Category: News

Local family businesses are taking extreme measures:

St. Louis shoppers can expect to see more grocery prices fall as competitors react to Schnuck Markets Inc.’s move to cut what it charges for some 10,000 items.

“We’ve always been competitive, and we always will be. That’s the bottom line,” said Greg Dierberg, president and chief executive of Chesterfield-based Dierbergs Markets Inc. “We’ll react to any items that we need to.”

Are they providing better values for the customers in the region out of the goodness of their hearts or in cutthroat competition between the chains?

Of course not.

Schnuck Markets launched its aggressive pricing strategy on Sunday, ahead of what it sees as rapid expansion of Wal-Mart Supercenters into the St. Louis metro area. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Ark., has more than 2,100 Supercenters in the U.S., including seven in the St. Louis market [sic, in that the story lacked a period]

Proof again that Wal-Mart is destroying mom-and-pop businesses and ultimately hurting the consumer. But it’s so subtle that you can’t see it unless you squint really, really hard until the very dust motes before your eyes become capitalistic monsters.

Compare and contrast:

• Illinois House votes for electricity rate freeze
  

  In response to sharp increases in Illinois electric rates this month, the Illinois House voted Sunday to freeze rates at their previous levels.

• Chavez to nationalize companies in move toward ‘socialist republic of Venezuela’:
  

  President Hugo Chavez announced plans Monday to nationalize Venezuela’s electrical and telecommunications companies, pledging to set up a socialist state in a move with echoes of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution.

  “We’re moving toward a socialist republic of Venezuela, and that requires a deep reform of our national constitution,” Chavez said in a televised address after swearing in his Cabinet. “We are in an existential moment of Venezuelan life. We’re heading toward socialism, and nothing and no one can prevent it.”

Very different, no? One is a national entity that is controlling electrical rates for the benefit of its citizens and the power-mad people who want the control, and the other is a state government. Also, the national entity will ultimately be responsible for production of the electricity or its decline, whereas the state entity will merely be responsible for holding hearings on why companies go bankrupt when pressed for increasing service for no increased revenue.

Buried in the story of another US submarine colliding with another Japanese merchant vessel (man, those Navy guys are still pissed about Pearl Harbor, ainna?), we get this nugget:

The Mogamigawa was traveling from the Gulf to Singapore and was carrying a crew of eight Japanese and 16 Filipinos. It is expected to arrive in the port of Khor Fakkan later Tuesday, company spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.

Apparently, it’s protocol in some companies that if you leak information about where your valuable ships and their valuable cargo are going and when, you must do so anonymously.

Odd the things those Japanese write into their employee handbooks.

Hidden within the story that Taser, International will offer models of its patented drunk killing device to the general public, we see what kind of superscam this really is:

Taser has however said that it will be sold inert, and activated after the purchaser takes part in an online background check.

That is, you, gentle reader, would spend your filthy lucre on a device that won’t work until Taser, International, says you’re okay to have a working Taser.

The next step, of course, is a Taser-As-Service model, where the self-defense tool only works if you keep up on the monthly subscription fee. Forget to tell Taser, International, that your credit card expiration date changed, and you’re in for a big surprise on that underlit street where you encounter a couple ruffians.

This American Dream?

Briny Breezes is a down-market relic of old Florida, surrounded by glamorous multimillion-dollar homes and splashy high-rise condos.

The Briny Breezes brochure calls it a “self-governed mobile home community of kindred souls.” Residents of the Palm Beach County town cruise the narrow streets on golf carts, passing palm trees and tiny, neatly manicured yards. They wave to each other and chat about the next neighborhood outing — water aerobics at the community pool, shuffleboard near the clubhouse, bowling night.

An idyllic place where a hundred thousand dollars or so buys you a trailer on the ocean in paradise, where you can live almost inexpensively through your golden years (whenever you make them)?

That’s so 1959. This American Dream:

Briny Breezes’ board recently approved the sale for $510 million. The owners of the 488 trailers have until Jan. 10 to ratify or reject the deal. A two-thirds majority is needed to sell. The amount each person would get depends on how many shares the resident owns. Each share is worth roughly $32,000 under the developer’s offer. Owners would not get any money — and wouldn’t have to move out — until 2009.

Kevin Dwyer, 47, is all for the deal. Dwyer, who paid $37,500 for his trailer nine years ago, would make about $800,000.

“See these pockets? They’re empty,” Dwyer said, a stack of unpaid bills sitting on a table in his single-wide trailer less than 100 yards from the ocean. “I’ve nickeled and dimed my whole life. I hit the lottery.”

The American Dream of 2007, shared by many individuals and their elected officials, where you can get rich through a small investment and the forced relocation of your neighbors.

Suddenly, I don’t think we’ve learned so much as a nation since the founding days.

Scientists predict 2007 May Be Warmest Yet. Well, in that spirit, I’d like to say a few things about 2007:

• It may be the worst smelling year ever if everyone forgets to shower and the dogs run amok and defecate everywhere, leading people to track it into buildings.
• It may be the coldest year ever if El Padre locks El Nino in his room for not doing his homework.
• It may be the worst hurricane season ever, or the best, or somewhere in between.
• It may be the year Prince Charles ascends the throne and orders an invasion of the United States and Canada to restore them to British hands, if he goes completely mad.

I mean, come on, they’re scientists. They make predictions that may come true, but they’re working off of slightly less incomplete sets of data than Pat Robertson. How come these fellows get a headline more sympathetic than scientists who say man might have actually lived concurrently with dinosaurs? How about those who say the natural world has a greater tolerance than mankind could overcome even if it tried?

Because one might move public policy in a more progressive direction, you think?

The Bush administration and its Iraqi policy gets a boost from an Oakland resident, who realizes that the violence in Iraq is no worse than that of a typical American city:

“There have been three drive-by shootings in the past two months on my street,” said Miltiades Mandros, whose North Oakland neighborhood was the scene of a feud between rival drug dealers in 2006. “There are bullet holes all over my building from automatic weapons. It looks like it’s Baghdad or Beirut.”

Instapundit links to a post at NewsBusters about ABC News’s use of [sic] that might indicate media bias or lack of belief in an afterlife.

NewsBusters says:

Adding religious insult to mortal injury in its coverage of the 3000th US service-person to die in Iraq, ABC seemed to suggest that there was something odd or erroneous in the expression of a traditional belief in the afterlife.

The quote to which ABC News applied the [sic] is:

“You were one of my best friends and I’ll never forget you. All my prayers go to your family and I’ll see you again.” (sic)

Come on, people. There is a grammar error in the sentence, so use of [sic] is appropriate. The second sentence is a compound sentence, which means there should be a comma before the conjunction between the clauses. It should be: All my prayers go to your family, and I’ll see you again.

Here’s a story on ABCNews.com that uses the comma appropriately:

Rumsfeld was supposed to be an honorary pall bearer at Saturday night’s ceremony, but bad weather in New Mexico apparently prevented him from making the earlier service.

See? ABC News was noting that the comma was missing in the source material. Not that it’s a bunch of godless heathen mocking Christians.

People ought to save their outrage for outrageous things, not inventions based on faulty understanding of grammar.

Hey, all the cool news agencies are doing it. Why not MfBJN?

Hussein had problems with Bush Iraq policy

BAGHDAD(AP) — Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein questioned the Bush administration’s rationale for the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq in interviews he granted on condition they not be released until after his death.

In his embargoed July 2004 interview with The Daily Mirror, Hussein said the Iraq war was not justified, the Mirror reported Saturday night.

Hussein “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as continuing the lucrative, er, punitive sanctions, much more vigorously, the Mirror’s Peter Arnett wrote. The story initially was posted on the newspaper’s Internet site.

“I don’t think I would have gone to war,” Hussein told Arnett a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion.

In the tape-recorded interview, Hussein was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. A sovereign leader should never justify; they should merely invade their neighbors and execute any dissidents,” Hussein said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error that they should justify what they were going to do.”

In an interview given with the same ground rules to the New York Daily News last May, Hussein said he thought Bush had erred by staking the invasion on claims he had weapons of mass destruction.

CNN, reporting on Saddam Hussein’s execution, gives Saddam the dark date graphic saved for statesmen and celebrities:

Me, I’m trying to figure out how a tyrant gets this. Pinochet didn’t when he died a couple weeks ago. Is this reverence reserved for cause celebres that one in the media would hope reflected badly on America, or the Bush administration?

I am so cynical.

In a story entitled Woman, 57, is shot, killed on her porch, we have these rich nonsequitors:

A neighbor said he had heard a gunshot about that time but didn’t see anything unusual.

“This is a very quiet neighborhood,” Capt. David Dorn said. “This is very unusual for this neighborhood.”

Neighbor hears a gunshot. In this very quiet neighborhood. Nothing unusual.

I wonder what my neighborhood rates on the very quiet neighborhood scale.

Kudos to AP, who found a way to turn Gerald Ford’s death into a means to flog the Bush administration:

Former President Gerald R. Ford questioned the Bush administration’s rationale for the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq in interviews he granted on condition they not be released until after his death.

In his embargoed July 2004 interview with The Washington Post, Ford said the Iraq war was not justified, the Post reported Wednesday night.

That takes skill and effort. Or lack thereof.

In Alaska, a woman suspected that a package had been delivered to her old residence by mistake, so she called the current resident. Current resident said he didn’t know anything about it. So the woman called the state police, and they searched the man’s home.

Sure, the troopers found a cornucopia of drugs in the man’s home, but that leads me to think he might have been under suspicion and the misdirected package provided a mere pretext for a search. But still, we’ve lowered the bar to the point where suspicion of a misdirected package can lead to a police search warrant.

Aw, who am I kidding? The police do this sort of thing based on the uncorroborated tips of informants.

The story seems to indicate that the woman got her Avon samples back, though. Well, she will, after they’re done being evidence in a trial.

U.S. Toll in Iraq Surpasses That of 9/11

Now, with that Grim Milestone™ out of the way, can we get on with continuing to win?

Not so that you’d know it from AP reports.

(Thanks to Ann Althouse for the direct link, since the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a different story linked from the home page with that headline, so I couldn’t direct you there.)

UPDATE: James Joyner provides other useful metrics.