Category: News

UCLA workers snooped in Spears’ medical records:

UCLA Medical Center is taking steps to fire at least 13 employees and has suspended at least six others for snooping in the confidential medical records of pop star Britney Spears during her recent hospitalization in its psychiatric unit, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.

In addition, six physicians face discipline for peeking at her computerized records, the person said.

Questioned about the breaches, officials acknowledged that it was not the first time UCLA had disciplined workers for looking at Spears’ records. Several were caught prying into records after Spears gave birth to her first son, Sean Preston, in September 2005 at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, officials said. Some were fired.

Forget the anti-totalitarianist spin of central data repositories for a moment, and reflect on the common basics of nosy human nature. When you build these databases, you make it possible for common people who have some access to it for real purposes to access a bunch of it for their own prurient interest.

It’s an unforeseen consequence, no doubt, of actions our legislators and leaders take. The consequences, like most, are only unseen by the actual people tasked with Doing Something! but are quite obvious to those of us who know the nature of the human animal.

The first paragraph of a story in the San Francisco Chronicle (linked on the site’s home page as THE FORGOTTEN WAR, as though the Iraq War has slipped anyone’s mind), sort of supports one of the reasons for going to war:

The war in Iraq has gone on for five years now, but there is almost no sign of it in the Bay Area, a region where 7 million people live.

Well, that was sort of the point of the flypaper strategy, wasn’t it?

The rest of the piece is a creative writing assignment about how nobody’s protesting or the nation isn’t rising up or something. It does, however, feature this wonderful simile:

Yet the war is a presence in the Bay Area, like an underground river, like a storm just off the coast, like a deadly illness that will not go away.

But deadly illnesses don’t go away until, I dunno, you die.

Sounds like staff writer Carl Nolte is really saying Death to America, ainna?

I guess you could defend him by saying he’s a bad writer.

P.S. I did include your name, Mr. Nolte, so you’d catch this mockery next time you google yourself. Consider yourself mocked!

When St. Louis County Executive Charles Dooley removed the sales tax increase to support Metro, the local mass transit agency, from the upcoming election ballot, here’s the kind of shenanigans he wants you to forget before he tries again to convince you to pay more to support more such shenanigans:

As its lawsuit against a team of contractors dragged for years, the Metro transit agency saw its legal bills balloon — at times topping $1 million per month.

Among the bills Metro paid was a $624-a-night hotel room, and group dinners at high-end restaurants that topped $300.

The agency covered more than $30,000 in lodging expenses for one of its law firms, including two rooms at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Clayton that the firm used as a satellite office during the trial.

Agency leaders even paid out about $9,000 on a typo. That was the cost for a lawyer who billed for 76.9 hours of work — in one day.

The costs during the three-year legal battle soared to more than $21 million — shattering Metro’s own estimates of how much it would pay for the case. The Post-Dispatch reviewed many of the bills generated by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, as you recall, was because Metro was shocked and embarrassed by how much cost overrun occurred on the recent extension of the light rail system. Funny, though, that Metro, with its seasoned professionals in mass transit and government teat-sucking, was astonished to discover the cost overruns whereas those of us who bash the government and its teat suckers were far less surprised that hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared into the ether.

Mo. politicians clash over photo IDs:

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan tells congressional lawmakers that requiring photo IDs for voters won’t do much to stop voter fraud.

She says photo identification only helps in rare cases when someone tries to impersonate another voter.

The Democrat claims a photo ID requirement would do more harm by disenfranchising elderly and poor voters who lack proper ID cards.

Considering how many dead people and underage voters apparently vote in Missouri (story), Robin Carnahan seems to imply that the state of Missouri, in which she is supposed to be Secretary of State but instead seems to have the title of Democrat Party Mole, has already issued photo identification to that same set of the “population,” and that Mickey Mouse would only be caught when he tried to vote as George Washington.

Issuing photo IDs to the dead, to toddlers, and to people whose names match celebrities or cartoon character, I have to admit, seems to be a bigger problem than mere voter fraud.

Kevin Murphy reflects upon the Kirkwood shootings and sees beyond the handy racial template:

Kirkwood is suffering from a clash of aesthetics and has for a long time. All the big fights for the last 30 years (or more, I can only speak personally to 30 years) have all been over aesthetics. Usually its couched in terms of the effect on neighborhoods and property values but the majority of Kirkwood wants to keep the city a place of high end residential properties (nothing wrong with that) and if that limits what you do with your property, so be it. And that’s when the fighting begins – when you do something with your property that goes against the Kirkwood aesthetic. Tear down an old house to put up a new house – fine if the old house is one of the many old small ones and the new one fits in with the look and feel of Kirkwood. Tear down a charmer to put up a McMansion – Kirkwood explodes in red yard signs “Protect Historic Kirkwood”. Tear down a house to put in a parking lot – don’t even think about it Baptists.

Meachem Park has been thoroughly reconstructed since it’s annexation from Kirkwood. Law and order, and all that that entails, has been provided. And if the order that is imposed doesn’t conform to the locals desires, it does to the wider Kirkwood aesthetic. And no amount of jawboning about race, no amount of representation on the city council will change that.

Yes, but the handy racial template will keep the power-accumulating and power-abusing government officials from having to reflect on what they do that might make someone lash out violently. So they can go on, after the bread and circuses of racial harmony, stepping on the individual citizens.

Not that he has ties to Obama; that Republicans may be involved: Corruption May Prove Bipartsan in Illinois:

Illinois businessman Stuart Levine, an associate of Republican former Gov. George Ryan, had dinner one evening in 2004 with fellow businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko — an associate of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich — at the Standard Club, a ritzy members-only hotel near Chicago’s downtown financial district.

Meanwhile, the Post-Dispatch continues to endorse the consolidation of power into political hands that makes this sort of corruption possible.

If only gay marriage were legal, sadistic lesbians wouldn’t have to kill to prove their love for one another.

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

You know how some of us like to make a little ad absurdum fun about the nanny state bubble-wrapping everything for the safety of its citizens adult children?

Britain is removing satire from our repertoire:

Britain’s first ‘Safe Text’ street has been created complete with padded lampposts to protect millions of mobile phone users from getting hurt in street accidents while walking and texting.

Around one in ten careless Brits has suffered a “walk ‘n text” street injury in the past year through collisions with lampposts, bins and other pedestrians.

There’s a picture at the link.

History repeats itself, the first time as satire, and the second time as just good sense according to British government officials.

Coming soon: buddy bumpers to keep you out of the street.

(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)

Perhaps that wouldn’t be such a winning slogan, but the Boeing machinist union wants to overturn the decision making apparatus of the United States Air Force:

Furious over the potential loss of tens of thousands of American aerospace jobs, a major union representing Boeing Co. workers intends to press Congress to overturn the military’s awarding of a tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and its European partner, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co.

Before you let those fellows go all American Pie on you, don’t forget they like to strike at inopportune times.

Be hell of a thing if our Air Force planes couldn’t reach their targets because the Air Force had tankers on back order because machinist strikes pushed their delivery dates, ainna? Guess that’s not going to happen unless our elected betters in Congress will it.

In a stunning turn of events, governments have thought to use the Kirkwood shooting as an excuse to cloak themselves in greater “security” by persecuting dissident citizens and offering a show of force to intimidate citizens. After Kirkwood shootings, gadlies [sic] under the microscope:

Dienoff, who denies he would ever hurt anyone, is among a small number of people who rarely miss the opportunity to attend local government meetings, where they raise the hackles of officials over issues from taxes to traffic tickets.

Often called gadflies, they see themselves as champions of freedom and watchdogs of local government.

But post-Kirkwood, a conflict has arisen between security and First Amendment rights. Where these critics may once have been seen as annoying, if sometimes right, some are now being looked at as possible threats.

Some cities have moved to install metal detectors and to have armed officers on hand. At least one, Pine Lawn, has voted to bar anyone it deems disruptive from public meetings.

Fortunately for those entrenched in local municipal power, the Kirkwood shootings have a ready-made racial template so that citizens and their leaders don’t have to think of it in terms of a small government throwing its weight onto a single citizen, pricking him and then silencing him until violence is his only possible expression.

No, it’s racial. Kumbaya, have some harmony-building meetings, and then take exactly the wrong steps.

Because silencing the disenfranchised faster and moving into micro-sized totalitarian city states more quickly isn’t going to ensure safety. Limiting the government’s influence and not running cities like fuedal fiefdoms might.

Once an organization finds success in its push to rule citizens’ lives (namely, through regulating corporations and the citizens they serve), that organization often likes to turn its prowess at ruling to other endeavors. Another case in point:

The Dodge pickup has rust on the tailgate and a Harley-Davidson sticker on its back windshield. Beside it sits a Honda Accord with a big, white butterfly on the windshield and American flag butterflies on each side of the trunk.

There’s the minivan sporting a tattoo parlor bumper sticker and a miniature San Francisco football jersey suctioned to a window of a red Cougar with a scuffed-up driver’s side.

They all have one thing in common: Their owners didn’t pay off a car title loan, and now they’re getting ready for auction.

For years payday lenders have been the bad guy in the predatory lending debate while their close cousin, car title lenders, have cruised along unnoticed – and perhaps more disturbing for some – unregulated in several states. Many efforts to regulate the industry have failed as the lenders pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into legislative campaigns.

Sadly, the totalitarian impulses of the news media continue to cast organizations who offer services as the bad guy, not the ill-informed or naive sheep who get into bad situations and clamor for the government to save them from their decisions.

Spring flooding possible after heavy snow in upper Midwest:

There’s a good chance of flooding on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers this spring because of soggy landscapes and a heavy snowpack in the upper Midwest, according to the National Weather Service.

So I guess that means I’d better plan on having my tax dollars spent to fix the leaky basements of recent development on flood plains, eh?

Which is worse, the fool who builds multi-million dollar mixed use developments on land that gets submerged, or the fools who suffer a government that feels compelled to bail that fellow out with buckets of cash?

Two things from the SunCrest Call, a local free paper I pick up whenever the OB pats my beautiful wife on the belly and says, “Good job.” The first, an insert by the mayor of Sunset Hills:

Click for full size

The mayor took office in Sunset Hills after the previous administration approved a redevelopment proposal that would have depopulated a subdivision. Many of the residents bought new houses before the actual buyout occurred, and when the funding for the project collapsed, ended up with double mortgages. They were not pleased and threw that bunch out, but now the new bunch wants to redevelop a different area using all of its coercive government powers, and the mayor wants to let you know he’s a better big Keynesian wheel than the last guy.

Meanwhile, a columnist in the paper lauds another mayor for using coercive government power–the power to tax some, but to not tax others–on something the columnist likes:

“There comes a time when you have to back off on your principles and do what’s best for this community.”

We commend Crestwood Mayor Roy Robinson for putting aside his former blind hatred of TIF and trying to ensure that the city has all of its economic-development tools available.

When Crestwood Mayor Roy Robinson made this statement in January 2006, some of us held back laughter, wondering how this was possible.

But two years later, Robinson has shockingly lived up to this creed.

On Feb. 12, the mayor who once ran for office opposing tax-increment financing broke a tie vote among aldermen to protect the use of TIF and, in our opinion, also protect the city’s best interests.

That is, the government can give unfair advantage to new businesses in the region and can soak existing, loyal businesses who have been part of the community for years. And principles get in the way of doing what a select set of businessmen and newspapermen want.

Because those new businesses would buy ads in that same paper, don’t you know? Well, hopefully, anyway.

Lazy fare capitalism, it’s called. And it’s close enough for the Call Newspapers.

See also Krauthammer’s bit on rent seeking at the Federal level.

Not jumping to what would probably be good suspicions, police again prefer to calm the sheep instead of alerting the citizens (Police: Deadly toxin found at Las Vegas hotel):

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said Friday there does not appear to be a link to terrorists.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Buried in this story, an often overlooked nugget about Barack Obama:

is delivery is interesting and pleasantly cadenced, and his cigarette habit helps keep his vocal register commandingly, almost seductively, low.

Oh, yeah, Barack Obama smokes!

How do you like him now, granola munchers?

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

A photographer or editor with an apparent lack of astronomy experience titles a photo of last night’s eclipse The Moon In An Otherworldly Moment.

Good job, fellows. Good job.