of extranationals talking about the American election this month, apparently ministers from other Arabic states are squawking about the Iraqi elections due this January:

Violence and boycotts could yet stop promised Iraqi elections going ahead on time, Arab ministers said, despite Baghdad’s confident assertion the landmark vote would be held on January 30.

Iraq had somewhat upstaged a major international conference in Egypt on its future by announcing the date for the first post-Saddam Hussein elections a day before the meeting opened.

But not everyone was impressed by its confidence.

So let’s run down the list. Doubters include:

• Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit
• Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki
• an Arab delegate to the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity
• Jordanian government spokeswoman Asma Khodr

Hey, here’s a hearty cup of butt the hell out for those representatives of undemocratic societies who have sound bites about sacred democracy. You know what happens if the Sunnis boycott? They don’t vote. Choosing not to participate does not render the decision of the participants invalid. It just means you have to wait until the next election to choose again whether or not to participate.

In Wisconsin, a nutbar in the woods, instead of hunting deer, shot five other hunters in whose tree stand he was trespassing. Story.

Uh oh, and wouldn’t you know it, he had an assault rifle:

Five deer hunters were shot to death and three were wounded Sunday by a man who was hunting from someone else’s tree stand in northern Wisconsin, authorities said.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark.

The bizarre attack happened on private land in this Sawyer County town about noon on the second day of the gun deer season, a time when hundreds of thousands of deer hunters are in the woods throughout Wisconsin.

Sawyer County Chief Deputy Tim Zeigle said Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark about 4 p.m. on a road about one mile from the scene, just across the Sawyer County border in Rusk County.

Vang was armed with an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle, a weapon that’s similar to a 30.06 but seldom used by deer hunters, Zeigle said.

Let the call for a renewed ban begin! Oh, wait, somewhere out there it already has.

Personally, I think there’s more to the story–like the relationship between the shooter and the dead and wounded–that will not be included in follow-up stories after the nationwide gun banning crowd crows about the dangers of guns.

Disabled dolphin jumping again with world’s first artificial fin, seeking Sarah Connor.

What the (obscenity deleted) is the Toronto Star thinking to entertain the question Should Canada indict Bush?

When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa — probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or should he be charged with war crimes?

It’s an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under Canada’s Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada’s ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new International Criminal Court. While never tested, it lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign leader like Bush could face arrest.

In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute, it is any conduct defined as such by “customary international law” or by conventions that Canada has adopted.

Holy faltering hockey league, but I’m volunteering for the invasion force to liberate Bush should some Canadian try to make a statement by doing this. Crikey on a cracker, but doesn’t this Walkom fellow understand that the local bar’s softball team in the J’s summer social league could successfully trump the entire Canadian military? I mean, no matter how well the six Canadians remaining in the Canadian military can fight, they’re still outnumbered because, remember, in softball there are ten players on the field. Even if the Canadian military calls up the reserves composed of out-of-work NHL players, we’ll call up the gas station’s softball team!

Canadian winter be damned! I’m from Wisconsin. Bring it.

It’s amazing that anyone would take these sorts of sentiments seriously. I don’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be so glib.

But Thomas Hokkum is no Gordon Sinclair.

(Link seen on Little Green Footballs.)

No, please, it is a mental illness, making me a protected class completely unfireable in the workplace and able to seek special accommodation from the rest of you:

Animal hoarders are not necessarily mentally ill, said Gail Steketee, a psychologist at Boston University. “The best bet is to call it a wellintentioned behavior gone awry.”

Steketee is one of dozens of scientists who volunteer with the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium in Boston, a group formed in 1997 to study the problem. There is no known treatment, she said.

Animal hoarding, a term coined five years ago, is defined as collecting more animals than can be cared for, combined with a failure to realize the squalid conditions are hurting both the homeowner and the animals.

Someone fund another study, and keep going until I get to collect Social Security for having large numbers of cats.

Voters in Columbia, Missouri have apparently passed referenda decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana: Voters cut marijuana penalties:

Decriminalization means if you’re caught in the city with a small amount of marijuana, “you don’t get arrested, you don’t go to jail, and you don’t get a record,” according to Dan Viets, a Columbia defense attorney who helped spearhead the effort to pass the propositions. He’s also defended clients against marijuana charges here for 18 years.

Fortunately, though, the United States Congress will undoubtedly move quickly to make it a Federal crime to possess a joint to cover situations such as this where residents of a particular area try to determine their own standards of behavior.