Category: News

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.

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.