Category: News

Robert J. Samuelson, economic columnist for the Washington Post, usually offers sensible advice on economics. However, in this column about oil prices, he proffers the following dangerous aside:

(And yes, we need a gradually rising fuel tax to create a strong market for more-efficient vehicles.)

You know, I find it terribly inconsistent that so many people who lament the high price of gas are the same people who, only a couple short years or months ago, were clamoring for a high fuel tax to alter people’s behavior are now up in arms about the market-dictated rising prices of fuel. Just think where the price of gas would be if the East Coast “Conservatives” had had their way.

The behavior we alter with any new revenue stream is the government’s: it spends the money, and when the citizen behavior is effectively altered, the government will have to come up with alternative behaviors to modify or raise general revenue streams. We know that the only painful cuts the government tends to make are slower increases in spending.

Which is why I’m surprised at Samuelson’s advice here, coming as it is in the middle of a column on high fuel prices.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Headline: Texas polygamist kids abused, officials say. Evidence offered in the brief story?

Commissioner Carey Cockerell, who oversees the state agency now caring for the children, said medical examinations have revealed numerous physical injuries, including broken bones in “very young children.”

How many hundreds of kids did they take to find “numerous physical injuries” including broken bones in “very young children”?

Nearly 500.

Go to any elementary school. If you see a cast, that child has been abused, right?

St. Charles art center seeks more city aid:

A former industrial site that has become a hub for the local arts scene and a popular event venue is seeking more city money to plug a budget gap.

One would ask how popular it is, then, if it cannot sustain itself. Very popular, no doubt; ask anyone who’s there or who runs it.

Best quote of the day, though, for its galling honesty:

“The obvious thing is to go to your daddy” before seeking additional private money, said Dick Sacks, who heads the foundry’s board.

Who’s your daddy?

Kudos to the Metropolitan Mass Transit Boondoggle Association for getting a bill reduced $95,000:

A consulting firm that worked on Metro’s failed lawsuit against MetroLink designers has agreed to knock $94,617 off its final bill after the agency questioned some travel expenses and other charges.

Too bad the ill-conceived bucket was so big as to make this win negligible:

Metro, formally known as the Bi-State Development Agency, spent more than $21 million on its three-year legal battle against the original designers and construction managers of the Shrewsbury MetroLink line. But after a three-month trial, a St. Louis County jury ruled in favor of the defendants, who had counter-sued.

Metro later reached a $6 million settlement with the contractors — bringing the agency’s total trial cost to $27 million.

With enough judicious budgeting like this, the whole thing will take an extra 30 minutes to go bankrupt.

CNN Radio reported about an automobile accident in remote Arizona that killed and injured a large number of people jammed into a truck. Just people, the radio announcer said. A special kind of people, my mind inferred. This AP article alludes to what special people they might be:

A pickup truck jammed with people has crashed in remote central Arizona. Four people are dead and nearly 30 are injured.

Authorities are investigating the immigration status of those involved in the Sunday morning rollover crash.

Funny that the Public Health aspect of illegal immigration is never discussed. That public money is spent on chasing down and treating people suffering from exposure or dehydration crossing in the desert or in treating people hurt in accidents where large numbers of them are crammed into trucks or whatnot.

Spurious and scurrilous laws are passed with larger impact to protect far smaller sample sizes of citizens. How about taking illegal immigration seriously and enforcing the laws or erecting the walls in the name of public safety?

Hah! Just kidding. People who do illegal things will do them regardless of how more illegal you make them; it’s always easier to layer on more control upon the law abiding than to bring the existing criminals to heel. See also all gun control attempts.

You remember the last time the media got hopped up on a shark frenzy? Summer 2001.

Now it’s an election year, and maybe I’m just on a hair trigger for my normal paranoia, but when I start hearing about the sharks ramping up their attacks, I’m suddenly worried about what effect a mass casualty attack would have on American soil right before the elections.

The truthers taking to the streets claiming Bush did it to stay in power, and maybe Bush even tries a Guiliani “I need to stay in power a little longer to handle it” attempt, and suddenly….

Well, use your fetid imagination if you’ve got one.

When someone wants to offer arguments on a political subject, how does the St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlight his reasoning? Hah! Trick question. It doesn’t; it highlights how he looks! The headline: A boy-next-door is fighting affirmative action. The lead:

Tim Asher sat calmly and appeared unfazed moments before he was to address a roomful of Latino leaders, some of whom were likely to be hostile to his message — that Missouri should end affirmative action programs based on race and gender.

In the last couple of months, Asher, 45, has become accustomed to speaking before skeptical crowds like this one at Hispanic Day at the Capitol.

Asher, with his boy-next-door looks, has become the face of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative.

Well, played, Post-Dispatch journalist and editor, well, played.

Content of his character and/or intellect? Nah, that might be too convincing; let’s diminish him by calling him a pretty boy.

An anonymous commenter proffers an informed argument that pitbulls and their owners are genetically defective and should be euthanized in a comment to this three year-old post.

You meet the nicest people as the result of Google search results, don’t you?

Another blog supports the thesis from my Suburban Journals column from yesterday: Some Things Are Still Cheap:

Once in a while at work I am taken aback at how cheap some things are. I find myself on occasion wondering how a certain item could be made in China, shipped over here, marked up, then marked up by me and still cost what is a relative pittance.

I have always been amazed at how cheaply you could eat if you needed to. I am not talking about USDA prime cuts here. If you were down and totally out and needed to resort to cheap food just to sustain, you can get by on just a few bucks a day. Mac and cheese is .59. A loaf of bread is still under a buck. Fruit and veggies are still relatively cheap compared to other foods.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

The headline is “Turtle-napper pleads pleads guilty“, but the story indicates the animals were merely poached:

The third of three men charged in a illegal turtle-napping scheme pleaded guilty in St. Louis today to a federal felony charge.

Bobby Wayne Pyburn, 20, admitted that he and Erich Wayne Higgins, 33, had set up nets and illegally trapped dozens of turtles late last summer in Missouri’s bootheel and sold them to Kenneth Brandon Reese, 26, in Arkansas. All of the men are from Lake City, Ark., the U.S. Attorney’s office said.

What’s the difference?

-Napping tends to refer to either the illegal capture of people or, less formally, pets. However, by applying it to wild animals instead of the more precise term for the crime that already exists, the journalist and writer are elevating the wild turtles to the same legal status as humans or human possessions.

Think I’m making too much of this? Well, try this analogy on for size. Poaching:-Napping::Hunting::Murdering.

In both cases, the gerund for an act involving wildlife is replaced with a legal term dealing with crimes against men to elevate your outrage at the lesser charge by making it sound like violence against man.

Orwell would be proud.

Noggle on driveways today, but it still pales compared to the achievements of others.

UPDATE: The link is way stale, but here is the column:

I think the St. Louis Post-Dispatch got things in the wrong order here when it describes a citizen expressing his views to his leaders:

Ignoring lobbying from a major Republican campaign donor, the House voted overwhelmingly Monday to grant the largest tax break ever in Missouri to a Canadian firm.

With little debate, legislators approved a package aimed at luring Montreal-based Bombardier Aerospace to build a $375 million plant near Kansas City International Airport.

The bipartisan vote was 125-16. The bill now moves to the Senate.

Bombardier could draw up to $40 million a year for 22 years, as could other “mega-projects” that invest at least $300 million and employ 1,000 people at above-average wages.

Critics, led by multimillionaire Rex Sinquefield of St. Louis, have questioned whether the state would get its money back. His free-market think tank, the Show-Me Institute, recommends the state give tax breaks to everyone instead of picking projects to promote.

The paper uses lobbying as a negatively laden code word these days which means “sought government attention.” The fact that he often gives to Republicans is also a code that he’s a fat cat. In short, the Post-Dispatch tries to marginalize the person’s views, which are that the state shouldn’t engage in crony capitalism and give breaks to its friends or to projects its legislators like.

A good principle, but not one to even consider when it comes from a wealthy Republican lobbyist.

The piece in bizjournals.com is entitled Yeah, it’s tax deadline, but government isn’t all bad, but I think I’ve summed up the point with my headline. Author asserts:

Sorry to disappoint all you tax-and-spend bashers out there. This won’t be another article bemoaning profligate government spending and the ill effects of our tax system on American businesses, jobs, consumers and bank accounts.

As worthy a cause as that is, it’s really too easy – shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. I need a more challenging task.

How about all the benefits our government bestows on us when it spends all that tax money?

Yeah, that’s the ticket – science fiction.

Let’s see.

Wait. Give me a minute. I’ll think of something.

Now, I’ve got it!

Technology.

We live in a society and economy that requires constant technological advances. Whatever your views on government, one is forced to admit the fact that government is responsible for funding basic research.

Well, the author certainly killed a number of words in his minimum with that transition, didn’t he?

But from then on, it’s all about how government buys us Tang by taking from my poor elderly one-eyed neighbor and giving to universities sitting on fat endowments and defense companies awash in government contracts.

Spare me the huzzahs.

A local Navy serviceperson dies, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is happy to run with the mother’s belief that the Navy caused her death through negligence. The conspiracy theory is a bit stunning in its details, including the charge that the servicewoman was ordered to clean up a bathroom instead of leaving it for the military’s maid service:

Her daughter returned to find sewage backed up in her bathroom at her barracks. The barracks chief provided the sailor and her roommate rubber gloves, scrub brushes and detergent and ordered them to clean it up.

Both became ill, but the roommate recovered.

. . .

“Whoever told those girls to clean up that bathroom, they have other people to clean those things up,” she said.

The woman’s death is sad, the grieving understandable. However, thinking the military is negligent for having a servicewoman clean a restroom (raw sewage? You mean the toilets backed up? Heaven forfend someone less than a hazmat team tackle that!) and agitating (for a settlement? An apology from George W. Bush? A chance to be the Cindy Sheehan of sewage?) is not understandable nor does it elicit sympathies of any but a few with an existent anti-military doctrinaires.

Like the editorial staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who runs these questioning stories relatively regularly.