Category: News

Isn’t that what I should make of this?

Nowadays, intrusive government is a liberal worry. Between the Patriot Act and the Supreme Court deciding that any claque of local official can, at their whim, seize your house and give it to his brother-in-law to develop into a Starbucks, Democrats have inherited the difficult task of keeping our leaders from seizing control of an ever-increasing slice of our lives.

I think I am having vapors. Someone wave a beer under my nose to revive me.

The man once called me a genuis. Just so you know what his standards really are.

The transportation columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (transportation columnist?) compares light rail to buses:

So for $550 million, here’s how many more buses Metro could have put on the road every day of the year for 16 hours a day: 241 new bus routes for five years; 120 bus routes for 10 years; 80 bus routes for 15 years; or 60 for 20 years.

So why does the government prefer light rail schemes to buses?

But Metro says about half of the passengers who ride MetroLink make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. Only 17 percent of bus riders make that much. In fact, more than half of them make less than $15,000.

Quite so.

Deep Impact Spacecraft Ready for Mission:

A NASA spacecraft was speedily closing in on its target Friday, a comet scientists hope to smash open this weekend, producing celestial fireworks for the Independence Day weekend.

Finally, we’re an interplanetary hegemon! Woo!

Perhaps I’ll have to retool the t-shirt:

City forces out 2 downtown businesses: Action follows high court ruling on eminent domain:

Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling approving a Connecticut city’s plan to take private land by eminent domain may seem far away.

But to John Revelli, whose family has operated a tire shop near downtown Oakland for decades, the implications hit home on Friday.

A team of contractors hired by the city of Oakland packed the contents of his small auto shop in a moving van and evicted Revelli from the property his family has owned since 1949.

“I have the perfect location; my customers who work downtown can drop off their cars and walk back here,” said Revelli, 65, pointing at the nearby high- rises. “The city is taking it all away from me to give someone else. It’s not fair.”

The city of Oakland, using eminent domain, seized Revelli Tire and the adjacent property, owner-operated Autohouse, on 20th Street between Telegraph and San Pablo avenues on Friday and evicted the longtime property owners, who have refused to sell to clear the way for a large housing development.

It’s not fair, but late trends in our governance indicate that it’s more fair for some than others.

Pit Bulls: 19
Sharks: 6.

The Sharks are really pouring it on and could mount a comeback!

Who better to replace Sandra Day O’Connor than Daniel Day-Lewis?

It keeps the Day parity on the court, which is vitally important, since the judiciousness and meaningful career are less important to opposition forces than trivia.

Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 Jobless.

Jobless? Hardly. It’s not as though the Minnesota government will not come back. It should be Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 On Unscheduled Paid Vacation.

But how would that play out the evolving epic of governments tearing dollars from the hands of the little guy?

The Canadians can no longer adequately defend it:

The navy is back down to one working submarine.

Of the four used subs Canada acquired from Britain for $891 million, Halifax’s HMCS Windsor is the only one that can go to sea. HMCS Victoria has stopped sailing from its British Columbia base and will go into an extended docking work period next month that will last almost two years.

“We have no choice,” said Lieut. Diane Grover of navy public affairs.

We had better strike now. The Canadians will enter the 20th century in a matter of months. Well, 30 or 40:

The navy expects to see its first sub fully operational and able to fire torpedoes by 2009.

BTW, Happy Canada Day to all of my Canadian readers. Enjoy your first of July celebration while you can, before we subjugate you and force you to celebrate the fourth of July with us.

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, supports government reduction of property rights:

I’m generally a personal liberty, Milton Friedman, let-’em-buy-heroin-if-it-makes-’em-happy kind of guy. Yet I’m also always glad to see cigarette smoking restricted, basically, because it kills some people and annoys the rest (so would legal heroin, but heck, why be consistent? It’s summertime).

We seem to be doing it the right way, too, slowly whittling away the social space allowed to smokers. Smoking has gone from being cool to being an embarrassing personal lapse, somewhere between picking your nose and bedwetting. Soon the guy standing on the corner smoking a cigarette will carry the same cachet as someone standing on the corner sucking wine out of a bottle in a bag.

I’m not gloating. I’m sad for cigarettes — a lovely habit, a nice vice. Except for the kill-you part. But it’s in society’s interest to shuck them as soon as possible. Women used to paint their faces with white lead, but it had bad side effects, like death, so they got out of the practice. Habits change, if we’re lucky.

Sorry to join the cacaphony of people who only comment when they disagree with you, Mr. Steinberg, but the slow whittling is not of smokers’ rights, but property owners’ rights in many cases. Would you applaud it were the governments to start banning pasta in restaurants because of the obesity academic?

They wouldn’t do that? Why not? It’s a public health issue, and property rights mean nothing any more.

Perhaps we could just think of it as though the local governments were condemning the airspace within private property and offered just compensation in the form of their continued indulgence in the “owner’s” “right” to own/operate the property/business.

Update: Apparently, this set off William Squire: Neil Steinberg is a Bigot.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

It’s the only thing I can get from this piece entitled "Little room for real news" by Rob Borsellino of the Des Moines Register. He intersperses the trivia covered by new media with things the media doesn’t cover, like the badness of the current administration:

I knew the exact time Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, and I could tell you that the runaway bride got a half-million-dollar advance to tell her story.

But I had lost track of how many U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq.

And:

I listen to the president making a speech about how much better the world is without Saddam Hussein in power and how much progress we’re making in Iraq. That’s followed by news stories about a car bomb killing dozens in Baghdad, U.S. recruitment going into the tank, Iran and North Korea getting nuke savvy.

So I’ve got to wonder if the commander in chief is dealing with reality.

I listen to the vice president calling Guantanamo Bay critics a bunch of anti-American crybabies with nothing better to do with their time, and then I hear those left-wing radicals from the Red Cross talking how the U.S. is using tactics “tantamount to torture.”

So how much attention should I pay when the V.P. speaks?

Finally:

The Bolton nomination and "the deadlock that has centered on Democratic demands to see draft testimony that Bolton's office prepared on Syria for a House committee hearing two years ago and insistence on seeing 36 names Bolton requested and was allowed to see from blacked-out National Security Agency reports." Or news that “Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride, was found to have prior records for shoplifting in two separate cases.”

Given the choice between innocuous fluff and the common funeral drumbeating of “serious” journalists, I choose….

Not to watch the news or read the newspaper. Duh.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Dear world, now that Kelo is settled “law,” I move we change the naming from eminent domain to:

Imminent Domain

Because now it’s just a matter of time.

Radley Balko rounds up even more private-to-private transfers after the Kelo decision.

To quote Don Henley, "Gimme What You Got":

Now it’s take and take and takeover, takeover
It’s all take and never give
All these trumped up towers
They’re just golden showers
Where are people supposed to live?

Municipalities answer: who cares, as long as they shop here?

A message from the President of Marquette University, anouncing the name-change-back-to-the-name-before-the-name-change:

I am pleased to announce that our athletics nickname effective July 1st will be the Golden Eagles. This decision was made by you, the Marquette community, through the “MU Voice” voting process. I want to thank all of you who participated in “MU Voice” for taking the time to vote for the nickname that we will use as we enter the Big East Conference on July 1st.

The decision, had it been left to the Marquette Community, would have been Marquette Warriors, but Marquette University is a European democracy. You can choose from amongst the choices your betters put before you, of which the most popular choice will not be allowed.

The name Golden Eagles has a proud association in Marquette’s history since it was our name from 1994 to the present. I am pleased that this tradition will continue in the Big East Conference, one of the most prestigious and competitive conferences in the nation. The Big East is also known for the academic quality of its student-athletes, and our Marquette student-athletes will be no exception. They excel both in the classroom and in athletic competition.

Marquette shows its committment to academic evidence by finding the last ten years indicative of history.

Ultimately, more than one-third of the Marquette community eligible to vote participated in either phase one or phase two of the voting process, with 35,777 total individuals casting votes. Thank you for your passion and enthusiasm for Marquette University. Your dedication is vital to ensuring our future progress and success.

Clicking a radio button and typing in a secret code number is not dedication. Volunteering, financial support, and whatnot are. I’ve done one of the above. Guess which, and you wouldn’t necessarily thank me.

Let me also thank Advantage Research, Inc., the independent firm that administered “MU Voice,” for creating and executing an honest, fair and scientific process. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the work of the Nickname Advisory Committee, comprised of representatives from the Marquette community, for ensuring the integrity and transparency of this process.

No, no, thank you, Marquette, for expending a large sum of money on a farce that didn’t address anything but an ill-conceived name change on your part. Advantage Research just sucked up some dollars from students and those alumni who are dedicated and passionate, or at least just dedicated, to go back to a slightly less ill-conceived.

Of course, we know that Marquette is first and foremost an academic institution committed to educating men and women to be a leaven for good in our society. We must not lose sight of this important mission rooted in our 450-year Jesuit tradition. Thank you for your care and concern and for the pride we share in the values of this wonderful university. We Are Marquette!

You are Marquette. Me, I am just a guy who graduated there and managed to find a series of jobs in the private sector.

Well, one could assume that when one reads the latest column from Eric Mink, the television critic turned commentary editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Writing a rather standard piece attacking Cheney for Guantanamo Bay, Mink madlibs:

“They got a brand new facility down at Guantanamo,” Cheney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last Thursday. “We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well-treated down there. They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

I kind of wish the ever-dizzy Blitzer had asked a couple of follow-ups: “Everything they could possibly want, Mr. Vice President? Like a fair and impartial process to see if they even belong there?

I assume that Mink means right to the United States court system (since military tribunals and so on would not be impartial enough). Of course, the people at Gunatanamo Bay are (everybody sing the chorus) illegal combatants, not even covered under the Geneva Conventions, but Mink wants to convey the benefits of U.S. citizenship upon people who dedicated themselves to killing American soldiers and , aside from the concrete practice of shooting American soldiers (not like killing citizens), who dedicated themselves in theory to destroying Christendom or the United States (great Satan and so forth).

No word on whether Mink would convey other benefits of citizenship upon other citizens of the world, such as sending Social Security checks to China (think how it would help prevent parents from killing little girl children who could not take care of them in old age!)

As long as Mink continues to help perpetrate his columnular identity as a stereotypical knee-jerk liberal lover of humanity, but not so much a keen observer of its nature, I will help. I think he would.

Good morning, sunshine. Now that Kelo has established how little justification your local government needs to seize your land, do you know what’s afoot?

Radley Balko rounds up gleeful local governments’ new projects.

Summer of the Pit Bull continues: Woman recovering from pit bull attack:

A San Jose woman was recovering from bites to her hands and arms after her 8-month-old pit bull mix attacked her in her home Sunday, police said.

The 36-year-old woman, who was not identified by police, was cleaning up after the dog got sick in the house in the 0-100 block of George Street when the dog attacked her about 6 p.m., according to San Jose Police spokeswoman Gina Tepoorten.

“For some reason, the dog ended up turning on her and attacking her,” Tepoorten said.

Not to be outdone, we get a sequel to the Summer of the Shark: Shark Attacks 2nd Teen Off Fla. Panhandle:

A teenage boy was bitten and critically injured Monday in the second shark attack in three days along the Florida Panhandle.

Man, I cannot wait till the hysteredia brings us the climactic conclusion in two years: Shark Vs. Pit Bull: The Reckoning (tagline: “People were only the appetizer”).

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

I should have sympathy for the father of three children who were found dead in a car trunk in New Jersey. However, he and the media are all too happy to blame the police:

Dad: ‘Maybe they should have looked in the trunk’: Father of 1 of 3 boys found dead questions police methods:

As authorities began investigating why police failed to search a car trunk where three missing boys were found dead, the father of one of the children said Sunday he could not understand how they died so close to home.

Anibal Cruz, 38, said the family assumed that police looked in the trunk of the car that was parked just steps from where the boys were last seen playing.

“That was the first place to look,” Cruz said. “You can look through the windows and check inside. That is simple. Maybe they should have looked in the trunk.”

I want to stay away from personally impugning the parenting skills required in this endeavor, since I wasn’t there and I only get the understanding and facts of the situation as provided by the media.

I do wonder why it’s necessary to fault the police for the children’s deaths. If this explodes into a lawsuit against the police, then I will impugn the parents of the children. But not now, damn it. He lost three children and grieves, lashing out. Hopefully, he’ll recognize that the police weren’t at fault and to blame them at a time like this disservices them and his children’s memory.

The media should take steps to keep him from looking bad, too, during this emotional time and not amplifying his comments into an indictment of sloppy police work.

Some bloggers think that restrictive state statutes might prevent eminent domain abuse. Like Owen at Boots and Sabers:

As this ruling states, “for more than a century,” the high court has favored “affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.”

That a nice hope. I’ll dash it with two words: interstate commerce.

Because believe you me that the first time the City of Podunk wants to hand a nationwide company a set of tract homes and small businesses so it can build a plant or office complex but cannot because the state has restricted it, some cabal of coporate lawyers are gonna shriek that the state’s laws restrict interstate commerce.

Dustbury also wrestles with this. I hope I’ve helped settle the question, although it’s not the answer any citizen of this country should enjoy.