Category: News

What is the difference between Michael Vick (Falcons’ Vick Accused of Executing Dogs) and the city of Denver (Denver pit bull ban draws dog lovers’ ire)?

Michael Vick bought his own pit bulls and “executed” them, whereas the city of Denver seized other people’s pit bulls and “put them down” for the good of society.

Haha! No, I guess it’s not funny. It’s even less funny when you think of the lack of principles involved.

And you know what’s really cheesing me off about the dogfighting thing? It’s the perversion of the language. I mean, come on, a rape stand? That’s not the term by which you buy them in the catalog; it’s called a breeding stand, and it’s designed so that mating dogs don’t hurt each other during mating (or to hold the dog for grooming or whatnot). But the papers and the indignirati all use rape stand because rape is an automatic bad word above reproach. Like here’s Brian J. Noggle saying that rape isn’t rape when a breeding animal hasn’t given its consent to be bred.

Or Michael Vick “executing” dogs. I mean, seriously, executing them? We’ve used that term to refer to a procedural sort of killing by some sort of authority, not tossing kittens in the river. But, again, it’s an automatic bad word, worse than killing a dog, Michael Vick was executing them.

George Orwell would nod sadly but knowingly.

Watch for that warning label, coming soon thanks to this lawsuit:

A Morgantown man, his mother and his friend are suing McDonald’s for $10 million.

The man says he bit into a hamburger and had a severe allergic reaction to the cheese melted on it.

As a severely allergic man, he took every reasonable precaution to ensure his own safety:

Jeromy did his part to make it known he didn’t want cheese on the hamburgers because he is allergic, Houston said.

He told a worker through the ordering speaker and then two workers face-to-face at the pay and pick-up windows that he couldn’t eat cheese, Houston said.

“By my count, he took at least five independent steps to make sure that thing had no cheese on it,” Houston said. “And it did and almost cost him his life.”

After getting the food, the three drove to Clarksburg and started to eat the food in a darkened room where they were going to watch a movie, Houston said.

Jeromy took one bite and started having the reaction, Houston said. One of the three immediately called the McDonald’s to let restaurant employees know they had messed up the order, but had to cut the call short when Jeromy started having a bad reaction, Houston said.

That’s right, he told people he was allergic but didn’t take the precaution of actually checking his food. Afterwards, while he’s reacting, his friends call the McDonalds.

Sounds like someone is digging for some free money here.

On the other hand, here’s an encouraging sign from our health industry:

The lawsuit alleges Jeromy “was only moments from death” or serious injury by the time he reached the hospital.

. . . .
McDonald’s representatives offered to pay half of Jeromy’s medical bills — which totaled about $700. When Houston became involved, he said the company offered to pay all the medical costs.

The cost of saving someone only moments from death: $1400.

Good work, health care industry!

Prices are going up for some commodities when the supply goes down and demand remains the same or goes up:

The wholesale price of cocaine has surged since December because of a shortage of the drug in 37 U.S. cities, including Milwaukee, according to a recent announcement by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Isn’t it stunning that this happens to drugs but not to petroleum, where price increases are always the result of mere greed on the part of the oil companies?

In between the bomp-bomp-bomp-bomps of the NPR All Things Considered intro music today, they teased me that one of their upcoming stories was about the possibility of reinstituting the draft.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, I have been hearing that for the last five years. In 2003, my own grandmother expressed fear of it, sure that Bush was going to impress my younger cousins and send them to Iraq.

To heck with it; I am on the bandwagon. Let’s restore the damn thing so that I don’t have to hear horror stories about that particular monster in the closet, children voters, a whole decade.

UPDATE: Here’s the story.

And I’ve reconsidered; if we reinstitute the draft, the same people worried about it coming back would take to the streets to demand its end, again. So we might as well not if they say we’re going to.

UPDATE II: James Joyner weighs in, sort of.

I guess that’s the message from this poll:

Ninety-one percent of Americans believe sending text messages while driving is as dangerous as driving after having a couple of drinks, but 57 percent admit to doing it, a poll released on Tuesday said.

The Harris Interactive survey commissioned by mobile messaging service Pinger found 89 percent of respondents believe texting while driving is dangerous and should be outlawed.

Even so, 66 percent of the adults surveyed who drive and use text messaging told pollsters they had read text messages or e-mails while driving. Fifty-seven percent admitted to sending them.

Please, mama government, save me from myself!

A good follow-up question would have been to ask how many obeyed the speed limits, existing laws designed to regulate behavior while driving, to determine how many of those people we could expect to heed new laws about texting while driving.

Oh, never mind.

In St. Ann, a municipality in northwest St. Louis County, its sales tax mainstay is not providing the tax revenue it used to:

When Northwest Plaza gets a cold, St. Ann sneezes.

Northwest Plaza is ailing right now, and St. Ann’s finances are following suit.

The city depends on sales taxes from the shopping mall for a big chunk of its revenue, and sales at the mall have been on a steady decline since 2000.

“We are extremely sales tax driven,” said Mayor Tim James. “When that money goes on hiatus, which is what we are hoping, and not gone for good, it really shakes things up.”

Since 2000, the city has reduced its work force to 92 from 112 and has begun charging residents for garbage pickup that used to be free. But so far, the city has kept up appearances. Potholes are being fixed, and the streets are being patrolled.

Ah, yes, the facade of providing core government services instead of blowing scads of cash on a water park that won’t break even on an annual basis (like so many of your neighbor municipalities are).

So what is the lesson about this that municipal leaders can learn? Partnering with land developers in crony capitalist schemes to increase your sales tax revenue and then spending that sales tax revenue as though it will continue to grow infinitely might put you into trouble when those sales taxes decline?

Nah; the lesson is thank goodness you’re not fools like those people in St. Ann!

Deep within this New York Times article lamenting that having only a couple of million dollars doesn’t make you nutso rich (a point of view with which I agree, actually), we get this bit of commentary with which I don’t:

David Koblas, a computer programmer with a net worth of $5 million to $10 million, imagines what his life would be like if he left Silicon Valley. He could move to a small town like Elko, Nev., he says, and be a ski bum. Or he could move his family to the middle of the country and live like a prince in a spacious McMansion in the nicest neighborhood in town.

But Mr. Koblas, 39, lives with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in Los Altos, south of Palo Alto, where the schools are highly regarded and the housing prices are inflated accordingly. So instead of a luxury home, the family lives in a relatively modest 2,000-square-foot house — not much bigger than the average American home — and he puts in long hours at Wink, a search engine start-up founded in 2005.

“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

Speaking on behalf of those of us in the middle of the country, please stay on a coast.

I don’t know who’s more of a self-important twit; the journalist writing the story, or the mcmillionaire.

MADD offers comments on Amtrak offering booze to high end rail customers:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving questioned whether $100 in free alcohol was too much.

“This sounds like a lot of credit toward possible overindulging,” said MADD spokeswoman Misty Moyse.

Considering that the overindulgers would be riding a train, I think MADD is out of place here, but kudos to CNN for finding political opposition for a business/travel story.

Apparently, the press cannot keep its mouth shut regarding the United States’ covert incursions and invasion of a sovereign nation:

O, Canada! More Americans Heading North: The Number of Americans Moving to Canada in 2006 Hit a 30-Year High

Our citizens cry out for more wait times for medical services!

Missouri Department of Transportation, November 10, 2004, after a Missouri Constitutional amendment throws hundreds of millions of dollars into the Missouri Department of Transportation budget:

Funding from passage of Amendment 3 will provide thousands of miles of smooth roads on Missouri’s most heavily traveled highways, officials with the Missouri Department of Transportation announced today.

MoDOT unveiled the Smooth Roads Initiative, a plan to provide 2,200 miles of smoother pavement, brighter road markings and other safety improvements in three years. The initiative is the first part of a three-part plan to use Amendment 3 funds to improve the state’s highway system. A map specifying the selected roads was included in the announcement.

“Missourians spoke loud and clear when they voted for Amendment 3,” said MoDOT Director Pete Rahn. “By an almost four-to-one margin, they said they’re not happy with current road conditions, and they want them fixed. Starting today, that’s just what we’re going to do.”

Fast forward (or travel one day at a time like the rest of us) to August, 2007, not even three years later, and learn that despite the best efforts of the government, that new money ain’t enough:

Missouri’s top transportation official is canvassing the state talking about a “perfect storm” forming over his department.

Road construction costs are spiking, debt payments are ballooning, and at the same time, fuel taxes are generating slightly less cash and the federal highway trust fund is speeding toward a multibillion-dollar deficit.

Wow, who could have seen that coming?

The more you feed the government, the bigger it gets; the bigger it gets, the more it needs to eat. Ah, who cares about economics and an understanding of a bureaucratic nature. THE BEAST IS HUNGRY!

Mark Steyn enumerates flaws in the justice system. I agree with everything he says.

But I don’t expect that there will be a groundswell to fix these issues since it’s not everyone’s grandmother getting railroaded like everyone’s grandmother is starving and destitute. At least, that’s how Congress characterizes them.

James Joyner looks at a Congressional Budget Office report requested by Congressman John Murtha, D-PA about the feasibility and impact of bringing back the draft, and Joyner wonders:

One wonders, then, what he hoped the CBO study would accomplish.

Well, here it is in Time magazine.

Reports indicate that the government is studying the feasibility of reinstituting the draft. Never mind that, once again, these initiatives/studies/legislative proposals come from Democrats who really only want the word “draft” in the news. The important thing is that the public, helped along by the message-managers in the media, will think this is a George W. Bush / Republican thing.

Behold the beauty of the rhetoric:

So then what about the third, most controversial option — is it time to reinstitute the draft? That option has a certain appeal as the Army fell short of its active-duty recruiting goal for June by about 15%. It is the second consecutive month the service’s enlistment effort has slipped as public discontent grows over the war in Iraq.

Bringing back mandatory service has been the refrain of many who want to put the brakes on the Iraq war; if every young man is suddenly a potential grunt on his way to Baghdad, the thinking goes, the war would end rather quickly. It’s also an argument made by those who are uneasy that the burden of this war is being unfairly shouldered by the 1.4-million-strong U.S. military and no one else.

The war unfairly shouldered by an all-volunteer military. An option put up by the journalist for a problem that he has inflated (military recruiting not meeting its goals).

I don’t think a draft is going to happen; however, what’s important to certain elements within our nation is that grandmothers, mothers, and the young fear it enough to elect the “protectors” of youth. Even those same “protectors” are the ones studying and trying to reinstitute the very bogeyman they slay.