Category: News

Headline: Police officer tasers woman, 82. However, if you’re doing anything but scanning the headlines, you get a slightly different story:

Chicago’s Police Department is investigating an officer’s use of a Taser last month on an 82-year-old woman who was swinging a hammer when police arrived.

You’re forgiven if you thought cops were tasering another 82 year old woman.

A senior Congressman sees fit to inject his office into oversight of televangelism:

The top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee has launched a wide-ranging investigation into the financial dealings of six TV evangelists, including Joyce Meyer, the popular preacher who has built a $124-million-a-year empire headquartered in Fenton.

On Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Meyer to provide his staff with documents detailing the finances of the Joyce Meyer Ministries, including the religious group’s compensation to Meyer, her husband and other family members, as well as an accounting of their housing allowances, gifts and credit card statements for the last several years.

Congress shall make no law doesn’t say a thing about fishing expeditions into religious organizations, does it?

Update: James Joyner links to another article that describes other targets of the investigation and applies the adjective mundane.

So KMOV TV runs this commercial barking about its INVESTIGATION! into the fact that our government is woeful on its obligation to maintain highways and bridges so that they don’t, I don’t know, actually collapse into the Mississippi River.

However, it’s good to see some homeowners have their priorities in order:

Nearly 100 signatures have been gathered from residents whose homes sit along Interstate 270 in Kirkwood, calling for a study to see if a sound wall should be constructed to shield residents from traffic noise.

Whenever you see stories about people who bought homes along the interstate suddenly confronted with noise and who now clamor for government-funded remediation, remember that every last study conducted to see if it’s necessary and every last dollar spent on making their backyard decks more enjoyable is less steel and concrete to make sure the highways safe for everyone.

I don’t want to hear breakdowns of city/state/government funding or dedicated resources to these sorts of things because that same city/state/government funding could and should be dedicated to the basic repair of the roads.

I speak as someone who bought a house on an interstate. I got a better price because of the noise; I’m not going to expect you to make my cheap property more valuable nor to improve my lifestyle. Period. Especially not at the expense of vital infrastructure maintenance.

No, not the death threats; the spouse:

Ms Whitney, a CIBC analyst who is married to the former World Wrestling Entertainment champion Death Mask, prompted a near 7 per cent drop in Citigroup’s shares on Thursday, after suggesting that the bank needed to raise more than $30 billion to restore its capital cushion.

They sure know how to recruit male students, don’t they?

She is a freshman at Lindenwood, as are six Miss Missouri Teen USA finalists. Also among the student body are Amber Seyer, Miss Missouri Teen USA 2007; and LaTasha Lawrie, Miss Kansas Teen USA 2005. In total, the school says it has about 30 winners or top finishers in beauty pageants.

Lindenwood was sort of in the running for my collegiate dollar, somewhere between SLU and Washington University; however, because my first choice accepted me, it was irrelevant.

A program like this, however, might have altered the equation.

Enormous steel sculpture lifted 12 stories:

A massive steel sculpture installed Sunday on the side of a South of Market building tells a story of humanity’s past and its uncertain future, says the Seattle artist who spent two years on the project.

The five pieces of stainless steel, obliquely titled “Artifacts from a Coal Mine” and weighing well over 10,000 pounds, were affixed as public art to the outside of a contemporary brick and concrete condominium building at 177 Townsend at Third Street.

“They evoke a lost world and the uncertainty of climate change,” said artist Mark Stevens, pacing Townsend Street as one giant sculpture after another was hoisted 12 stories up by a 200-foot-high crane.

If you have to say what your tangle of metal is supposed to represent, it’s not actually evoking anything, ainna?

Girl falls off bike while riding in the road, parents sue road builders:

The mother of a girl severely injured in a bicycle crash in 2005 is suing the people who designed and built the road where she was injured, saying her medical expenses are likely to exceed $25 million.

Only fitting because:

a combination of a road that was too steep, and dangerous wooden posts

Combined with, I don’t know, an accident.

The face that an attorney has found a large number of defendants (6) for the maximum number of out of court settlements is now matter of course. It’s not even sad on its own any more, just one more pixel in a sad portrait of personal irresponsibility in modern America.

Bad:

SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.

As officers swarmed the home with assault rifles, dogs and a helicopter, a Lake Forest couple and their two toddlers inside their home slept unsuspectingly.

On March 29 at 11:30 p.m., authorities allege, Randall Ellis, a 19-year-old from Mukilteo, Wash., hacked into the county’s 911 system from his home and placed a false emergency call, prompting a fully armed response to the home of an unsuspecting couple that could have ended tragically.

Couple that with the fact that in the next twenty years we’ll have SWAT teams with robots on them:

The National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.

Jeez, who’s going to need Terminators when you’re going to have defective software and pinheaded hackers playing potentially deadly pranks?

In this case, one suspect lacked motive, so we could eliminate them from the whodunit:

Authorities had no motive for the shooting.

Well, we’ll have to look elsewhere for our perpetrator, then, Hercule.

Sunset Hills project wants tax break:

The Sansone Group has proposed constructing an office-retail complex to replace the 35-year-old Holiday Inn motel-Viking banquet center on the northwest corner of Lindbergh Boulevard and Watson Road in Sunset Hills.

The developer is seeking $12 million in government assistance for the $48.2 million project. The aid would be via tax increment financing and transportation development and community improvement districts. Each district would levy one-cent sales taxes.

This is already not newsworthy, ainna? As the contracts are written in English, so they come with hands extended for money from the citizens of the “growing” or “revitalizing” area.

Story: Alorton police chief grazed in shooting.

Hedge:

Police chief Robert Cummings was grazed in his arm by a bullet apparently fired by another man during a drug stop, Illinois state police said today.

The Post-Dispatch does not completely eliminate the possibility of a self-inflicted wound.

In this blog’s very first post, I warned about the provisions in rescue group contracts that you signed to take a pet from them:

When my wife and I wanted to adopt a rescue dog, we had a hound visit our house, mainly to see if it wanted to eat our cats. The rescue volunteer provided a packet of information about dogs and a contract we would have to sign to take possession of the pooch. The contract included house inspections at will of the rescue group. It could also take the dog back at any time if it found our conditions “unsuitable, which includes but not limited to…” a non-exclusive litany. If we lost the dog; we’d pay the rescue group a thousand dollars, even if we “lost” the dog ten years hence when it died and we did not notify the rescue group in 1 (one) week.

Obviously, Ellen DeGeneres is not an avid MfBJNer:

Ellen DeGeneres is in the doghouse with a pet rescue agency after giving a pooch away to her hairdresser because it didn’t get along with her cats.

The talk show hostess and her partner Portia de Rossi adopted Iggy, a Brussels Griffon mix, on Sept. 20. But when things didn’t work out, DeGeneres gave the dog to her hairdresser.

In doing so, DeGeneres violated an agreement with the Mutts and Moms dog rescue agency by not informing them of the handoff.

When the agency called DeGeneres to ask about Iggy, she said she found another home for the dog. The agency sent a representative to the hairdresser’s home Sunday and took the dog away.

The entertainment industry takes note:

DeGeneres went public about the situation Monday while taping an episode of her show to air Tuesday. She admitted she didn’t read all the paperwork involving the adoption.

Ellen DeGeneres does not read her contracts.

Stunning finding reported in Reader’s Digest:

A February report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that taking antioxidant vitamins actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.

. . . .

But in 47 randomized trials involving almost 181,000 adults, researchers found that taking vitamins A, beta carotene and E, alone or in combination, actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.

Personally, I find my odds daunting, but at least they’re not 116% chance of dying.

Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned:

In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn’t breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.

Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.

Twit.

Man, I love the anthropological-style essays about hipsters who move to suburbia and report their shocking findings!

The second morning after I moved into my first officially “owned” home, I woke up to find my somewhat decrepit mailbox bashed in by vandals.

I was rattled. As an Asian, I thought perhaps the bashing was meant as a kind of message to me: You are not wanted here – or something to that effect.

Home ownership was, to me, a strange thing. You’d think it would give you a sense of belonging, of security. But for me it was a foray into territory that as a woman, and half Chinese, seemed off-limits, even though I was born here.

It didn’t help that my new next-door neighbor flew the flag in his front yard well past the Fourth of July and, I would discover, straight into winter.

I live in Santa Cruz, so my initial reading on the mailbox bashing seemed improbable. Still, I was shaken. The neighborhood was suburban style, and filled with a lot of folks of retirement age who had lived in the city since before it had become “progressive” – since before anyone had heard of the word at all.

Later on that day, as I was strolling along my block, I noticed that almost every one of my neighbors also had their mailboxes bashed in – except for those who had taken time to hand paint their mailboxes with flowers or hummingbirds, or who had added accessories to make their mailboxes into caricatures of cats or frogs or sharks or what have you. I mused that at least it was nice of the (I supposed) teenagers with the baseball bat to grant some forbearance for attempts at mailbox aesthetics.

She’s lucky she moved to suburbia in California, because let me tell you, if that half-Chinese woman had moved onto my block, I would probably have not even noticed. Dramatically!

And she could have reported how the people in this tribe walk their children, fly flags with strange foreign emblems (giant green and gold Gs), and refuse to mow their lawns religiously.

Somewhere, somehow, hipsters are all caught by surprise by the revelation that people who live in homes instead of condos, lofts, or urban apartments are people, too!

Given how easily the power has gone out over the last year or so, you would think that residents would agitate for the local power company to do something. Actually, you’re right. A series of “show trials” where the power company officials had to do some ‘splainin before the elected officials and their hangers-on, the press.

And when the company, AmerenUE wants to do something, what does it get? You bet! Residents agitating that AmerenUE is doing something:

Pam Schnebelen realizes that AmerenUE officials are going to have a tough time deciding on a route to build miles of transmission lines through Jefferson County.

But, they better not come through the LaBarque Creek watershed area in northwestern Jefferson County, she said.

“They are not going to build in this watershed,” Schnebelen said. “They’ll have to take any landowner to court to get an easement, because they can’t compensate in dollars for the environmental impact involved.”

Schnebelen, 57, Judy Browne-D’Amico and Bob Coffing, 68, all members of the LaBarque Creek Watershed Landowners Committee, recently invited the Journal to see the LaBarque Creek watershed area. The area includes private property as well as public lands and is located off Route FF near the St. Louis County line. It covers about 13 square miles.

Why can’t private industry use the same magic that the government uses to be all things to all voters?

Columnist Don Corrigan in the Webster-Kirkwood Times invents “remembers” a foreign policy bullet point that none of the rest of us do:

•Failure to pay for the war with Iraqi oil profits, as was promised.

Uhm, who promised that? I seem to recall some no war for oil chanting, but that wasn’t a response to the administration’s foreign policy establishment making a promise.