Category: News

The Scientology is strong with this one.

PROPERTY RIGHTS: Tear down the castle:

Conservatives have been trying for years to breathe more life into the constitutional protection of property rights. Many saw the sympathetic cause of the New London homeowners as a foot in the door. But their view could have handcuffed economic development.

The court’s decision may fuel the trend for big box stores to displace little businesses and homes, as in Sunset Hills. But it also will help cities improve their economic health or aesthetics. In essence, the decision is a bow to modernity. There aren’t castles anymore.

Bowing to modernity. Apt. All should bow to our new overlords, for whom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has always been the voice, supporting eminent domain to build ballparks for private companies and to revitalize downtown St. Louis.

There aren’t any castles any more for the common man, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch undoubtedly looks forward to the days when the serfs learn their places as bound to the land of their lords.

So can local governments now take intellectual property rights and give them to others? Because think of how much more profitable a movie theater would be if it didn’t have to pay the studios 90% of the ticket price….and how much more tax money for public use the local government would get….

And all that expensive software they need to run? Eminent domain! It’s all free!

Does the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision mean that my municipal government can determine that food products I have already ingested could better serve the public as fertilizer in the flower bed in the median of the Maryland Heights Expressway and compel me to report, finger in throat, to expel the contents of my stomach for public use?

If so, I hope the soil is very basic as I drink a lot of coffee and don’t want to burn the petunias.

Poll: Most want Congress to make sure Internet safe:

Most Americans believe the government should do more to make the Internet safe, but they don’t trust the federal institutions that are largely responsible for creating and enforcing laws online, according to a new industry survey.

From the paragons of efficiency that brought you the Transportation Security Administration.

A woman at an airport falls prey to larcenous predators: The DEA:

A Quincy woman carrying $46,950 in cash through Logan International Airport claims she was on the way to see a Texas plastic surgeon when federal drug agents seized the money she planned to use for a procedure on her buttocks and breasts.

“The agent looked at my buttocks and told me that I do not need an operation,” Ileana Valdez, 26, told a federal court yesterday in an affidavit contending she got the cash from selling her Dorchester business and two homes.

As some of you know, if law enforcement thinks you have too much cash on you, they can just take it and hold onto it for you until such time as you successfully sue to get it back.

DEA Special Agent Anthony Pettigrew said, “This is her version of events on that day. When there’s a hearing, DEA will present its version of what happened on that day.”

How nice; the DEA doesn’t plan to present evidence of wrongdoing. The DEA will present its version of what happened.

Can my local government seize my other private possessions now and turn them over to retailers to sell again? Because the city of Maryland Heights could undoubtedly put the sales tax paid by someone else on the things I formerly owned to good, public use.

UPDATE: I’ll take Illinois in the pool for the first government to try it.

Supreme Court rules: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

“The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including — but by no means limited to — new jobs and increased tax revenue,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin rounds up.

Alternate Title: Supreme Court Acts to Solve Housing Bubble Problem

Longer Yellow Lights Reduce Accidents.

But longer yellow lights don’t balance municipal budgets, so don’t expect the cameras to go away.

The transcripts and recordings of the last words during airline crashes.

(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)

Should cities be ISPs?

No.

Somehow, they get a whole story out of it.

Interesting word choice, Mr. Blankley:

Although this is a heavily researched book that includes amongst its sources almost a hundred people who are or were personally close to Mrs. Clinton, this is not a peek through a keyhole. Instead, it is a peek — and more than a peek — into the mind of Hillary. And, whether you like or hate Hillary, the inside of her mind is a fascinating place in which to rove about.

Now I know I will look for Hillary to be bushed from how politics have gored her.

(Link seen on Power Line.)

Found in a column by John Stossel:

<ñor> “No matter how hard women work, or whatever they achieve in terms of advancement in their own professions and degrees, they will not be compensated equitably!” shouted Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., at a “wage equity” rally in Washington, D.C.

Undoubtedly, the distinguished gentleperson is upset she makes $118,575 and her male colleagues make $158,100.

(Link seen on Outside the Beltway.)

What do you do if you’re a local government with a surplus? Turn it into a deficit! But Creve Coeur, Missouri, is rather blatant about it:

The Creve Coeur City Council is considering the proposed budget that begins July 1 and ends June 30, 2006.

The council is expected to vote on the proposed budget at its June 27 meeting.

The proposed budget for all funds shows revenues at $16.8 million and expenditures at $16 million. The apparent $800,000 surplus actually will be routed to long-term personnel funds, leaving the city with a $300,000 deficit in the general fund.

Uh oh! Deficit! You know what that means! Time to raise taxes:

The proposed budget includes a modest raise in what residents pay the city through their personal property taxes. Perkins said residents currently pay 7 cents per $100 assessed valuation. He said the city has not determined the amount of the increase but expects it will be between 8 and 9 cents.

Perkins said although an exact amount has not been determined because information from the county assessor’s office has not arrived, the city is looking at personal property tax numbers that would translate to about $13 a year more for a home valued at $350,000. The money would generate about $140,000 more for the city.

Other taxes in the city have gone up in recent years. The city’s utility tax, after decades of being at less than 5 percent, increased to 6 percent last year and will rise to 7 percent July 1.

Some businesses in the Olive Boulevard Transportation Development District increased their sales tax by one-half percent. The money will be used to pay for roadway and other improvements in the district. The city will not receive money from that increase.

Perkins said the city has begun looking into whether it should consider increasing its tax on business licenses. He said the matter will be reviewed by the city’s economic development and finance committees, but the issue is not part of the proposed budget for 2006.

• Personal property taxes–that is, cars and things that apartment dwellers pay, too
• Sales taxes
• Business license costs

Creve Coeur is on its way to becoming the perfect municipal government. An efficient tax raising and expending machine.

Why are poll numbers for the Iraq war slipping? According to Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post, the obvious answer is:

Not enough hippies:

In the absence of an antiwar movement, the American people have turned against the war in Iraq. Those two facts, I suspect, are connected.

He also goes on to use the term “U.N. aegis” without sarcasm, which indicates that the word does not mean what he thinks it means.

The aegis was Zeus’s shield, and as the residents of Rwanda and Srebrenica could attest (if they weren’t dead) that the U.N. cannot defend anyone but its leaders. The aegis was not Zeus’s proclivity to come down from on high and copulate with underage natives, which is a trait UN peacekeepers do share with the lord of the thunderbolt.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

American Airlines management, unions stand together on pensions:

Keep those pension checks coming.

That will be the battle cry today of some 300 American Airlines employees, who plan to flood the halls of Congress and lobby for pension reform. Airline management and key unions say they are united in preserving employee pensions, a benefit that’s been waylaid at other passenger carriers that have succumbed to bankruptcy.

I bet they can all agree that the lush government teat can do everything: Keep those checks coming to employees, and remove obligations from the company and its management.

Remind me to offer a pension plan that I cannot afford to anyone I hire; after all, if I get big enough and bankrupt enough, I won’t have to follow through on my contractual obligations, either.

A story about a biofeedback video game as part of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder:

Once a week, Pfc. Joshua Frey, a Marine who spent several months in Fallujah before he was shot Dec. 12, heads to a darkened office in the Naval Medical Center here and places a headset over his eyes.

He attaches biofeedback sensors to his arms, hands and chest, grabs hold of a joystick and enters a video game version of the Iraq war. As he moves through a “virtual” Fallujah, he encounters sniper fire, explosions and insurgents lurking in shadows. A Navy psychologist checks readouts from a flat-screen monitor showing the Marine’s heart rate, breathing, hand perspiration and skin temperature.

But for Frey and the U.S. military, this is no game. It is part of a potentially groundbreaking approach to treating the effects of severe combat stress, in Iraq and elsewhere.

A game with explosions and gun fire that’s designed to make people saner? Surely, Illinois Governor “Bod” Blagojevich’s head must be spinning, pending a catastrophic failure akin to supercomputers whose logic circuits Captain Kirk fried routinely through paradox.

Sure, some periodicals put headlines on press releases and run them as news. But the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel goes further and innovatively turns to its classified ads as a news source:

From a pale pink velvet fringed chaise to wrought iron patio furniture, the earthly belongings of Milwaukee restaurateur Sally Papia and her daughter will be sold piece-by-piece this week in an estate sale described in a classified advertisement as of one of the area’s finest in 33 years.

I wonder how much that cost, but I am cynical.