Category: News

You know, the media tends to really get down on surveillance in pursuit of terrorism. However, have you noticed how any intrusive police actions that infringe upon private citizens are okay if it falls under behavior that the media dislikes, such as driving after a couple beers?

Here’s the story:

Police in St. Charles County are drawing a new weapon in their fight to stop drunk drivers — blood testing.

On Thursday night, about two dozen officers from several area police departments are holding what they’re calling a “no refusal” checkpoint to catch impaired drivers.

From 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., police will stop all drivers at a busy intersection near Interstate 70, the city’s Main Street corridor and the Ameristar Casino. If those arrested on suspicion of driving drunk refuse an officer’s request for a breath test, police plan to get on-the-spot court orders for blood tests from a nearby on-call prosecutor and circuit judge.

Though the approach has already been tested in at least three other states, police say this style of checkpoint combining the “no refusal” element may be the first of its kind in Missouri. Police and advocates for tougher enforcement hope the effort adds muscle to a criminal justice system that often fails to keep drunk drivers off the roads.

Checkpoints, prosecutors and judges waiting on speed dial to issue warrants based only on refusal to submit to search, what isn’t to like if you’re pro-statist in pursuit of trivial goals or a pro-statist eager to just erode civil liberties because you can?

You want to get men into church? This ain’t the way:

On the Sunday before Easter, the Rev. Tom Skiles bounded onto a stage in the gym of Simpson Elementary School here.

Spirit of St. Louis Church’s praise band had just finished four chest-thumping Christian rock tunes, complete with light show, and Skiles’ flock of about 100 was settling into the metal folding chairs lined up in front of the stage.

“This is an awesome time of year, and I’m really pumped about what’s about to happen,” Skiles said. The pastor, 36, his head shaved, was dressed in jeans and blazer over a red T-shirt and spoke into his headset microphone.

What’s about to happen at SOS Church is a connection between the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the spinal cranks, head butts and anaconda chokes of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. As Skiles spoke, a large screen behind him projected the red UFC logo on a chain-link background, a reference to the cage in which UFC fighters do battle.

The church rents space each Sunday from the school, and on Easter the gym will be outfitted with an octagonal ring where Skiles will begin a four-week preaching theme based on the hugely popular sport of extreme fighting, or mixed martial arts. MMA, as fans know it, combines a variety of fighting techniques, from punching to kicking to elbowing to choking.

This is:

The Barna Group, a Christian research organization, has shown in surveys over the last decade that women attend church in much greater numbers than men.

Call it the “Surf City” strategy: tell the guys that there are two girls for every boy, and you’ll find a lot more boys interested in going. Why churches and universities don’t play this up, I don’t understand.

Well, except for the universities. That would be objectivating the girls.

Then they came for big screen televisions, and no doubt they’ll notice:

The California proposal—which could be adopted this summer—would forbid retailers from selling TVs that require what state officials think is too much power. Proponents claim they are mandating energy efficiency, and who could object to that? The practical effect, however, would be to remove TVs with screens 40 inches or bigger from the market.

Why not let the controlled markets work, and just let the sales fall as part of a depression caused by other leaders of that mindset?

Because that’s not ruling the peasants, baby.

Semitrailer truck carrying kegs of beer rolls over near Miller Park on I-94:

Crews will have to unload kegs of beer from a semitrailer that rolled over near Miller Park and they will have to close all westbound lanes of I-94 some time this afternoon when they’re ready to remove the truck from the freeway.

Except for some minor bruising, the kegs seem to be okay.

You know what would really suck? Getting hit by a keg truck and having the accident rupture some kegs which leak into your car and into your mouth and and you get a DUI for it. Now that would suck.

That’s what makes me exceptional at software QA. A good imagination for how it could be worse.

The problem is, his country is apparently the European Union.

From the London Telegraph, a story that covers the Republican wrath over President Obama’s remarks:

In a speech in France, a country that has been a bastion of anti-US sentiment in recent years, the President said: “In America, there is a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

“But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious. Instead of recognising the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what is bad. On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common.”

You know, I’m mostly Republican, but all American. President Obama can call me those things if he wants, but if he’s talking trash about America, now that does rankle me. I feel as though I should explain to him as I would a two-year-old that this behavior is inappropriate.

Perhaps this is President Obama’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech. Except in his case, one can reasonably wonder if he wishes it were so.

Krauthammer says:

(Video seen on Neo-neocon.)

Power Line guys say:

Barack Obama’s criticism of America before a French audience takes this approach to a new level. He is after all the president of the United States. Obama nevertheless passed judgment on the United States and found America wanting….

Gabriel Malor adds:

This guy is going to stand up Over There and badmouth Americans and President Bush? He’s a coward with an inferiority complex, a desperate desire to win the approval of his perceived European betters. What an ass.

County DA: No shooting victims could’ve been saved:

A faster response by emergency officials to the attack at an immigrant services center in Binghamton would have saved no lives, a county prosecutor said Sunday.

You know who might have saved lives? A concealed carry citizen on the scene.

Kaiser fires 15 workers for snooping in octuplet mom’s medical records:

A Kaiser Permanente hospital located in a Los Angeles suburb has fired 15 employees and reprimanded eight others for improperly accessing the personal medical records of Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to octuplets in January.

The unauthorized accessing of Suleman’s electronic records at the medical center in Bellflower, Calif., violated a California law designed to safeguard the privacy of health care data, according to Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson, who said the snooping incidents have been reported to the California Department of Public Health.

Ah, yes, practices, procedures, and laws. They don’t prevent this sort of petty violations of privacy. And they won’t when the data is stored in a very large government database to which every petty bureaucrat will have access.

But they give the legislators a nice, warm cover when they make it all possible.

Say it ain’t so! The government based legislation lobbied by industrialists on the industrialists’ marketing brochures and not on reality? Be still my beating heart (as soon as its beating is too expensive for Washington)!

It sounds like such a simple thing to do: buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, save the planet.

But a lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

On the dark side (which is the optimistic side for some people today), this will cut down on light pollution. And a bulb that does not illuminate is more energy efficient that the most energy efficient bulb that does.

In the meantime, remember, you have no choice come 2012!

President Obama, speaking on the dystopia he would inflict upon Americans:

“There is a moral imperative to healthcare,” Obama said. “Having said that, if we don’t address costs, I don’t care how heartfelt our efforts are, we will not get this done. … We’ve got to balance our heart and head as we move this process forward.”

Well, here’s how they balance the costs in Britain (formerly Great Britain, but now not so much):

A seriously ill baby has died just hours after a judge ruled doctor’s should turn off his life support machine against his parents’ wishes.

Here’s what the judge says about your right to life:

But yesterday, judge Mrs Justice Parker ruled the boy did not have the right to life ‘in all circumstances’.

The circumstance that abrogate that right to live: it’s to expensive to the government, the health care provider.

It would be easy for me to make a pithy response that using the heart and the head in government health care means some department head determines when your heart stops, but let’s be honest. Most of these decisions won’t be made by department heads or courts; instead, it will be some 24 year old with a social work degree killing off the expensive through bureaucratic process.

Or maybe ObamaDontCare.

Cal Thomas:

. McCaughey discovered buried in the bill a new bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. Among other things, it means a Washington official will “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.” Some of that occurs now, but this would take it to a whole new level.

…

Euthanasia will not originate with your beloved grandmother or parents. It will start in a public hospital with a 100-year-old woman who has multiple health problems and “wants” to die so as not to “burden” anyone. Public opinion polls will determine that a majority favor letting – even helping – the old girl die.

Yes, there are times when a patient and his family may decide to forgo treatment and allow death to occur, but that decision should not be made by a government official. Once that door is opened (as it was with abortion) there will be no closing it and dying will become a patriotic duty when the patient’s balance sheet shows a deficit.

A shot of night-night will always be cheaper than any condition worse than a bad haircut, and it might be cheaper than a second haircut. Keep this in mind when begging for government health care. You’ll pay for what you get.

Secondly, no quote here, but Scott Atlas lays out some points of pride for our “broken” health care system. Like the supermarkets stuffed with copious meats, dry goods, and fresh fruits vegetables in the middle of winter, our enjoyment of the wonderful things we have are becoming dangerously divorced from the understanding of the contingent nature of them. The lifestyle and system into which we have been born is not the floor of all possible outcomes. It’s near the topmost of possibility.

Beginning in 2009, new currency will replace Federal Reserve Note with Federal Note because there’s no longer any reserve left in the Federal Government, and surely no rights left to the states or the people.

Estimated cost savings: $303 million annually. Of course, by “savings,” that means “$303 million funneled to Chicago activist organizations/political fundraisers,” but that’s what happens when the government controls the dictionary that the newspapers use.

Cradle-to-grave health insurance becomes more cost effective, yea, efficient, the closer the grave is to the cradle.

Build that into political law at your own risk.

Just kidding! If you’re building the laws, you have special exemptions.

Chances that President Obama will heed one of his most beloved senior advisors and give out a brand new house to everyone in the audience today in Mesa, Arizona: 1 in 2000.

It would ensure enthusiastic, bipartisan crowds (including a couple of Republican governors who might need somewhere to live after their next election) at all his stumps and it would keep the wife of a Republican state legislature from upstaging him again. Win-win!

From a Washington Times article entitled "‘Doom’ talk scored as ‘not presidential’", we have a former "senior aide" to George W. Bush showing that Republican professional political parasites can look like twits:

Brad Blakeman, a senior aide to Mr. Bush from 2001 to 2004, said the new president’s language is immature.

“It’s not presidential. An American leader needs to be hopeful and optimistic – and truthful. Everything he says is parsed; everything he says is searched for deep meaning. When he goes to ‘DefCon 5’ on the economy and says that we’re on the brink of catastrophe, it’s absolutely insane.”

As anyone whose life was changed by the 1983 film WarGames can tell you, the DEFCON scale goes from 5, the lowest which is used during normal peacetime conditions, to 1, which means the mountain is closed, brother.

Maybe professional political parasites should really stay away from the military talk since they don’t teach that so well at the Kennedy School of Government.

That is David Axelrod’s wife and kid on the cover of Parade magazine this week.

Congress has passed the new, $787 billion dollar stimulus bill.

Anyone else remember how, in the ancient history of a half decade, a $250 billion dollar transportation bill was a big deal?

Then came TARP at $700 billion (essentially, a number the then-Treasury Secretary made up. Now we have $787 billion.

Thus, the new floor is set. Next time, Congress will have to pass something even bigger. Which they probably will. And anything less than $787 billion dollars will seem as though Congress isn’t trying harder.

(At least one of these links seen on The Anchoress, where she’s gloomier than I am.)

Also read this for a summary of some of the things in the bill. At 1000 pages, nobody really knows what all is in it. Some lobbyists no doubt know the parts they wrote, but no one knows what is in the whole thing.

The two most e-mailed stories yesterday from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Click for full size

1. St. Louis Zoo elephant has deadly herpes strain
2. St. Louis keeps No. 1 for two STDs

Good:

• Bill increasing penalties for obscure governance.
• Midwives legalized.
• Bill making simultaneous legislative position and political consultancy business illegal.

Bad:

• Bill to allow students who don’t graduate chance to participate in graduation if they’re disabled. The disabled have more legal rights than the enabled, do they not? As a bonus, this bill has a girl’s name attached to it. A MfBJN rule of thumb: if a bill has a child’s name on it, it is a bad law rushed into the books for sentimental reasons.

AP helpfully kicks Bush again: Bush overpaid banks in bailout, watchdog says.

So, will Obama be at fault when the new stimulus plans, or will it be the dark nature of humanity rejecting or sinning against the perfection of Porktopia?