Category: News

Variable speed limits set to begin on I-270:

Starting Thursday morning, the Missouri Department of Transportation will begin a two-year experiment with variable speed limits along Interstate 270.

Motorists might have already noticed the digital speed limit signs that began popping up along the Missouri stretch of the highway in recent weeks. So far, those signs have shown that the speed limit is 60 miles per hour.

But by the morning commute, the speed limits on those signs could change to as low as 40 miles per hour depending on traffic flow.

Hey, we’ve already seen the authorities stretching existing laws to cover things that they didn’t. Why not just give the authorities to actually change the rules at their whim?

I’m sure this power will only be used for safety, and not revenue enhancement. So it will only be coincidence when these speed limits drop during nonpeak times when there happen to be a large number of municipal police cars sitting on the entrance ramps.

Suspect, 17, arrested in bus beating case:

The attack occurred about 3 p.m. last Wednesday, when a masked male boarded the bus near N. 60th St. and W. Silver Spring Drive and immediately began beating the driver.

The bus driver drove about two blocks north on N. 60th St. before the suspect grabbed the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator.

The bus traveled about another 50 yards before crashing into a tree near N. 60th St. and W. Carmen Ave.

The suspect got off and ran north. The bus driver suffered minor injuries, but no other injuries were reported.

Ride mass transit, and you ride with a large number of strangers and the occasional felony-minded individual who will attack you for no reason. At which point, none of your fellow riders will come to your aid.

You know, if only mass transit used expensive, inflexible trains instead of buses, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe the argument should be that trains won’t run in to trees as easily when their drivers are beaten. Keep trying, New Urbanists, and remember what that Urban buys you.

Story from last week: John Burroughs Teacher Arrested For Misconduct With A Minor:

A John Burroughs School teacher is on administrative leave after being arrested for misconduct with a minor.

….

Ladue Police were tipped off by an anonymous call, and a Johns Burroughs’ teacher has since been arrested. Police aren’t releasing his name because he hasn’t been charged yet.

“There was an inappropriate relationship that took place over a 3 year period,” says Detective Andreski. [emphasis added]

Ah, that reliable old anonymous call. Less reliable than the testimony of a cellmate overall.

Later: Burroughs School Still in Shock over Allegations against Teacher:

It is alleged that the teacher had inappropriate contact with a Burroughs student.

Ladue Police said they’re investigating the alleged relationship between the teacher and the student, which could have occured [sic] over a three year period. [Emphasis added.]

Hmm, that seems to hedge a little, doesn’t it?

The story now: Prosecutor: Not Enough Evidence to Charge John Burroughs Teacher:

St. Louis County Prosecutors said there is not enough evidence to file charges against a teacher at a private school in Ladue.

Not that he didn’t do it, but that there wasn’t enough evidence to file charges. Hah! As we’ve seen, there’s often a way to prosecute where something isn’t against the law; is it possible this poor, soon to be jobless teacher actually didn’t do anything?

Of course, if one presumes that one is innocent until proven guilty. However, in the world of law enforcement hemming, prosecutorial hawing, and media rah-rahing, false charges and overeager arresting get footnotes instead of salacious headlines.

Finally, after the initial furor has died down, some creative prosecutor has found a way to bring charges in the Child Commits Suicide In Response To Online Taunting case:

The incident prompted an international cry for action, but Missouri and federal prosecutors here in St. Louis examined the circumstances shortly after Megan’s death, and passed on trying to build a criminal case. No law, they said, applied.

Then, in January, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles began issuing grand jury subpoenas, signaling a new interest in the case.

MySpace is based in Santa Monica.

Prosecutors are said to be seeking a felony fraud indictment under the legal theory that Lori Drew defrauded MySpace of computer time and resources by supplying false information.

In December, St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas said that the circumstances surrounding Megan’s death defied a simple placement of blame.

After local and localized federal prosecutors decided no laws were broken, another, more ambitious headline-hungry creative prosecutor has found a way to advance his career get his name in the national papers serve justice.

In twenty-first century America, forget double jeopardy. You’re not safe from prosecution or persecution until everyone in government service has a crack at you.

(Yes, I know that double jeopardy applies to actual prosecution. However, it’s enough now that any act brings the possibility of numerous charges in multiple jurisdictions that make it clear that the principles behind double jeopardy, that the government and its individual executors shall not continuously hound a private citizen, are violated de facto but not de jure.)

Huh, who knew I was suffering from the effects of the Bush economy and endorsing a Democrat challenger in this year’s presidential election?

With the skyrocketing costs of fuel and food, people cite sticker shock as the catalyst pushing them into the garden.

“It’s crazy that we’re spending so much oil, time and money on food,” Staley said. “If we can do it in the backyard, why not?”

Concerns over food safety and the environment are among other factors prompting people to get their hands dirty. And, of course, the bragging rights that come with serving a homegrown tomato.

I mean, if the journalist is going to ignore other reasons for the draw of gardening–that is, of exerting control over the nearby environment and tying down that Gaia wench and making her do what you want for a change, the nesting instinct, the desire to have a food source when the centralized government falls and disorder reigns, or having free seeds come in the mail–and if the journalist is instead going to impute the failing environment story, why not just go right out and say that gardeners are voting for Obama this year?

Brazen robber shot Overland store clerk:

Overland Police Chief James Herron said a surveillance camera showed police what happened next:

The robber pulled a small-caliber semiautomatic handgun and demanded money. The clerk did everthing right, Herron said. He obliged — opening the cash register drawer and stepping back, just as management had taught him to do.

But the robber fired anyway. He shot the clerk once in the shoulder, then reached into the register to grab the money. The robber then jumped onto the counter and tried to fire several more times, but the gun malfunctioned. He ran out the door and down the street. Two customers on the lot saw him. They found the clerk on the floor behind the counter and called police.

Fortunately, corporate training didn’t include the advanced techniques, dying to prevent corporate liability for accidental employee-inflicted wounds during self-defense.

Similar story related at Books, Bikes, and Boomsticks. Perhaps a wave of similar incidents will change corporate policies in this regard, but I’m not hopeful that corporations will ever value their individual employees rights to life and self-defense over their own legal liabilities.

Also, memo to the city of Florissant and to all similar (soon to be simply “all”) cities who lust for surveillance cameras to prevent crime: discounting the British example, wouldn’t common sense indicate that cameras haven’t eliminated bank robberies or gas station hold ups and won’t particularly impact street crime?

Not, I suppose, if budget is on the line. A higher principle than anything stated by government officials.

In this piece about Obamalove in the media, the professional journalist/writer fumbles:

If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days?[Emphasis added]

The examples cited, as you well know, gentle reader, are not gerunds at all, but rather are examples of the present progressive tense (often with the form of to be omitted).

Unless, of course, the author truly means that Hillary becomes talkin’ with guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal and that these gerunds are supposed to be used in the predicate nominative sense. However, that does not appear to be the case. But I just wanted to throw in another esoteric grammar term to show that I know what a gerund is.

But we cannot expect our snobbish elites to know their grammar, can we?

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Let me know if you’ve heard this before: Government meddles in free market because it can. Prices rise. Government investigates price gouging:

St. Louis County officials plan to ask the state attorney general to investigate whether some trash haulers have gouged residents by drastically raising rates in recent weeks.

The county’s chief operating officer, Garry Earls, said some residents in the county’s unincorporated areas have received bills that are almost double their previous rates.

“This price gouging is tantamount to unscrupulous contractors ripping people off after a major storm,” he said.

The county is moving ahead with plans to divide its unincorporated areas into eight trash collection districts. Through competitive bidding, it would hire a single hauler for each district, except in subdivisions that opt out of the program.

The government’s action leads to a rise in prices that justifies, in the government’s mind, more government action.

The commanders of the economy are at it again:

A bill before the Missouri House would prohibit doctors from marking up the cost of certain anatomical laboratory work — such as skin biopsies and Pap tests — that are performed by outside laboratories.

The bill, which has been approved by the Senate and is awaiting floor debate in the House, would prohibit what’s known as “pass-through” billing.

That’s when a doctor sends a patient’s test sample to an outside laboratory for analysis. The lab charges the doctor a discounted price for the work, but the doctor bills the patient’s insurance or the patient a higher amount.

No word on whether the Missouri state legislature will go after mechanics, computer repair shops, construction people, and every other business that uses subcontracting. It’s doubtful, though, because these people are not the current boogeyman that the medical industry is.

However, once that particular Gulliver is bound to earth, watch out.

UPDATE: Legislator corrected to legislature in title and body. Now that someone’s reading it, I suppose I should make it correcter.

A “memorial” park in Lake St. Louis is surprised by criticism that its memorial plaques include sections on “mistakes” and “consequences” of the wars in which the dead fought:

Plaques citing “mistakes” in U.S.-fought wars have been removed from a new Veterans Memorial Park after veterans complained.

Ralph Barrale, head of the veterans group behind the park, said he’s sorry if the plaques upset anyone.

“We don’t want to disgrace the city or anyone else,” he said. “If we offended anyone, I am personally sorry.”

At issue is information on small metal plaques that had been glued atop stone pedestals. The plaques summarized the nation’s wars, with the information divided into sections, including “mistakes” and “consequences.”

In another story, Barrale is quoted as saying:

World War II veteran Ralph Barrale, who is 84, says it upsets him that some in his St. Louis suburb don’t want to read “the good and the bad” of America’s wars. He says they are historically accurate.

However, here’s some of the meat on the plaques:

For example, the “mistakes” portion of the plaque titled “Global War on Terror, 1997-Present” read, in part: “As of 2007, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars failed to enable viable governments leading to continued guerrilla fighting. The Iraqi Army was quickly crushed but the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army and removed civilian government employees belonging to the ruling political party leaving no one to help maintain security or run the country, which was contrary to policy used after WWII in Germany and Japan.”

Under “consequences,” it stated: “U.S. was accused of a Crusade against Muslims which caused riots all over the Muslim world. Pakistan became an opportunistic ally of the U.S. in its Afghanistan war. U.S. lost prestige around the world.”

That’s not historically accurate, that’s historical interpretation. The sort of thing that’s up for discussion and controversy. If Mr. Barrale wants to put those interpretation into government-sanctioned metal in a park, he wants them to be known as fact instead of what he and his other elegy composers think.

A co-worker complains about threats made by another:

A 54-year-old doctor at St. Anthony’s Medical Center was arrested after being accused of threatening people during preparation for surgery by allegedly saying he would shoot up the hospital, police said.

Luckily, the SWAT team swooped in and got him before he could get his arsenal from his Lexus:

The doctor allegedly made the threat April 11 and it was reported to police April 23, officials said.

An almost two week lag time before the arrest? It sounds like someone got cheesed off later at the doctor and called the buttons on him.

There’s probably more to the story than the paper lets on, but each of these ill-described incidents leads me to believe that the police might come for me someday on some wisecrack gone awry.

St. Louis Magazine has a in-depth look at the Kirkwood City Council shootings this month with insight that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s coverage sadly lacked.

It looks like the online version has three additional parts not found in the print magazine, too, which means I have further reading to do.

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.