Category: News

Come on, who are they trying to fool with this gambit?

A quarter-cent sales tax that would provide $40 million a year for children’s crisis and wellness programs will probably make the county ballot next fall.

A regional consortium of 20 providers of mental health and other support services for children says St. Louis County children are suffering because they lack critical funding for services geared toward mental illness, physical abuse, substance abuse, pregnancy and homelessness.

The county, despite having more than three times the youth population of any other county in the state, is lagging behind its smaller neighbors, including the city of St. Louis and St. Charles, Lincoln and Jefferson counties, say members of the group called Putting Kids First. All of those counties have established a sales tax to fund mental health services, substance abuse and child abuse prevention programs. The most recent was Lincoln County, which approved a quarter-cent sales tax in November 2006.

The money raised by the sales tax is going to get spent with the very people pushing it, hey? So aren’t they a special interest group doing a little rent-seeking? Oh, I forget, they’re doing it for the children, for whose benefit everyone should bleed and sacrifice, except of course those who Serve them. They should get tax money.

And phooey, again, on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for supporting it and continuing to identify sales tax rates in the terms of a horse race or the arms race. What, are we in the county afraid that the city will break the beautiful, wonderful, happy 10% sales tax barrier first?

From The American Thinker:

What do I accept? That the U.S. is just another European country now. We are all welfare states if not outright socialist ones and our political choices are between center-left and left-left. Time to get used to it. Moving to France won’t make much difference, whether you are Alec Baldwin or Chuck Norris.

Sadly, I agree. Things will probably get worse before they get better. However, two things might come into play to stem the tide:

• More children to conservative families than non-conservative ones.
• Home schooling and more attention to education by conservative families balances the unchecked education indoctrination in schools and universities.
• Migrations of the population out of the cities and to less populated areas, leading to a decentralization of governments in the best case scenario.

Because without hope, I got nothing.

Robbers steal $163m in art from Zurich:

Three armed men in ski masks stole four paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth $163.2 million from a Zurich museum in one of Europe’s largest ever art heists, police said Monday.

What did they get?

A reward of about $90,000 was offered for information leading to the recovery of the paintings – Claude Monet’s “Poppy field at Vetheuil,” Edgar Degas’ “Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter,” Vincent van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches,” and Paul Cezanne’s “Boy in the Red Waistcoat.”

What didn’t they get?

The museum also owns Auguste Renoir’s “Little Irene” and Edgar Degas’ “Little Dancer.”

You know, I have a print of “Little Irene” in my house. How they passed up Renoir for Monet and van Gogh, I cannot understand.

The article claims the following regularly scheduled “Don’t try this at home even though the news article has a big dollar amount in its headline” warning:

The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $6 billion annually, and Interpol has about 30,000 pieces of stolen art in its database. While only a fraction of the stolen art is ever found, the theft of iconic objects, especially by force, is rarer because of the intense police work that follows and because the works are so difficult to sell.

If I were a novelist, or if I were a practicing novelist, this is how I’d plot it out: Russian millionaire who’s a big fan of Monet or wants the Monet to impress his hot young figure skater chickling hires the job out at $2 million a man. It’s costing him $8 million, but far less than he’d have to pay to buy it at auction or on the black market. The other guys snatch and grab a couple extra for their bonus. They wrap the Monet up and ship it to a dead box in Finland, just standard freight, and keep or sell the remainders. After their $2 million payoff.

But I’d save the real plot twist for what comes next.

AP overstates its poll results when it says Bush, Congress hit bottom in AP poll:

It’s almost as if people can barely stand the thought of President Bush and Congress anymore. Bush reached his lowest approval rating in The Associated Press-Ipsos poll on Friday as only 30 percent said they like the job he is doing, including an all-time low in his support by Republicans. Congress’ approval fell to just 22 percent, equaling its poorest grade in the survey. Both marks dropped by 4 percentage points since early January.

Actually, I would expect the absolute bottom to be armed insurrection or at least some sort of lynching. Disgust with one’s government and party, pithy remarks made amongst the like minded, and/or staying home on election day after filing one’s taxes in a timely fashion but answering negatively to a pollster doesn’t strike me as the bottom.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

From the story Fake FedEx Trucks; When the Drugs Absolutely Have to Get There:

A fake U.S. Border Patrol van was found to be carrying 31 illegal aliens in Casa Grande, Ariz.

An alert agent recognized that the “H” in the van’s serial number is a letter used only on U.S. Border Patrol Jeep Wranglers. It should have been a “P.”

One suspects that the story would have been almost as informative without the clarity that’s only useful to smugglers.

Now, how about some Pantone colors for the fake logos, ABC? What, are you holding something back because the Bush administration censored you?

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Total Missouri vote count for Fred Thompson: 3106.

That might include me, but on further reflection, I somehow was filling out a St. Louis City paper ballot; I know because I voted against its half cent tax increase for practice.

Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast:

An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

Someone said boat anchors were doing it. Doing it effectively, I would say.

Southwest Airlines commercial becomes reality in Milwaukee:

After the opening, Weiland nearly lost the entire audience during the usual meet-and-greet interlude when he stuck his foot in his mouth and addressed the crowd “Chi . . . CA . . . go . . . ” He was met with a barrage of boos.

Yeah, if you’re playing a crowd in Milwaukee, you probably cannot go more wrong.

Rising food prices? How could that happen? Those darn cosmic forces aligning against us:

The underlying reasons for the skyrocketing prices are complicated, with roots in places as far away as Australia and as close as a newly planted acre of corn. Rising fuel prices are a main cause, but other factors, particularly a new government mandate for more corn-derived ethanol, are playing a role, too.

“It takes a lot of bad things happening at the same time, for the prices to go where they have,” said Pat Westhoff, co-director of the Food and Agricultural Research Policy Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

We’ve got government mandates saying food should be burned as fuel and government prohibitions restricting nuclear power, new drilling, new pipelines, and new refining capacity. But mandates are made in the passive voice, and these things just happen.

The race for Matt Blunt’s successor as Republican candidate for Missouri takes an interesting turn as another government member amasses an army and leads it to Jefferson City:

“I’m in,” Kinder said Thursday. Asked if there was any scenario in which he would not run, Kinder replied: “No. Crossed the Rubicon.”

What, he’s not actually saying he’s started a civil war and an armed conflict to turn the Missouri Republic to the Missouri Empire? Those whacky politicians and their misunderstood metaphors!

(Full disclosure: I once was approached, sort of, to be a candidate to work on Kinder’s blog. Which is why my name crops up from time to time on his team’s blogroll. Obviously, I didn’t take it, which would have precluded me from snark like this.)

Forget whether the account conforms to the facts; this story isn’t even internally consistent:

The mother, Amy Fujarte, was in the house alone at the time of the fire, Svetanics said, and was taken to an area hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.

But:

Nickie Bequette, who lives across the street in the 9700 block of South Broadway, said she was enjoying a morning cup of coffee when she looked out a window and saw smoke pouring from the house and the mother escape out a side door with two children.

Which was it? Obviously, it wasn’t worth the reporter’s shoe leather.

Oops doesn’t cover it.

Charter Communications is offering apologies —and $50 credits — to customers who lost e-mails when 14,000 accounts were cleared out by mistake.

Charter was doing routine maintenance Monday, clearing out old, unused accounts from the system, when the 14,000 active accounts were accidentally cleared as well, according to Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the Town and Country-based company. About 1,000 of those accounts were in Missouri and about 300 were in Illinois, she said.

The accounts should still be open to customers, but everything in them was deleted — and is gone for good.

Also, Charter tips a bit of its internal process regarding backups for client data. The part it reveals is the text “Why bother?” The font in which they wrote that particular piece of internal documentation remains secret, covered by an NDA no doubt.

In a stunning turn of events, developers who promised willingly gullible government officials the moon to get public dollars for development get the money and start managing expectations, i.e., backtracking on the promises they made:

For the first time, both development partners in the $387 million Ballpark Village are saying it’s unlikely that a significant portion of the project will be completed in time for the All-Star Game in July 2009.

Several months ago, one of the developers, the St. Louis Cardinals, acknowledged the possibility of delays on the downtown project. Now Chase Martin, director of development for the other co-developer, Baltimore-based Cordish Co., also is lowering expectations.

Who could have seen this coming?

Memo to the willingly gullible elected and unelected public officials: when a developer promises the moon, expect to see his backside.

So we have this team representing New York and this team representing Massachussetts in one of the biggest contests of the year.

You don’t say.

Funny how “the officials” helped scuttle the hopes of the team from the Midwest that the whole country could have rallied around, ainna?

To stimulate the economy, Democrats in Washington want to provide another “rebate” to those who didn’t pay taxes to return:

Nearly 40 percent of Americans owed no federal income tax last year, though even low-income workers paid taxes for Social Security and Medicare. While Bush has refused to disclose specifics of his $145 billion plan, administration officials and Republican lawmakers favor a proposal that would offer rebates of up to $800 for individuals and $1,600 for families – but only if they paid that much in taxes last year.

….

Administration officials and Republican lawmakers say it only makes sense to give tax rebates to people who actually paid taxes. But Democrats are gearing up to fight that approach, arguing that a stimulus plan should put money in the hands of low-income people, both as a matter of fairness and because people who are struggling to make ends meet are most likely to spend any government payments quickly. For the purpose of jump-starting the economy, economists want people to spend extra money as quickly as possible.

A tax cut would be fair, but a facile and arbitrary distribution plan, that gets voters from those who receive free money from the rest of us courtesy of the Washingtonian tax centrifuge.

A bunch of kids throw a bag of feces (story). A juvenile prank and gross, but how does it fit on the moral scale? Well, according to the woman hit with the, erm, shrapnel:

They saw me standing at the entrance, and they did it anyway,” she said. “It was very evil.”

Not merely evil, but very evil. I wouldn’t put it much past naughty myself, but I have perspective.

The teens have been charged (story), and the woman, a school teacher, shows her perspective and forgiveness:

“I’m glad they charged them,” Geusz said. “I wish they could find more charges.”

And:

Geusz said the two oldest boys later came to her classroom at Fort Zumwalt North High School to apologize. She said she asked them to leave because she did not believe what the boys were telling her.

And:

Now, Geusz said, she hopes the courts will impose a punishment that sends a message, perhaps requiring the boys to pay for her clothes and do community service. “I’d love to see them in jail,” she said. “I’d love to see that because what they did is just horrendous.”

I guess she’s showing perspective by not calling for their outright execution.

Meanwhile, inventive Federal prosecutors are no doubt finding ways of turning this into either a hate crime, a sex crime, or a fraud crime so that these kids can pay a greater penalty and really screw their lives up for a prank gone wrong.

Federal prosecutors have saved the day as they look to gin up charges for the woman whose online foolishness caused a girl’s suicide. Well-played, you inventive devils in the executive branch!

Federal officials in Los Angeles are investigating whether it was fraud for someone to use a false identity on an Internet social network in a taunting blamed for the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier.

Missouri and federal prosecutors in St. Louis previously examined the circumstances but passed on trying to build a criminal case, saying no law seemed to apply.

As a software tester, I make up names and submit them through forms all the time. Good to know that the federal government can now prosecute me for fraud.