Category: News

Andrew Sullivan psychoanalyzes voters in the middle of the country:

My own hunch is that these voters do not like a massive increase in government spending, a huge jump in public debt, and a post-war policy in Iraq that seemed blindsided by reality. But here’s my other belief, and it’s about Abu Ghraib. The images from that prison shamed America in deep and inchoate ways. Traditional conservative patriots in particular were appalled. The awful truth is that this president presided over one of the most damaging blows to American prestige and self-understanding in recent history. He may not have been directly responsible; but it was on his watch. And he ensured that no one high up in his administration took the fall for the horror. I think traditional patriots were saddened, shocked and horrified by the abuse and, to a lesser extent, the Bush administration’s self-protective response to it.

How can you doubt this man? His last hunch was that these very same people are over-represented in government and undertaxed.

In today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, David Nicklaus defends Wal-Mart. Good to see someone with a proper capitalist attitude writing on the business page.

Sample:

Wal-Mart may be a danger to competitors or even to retail clerks’ unions. But it’s hard to imagine the retailer damaging an entire state.

Yet that’s the claim of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which last week listed Vermont among the nation’s 11 most endangered historic places. The threat, the National Trust’s news release said, is “an invasion of behemoth stores that could destroy much of what makes Vermont Vermont.”

Preservationists should stick to saving historic buildings and neighborhoods from the bulldozer and wrecking ball. When they try to keep one company out of an entire state, they’re really fomenting class warfare.

Not class warfare. They’re trying to foment a Marxist revolution.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports on a new initiative to curb cruisers: advertisements on the back of city buses which are meant to be seen by people driving in cars. That’s the kind of innovative thinking that would put abstinence-education information on condom wrappers, which someone somewhere surely thinks the government is not funding enough.

But speaking of cruising, a resident intones:

The common notion of cruising is “totally inconsistent,” with what really occurs, he said.

McNeely said the cruising he sees goes far beyond high school kids heading up and down Highway 100 on a Saturday night.

“You have the loud, loud music going. People getting in and out of cars. People riding down the street hanging out of the sunroofs, hanging out the windows,” McNeely said.

And it’s often lewd, he said, with cruisers stopping to urinate in yards, and young women flashing their breasts from passing cars.

“It’s likely they’ll be topless as well as bottomless with a thong on,” McNeely said.

What, loud music, obnoxiousness, and chasing members of the opposite/preferred sex? What is McNeely’s idea of cruising, riding along in a calaboose?

Kudos to KMOX radio for an on the scene report of a possible sighting of a potential person of alleged Middle Eastern complection today. I think it was Kevin Killeen, reporting live from Illinois, who filed this report, transcribed from memory and appropriately snarked-up:

I’m reporting live from <highway> and <highway> where several acres’ of petroleum storage facilities sit unguarded behind a chain link fence. This morning, witnesses saw an SUV parked by the side of the road taking pictures. Inside the SUV, a dark-complected man with dark hair and a woman sped off at a suspiciously high rate of speed when approached. Authorities are investigating.

That’s it, fellows. You get the gist of the report there. Something suspicious was reported, but nothing is known yet, but we’re going to broadcast it live to prove we have a news team here comprised of three people and a van. Also, we’re going to identify in great detail the location and how soft the target is. Back to you, Carole.

:: snort ::

Mark Steyn, from his Chicago Sun-Times column today:

But that’s the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren’t a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren’t a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn’t lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.

What he said.

This story in the Denver Post sends an interesting message to citizens following DOJ instructions to BOLO for terrorist suspects:

2 suspected al-Qaeda agents dropped in for meal, says Denny’s manager in Avon

The FBI office in Denver has received “numerous” calls about the seven people believed to be associated with al-Qaeda pictured Wednesday in newspapers.

Monique Kelso, spokeswoman for the Denver office, wouldn’t characterize the calls as “sightings,” but at least one was reported as such.

Samuel Mac, manager of the Denny’s in Avon, isn’t happy with the response he got from the FBI when he reported that two of them ate at his restaurant Wednesday.

That’s the set-up. Here’s the punchline:

But she [Monique Kelso, spokeswoman for the Denver FBI field office] said the FBI has no reason to believe any of the seven are in Colorado or traveling through.

Got that? If you think you see any of the suspects, call the authorities, who won’t find your information believable.

Swell.

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.