Category: News

From the mouths of assistant university police chiefs:

A man and a woman were shot to death in the University of Washington’s architecture building Monday morning in what may have been a murder-suicide, university police said.

Officers responded to reports of gunfire found the two in an office on the fourth floor of Gould Hall, Assistant University Police Chief Ray Wittmier said. He said a weapon was also found in the room.

“It’s quite possible that the suspect is one of the deceased,” Wittmier said. [Emphasis added.]

Is he confusing suspect with perpetrator, or is he being coy?

Michelle Malkin is right, this is funny, unintentionally:

KIMBERLY SHRUM grips a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver and aims at a target 25 yards away.

Bang.

A hot shell casing hits the floor, joining hundreds of others littering the concrete at Jackson Arms Indoor Shooting Range in South San Francisco.

Update: Who am I to snicker? I once refered to the Springfield XD as the Springfield XP. So I am as ignorant as a journalist who either didn’t pay attention to or even attend the event she was covering or who decided to Hollywood up the experience.

A reader (and by reader, I mean someone who found this site while googling Lou Sengheiser) sends along a helpful link to his federal indictment press release.

As you know, I’ve previously been sympathetic to Sengheiser (here and here). I’ll still stand on innocent until proven guilty, but it’s not looking good for him.

Least I can do, since his brother seemed like a nice guy and gave us a good rate on our wedding reception hall. The Shania Twain CD thing notwithstanding.

St. Louis County government mandates its residents to partake of a private service so it can negotiate better rates for the service:

The county’s Waste Management Code, approved last year by the St. Louis County Council, provides for the county to establish “trash districts” throughout the unincorporated areas.

The code establishes a minimum level of service that must include once-a-week trash pick up, once-a-week recycling pick up and at least twice-a-year bulk waste pick up. The minimum level of service requirement applies to both unincorporated area and municipalities in the county.

However, recycling pick ups will not be required for municipalities that operate a drop-off recycling center.

Creating the trash districts would mean St. Louis County would negotiate a contract — hopefully at a price lower than what residents pay now — with a single waste hauling company.

It’s one thing to mandate some sort of minimum accummulation of detritus around one’s domicile for public health reasons, but it’s another to mandate a monopoly and to make all residents customers of the monopoly at the risk of breaking the law.

Conceptually, there’s no reason this is any different from the county council making cellular phones required and then ordering citizens to use Cingular because the county council members will get a better rate.

Illinois legislator channels Hugo Chavez:

Illinois government should get into the electricity business with a state-run, non-profit power agency, the leader of the Illinois House proposed Tuesday, in legislation that denounces Ameren and ComEd for recent rate hikes and service failures.

House Speaker Michael Madigan, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats, filed a bill Tuesday afternoon to create a publicly owned power authority that would use Illinois coal to generate and sell electricity to state residents at cost.

“Excessive costs of electricity (in Illinois) pose a serious threat to the economic well-being, health and safety” of residents, says the 47-page bill, which would establish the Illinois Power Authority Act.

Is there anything that government officials don’t think they can do better than private industry?

I didn’t think so.

Briefly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had the the crime in this story wrong:

Click for full size

Now, if we could only get tax invasion really made into a crime for bureaucrats, we’d be getting somewhere.

From the quiz Smart, very smart: Test tells if you know what a fifth-grader knows:

13. “You are as strong as an ox.” Is this statement a simile or metaphor?

Oh, yeah.

The exorcists in our government have caused the demon to flee, but now they’re complaining about the loss of ritual, offerings to the church that persecuted the demon:

“Does this mean they are going to quit paying taxes in America?” asked Clinton, a US presidential candidate.

“They get a lot of government contracts, is this going to affect the investigations that are going on? Because we have a lot of evidence of misuse of government contracts and how they have cheated the American soldier and cheated the American taxpayer,” Clinton, speaking in New York, said of Halliburton.

Woman killed in police station:

A 35-year-old woman was killed inside the Fox Lake Police Department on Sunday afternoon as she frantically tried to flee her husband, authorities said.

A pedestrian called 911 around 4:45 p.m. after seeing a man ram his car into the woman’s car in the parking lot of the Fox Lake municipal building, according to the Dodge County Sheriff’s Department.

The woman, whose name was not released by authorities Sunday night, ran from her car and fled into the building as her husband pursued her inside, the department reported.

By the time a Fox Lake police officer arrived, the 40-year-old husband was getting back into his car, authorities said. There was no sign of the woman.

David Nicklaus writes a column on the drastic electricity price increases in Illinois, and finds a common villian: The government.

The Legislature, after all, passed the deregulation law in 1997 that led to this year’s rate increases. Consumers benefited for a decade from a rate cut and then a rate freeze. But the utilities, which no longer own power plants directly, had to buy power on the open market beginning this year and pass the cost on to consumers.

Statinalizing the power companies won’t solve the problems that exist when physical suppy and demand collide. Government officials only trade in perceptions.

Someone’s attempt at planned obsolescence has gone horribly, horribly wrong:

Six years before the RMS Titanic set sail on its doomed maiden voyage, a Great Lakes steamship was launched, and it’s still in operation.

Now called St. Marys [sic] Challenger, it is the oldest ship still in service on the Great Lakes. This winter, the 101-year-old Challenger is docked in South Chicago while a maintenance crew from Milwaukee does minor repairs to get it ready for spring sailing.

No, wait; back in the old days, they built simple things that could run for a long time instead of complicated things that break right away. Because in the distant past, quality was a virtue more important than mere profit to companies and a feature more important than any bell or whistle to customers who had attention spans measured in generations instead of seasons.

Will city planners and those who’ve mistaken government service for a real-life game of Sim City take note about this development that, after a number of years, lacks the foot-traffic sorts of business it promised?

At first glance, a trip to the New Urbanist community taking shape on Hercules’ bayfront is reminiscent of the neighborhood depicted in the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show.” Each Craftsman, Victorian and Italianate home couldn’t be more perfect, glistening in an array of tasteful pastels.

But at least Carrey’s character, trapped in a seemingly idyllic seaside community, could walk to the local cafe for a cup of coffee. Three years after moving into the Promenade section of Hercules’ New Urbanist Waterfront Redevelopment District west of Interstate 80, residents still have to drive or take a long walk for items as mundane as a cup of coffee. The bustling just-walk-to-it village, touted as a model of the New Urbanist movement, has yet to materialize.

One of the tenets of the movement is that residents should be able to access essential services without having to drive to a strip mall on the outskirts of town. The idea is to locate retail hubs within walking distance of neighborhoods, or within easy access to mass transit. Currently, the mixed-use, live-work spaces on Railroad Avenue, which are meant to house these shops and services for Promenade district residents, contain real estate offices, finance firms and, of course, a company that specializes in staging homes for sale.

No, of course not; your community leaders know they’re smarter than those saps in California, and that their misunderstanding of how urban areas grow from central planning instead of organically based on industry/employment won’t make the same mistakes.

Of course, they will. They’ll drive out stinky heavy industry to beam down a Star Cups (an off brand coffee shop, because a profitable corporation knows that light residential areas are risky for sustained business operations). Meanwhile, the affluent types who can live in New Urban areas because they commute to higher paid jobs elsewhere or because they’re on a trust fund/retirement will continue to draw the sorts of businesses they can support–expensive places that can survive when the customers aren’t frequent. Like real estate offices, financial firms, a company that specializes in staging homes for sale, and expensive beauty salons.

Here’s today’s CNN.com home page:

Featuring the the Secretary of State as Nosferatu and a headline about the sitting president: Doctor plays whack-a-mole on Bush’s face.

Well, I guess the world’s first and most self-important news network has to compete with the Daily Show.

Police: Cell phones a weapon against drunk drivers:

Many drivers in Missouri and Illinois are armed with an important device to combat drunken driving: Cell phones.

With cell phone use on the rise, drivers are being encouraged to report vehicles that show the telltale signs of driving under the influence, such as swerving into the shoulder and crossing the centerline.

For safety’s sake, take your eyes off the road and dial.

Missouri bill would trade casino loss limits for a tax:

A Senate leader proposed a new twist Monday in the long-running debate on loss limits in Missouri casinos.

Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, wants to remove the $500 loss limit per two-hour period and impose a 1 percent tax increase on casinos. Money generated from the changes would be directed at a new scholarship program available to all high school graduates attending a public or private Missouri higher education institution.

You see, they placed this artificial cap on spending to make sure that the casino clients had to fritter their savings away on the riverboat “cruises” (that’s what the two hour periods represent, time when the boats would be “cruising” the river; quaintly, riverboat gambling was supposed to take place on boats, not on buildings in an inch of picturesque river backwaters engineered to appease the letter of the law).

But never mind artificial tips to concern for the citizenry; there’s money to be made on it.

Coming soon: decriminalizing murder for hire and replacing it with a licensing fee structure, permit requirements, and an excise tax.

McCain denies links to ‘soft money’

His ill-guided support–and passage of–campaign finance reform (aka “make the trained monkeys dance faster when the fundraising organ grinder plays so they can gather smaller peanuts and empower the * Congressional/Senate Committee or Unattributable Issue Advocacy Groups) has ensured I won’t support McCain for president this time around, his attempts to deny candidates access to any money now is misguided.

Or maybe I misread the headline.