Category: News

In an otherwise good, Spoons-approved column for the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman identifies the slippery slope that gun banners are encouraging with the Assault Weapons Ban. Unfortunately, he deploys a stink bomb of clich (pronounced, yes, clitch):

The guns used by the Red Army and assorted guerrillas around the world are indeed automatic weapons, firing up to 100 rounds a minute with a single squeeze of the trigger. But the so-called AK-47s allowed before the ban were semiautomatics, which fire only once each time the trigger is pulled. They are to authentic military weapons what a beer-league softball player is to Barry Bonds.

Yick. Poor form, Peter.

So I read in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that Marquette University might return to the Warriors as its mascot:

A $2 million gift isn’t tempting enough to get Marquette University to change its nickname back to Warriors, but the fact that an important alumnus asked for the change during a public event is forcing the university to think about it.

Wayne Sanders, the vice chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, said at the end of the commencement address to Marquette graduates Sunday that he and another, unnamed trustee each would give $1 million to Marquette for the switch from Golden Eagles to Warriors.

School officials declined the money Monday, but they said that in coming weeks, the board will consider formally revisiting the decade-long debate.

Jeez, I feel old. A decade-long debate. Here’s what I wrote in the Marquette Tribune in 1993(?) in my column “Through These Eyes”:

Through These Eyes #6: The Great Mascot Controversy

In the interest of saving the university some money, I would like to make my contribution to the “Name the Mascot” competition. There’s no need for them to go throwing away money to a private consultant, even though I realize they just stuck us for ten percent more for just such academic emergencies. Let that much-needed cash go to making some dean’s office more competitively decorated like that of other schools.

Okay, the Native Americans got a little bent out of shape that the university used an image of a Native American for a while there. I know what great strain and emotional upset some of them must have gone through attending basketball games and seeing the mascot, even if it was a descendent of the original Native Americans. This great debate is not limited strictly to the campus. All over the country, groups of Native American are protesting the use of their heritage on athletic teams. I mean, I can understand. I abhor the New York Yankees. How dare they?
So now the university needs a new, non-offensive mascot. Something that can be identified with the Warrior. I humbly submit the following.

How about a white man dressed in skins carrying a club? Think about it, a nice barbarian figure for our sporting events. No, wait. That might be deemed too something-ist for our school if we featured a White European Male mascot like that. Besides, it is not a sort of figure easily identifiable with a Warrior. We’d hate to be mistaken for the Marquette Neanderthals.

Okay, idea two. A nice knight figure. In armor. A chivalrous warrior. No, wait. That’s still a European figure. Besides, some Arabic or Islamic groups might get angry because every few years a bunch of these guys would get together and try to take over the Middle East, or select parts thereof.

Okay, check this out. An African tribesman. With a spear and paint. No, can’t do that. The African Americans would have the same objections as the Native Americans.

Well, how about a samurai in his battle robe and armor, helmet adorned with ox horns, quiver, gold-studded sword, his ancestral crest, the whole bit? Maybe a neat little pseudo-seppuku when the sports team is down? Oh, there’s that blasted heritage argument again.

How about that lone American warrior, the cowboy? Why not, Rick Fields classifies that historical figure as a warrior in his book The Code of the Warrior. Since I’m running low on ideas, why not? A six-gun and ten gallon hat, idealizing the American spirit of independence and swift justice. Uh-oh, wait a minute. Cowboys tended to shoot Native Americans, didn’t they? Maybe this version of our mascot wouldn’t placate them so well….

I have to admit, I’m getting a little frustrated here. When I think of a Warrior from history, I tend to think in terms of different heritages like that, and that’s already proven to be taboo. Either the Warrior was the member of a distinct ethnic group that can and will be offended, and/or they killed people of an offendable group.

I mean, that’s the way I see it. Of course, that is ignoring the common denominator among all Warriors, which is some sort of hardiness and bravery, a willingness to risk their very lives in pursuit of what they thought was right, the skills of life and death intertwined into a person who would kill or die for honor and justice. The Native American Warrior did this. Maybe having a brave as our mascot is not so much a way of spitting on a race of man and saying “Nyah nyah, you injun,” as it is a way of showing respect for a gallant breed of our species and the finest their culture produced.

Or, I guess we could have Patty Smythe mousse up her hair and paint her face up and start singing, “Shooting out the walls of heartache, bang-bang…” But that might get a bit expensive.

(Pssst. Want a bit of irony? The Marquette Tribune had four rotating columnist of varying political viewpoints–Right, Right to Center, Center to Left, and Left. I was Center to Left–less a tribute to the “right wing” nature of the Marquette campus (as a Jesuit university) and more to the preconceived notion of what long hair meant. A mullet. You got something to say about it?)

Check this out, gentlemen:

A man has been charged with child abuse for not applying enough sunblock to his 12-year-old son before a day at the beach.

The boy was severely burned as a result, authorities said.

Walter McKelvie Jr., 43, of Vineland, was indicted Tuesday and charged with one count of child abuse and neglect in the July 20 incident, in which he took his mentally disabled son to the beach in Wildwood.

A sunburn as child neglect. Great. Were this the case, my father would have been up every time he toook us swimming at his new wife’s parents’ pool. Sunblock? In the 1980s? Are you kidding me? Wear a t-shirt while swimming? Naaah! We were young and we could take it.

Granted, this child is “mentally disabled”. but its meaning is not clarified in the article and can be nebulous to say the least. Dyslexic? Incapable of speech? “Mentally disabled” is all we have, so I will assume the worst for the father, which is “not very.”

Because:

The son, identified only as R.M., suffered large, bleeding blisters on his back and face. Authorities were alerted by the boy’s mother, who has custody of him but was not with him at the beach, according to Assistant Cape May County Prosecutor Meghan Hoerner.

Hell hath no fury. And back off, you hosers, I’m the product of a broken home, so I will tell you so.

Perspective: Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the old man was flirting with the beach bunnies, impervious to their disinterest to the mid-life-crisised, pierced, and balding man with the child with Down’s syndrome and said child boiled during this several hour beerspan. But the article doesn’t give me that. I reserve the right to judge this a case of ex-wife seeks revenge through the criminal courts.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Mike Nichols of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel provides a little perspective on the cataclysmically-worsening climate:

In Elm Grove and Brookfield, so much rain fell in an eight-hour period in 1997 that it was labeled a “300-year-storm” – just about the worst thing to happen, we were led to believe, since the invention of the loincloth.

That’s definitely bad – though not nearly as bad as the “500-year storm” that reportedly hit the exact same area the very next year.

Not nearly as cursed, either, as what transpired in the late-1990s in New Berlin.

Here’s a real paragraph from a story about New Berlin that ran in this paper three years ago:

“Storm water management efforts were under way in New Berlin long before 100-year storms hit the city in 1997, 1998 and 2000…”

That’s right. The only year between 1996 and 2001 that there was not a so-called 100-year storm in New Berlin was 1999.

But take his perspective with a grain of salt. He’s just a newspaper columnist, not a scientist seeking funding for his particular project or trying to better the lives of lesser men through dictating policy in his field of expertise, damn its impact on everything else. That is, Nichols has an agenda of some sort.

In his column in last Thursday’s Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman explains High gas prices are no cause for panic.

Lead:

Back in the 1970s, younger Americans might be surprised to learn, government bureaucrats controlled all prices in the economy. I’m not talking about the economy of the Soviet Union or Cuba–I’m talking about the economy of the United States. If a company wanted to raise its prices, it had to ask for permission from a federal agency, which didn’t always agree.

The experiment was a disaster, and it cured most politicians of the urge to meddle in such matters. They learned they weren’t qualified to decide the correct price of any commodity. Except one: gasoline.

Libertarians, for their foreign policy shortcomings, understand laissez-faire.

Misplaced modifier of the week, from John Kass’s column in last Thursday’s Chicago Tribune:

“I saw no weapons being used,” wrote Harrison, the wife of a retired cop whose husband was in the hospital, leaving her alone that night when it happened.

Or maybe it’s one of those open marriages.

Go read the column. It’s about how a single man, who confronts a suspicious character, is being persecuted by the authorities who know that prosecution and trial are but one “tool” in their toolbox to breaking someone.

Hold on to sixteen, as long as you can.
Changes come around real soon and make us women and men.

A little unwritten mandate to the NPR news types who led off the 3:30 newscast with a two-sentence “story” that relatives of and former Abu Gharib detainees want the soldiers who humiliated them put to death. That’s the whole story. A throwaway line with no balance or other information, undoubtedly crafted carefully to work “Abu Gharib” into the the top of another newscast. Obviously, all those liberal arts classes did not go for nothing.

A hearty and somewhat louder unwritten mandate to you for giving this sort of barbaric, disproportionate punishment proposal a forum, which might lead some people to even entertain the notion that that West Virginia private is going to face a firing squad or a stoning for stripping clothes from a detainee or for making an Middle Easterner put a shoe in his mouth. How dare you? How <omitted> dare you?

What do I mean an unwritten mandate? Well, gentle reader, as this is a family blog, I won’t actually type it here, but suffice to say that when it’s a spoken mandate and I am feeling particularly combative, I tend to pronounce the verb portion to rhyme with awk.

Ponder this story: £40m Heathrow gold robbery foiled:

A gang of men got out of the van and threatened warehouse staff with at least one firearm and other weapons, including knives, Scotland Yard said.

The gang tried to steal the gold bullion at the warehouse and force their way into a secure area containing a large quantity of bank notes, police said.

In a nation where citizens don’t carry guns, the bad guys feel safe trying to steal $70 million dollars with one gun and a couple of knives.

Thieves would not be so bold in great swaths of the United States and in Israel.

Class, today’s compare and contrast courtesy of FoxNews.com and CNN.com. The subject: Sarin gas munitions in Iraq. Right-click and select View Image to see full image for each.

FoxNews.com	CNN.com
10:17 am
“Nerve Gas Released By Iraq Roadside Bomb“ Important stuff up first. Nerve Gas. Iraq. Roadside Bomb.	“Artillery round in Iraq emits sarin gas, U.S. military says“ The incident’s diminishing begins. It’s just an artillery round emitting a gas, not an improvised explosive device. Kudos, too, for using the Authorities Allege Asterisk rhetorical device to make the teller of the incident into the story.
3 pm (sorry, no screen caps)
“U.S. Confirms WMD in Iraq“	None. Main headline involves story of Iraq Governing Council leader.
7 pm
“Sarin, Mustard Gas Found in Iraq“ Elaborating and emphasizing the WMD.	“Busy Hurricane Season Ahead“ Nothing to see here, folks..

Within nine hours, CNN had decided that further evidence of Iraq’s non-compliance with U.N. mandates regarding banned weapons and weapons systems are no longer important. Not as important as seasonal weather patterns in the Caribbean, anyway.

Update: Ravenwood noticed it, too.

John Kass, of the Chicago Tribune, reflects on what Abu Gharib says about America (registration required). Cripes, what to excerpt?

You might see these photos as evidence that we should never have been in Iraq, that we’re no different than our enemy, that we should pull out now.

I’d respectfully disagree with that.

We are different. There is no moral equivalency here, despite what some politicians want you to believe.

Those Americans who committed outrages at Abu Ghraib should be sent to prison, and not only the enlisted people and the strange woman with the dog leash, but their commanders as well. Let’s be clear on that. Torture and the mass murder of innocents was Saddam’s policy. That is not our policy. Just as the severing of heads and putting it on video is not our policy.

As a political tactic, comparing the United States to Saddam Hussein promotes uncertainty in selected constituencies, particularly the young. It is absolutely necessary that we reject it, because it saps American confidence. It is dangerous.

There is no other option but to accomplish the mission in Iraq, to develop some stable government and turn the country over to the Iraqi people. Yes, that might mean that U.S. forces will be there for years.

That should give you a taste, but you’ll have to read the whole thing to see him quote Victor Davis Hanson.

Overlawyered.com and Radley Balko report on the next target of Big Litigation: the alcohol industry.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, this cannot stand. I urge you to each contribute heavily to fill the coffers of the defense funds for the brewers, vintners, and distillers. I myself like to contribute and show my support by stopping by the liquor store frequently, and I plead that you do the same. And invite me over.

Thank you, that is all.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has uncovered:

Black students in the St. Louis area are more likely to attend a school in a district that is virtually all black than they were in the 1960s.

Fifty years after the highest court in the land declared school segregation illegal, the region’s student population as a whole has become more diverse. But still about half the area’s students – white and black – attend public schools where nearly all the children look like themselves, a Post-Dispatch analysis shows.

As part of its long commemoration of the Brown v Board of Education, the paper concludes that schools are still segregated. The paper, however, misunderstands or misrepresents a basic concept in segregation: Segregate is a transitive verb, wherein a subject segregates a direct object. Segregation was bad when governments segregated people based upon race because it did not allow them to choose the schools their children attended–the government assigned it by race. With Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court said that separate facilities for members of different races were inherently unequal.

Once governments quit segregating pupils by race, segregation ended. However, the Post-Dispatch, arguing in favor of expensive forced integration programs, intimates that since schools are not integrated, they’re still segregated. But schools are now segregated by choice, as people send their children to schools where they live and can choose where they live or they can send their children to private schools.

Hold on, some people would argue, parents are not free to choose where they live! A family living on a single service industry salary cannot live in the Ladue school district! Therefore, they are not free! They’re segregated to places they can afford to live and are thus not free and their children should be bussed to Ladue!

If you think that, I have two words for you: But since this blog is read by my mother-in-law, I won’t say them, but I will think them very hard in your general direction. First, you’re misrepresenting freedom to choose as freedom to make any choice or take any action. Freedom to choose means you can choose what’s available to you, not among all possibilities real or imagined. Just because I’m not free to travel astrally between the galaxies, soaring on the cosmic wind, that does not mean I am unfree to choose between the possibilities available to me. So parents are free to move, if they want, to places with better schools and/or to make sacrifices for their children’s educations if that’s what they value.

As for anecdotal evidence, I can only offer the following: A close friend of mine attended the Principia, an elite high school in the St. Louis area. Her mother had gone there. So she did. Of course, her mother made extreme sacrifices to send my friend to the Princip. Her mother was a single mother, raising two children in Colorado and New Mexico, but she moved the family to St. Louis and made sacrifices, deals, and relied on the help of others to ensure her children could attend the school she chose for them. She chose. Period.

So feel free to continue to ignore the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s perspective on this issue, and continue to take care of your children and your schools instead of forcing the government to waste its limited resources on creating a sixties Coke commercial world of properly rainbowed schools of which the Post-Dispatch would approve.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch approvingly reports:

The mother of accused serial killer Maury Travis, whose bizarre hanging death in the St. Louis County Justice Center was ruled a suicide, filed a suit Friday against the county, the architects who designed the jail and the contractors who built it.

The federal suit by Sandra Travis Harden claims her son’s civil rights were violated by negligence and building flaws while he was supposed to be on a suicide watch after his arrest in June 2002 on federal charges involving two kidnappings.

Her boy killed himself, but his civil rights were violated because the government did not restrict him enough so that he could not kill himself.

Don’t dwell on it too long, gentle reader, for it might cause your head to explode, and I don’t want to violate your civil rights by not preventing you from being informed.

At which time, I guess, your survivors could sue my family, the makers of the components within my computer, my Internet Service Provider, blogger, and the company that built the comfortable chair in which I am sitting. Also, to spare the company litigation, I would like to point out I am not drinking a delicious Guinness at this time.

Dan Caesar writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

With a week of retrospective, that seems to have played out to a “T” in the Blues’ nixing Fox Sports Net’s desire to keep Ken Wilson, who had broadcast Blues games for a record-tying 20 full seasons.

Geez, I think that’s supposed to be a metaphor. Is he talking about tee-ball? A tie? I don’t know.