Category: News

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.

Judge: Wage law doesn’t apply to local gov’t:

Circuit Judge Richard Callahan ruled that the new law cannot be applied to local governments because the new pay scale applies to an “individual, partnership, association, corporation, business, business trust, legal representative, or any organized group of persons.” Callahan decided that doesn’t include local governments.

I guess not; the government is neither the legal representative of the people nor organized.

That must make them a motley band of infighting self-anointed rulers of the plebes. I have to agree.

Apparently someone is planting acid bombs in San Francisco:

A 10-year-old girl was sprayed with hydrochloric acid Sunday after her brother kicked a bottle that had been left on the street in front of a Redwood City church and it ruptured, according to the Redwood City Fire Department.

It is the fourth time in about a month in which chemical-filled bottles have been found in San Mateo County, Battalion Chief Steve Cavallero said.

The last one was planted outside a Lutheran Church.

Funny how little you can find about that on the Internet.

You know why I don’t tend to read the letters to the editor in the local papers? Because many of them read like this thoughtless screed, summed up with the pithy:

Your freedom to choose ends when it impinges on my right to a clean planet.

Oh, revel, revel, gentle reader, in that principle. Your basic freedom ends where it impinges upon my freedom to an arbitrary, aesthetically determined freedom.

And don’t think that your freedoms would not continue being abrogated until such time as everyone achieves the same level of misery.

Practical joke leads to cop’s shooting:

Police believe a practical joke led to the shooting Tuesday of a 23-year-old Ste. Genevieve police officer.

The rookie deputy allegedly faked a break-in around 9:45 p.m. at his brother-in-law’s home in Festus, said Festus Police Chief Tim Lewis. The brother-in-law thought an intruder was about to enter his house and reacted by shooting him.

A short time later, Festus police noticed a car speeding along Veterans Boulevard and realized the vehicle was racing to Jefferson Memorial Hospital. Once there, they recognized the shooter as an on-call minister for the police department.

Jeez.

The Missouri Bar has a handy guide to keep on hand in case of nuclear detonation, river-shifting earthquake, tsunami, devastating hurricane, or apartment complex fire so that you can be sure to protect your legal rights and pay legal fees with whatever survives the looting, roving gangs, and roaming vigilantes or protection-confiscating police.

There’s no point in merely surviving if you cannot sue someone, I guess.

Compare and contrast with this wisdom (link seen on Dustbury; these bits correctly inject perspective into the concept of “mass disaster,” but one suspects that the light versions of mass disasters are the ones the Missouri Attorneys’ special interest group / lobbying organization is most willing to help the victim through.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel carries a regrettable story about a little old lady who lost her “life savings” of about $20,000 because she left it in the form of a check in a safe deposit box for 22 years (regrettable both because her life savings was only $20,000 and because she lost it). Tucked inside, we have a stunning display of simplistic Web research and basic misunderstanding of economics:

Willie Floyd said she hadn’t thought about the interest she was losing by not having it in a standard savings account. The interest she would have earned could vary, but a calculator provided online by the Federal Reserve Bank indicates that if she had bought something for $19,700.22 in 1985, it would cost her $38,480.79 to buy the same goods or services, based on the Consumer Price Index.

Bravo, Marie Rohde, your economics teacher must be proud!

You don’t have an economics teacher? The deuce you say!

David Nicklaus, my favorite St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, had a two part series this week about the problems that the Renaissance Hotel in downtown St. Louis faces as its presence and that of the relatively new, absolutely expensive convention center hasn’t led to its financial success (Part I, Renaissance hotel troubles reflects woes facing local convention business and Part II, More space isn’t the solution for Renaissance).

I don’t understand the current municipal government drive to turn empty space into empty buildings (or used space, through the magic of eminent domain and sweetheart deals and tax incentives for private “tick on a tax payer” businesses). Aren’t there enough examples of these sorts of failed projects or empty shopping centers to perhaps make our great white fathers (of whatever color) abandon the principals of private property and free market a little less gleefully?

Nah, I doubt it.

The slide into a nanny state can actually be a slippery slope when they want to legislate sled safety:

“The challenge that we face is that it’s not the norm – nor is it likely to ever be the norm – for kids to wear helmets while sledding,” said Bridget Clementi, injury and prevention manager at Children’s Hospital and Health System.

Ah, but the government and child safety advocates how to make a norm, don’t they.

This story has everything that goes into policy decisions in contemporary America:

• An anecdote.
  It was close to midnight at Lowell Park, which has one of the best sledding hills in the county, and Ziebell, who had just turned 20, jumped on a snow tube with a friend. The friend fell off while they were zooming down the hill, but Ziebell continued and slammed into a tree trunk, splitting open her skull and crushing her left arm.
• A spurious statistic that falls apart given any thought.
  

  Area trauma centers are reporting the usual snowboarding wrist fractures, sledding concussions and ankle injuries, but Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin already has admitted three children since Nov. 1 for sledding injuries. That’s more in-patient sledding accident victims than in the five-month season last year.

  Keep in mind, it’s been a very snowy two month period and don’t consider that swimming pool drownings are down a touch in the same period.

And, of course, the impulse to legislate away any possibility of accident, regardless of cost or impact.

Sure, the article doesn’t advocate legislation directly, but these things always start this way, don’t they?

How else can we take this column?

I’ve used this column in the past as a means of issuing impassioned pleas to product designers. Now it’s time for another, at least as heartfelt as the ones in the past: Please, keep things quiet. Or at least give me the option of doing so.

I’ve noticed that over the past few years, more and more of my appliances want to tell me things, whether I want to hear them or not, something they accomplish via a variety of beeps and buzzes.

He then tells manufacturers to knock it off. For his own comfort, he would deprive the visually impaired of the ability to know when their dishes are done, when their laundry is done, or when their power to their televisions has gone out. Or he would give pranksters the ability to deprive the visually impaired of those same abilities.

Friends, I know the world we’re living in and its march to a cacophonous new world where silence must be broken to better serve the minority amongst us who cannot see or cannot see well. At a nearby intersection, the crosswalk now blares “Wait!” or “Walk sign is now on to cross” along with an incessant beeping to draw the infrequent visually impaired person to the push-to-cross button. It never stops, and it insists upon making its noise all the time for the benefit of the few.

Much like the occasional news story about visually impaired people who are endangered by the silence of hybrid vehicles. When they get their way, all hybrids will be outfitted with internal combustion engine sound simulators so that the minority is not endangered. Meanwhile, other minorities will continue to agitate for sound abatement expenditures to counter internal combustion engine sounds and the eventual loud safety mechanisms.

Me, I am preparing for the beeping, blaring future by buying ear-plug stock and turning up the music in my headphones so I can deaden my ear nerve endings.

According to the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, it’s okay when the police officer lies to Federal investigators in an immigration matter:

The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission voted Wednesday to overturn the firing of Police Officer Alexander Ayala, even though he lied to a federal agent as his brother was being investigated for adopting a false identity.

…
Ayala’s firing came after an internal investigation alleged that he had lied to immigration officials when asked May 30 about his brother’s citizenship status. He told a federal agent that his brother, Oscar Ayala-Cornejo, was a Mexican citizen living in Mexico, and that he had not spoken to him for a long time, according to testimony provided by witnesses before the commission Wednesday.

“At that moment in time, I was being a son and brother,” Ayala told commissioners Wednesday night as he pleaded for his job. “I was an immigrant, and it’s hard being an immigrant here.”

The rule of law takes another hit, or at least the perception does. When you have an accumulation of stories wherein suspects surreptitiously recording their own interrogations catch police detectives perjuring themselves, wherein police patrolmen are caught threatening to make up things to take citizens to jail by dashboard cameras in the citizens’ cars, and wherein police officers are allowed to keep their jobs after lying in an investigation and in supporting lawbreaking by family members, you’re facing an increasing suspicion on the part of the citizens that maybe the law enforcement officials aren’t exactly looking out for the citizens and that, instead of being held to higher standards, are held to lower standards.

Maybe law enforcement professionalism isn’t taking a hit. Perhaps the legislators’ eagerness to add ever-increasing numbers of police to the streets hasn’t actually lowered the standards for recruits or the training thereof. But the perception of rule of law, or lack thereof, will have a certain impact on citizenship, and not a good one.

Headline: Former state rep sentenced for fraud. Lead:

Former State Rep. Nathan Cooper, somber and tearful in federal court, was fined $6,000 and sentenced to 15 months in prison today for an immigration fraud scheme that derailed his political and legal careers.

Oh, yeah, sounds like the same old game, ainna? We don’t get the party affiliation until paragraph 8.

The Cape Girardeau Republican pleaded guilty in August to one count each of visa fraud and making a false statement to the Department of Labor.

Has AP paid attention to the right-leaning blogosphere’s game, or has it always let the party affiliation fall into the lesser paragraphs on some stories?

Foreign manufacturers, that is:

Missouri exports hit $12.8 billion last year, up 22 percent from 2005, and experts predict this year’s export sales will be even higher. Illinois exports totaled $42.1 billion in 2006, up 17 percent from the year before. Canada, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom and China are the top export countries for both states.

Oddly enough, the story’s headline, Local companies moving deeper into exporting, doesn’t mention the effect the lower exchange rates have. The story itself does mention it, though:

LaBounty and others attributed the recent growth in local exporting in part to the weak dollar, which has fallen more than 10 percent against a basket of currencies in November compared to the same time in 2006. What that means: The cost of U.S. goods is cheaper for companies and consumers abroad.

Still, one can see that this is a “good” economy story instead of a “bad” one, which no doubt would have mentioned the lower dollar in the headline.