Category: News

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.

Check out this reportage of three accidents in Missouri in the last day:

The man is active voice and is responsible for his accident:

Just after it started raining Wednesday evening, Jeremy D. Evans, 34, of Imperial, ran his 1986 Ford F150 pickup truck into a tree.

The first woman, though, was just unfortunate that her big mean vehicle acted of its own accord:

Allen’s car left the road and hit a tree, police said.

Finally, a second woman fell prey to wandering car syndrome:

The car went off the left side of the road, hit a concrete median and came to rest on the left shoulder of the highway, police said.

Also, note that the women were wearing seatbelts, which led to “moderate” injuries; the man, not wearing a seatbelt, also had “moderate” injuries, as though the consequences of ignoring the government diktat had no affect at all.

The Animal Effect, wherein an animal in jeopardy in a movie is more poignant than human carnage (a la Independence Day, where the loudest cheer erupted in the theater when the dog survived the destruction of LA whereas presumably hundreds of thousands of humans, including minor characters, did not), strikes the news:

Zookeepers were called in to help when police discovered a man-sized alligator in the basement of a Carthage home.

Police found the American alligator while responding to a call about an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound Monday.

The remainder of the story discusses the efforts to rescue the animal. No word on the accident victim or attempted suicide.

The man is just the man, but the alligator is an unspoiled child of Mother Gaia.

I only wish I were kidding, but I think it does fit into the current inversion of values, where all things of nature are more valuable than damn, dirty humans.

Prosecutors recognize that any of us who experience frustration with home improvement project are only a couple steps and some intelligence away from this:

Prosecutors are not expected to file charges against a Missouri man who fatally shot his wife while he was trying to install a satellite TV system in their home.

Henry County investigators ruled that Patsy Long’s March 22 death was accidental. Her husband, Ronald Long, fired his .22 caliber pistol from inside their Deepwater home after he couldn’t punch a hole through the exterior wall using other means.

On one hand, I am being a little snarky because this seems so foolish as to be negligent, but on the other, I am happy to see prosecutors who can see an accident that doesn’t want responsibility and a couple percentage points on their conviction rate.

I do think a gun safety course might be in order, though, ainna?

A line, any line. The St. Louis County municipality of Clayton refuses to give something to a land developer:

Clayton turned down a request last fall by the developer to include the land into an adjacent tax increment financing district.

Of course, my inner cynic (inner cynic? It’s showing all the freaking time) says this is only because the Soviet of Clayton has a better 10-year plan for a different TIF district gift to a different developer that includes the other land, but maybe, just maybe, Clayton is holding a line.

Blanket immunity means cops in Missouri can brandish weapons in anger and not get charged for a felony.

This actually is a good intersection of bad laws with belligerent behavior of law enforcement, the two things that are working most quickly to sap the respect for the rule of law in this country.

Some people might point to rap music or movies, but I’ll point to the ill-conceived institutional examples.

Well, the actual headline is Crestwood mall to become open-air lifestyle center, but it looks to be another case of a mechanism to support the risk-free lifestyle large land developers enjoy in the 21st century:

Crestwood Plaza will be at least partially demolished and transformed into an open air lifestyle center, according to one of its new owners, Chicago-based Centrum Properties.

Centrum along with New York investment advisor Angelo, Gordon & Co purchased the 48-acre mall from Australian shopping-mall giant Westfield Group for an undisclosed sum. Westfield bought the mall, built in 1957, for $106.4 million in 1998.

The deal, reported first in the Post-Dispatch by columnist Joe Whittington two months ago, closed on March 26. The mall has been temporarily renamed Crestwood Court.

“It had not been aggressively managed for years,” said Sol Barket, Centrum’s managing partner of retail development. “We saw it as a great opportunity to create an open air lifestyle center.”

A great opportunity to soak the taxpayers of another state, you mean.

“We will also require subsidies from the city of Crestwood,” he said.

Of course.

The sale came as the mall’s future was hanging in doubt. A number of retailers have pulled out of the center, including anchor retailer Dillard’s Inc., which closed in October. Crestwood has two other anchors, Sears and Macy’s.

You know why the future was in the balance and why traffic dwindled and whatnot? Partly, because businesses couldn’t prognosticate what sort of cockamamie plan the city would come up with and get suckered into. Well, there it is.

Money paid to developers, or money not collected from developers. Meanwhile, watch your ballots for incremental tax increases to fund basic services that will suffer from a mysterious problem in lack of funds from existing sources.

Aw, forget it. Just contrast 2001 New York and 2008 Washington, D.C.

New York:

Washington, D.C.:

Congratulations, D.C. You’ve got less class than New York.

(Link seen on Powerline.)

Here’s a snippet from Al Gore’s appearance on 60 Minutes talking about global warming skeptics:

Two things about this clip, particularly in naming the skeptics of global warming:

• “You mean Dick Cheney?” he asks. Seriously, who’s the vice president in his world? Al Gore throws this out just so that he can say the fighting words Dick Cheney and so the faithful can react appropriately to the invocation of the demon. Seriously. And then, “Mm-hm.” Pompous (can’t think of appropriate noun for Al Gore, sorry).
• Secondly, who does this fellow think he is? Doctor Al Gore, credentialed climatologist? The only reason he’s gotten the attention he’s gotten for his position and the stepladder to the pedestal he’s standing on come from having the titles Senator and Vice-President in front of his own name. So he’s going to start demeaning them now?

Goofball. Pompous goofball. There, I have a noun for him.

Maybe he’ll get pulled from the Democratic bench this year, and the Republicans can beat him again.