Category: News

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.

MfBJN, September 2, 2006:

The two figures on the right; they’re falling forward, arms splayed out and in a grimace of pain as though they’ve been shot in the back by unknown assailants while trying to flee.

Life, Christmas 2006:

A security guard for MetroLink is reported in serious but stable condition today with a gunshot wound suffered at the Delmar Station, police say.

It brings miscreants to quiet suburbs, offers a locus for gunfire, scares off the normal people, and costs tax money for subsidies. Is there anything light rail cannot do?

I don’t know what’s more frightening about this story: Great Lakes live fire a no-go:

Bowing to pressure from a wide-ranging group of critics, the U.S. Coast Guard on Monday backed off from plans to permanently conduct live fire exercises on the Great Lakes.

• The Coast Guard holds live fire exercises and thought it would be fun to do so on waters heavily trafficked by civilians.
• The Army hasn’t publicly said it would not hold live fire exercises in American cities.

Apparently, a recent Missouri court decision has determined that it’s your obligation, after a divorce, to maximize your income to fund your court-anointed financial duties:

If you are well paid, a parent and living in Missouri, pay special attention to this column.

That’s because a recent ruling by the Missouri Court of Appeals seems to invite local courts to compel divorced parents to seek work anywhere in the world if doing so would maximize the payments they could make in support of their children and ex-spouses.

In Payne v Payne, which originated in St. Louis County, the husband had been employed as an oil trader at the time of his divorce. Based on yearly earnings of $141,000, the court set child and spousal support payments totaling nearly $36,000 per year. Unfortunately for Mr. Payne, he lost his job shortly after his divorce.

Four months later, the husband asked the court to reduce his support obligations, contending he had been unable to find a comparable job in his field in St. Louis or elsewhere, despite search efforts that reached across the nation and overseas. To support himself, he had started an antique business but was generating far less income than he had earned previously.

The courts decided that Mr. Payne had to continue working in his highly paid field, even if it meant relocating. The courts were going to dictate Mr. Payne’s career and job choices, under the threat of jail time for contempt no doubt.

The lower court’s decision was overturned on appeal, but still, this intervention of the courts on a citizen’s career choice is galling and chilling. And frighteningly potentially prescient.

Thousands in dark after Northwest storm:

Residents of the Pacific Northwest struggled to stay warm Saturday after the worst windstorm in more than a decade knocked out power to more than 1.5 million homes and businesses and killed at least six people.

More than 600,000 customers in Washington and Oregon still had no power Saturday, and utilities said some might have to wait into next week for their lights to go back on.

Me, I blame those who have sought out the devil of electricity and who now are dependent upon its snug snake-like embrace for their own survival and happiness. Also, I curse the Tennessee Valley Authority some 70 years later for bringing power to those outlying areas that could not hold it through the slightest adversity.