Category: News

Centene ruling may have ‘chilling effect’:

“Getting eminent domain for a project is already tough and this decision is going to make it tougher,” said Jay Case, principal of Chicago-based Orchard Development, which is rehabilitating several historic buildings in St. Louis. He also is developing Trianon, a high-rise residential development in Clayton. None of his projects required eminent domain.

“The decision will have a chilling effect on any community government thinking about invoking eminent domain,” Case said.

Rule of law and the right to private property do so stand in the way of unbridled greed.

Missouri courts block expansive definition of blight, disgruntling land-rustling developers and their greedy municipal sidekicks:

The Missouri Supreme Court narrowed the bounds of eminent domain Tuesday in rejecting the Centene Plaza plan for downtown Clayton and raising the bar for taking private property.

The upscale city failed to prove that property in the 7700 block of Forsyth Boulevard was blighted, the judges ruled in a 6-1 decision favoring landowners who fought condemnation.

City officials began the process to take the land in late 2005 as a site for a $210 million office-retail complex whose future is now in question.

Under the ruling, developers who seek to use condemnation to take land from other private owners will have to give proof that the property is not only old or of obsolete design but that it impacts health and safety as well.

This is very good news for property owners. Now they cannot be thrown out for owning uncool buildings or not producing the maximum level of revenue possible (at least, not until another court determines that impacts health and safety means “doesn’t provide sales tax revenue that funds local EMT services.”

And for the kids in the Mystery Machine, this is also good news, since it will force developers to once again rely on the trick of convincing land owners that the property is haunted, and hey, that made for great cartoons.

As Jack Travis said in Lethal Weapon 3:

The police department’s got it all: guns, ammo, drugs, cash… it’s a one-stop shopping center. If you’ve got the balls and the brains, there’s not a fucking thing anyone can do about it!

So it goes:

Explosives capable of causing “extensive damage” have been stolen from a St. Charles County firing range used by the sheriff’s office and the FBI, federal officials said Tuesday.

Officials are still trying to determine how much dynamite, C-4 and other explosives were taken and exactly who was responsible.

And special kudos to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for its discretion:

The explosives, including C-4, dynamite and safety fuse, were being stored at the St. Charles County training center and firearms range at 1835 South Highway 94, Schmitz said. The range is located in a rural area.

They were stored properly in the federally approved storage magazine, which resembles a large construction Dumpster, Schmitz said.

Awesome. Now everyone knows exactly where to find bomb making equipment in the future and exactly what sort of storage mechanism to look for.

In the novel or screenplay I build from this, the crooks/terrorists/bad guys will just use a construction truck that hauls away large construction dumpsters to pick it up.

Maybe I’ll even make the bad guys disgruntled land developers. They’d have access to that sort of thing and a strong urge to blight an area.

Bogus storm reports probed: FBI joins search for fake warning source:

The FBI has joined the effort to find whoever has been sending false reports of severe weather to the National Weather Service.

The service began getting the reports in mid-April through an online form on its Web site. The areas affected by the reports have included Milwaukee, La Crosse, Chicago, and Lincoln, Ill., said Tom Schwein, chief of the National Weather Service’s systems and facilities division for the central region in Kansas City, Mo.

“We’ve been detecting a regular pattern of a person who has been submitting false severe weather reports that are constructed in a way that seem very realistic,” Schwein said. “Whoever this person is seems to have knowledge of severe weather reports. When they send in reports, they seem very plausible.”

It’s fortunate that the FBI has nothing to worry about more than pranks.

Schwein likened the reports to calling in a false bomb threat or pulling a fire alarm when there is no fire.

Oh, puhlease.

Let your child drink at home: 27 months in jail:

Elisa Kelly did not want her teenage son, Ryan, or his friends to endanger their lives by drinking and driving. So she decided to let him have a 16th birthday party at home, where she would supply the beer, confiscate all the car keys and supervise a nightlong sleep-over.

Today she begins a 27-month jail sentence imposed by courts in Virginia – where drinking is banned for people under the age of 21 – for “contributing to the delinquency of minors”.

That’s reduced from the original sentence of 8 years in jail.

On the less serious end of crime, we have shoot your husband dead, 210 days in jail:

Knoxville native Mary Winkler will go to jail in connection with the killing of her minister husband.

A judge sentenced Winkler to three years of split confinement in connection with the shotgun slaying of her husband in March of 2006.

Of that, she’s been ordered to serve 210 days in jail.

But she apparently prays for her ex-husband’s family every day that they can find peace. That’s swell of her.

Respect for law and order continues to erode as society contemplates how serving liquor to teenagers is considered a far more serious offense than shooting someone in cold blood.

(Links seen on a big victory, Dr. Helen.)

Milk price to take jump:

It costs more to drive to the store these days – and once you get there, you can expect to pay more for milk.

Driven up by high transportation costs, an increase in feed prices and even a drought in Australia, the price of milk is likely to rise by up to 40 cents a gallon over the next few months, dairy market forecasters say. Cheese prices could go up by 60 cents a pound.

If the increases occur, a gallon of whole milk would cost an average of $3.78 nationwide, based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s monthly survey of milk prices in 30 metro areas.

Sure, the milk industry says it’s rising costs, but is it really….

• Record profits in the milk industry?
• Collusion with the soft drink industry to sell more soda to children and their parents?
• Government meddling to make children more unhealthy so unelected and “merit”-based government employees can further erode parental authority ?

Because once we go off the rails of believing people who actually know and study the industry, we open ourselves to the infinite possibilities our uninformed minds can confect. That, my friends, is the essence of freedom.

Few Francis Howell high schoolers test positive for drugs:

A year of mandatory random drug testing in the Francis Howell School District produced few positive tests, according to district leaders who say they want to continue the program next school year.

A little more than 2 percent of mandatory random tests of Francis Howell District high school students were positive for drugs, administrators said Thursday.

Jim Joyce, the district’s director of communications, said 16 of the 660 random drug tests came back positive, finding marijuana, amphetamines or cocaine.

For those of us keeping track at home, that’s a program that was projected to cost $60,000 per year. Or $3750 for each positive result.

But obviously, the program must continue because parents are clamoring for it:

The district originally had planned a voluntary testing program for middle school students, too. Joyce said the district decided to focus on perfecting the high school program after only a small percentage of parents signed their children up for the program.

No, this is about getting budget and getting power over students. Regardless of its actual results, it must continue, for the state knows better than you peasant parents.

Coming soon, a Rapid Response Counseling Team equipped with surplus military gear and no-knock warrants to make you understand drugs are bad!

Everything you own, citizen, is at the government’s leisure and at its disposal. Or some government officials think:

American cell phones can already check e-mail, surf the Internet and store music, but they could have a new set of features in coming years: the Department of Homeland Security wants them to sense biological, chemical and radioactive material.

Putting hazardous material sensors in commercial cell phones has been discussed in scientific circles for years, according to researchers in the field. More recently, the idea gained support among government agencies, and DHS said publicly in May that it wants businesses to start coming up with proposals.

No doubt the wireless carriers are all behind this proposal because they’ll have an excuse to make everyone upgrade to new, more expensive phones and to charge all customers new monthly fees to support the mandatory program.

Not to worry:

Like the built-in GPS function many cell phones now offer, customers would have the option of turning the sensors off, McGinnis said.

Got that, citizen? For marketing e-mail, you have to expressly opt-in, but for intrusive government surveillance programs, you have to expressly opt-out, with that opt-out no doubt going to a database of people who suspiciously opted out.

I have no problem if this becomes a netcentric program like SETI At Home, but the government and its cronies in corporations don’t play like that. Because the government knows what’s best for you!

The San Francisco Chronicle laments the death of a wasteful tax-funded project:

For just 10 cents a day per child, California public school kids are getting to eat fresh apples, oranges and strawberries along with their Pop-Tarts and doughnuts at school breakfast.

At least, that’s been true for the last two years under the pilot Fresh Start program, designed to steer kids away from obesity and diabetes and toward healthy foods.

But Fresh Start is in jeopardy just as preliminary reports are showing its initial success. In an effort to cover a $366 million funding gap in the education part of the state budget, the Legislature recently cut the $11.1 million that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to keep Fresh Start going in the next school year and make it permanent.

The cut incensed child nutrition specialists and advocates.

California has accidentally done the fiscally responsible thing and eliminated a goofball project that steps outside the bounds of the government’s responsibilities. Notably, those who received the largesse are upset.

This post is getting a lot of hits for Jessica Cutler today, apparently because she just filed for bankruptcy.

Which helps traffic since I’m not posting anything much this week.

Oh, sorry, no; since it’s a bad thing for a particular woman, society should perhaps take extra steps to not do it: Texas woman on death row still represents rarity:

A neighbor in a suburban Austin neighborhood appeared to be the perfect babysitter for Eryn Baugh’s infant son and his 2-year-old sister.

“She’s the most sweet, endearing person in the world and put forward this good Christian front,” Baugh said of Cathy Lynn Henderson, who lived two blocks away. “She could sell snow to an Eskimo.”

But just weeks after Henderson started working for the Baughs, 3-month-old Brandon was dead and Henderson had fled the state. The infant’s body was found buried 60 miles away with his skull crushed, wrapped in his yellow-trimmed white blanket and stuffed into a box that previously held Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

Henderson, 50, is set to die in less than three weeks for the 1994 slaying that made her one of the most hated women in Texas. She would be just the 12th woman among the nearly 1,100 convicted killers executed since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1977.

Where are the people who complain about the fact that most corporate structures at the top favor men? For consistency, shouldn’t the underrepresentation of women on death row also be protested?

Silly boy; those who protest in their hearts of hearts often misquote Emerson: A consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Oh, no; a dispute over a sizeable sunken treasure find could derail the EU and cause Spain to send a vast armada–both of its remaining warships–up the Thames in an all-out war to break the backs of the English sea dogs: Deep sea treasure trove launches trans-Atlantic dispute:

Odyssey has insisted it found the wreck in international waters in the Atlantic but has kept the exact site secret, but Madrid suspects the ship was discovered in Spanish territorial waters and a Spanish newspaper reported the vessel itself belonged to Spain.

“What we’re seeing here is a presumed incidence of plundering,” First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said Friday.

Spain opened a probe into the exact location of the wreck last week after the culture ministry became suspicious of the circumstances in which the cargo, worth an estimated 400 million dollars, was found.

Yeah, Spain, who probably minted the coins from stolen Incan or Aztec gold, is on record accusing the American treasure hunting company of plundering. But that’s apparently how it goes in 2007; any possession that was previously owned by someone from another country belongs to the previous owner as long as it’s old.

Bonus additional snark: Iranian officials also claim that the Odyssey was in Iranian national waters and regrets missing the opportunity to seize it.

When presented with a story like this:

A truck driver hauling more than 17 million bees was killed in an accident on Interstate 55.

I am torn as into which direction I want to snark.

Do I wonder Is this part of the great bee assassination conspiracy that’s killing all the honey bees, or do I wonder Whom will the bees sue? and make a list that includes the truck company, the makers of the guard rail, the family of the dead truck driver, and the makers of Honey Nut Cheerios just because General Mills has deep pockets?

The possibilities are endless.

Because one’s inalienable rights fluctuate daily here in America, I thought I’d provide a quick cheatsheet of what is or is not allowed today, May 25, 2007. Please, go by the cheatsheet and do not try to reason out what the authorities will let you do from day to day nor try to apply common sense, as these two mechanisms will lead you astray.

• Your dog pooping on the lawn: CRIME.
  If your dog evacuates itself outdoors, as animals are known to do, you could be cited and given a ticket for it. In some areas, you can go to jail for not having a pooper scooper when you walk your dog.

• Leaving dog poop on a political opponent’s doorstep: LEGAL.

  Seriously. So dog poop is a bad thing, a health or aesthetic hazard when a dog leaves it behind as a matter of its lifecycle, but it’s not art. Or political metaphor. That, my friends, trumps health or ethical concerns regarding feces and urine.

• Flyers with, you know, words on them: CRIME.
  A felony, no less. Sure, the circumstances of the case are off-putting; it was a vendetta, and it expressed a moral sentiment that our revered betters in the government don’t often believe, but the girl is probably going to get jail time for pamphleteering.

Perhaps if you’re walking your dog, you will not be in trouble if you bring political flyers for it to poop on, or perhaps you’re protected from sensationalist hate speech prosecutions if you poop on your pamphlets before passing them around. Regardless, proper poop application seems to be the determining factor here.

Poop is protected speech, but words are not, except in those cases where poop is not protected speech. Ladies and gentlemen, the first amendment of your constitution as it stands today, May 25, 2007.

(One link seen on Instapundit.)

If you’re hoping to buy the latest Slayer CD this morning, forget it; it’s going to be sold out before today is done, as will a lot of Jack Daniels and black candles:

For the second time in a week and the sixth time in the past seven months, triple digits have been drawn in Pick 3. The numbers 6 – 6 – 6 were drawn in the May 22 evening Pick 3 drawing. This is the second time this combination has been drawn in the past two months. The triple 6 combination was drawn in the March 22 midday drawing.

Jeez, it’s bad enough that I have to worry about fools and the corrupt in the world. I’d rather those with demonic powers not revel in their power so obviously.

Well, that’s a relief, almost:

A big rig whose trailer was stolen was actually hauling 28 pallets of commercial “shop vac” style vacuum cleaners and not five tons of fertilizer as authorities had announced, police said Monday.

Until one begins to wonder how many shipments of bad things haven’t bothered the authorities because they only thought the criminals had gotten shop vacs.