Category: News

Now that New York, the state, is planning to issue driver’s licenses without proof of residency:

They were celebrating outside the governor’s office Friday as Eliot Spitzer handed a landmark victory to a half-million illegal immigrants.

The state will no longer require proof of citizenship for driver’s licenses.

“We’re changing our policy with respect to getting more people out of shadows and into the system so people don’t hide they’re here,” Spitzer said.

Can New York be far off from requiring drivers’ licenses to vote?

Seriously, Spitzer is obviously in favor of the national ID card and passing off the costs the state should fund to the federal government.

Worse, states across the country tend to recognize other states’ documents, but as we’re seeing with this and with the gay marriage thing, states are starting to make infantile decisions that will eventually require national initiatives (like national ID cards) to cover things that states could handle. Some decisions by individual states are completely incompatible with federalist principles.

The good news, if there is any, is that Eliot Spitzer will, like Mike Bloomberg, never rise above a city or statewide office in that lunatic asylum on the Eastern seaboard.

St. George officers get polite reminder:

Police Chief Scott Uhrig has given his eight officers a reminder about courtesy — and some words of warning — after one of his sergeants got fired for berating a motorist on tape.

“They know to be polite and courteous,” the chief said, “and they’ve been advised, ‘Stay on your toes. We don’t know how many other Brett Darrows there are out there.'”

Not, “Don’t be bombastic, treat citizens of other municipalities passing through our tiny one-stop light, city hall is just another house in the subdivision municipality-of-convenience as though they’re the people you’re supposed to serve and protect.”

Just, “Don’t get caught when being bombastic and not treating citizens of other municipalities passing through our tiny one-stop light, city hall is just another house in the subdivision municipality-of-convenience as though they’re the people you’re supposed to serve and protect instead of the mainstay of our city budget and outlets for your own egos.”

Good work, Chief.

Disingenius!

But Conrad wasn’t able to acquire the properties targeted for development.

“The city put out the request without having control of any of the land,” [Conrad Properties President Craig] Saur said. “We couldn’t get key parcels under contract at a reasonable price. Sellers wanted higher prices than was economically feasible for us to develop the project.”

He didn’t want to use eminent domain to acquire the land, Saur said.

“We want to be in places we are wanted,” he said. “If the city could get control of the land, they would probably have a lot more developers interested in the project.”

Surely Saur doesn’t think the city can make a better cash offer for the land. What does he expect them to do, use the Scooby Doo method? No, he’s saying that he won’t call for eminent domain, it would just be nice if eminent domain just happened.

The headline on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial? Editorial: Too important a job.

The lede?

Retired federal judge Michael Mukasey’s credentials seem to make him ideally suited to be the next U.S. attorney general.

The but:

Mukasey reputedly has an independent streak, but administration officials probably liked what they read in an August op-ed article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

In it, he seemed to sympathize with the need for broader investigative detention of suspects (beyond holding them as material witnesses) and the unlawful combatant designation and wrote that a separate national security court deserved scrutiny.

That responsibility for scrutiny now falls to the Senate. It should determine precisely what Mukasey had in mind in that op-ed but mostly whether he is the independent-minded attorney general this country so desperately needs at the moment to guard against excesses from any quarter.

That’s right; it’s an important job, the nominee has the credentials, but the Senate should conduct its regularly scheduled witch hunt to tar or feather this nominee because he thinks differently than the Senate majority party and the editors of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

After all, the associative property would seem to indicate that when the political is the personal, then verily the personal is political, and man cannot hold private (or publicly expressed) opinions and still do a job objectively according to the law of the land. Because the personal conscience or lack thereof is the highest law that some people can imagine.

It’s kinda dry reading, but this summary of a study indicates that older men who procreate are serving the interests of the human race, not themselves:

Evolutionary theory says that individuals should die of old age when their reproductive lives are complete, generally by age 55 in humans, according to demographer Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at Stanford. But the fatherhood of a small number of older men is enough to postpone the date with death because natural selection fights life-shortening mutations until the species is finished reproducing.

“Rod Stewart and David Letterman having babies in their 50s and 60s provide no benefit for their personal survival, but the pattern [of reproducing at a later age] has an effect on the population as a whole,” Puleston said. “It’s advantageous to the species if these people stick around. By increasing the survival of men you have a spillover effect on women because men pass their genes to children of both sexes.”

. . . .
Human ability to scale the so-called “wall of death” — surviving beyond the reproductive years — has been a center of scientific controversy for more than 50 years, Puleston said.

Only one of our presidential candidates fits that description. Fred Thompson: selflessly vaulting the wall of death to ensure longevity for the children and our children’s children.

(Link seen on Dustbury.)

Coffee Chain Changes Name Over Concerns It’s An Ethnic Slur:

A small but growing coffeehouse chain is changing its name amid concern that the moniker meant to celebrate the seed of its main product also is a disparaging term for Hispanics.

Beaner’s Coffee, based in East Lansing, Mich., on Friday informed franchisees and employees at its 77 stores in Michigan and eight other states that it would become Biggby Coffee, effective Jan. 31.

“That just doesn’t really fall within our mission to have a name that is derogatory,” Bob Fish, 44, Beaner’s chief executive, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “We felt it was important to do the right thing and change the name.”

Also, doo-wop music shall henceforth be known as doo-biggby music.

Old Building Needs Repairs:
Kirkwood Public Library will ask voters for a 12-cent hike in the residential tax rate:

After November, Kirkwood Public Library Director Wicky Sleight hopes duct tape won’t be needed to hold the aging library’s heating and air conditioning systems together.

On Nov. 6, Kirkwood voters will be asked to approve Proposition L, a 12-cent tax increase. The current residential tax rate, approved in August, is 16.7 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, down from 19 cents in 2006.

The Kirkwood Public Library Board of Trustees on Aug. 15 voted unanimously to place the tax levy before voters.

Residents Say District To Collect More Taxes Than Needed: School board OKs tax rate for year:

Despite concerns of some residents that the Kirkwood School District is not exhibiting fair financial practices, the Kirkwood School Board on Aug. 29 approved tax rates for the 2007-08 school year at $3.75 per $100 of assessed valuation.

In 2005, voters approved an operating tax levy ceiling of $3.85 per $100 of assessed valuation.

. . . .

Board Member Ben Clark said the board could be shirking its responsibility by not taking the $3.85 limit set by the voters.

Each of the government’s priorities get siloed into independent taxes/tax districts and each of them want more, more, more. When it comes down to a single issue, who could say, “No, don’t fix the libraries; no, don’t give the police a retirement plan; no, don’t put air conditioners in the schools.”

Back in the old days, I think they had individual elected officials who made the decisions on the priorities for the town. Now each piece of the town sets its own priorities that never conflict with the priorities of other portions of the government. After all, they can always ask the residents to pay more taxes, even if it’s more than the government needs.

Not that it’s a good standard, but a black comedian has been censured for using the word nigger:

A standup routine by black comedian Eddie Griffin was stopped after he repeatedly used the N-word, a magazine’s spokesman said Wednesday.

Griffin, who has appeared in movies such as “Undercover Brother” and “Date Movie” and the TV show “Malcolm & Eddie,” was performing at a Black Enterprise magazine event in the Miami suburb of Doral on Friday when he was cut off after using profanities and the N-word, said Andrew Wadium, a spokesman for the publication.

So I guess the whole black people say it and nothing happens canard is done, so everyone who used it instead of saying what’s the point in taking offense at a single word so much that it becomes a magic word? ought to feel vindicated. But they won’t. And they shouldn’t.

That’s not what the headline says; it says Verizon agrees to pay utility tax. However, we know that’s the result; apparently, it began collecting the tax, under protest, on bills a year ago.

But here’s the howler of the article:

Municipal officials contend the companies don’t have to make the customer pay.

“I do think it is confusing,” said Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League. “We would prefer if the companies paid it.”

Haw haw! And you know what, municipal officials? You don’t have to collect the tax money and blow on silly schemes, either. But you do.

Newly released documents indicate WIDESPREAD TROOP ABUSES!!1!! according to the ACLU and its PR firm, AP:

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a troubling pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.

A troubling pattern of bajillions millions hundreds of thousands tens of thousands thousands hundreds almost dozens of incidents:

The documents, to be released today by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents.

The system is at fault because it made the soldiers do it:

They show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed local residents.

Believing/insisting. Ah, how the truth is merely felt:

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a “stress position” they insisted was an approved technique.

Defense is gospel, unless of course, it’s the military defending itself from a lawsuit designed to….I dunno, make the military look defensive? As a defendant?

I’m glad we live under a system where this sort of thing is possible. I wish we lived in a culture where it was not so pervasive.

Jonathan Edwards identifies the first government diktat he would issue with a government-run health plan:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

Prepare yourselves to submit yourself to an annual review by a government bureaucrat of some sort, whether it’s a government-paid “doctor” or some paper pusher at the bureau.

Better yet, prepare yourself for the unstated list of government prohibitions that will come when “public health” is funded from the government leaders’ pool of available pork money. Probable prohibitions will include:

• Tobacco.
• Alcohol.
• Junk food.
• Dangerous hobbies.
• Places in the home where you can fall.

Trending toward the absurd? What is absurd in contemporary American public policy? Certainly not building sports facilities while bridges collapse or school districts are taken over by the state; certainly not people rallying for “single payer health care” or nationalization schemes who have thought out what it means other than fewer health care checks written in their handwriting.

Waukesha man loses pants, but not his shirt:

The worst part wasn’t that Mark Stahnke woke up Monday morning in the patio chair of some neighbor he didn’t know.

Or that his pants were missing.

The worst part was the contents of his missing pants: a cashier’s check for $41,093, which he meant to give to his son, and several hundred dollars in cash that he had gotten from the bank.

Stahnke still doesn’t know what happened between the time he left a bar Sunday night and the time he woke up in some stranger’s backyard Monday morning, but thanks to an honest citizen who found the missing pants and returned all the contents to the local authorities, Stahnke retrieved his valuables Friday from the Waukesha Police Department.

He got the pants back, too.