Category: News

Ask any QA or Project Manager, and they’ll agree. So will the St. Louis region as it tries to stomach hundreds of millions of dollars in tax overruns because Metrolink light rail feature creeped and people continued to tinker with design after the development began.

But it’s public money and public/private partnership, so nobody will get fired, which is the important thing.

If my home state needs me, I will serve in the invasion of Illinois. That is, if Wisconsin and Chicago have a war over water, my side is clear.

And just in case you wonder, I would have had to come down on the side of Kilbourntown in Milwaukee’s Bridge War because I’m from the northwest side.

Supervisors vote to require neutering of pit bulls, mixes:

San Francisco supervisors unanimously approved a set of ordinances Tuesday requiring the neutering or spaying of an estimated 7,000 pit bull terriers and pit bull mixes in the city.

The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, also will set new restrictions on the breeding of pit bulls, requiring breeders to obtain a permit from the city. People found violating the requirement to have their dog neutered or spayed could be fined up to $1,000.

One must wonder if this particular law means all currently endowed male dogs must be disenfrankcized. One suspects, given how much respect San Francisco has for other tenets of the United States Constitution, that legal protections like ex post facto don’t apply there either.

Maybe None: Is having a child — even one — environmentally destructive?:

Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation.

“As long as there’s one breeding couple,” he says cheerfully, “we’re in danger of being right back here again. Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.”

Knight’s position might sound extreme at first blush, but there’s an undeniable logic to it: Human activities — from development to travel, from farming to just turning on the lights at night — are damaging the biosphere. More people means more damage. So if fewer people means less destruction, wouldn’t no people at all be the best solution for the planet?

One could apply Knight’s sound–but hardly valid–logic to all of life itself, since every herbivore on the planet eats weeds and damages their life cycles, and every damn weed on the plant sucks nitrogen out of the soil and changes the environment.

Why stop at living processes? Why, rain erodes landmasses! Solar flares irradiate uninhabited planets! Novae char!

The only solution is to embrace nullity!

Anything less is inconsistency.

McCain: Pentagon spending ‘unsustainable’:

Republican Sen. John McCain Tuesday said the massive Pentagon budget for the war in Iraq can’t be sustained because of the need to replace weapons.

“We have unsustainable defense spending,” said McCain, a chief proponent of military acquisition reform. “Refurbishment or replacement sooner than planned is putting further pressure on DOD’s investment accounts. We cannot sustain the number of weapons programs that are in the program of record.”

However, Medicare spending and a new drug benefit are different. Whereas each dollar spent on a bullet or a bomb gets used up when that bomb or bullet is used up, each dollar of health tax dollars extends the life of someone who will need another dollar of tax dollars tomorrow.

The more they succeed, the more they cost. Unlike wars.

Talent’s amendment could save Boeing C-17:

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., on Wednesday introduced a $7 billion amendment to a defense spending bill, aiming to keep open the St. Louis production line for Boeing’s C-17 transport plane.

Pentagon officials recently alerted Congress of their plan to stop buying the plane.

The amendment by Talent authorizes the Air Force to buy up to 42 C-17s in the next few years. It also calls on the military to keep the line open until the need for more “lift” aircraft to deploy and sustain forces abroad is assessed.

Gee, I wish my wife would authorize me to continue spending money until we determined whether or not I really needed to.

Next time I am voting for the Libertarian.

As every other election today was some sort of referendum on how the public perceives Bush, this one must be no different:

Today is the last chance for White Settlement residents to vote on a charter change to rename the city West Settlement, a controversial proposal that has drawn nationwide attention.

How is it a referendum on the president’s aggressive strategy of fomenting regime improvement in the Middle East?

1. It takes place in Texas.
2. It’s about progressives changing a name from White something to avoid offending tender sensibilities.

If the name changes, undoubtedly it heralds a return to Democrat super-majority in Congress and the impeachment of everyone in the line of succession who is not a Democrat. Cue the happy music!

In Oakland:

It’s official. The deal that brought the Raiders back to Oakland 10 years ago is an unmitigated disaster. At Wednesday’s news conference announcing the extinction of personal seat licenses, city and county officials smiled bravely.

And why not? It’s better than crying.

As it stands right now, Oakland is clinging to the Raiders with a hope and a prayer, neither of which have proved to be an especially effective tactic in dealing with Raiders owner Al Davis. The team’s lease on McAfee Coliseum expires in 2011, which means it has until then to complete one of the greatest marketing turnarounds in the history of the NFL or the team will almost certainly leave.

As Davis said at the news conference, “We have a deal we can live with — at least for the next five years.”

Now there’s a rallying cry.

The facts are these: Personal seat licenses, which were supposed to painlessly and effortlessly retire the $200 million bond issue used to spiff up the Coliseum-Arena complex, were the worst idea since drafting Brigham Young University quarterback Marc Wilson. The licenses not only weren’t selling, they were less popular than the Denver Broncos. Even the stopgap idea, proposed by several pundits, that the Raiders should take the 10-year licenses and turn them into lifetime licenses, wasn’t going to fly.

So a professional sports team has screwed its fans with the “Personal Seat License,” nothing more than a convenience surcharge on the convenience surcharges inherent with buying season tickets, and has screwed its host city with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

And the cities come back for more.

An era of record movie prices, record newspaper prices, and record cable television rates coupled with increasing revenue?

Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest media company, reported an 80 percent increase in third-quarter earnings Wednesday and raised its stock repurchase program to $12.5 billion from $5 billion in an effort to meet shareholder demands to lift its slumping stock price.

The New York-based company, whose properties include the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, CNN, a major cable TV company and Time magazine, posted net earnings of $897 million versus $499 million in the same period a year ago.

Time to levy a federal punitive tax on these businesses! After all, what’s good for the oil companies should be good for the media companies who cheerlead immoral (even if rendered not illegitimate by faux populists in the legislature) profit confiscation and redistribution, ainna?

Senator Harry Reid has confused them again:

“I demand on behalf of the American people that we understand why these investigations aren’t being conducted,” Democratic leader Harry Reid said.

Taken by surprise, Republicans derided the move as a political stunt.

“The United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership,” said Majority Leader Bill Frist. “They have no convictions, they have no principles, they have no ideas,” the Republican leader said.

Reid demanded the Senate go into closed session. The public was ordered out of the chamber, the lights were dimmed, and the doors were closed. No vote is required in such circumstances.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, and more pithy, always beware the elected official who, on your behalf and for your own good, does things behind closed doors or without telling you what it is. One would almost expect the elected official to add, furthermore, that it hurts him/her more than it hurts us.

So I understand that Judge Alito, should he become a Supreme Court justice, immediately use the superpowers granted by the robe to spin the earth backwards and turn back the clock, some estimates up to 70 years. Why stop there? I’m unclear why the opponents think that the justices would undo only part of the Constitutional recreation that has occurred…why wouldn’t they turn the clock back 216 years and undo the Constitution? Why not 230 years and undo the Declaration of Independence? Yea, why not 790 years and turn back the clock on the Magna Carta?

Because the events of history are only important as guest stars in the drama that is the narrative of American History, where the eventual and sometimes lucky triumph of the common decent folk can only be corrected by the super-legislature courts with their supreme insight into what should be done, not what the Constitution’s authors meant in their drive to restrain government power.

Instead of judges who base their abjudication on the Constitution, some people want judges who turn forward the clock by any means necessary, whether granted by the Constitution or whether checked by other, elected government officials.

From presiding over the most-watched trial in history to the Supreme Court.

We at MfBJN congratulate Judge Ito!

Eh? Alito you say? I thought they said Al Ito.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

I oppose the Lewis Libby nomination to the Supreme Court.

Just in case NZ Bear ever wants to know.

April 1, 1945: United States Tenth Army invades Okinawa, Japan.

October 29, 2005: United States announces Half of U.S. Marines to leave Okinawa.

After sixty years of resistance, the Okinawan insurgents have thrown some of the American invaders out.

I fear we won’t have enough boots on the ground to weed out the remaining insurgency and to help spread democracy and capitalism to the Far East. Can the ramshackle Japanese government, originally appointed by the US and later selected in a number of sham elections and creation of a faux constitution, handle its own affairs without falling into a bloody religious civil war? Will the native warlords and the militant people live together peacably to build a nation together?

I also fear that it sends the wrong message to other insurgents around the world that if they resist and carp enough, they, too, can cause US political will to crack and to force 7,000 American soldiers to cut and run to Guam.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Sunday Drive.)