Category: News

Story: Residents of trailer park are given a year to move out:

Rex Smith tore open the certified letter last weekend, read it then woke his sleeping wife, Angie.

The letter was an eviction notice ordering them and the other families in Collinsville’s Crescent Mobile Home Park to move within the year. The site would be swallowed up by a city-backed $78 million commercial development that includes a Wal-Mart Supercenter, a Home Depot and other stores.

Starting off with the anecdote to humanize the tragedy, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch makes this sound like another eminent domain struggle, but it’s not:

Collinsville Acquisitions recently bought the site, just off Illinois Route 157. All residents will be forced to move out by May 19 of next year. The city plans to provide up to $19 million of the project’s cost with money mainly generated from a tax-increment financing district. In a TIF district, property taxes are frozen, helping increase the land’s value and freeing up money that would otherwise be used to pay taxes.

Sounds like the owner of the mobile home park, who rented the pad to the mobile home owners, sold his property to the developers. Capitalism working, albeit marred by the whole TIF and government financing. Still, the story does not indicate it’s eminent domain, so I will save my sympathy for those driven off their land by the government, or for those trailer parks whose existence is suddenly made wrong by zoning changes or other chicanery.

On a side note, let’s examine the whole mobile home park thing. It’s the worst of all possible residence options. You own and have to maintain a domicile, but you still pay rent for location and are subject to eviction. Man, what a poor housing choice. I’ve lived in apartments, houses, and a mobile home, and I think mobile homes in rental parks surpasses even condos and co-ops because although you “own” a condo but still have to pay maintenance for common areas, the condo owner’s association cannot tell you to take your loft somewhere else.

CBS News, in its radio broadcasts and its Web site, mischaracterizes the nature of the Stem Cell bill just passed by the House of Representatives:

Ignoring President Bush’s veto threat, the House voted Tuesday to lift limits on embryonic stem cell research, a measure supporters said could accelerate cures for diseases but opponents viewed as akin to abortion.

Here’s the text:

`(a) In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (including any regulation or guidance), the Secretary shall conduct and support research that utilizes human embryonic stem cells in accordance with this section (regardless of the date on which the stem cells were derived from a human embryo).

`(b) Ethical Requirements- Human embryonic stem cells shall be eligible for use in any research conducted or supported by the Secretary if the cells meet each of the following:

`(a) In General- Notwithstanding any other provision
of law (including any regulation or guidance), the Secretary shall
conduct and support research that utilizes human embryonic stem cells in accordance with this section (regardless of the date on which the stem cells were derived from a human embryo).

`(b) Ethical Requirements- Human embryonic stem cells shall be eligible for use in any research conducted or supported by the Secretary if the cells meet each of the following:

`(1) The stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in vitro
fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility
treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals
seeking such treatment.
`(2) Prior to the consideration of embryo donation and
through consultation with the individuals seeking fertility treatment,
it was determined that the embryos would never be implanted in a woman
and would otherwise be discarded.
`(3) The individuals seeking fertility treatment
donated the embryos with written informed consent and without receiving
any financial or other inducements to make the donation.
`(c) Guidelines- Not later than 60 days after the date of
the enactment of this section, the Secretary, in consultation with the
Director of NIH, shall issue final guidelines to carry out this section.

`(d) Reporting Requirements- The Secretary shall annually
prepare and submit to the appropriate committees of the Congress a
report describing the activities carried out under this section during
the preceding fiscal year, and including a description of whether and
to what extent research under subsection (a) has been conducted in
accordance with this section.’.

The limits are on government funding of stem cell research, not on stem cell research in and of itself by any party who wants to fund that research on its own–such as universities or pharma companies. However, those programs haven’t been eligible for federal government funding.

It’s unclear whether the media who report this are intentionally blurring this distinction to make the new bill into a fight for freedom against government oppression of scientific expression instead of what it is, a fight for freedom to spend government money. Perhaps the blurring is unintentional; some people in the media could very well believe there is/should be no action but government action.

Call me unconservative, but I’m not against this bill for the moral reason that groups of human cells are fully living humans who should have representation in the legislature. Instead, I oppose it for the moral reason that it’s the Federal government spending money on things the private sector should handle.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

UPDATE: Two other conservatives weigh in:

• At INDC Journal, Bill thinks President Bush’s veto would put the United States behind other countries. Kind of like how Boeing is falling behind Airbus, if you ask me, but then again, perhaps he’s right. Are universities and private sector companies out of the habit of expending their own capital on Research and Development without the government teat at which to suckle?
• At Just One Minute, the blogger/narrator agrees that the government should fund this research, but does recognize that the bill expands government programs, not curtails them.

Steve Chapman has perspective on base closings that elected officials lack:

It’s officially called the Department of Defense, but to many politicians, the label misstates its function. Judging from their reaction to proposed base closures, they’d like to rename it the Department of Jobs, Pork, Community Uplift and Incumbent Protection. That way, no one would get distracted by the petty business of protecting America.

Recently, the Pentagon released a list of proposed realignments in U.S. military facilities, from Maine to Hawaii. The plan calls for shutting 33 major installations and shrinking 29 others, which would streamline operations and save nearly $50 billion over the next 20 years.

But elected officials representing areas that would be adversely affected showed little interest in whether the changes would reduce costs, improve operations or cure cancer. They preferred to focus on the overriding issue: Their states or districts would lose federal jobs and dollars that they assumed to be a birthright.

Read the rest.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Home section story “At home with . . .Debbie Monterrey:

KMOX hired her to fill the co-host role vacated by the popular Nan Wyatt, whose murder by her husband dominated headlines for weeks.

Vacated by Nan Wyatt? Sorry, but Nan Wyatt didn’t exactly take direct action to leave the radio station. Her husband sort of vacated the co-host role when he shot Nan Wyatt.

Well, pardon me, but that is the subtext of this story:

An environmental group has filed a lawsuit to block construction of a coal-fired power plant in Southern Illinois, alleging that the project lacks a valid air permit.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Benton, the Sierra Club seeks a court order requiring Houston-based EnviroPower to obtain a new air permit and install modern pollution controls before starting construction.

Might as well make it the headline.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has discovered, again, that fund raising companies that work with dubious collective organizations use the donations to pay for their expenses and pass the proceeds onto the organization for whom it’s collecting donor money. The story: Police charity renews lopsided deal with firm. The lead:

A foundation run by Missouri police chiefs has renewed its contract with a Texas-based fundraiser despite criticism that the fundraiser takes too big a share of charitable contributions earmarked for the foundation.

“It’s the best we can get. It’s the best anybody can get right now,” said Sheldon Lineback, executive director of the Missouri Police Chiefs Charitable Foundation. The foundation is based in Jefferson City but works with police departments throughout Missouri.

In an interview this year, Lineback said the foundation operated a Web-based police training program, conducted statewide training conferences and offered technical assistance to police departments. Lineback also said the foundation was a clearinghouse for homeland security equipment for police departments throughout the state.

Lineback said the contract extension with United Appeal Inc. was similar to the foundation’s past contracts with the telemarketing company. He said it called for the foundation to get about 20 percent of money raised for the charity by United Appeal while the company gets about 80 percent. Most of the money is raised by telephone solicitations.

Actually, 20% is pretty good; when I was working as a telemarketing fundraiser for the Missouri Deputy Sheriffs Association, its cut was 17%.

It sounds outrageous, but it’s really not. These fundraising companies are businesses, and they rely on the income from donations–pre-distribution–to pay all of their expenses, including rent, salaries, expensive autodial equipment, terminals for the employees, and so on. All business expenses must come from the money raised; these companies don’t have chickens in the back yard whose eggs they can sell to pay the bills.

So after all expenses are paid, the profit, if you will, goes directly to a charitable foundation of dubious merit. The Post Dispatch wouldn’t complain if a business that was doing something productive was churning all its profit into charity. Also, the Post-Dispatch favors a coerced setup wherein an entity takes money from all people, keeps a chunk of it, and then redistributes the remainder to dubious good causes–that’s government, and the Post-Dispatch wants more of it. But because this is a for-profit business, the Post-Dispatch is on its case.

No, let’s look where we should find the outrage:

Records filed with the Internal Revenue Service show that Lineback receives a salary of about $70,000 a year. Half of that comes from his work with the foundation and the other half from his work with a related group, the Missouri Police Chiefs Association.

Other members of the foundation’s board of directors include Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Chief Robert Pruett, O’Fallon Police Chief Steve Talbott, Eureka Police Chief Mike Wiegand, Cape Girardeau Police Chief Steven Strong and Columbia Police Chief Randy Boehm.

Despite the fact that the foundation’s board is made up of publicly paid officials, Lineback says the foundation meetings are not open to the public.

During the past three months, Lineback has said repeatedly that he is too busy to make public minutes of any board meetings, contracts between the foundation and United Appeal or other documents requested by the Post-Dispatch.

No, the fact that a number of law enforcement officials sit on the boards serves as the red herring. This charity is not unlike any other, paid officials or not. It doesn’t have any extra duty to dispense its records or minutes because it’s a cop charity.

However, note that it is a charity fighting transparency, and it’s a charity whose executive director makes his living by running a number of charities. So these charities take the 20% they get from telemarketing fundraisers, keep their share, and pass on the benefits to their members–not to all police, but only to members.

The telemarketing fundraiser is the tick on the leech as far as I’m concerned. I don’t support telemarketing fundraising efforts, and I don’t support charities that exist to perpetuate themselves and their fundraising efforts. But then again, I am a small-hearted, small-government kind of fellow who tries to maintain a consistency, no matter who might see that consistency and shout “Hobgoblin!” before running away.

(Added to Outside the Beltway’s Traffic Jam.)

From the Post-Dispatch story entitled UM ends suit with $10m scholarship fund:

The University of Missouri has agreed to set aside $10 million for a scholarship fund to settle a class action lawsuit that the school violated state law for 15 years by charging tuition to in-state, undergraduate students.

That’s the University of Missouri system, right? Check it out:

Between 1986 when the University’s Board of Curators broke a 1939 law by charging educational fees based on credit hours until 2001 when the legislature repealed the 72-year-old statute, Mizzou was breaking the law at its campuses in Columbia, Rolla, St. Louis and Kansas City, Herman alleged and Romines ruled in December 2002. Since then, higher courts upheld the ruling.

Somewhere in that run-on sentence, the author says Mizzou was breaking the law at the four University of Missouri campuses listed. The problem? Mizzou refers specifically to University of Missouri at Columbia. That’s a specific nickname that the author applies to all UM campuses.

Word: don’t use the hip local lingo if you’re unclear on it.

In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story entitled Amtrak train hits tractor-trailer, we have an inadvertent argument in favor of ending Amtrak subsidies:

Six people on the westbound train, which had a total of 23 passengers and crew on its engine and three passenger cars, were taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital with bumps and bruises, said Kim Bacon, a spokeswoman for EMS. [Emphasis added.]

23 passengers and crew scattered among 3 passenger cars in a train that’s just left the St. Louis station bound for Kirkwood, Washington, Jefferson City, and Kansas City. Maybe the majority of its passengers get on at Kirkwood. Or maybe our goverments are spending millions of dollars to move dozens of people each day. But in a scenic fashion with historical ties, so that’s a bargain!

(Attempted submission, again, for the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Headline on CNN: Groups suing FBI over monitoring of activities:

Five civil rights, animal rights and environmental groups are joining together to sue the FBI to release records about monitoring of anti-war and other political activities by federal agents assigned to counterterrorism duties.

The FBI might monitor political groups under the trumped-up “counterterrorism” excuse. Wait a minute, which groups are suing?

The American Civil Liberties Union said the decision to file a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington came after the FBI ignored Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents. The other organizations involved are the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and United for Peace and Justice.

So we’ve got Arab groups, animal rights groups, and environmental groups. Groups that might be connected to rogue organizations that actually commit terrorist acts on American soil? Sounds like the groups the FBI should monitor in the name of counterterrorism.

We’re not talking about the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Technical Communications, or the United Auto Workers. And if a group called Prepared Youth of America or Tech Writers for Justice started setting fires to motels or IT companies that have crappy documentation, I wouldn’t mind the FBI sniffing around them.

Tasers: or else the cops would have to shoot you for not getting out of your car:

The two-mile pursuit ended on west 56th Street, but Martin refused to get out of the car. One deputy broke out a window and used a taser on him.

Cops wouldn’t shoot the driver in the case, nor would they clap him with the billy club. Because those leave marks that look bad in photographs. Tasers, though, are nice alternatives to deadly force.

02-P-381 Appeals Court: JOHN DOE[1] vs. MARY MOE.[2]:

Early in the morning of September 24, 1994, they were engaged in consensual sexual intercourse. The plaintiff was lying on his back while the defendant was on top of him. The defendant’s body was secured in this position by the interlocking of her legs and the plaintiff’s legs. At some point, the defendant unilaterally….

I forgot from whence I found that particular link, but I have to wonder who will be the first to demand that court cases like this be redacted from the public record to protect the impressionable minds of children.

UPDATE: I was remiss in not pointing out that I saw this story on Overlawyered.

Your topic, today, gentle reader: Causes for Alarm.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails:

Reznor said he began to grow worried about finances when he was told during a meeting with Malm and a lawyer in 2002 that there was “cause for alarm.”

The following year, he said, he asked Malm to tell him how much money he had. He said he was sent a financial statement that revealed he had at most $3 million in total assets and as little as $400,000 in cash.

Crew on the International Space Station:

A balky Russian oxygen generator broke down on the International Space Station, but its two-man crew has a reserve air supply that would last about five months, NASA officials said Friday.

The station’s primary generator, which has been operating in an on-again, off-again fashion for months, stopped working last week and the station’s crew has not been able to fix it.

Mission managers say the unit has failed for good. Consequently, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and U.S. astronaut John Phillips will be relying on reserves until replacement parts arrive at the station in late August.

Kylie Clem, a spokeswoman for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the reserves would last well beyond the scheduled mid-June arrival at the station of a Russian space freighter with additional supplies.

As it stands, oxygen supplies in a Progress cargo carrier now at the outpost will last until May 22 or May 23.

The crew also is equipped with oxygen generators that work like drop-down emergency air supplies on commercial airliners. Supplies from those would last until early July. Beyond that, there is a 100-day oxygen supply in tanks attached to the station U.S. Quest airlock.

Total air supply now onboard: About 140 days.

One of these situations is dire, and the other is not. Can you spot the difference?

From a story about how forfeiture laws are providing a windfall for small towns, we have this admission:

A police officer, aided by a drug-sniffing German shepherd named Bella, parks his cruiser on the side of the expressway three or four days a week, looking for any vehicle that seems suspicious — a broken taillight, an expired license plate or simply a car that changes lanes excessively.

That is all it takes to pull over someone who might be a drug courier. If the officer is lucky, he confiscates not only drugs but bundles of money.

Keep this in mind when your state legislature wants to add primary offenses such as seatbelt laws or cellphone use laws that allow police to pull you over for smaller and smaller reasons: they’re making it easier for the police to use you as a lottery ticket.

As the Marquette Mascot thing continues (see The American Mind and Marquette Warrior for updates), I cannot help feel the deja-vu with the current process offered by the Marquette administration. It’s like 1993 all over again.

Students (and now alumni) can offer suggestions, and the administration will choose the most innocuous and, oddly enough, lamest suggestions for a vote. No Warrior allowed. Then the students (and now alumni) will vote for the least stupid alternative. Granted, it’s a learning experience for students who will have to face that sort of decision every election, but.

In the end, no one will be happy, but the administration will have its overly-conscious arrears covered.

So, sullenly, I’ll add my suggestions, although it’s certain never to turn up on the ballot even as students in 1994 never got to vote on the Marquette Fighting Octopi. Friends, fellow alumni, and gentle readers who could give less damn, here’s a name I’m certain even the university president would love:

Marquette Wild

Hey, it worked for Minnesota.

Over at Draft Matt Blunt 2008, I dared to commend Matt Blunt for cutting the state’s outlays for library information technology infrastructure.

At the University of Texas – Austin, they’ve gone the other way; they’ve removed all books from the library to turn it into an Internet cafe:

Students attending the University of Texas at Austin will find something missing from the undergraduate library this fall.

Books.

By mid-July, the university says, almost all of the library’s 90,000 volumes will be dispersed to other university collections to clear space for a 24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.

“In this information-seeking America, I can’t think of anyone who would elect to build a books-only library,” said Fred Heath, vice provost of the University of Texas Libraries in Austin.

Their new version is to include “software suites” – modules with computers where students can work collaboratively at all hours – an expanded center for writing instruction, and a center for computer training, technical assistance and repair.

Libraries are moving from the repositories of information model to an entrance ramp to the information superhighway. As household Internet penetration continues to climb, libraries will make themselves as relevant as public television viewing points. But they get more budget and they get to convince themselves that even though they’re librarians, they’re not bookish.

Unfortunately, by moving to a service provider business model, so to speak, libraries marry themselves to continual, increasing costs of business. Whereas the library could alter the number of books to accommodate different fiscal realities, buying fewer in years with less revenue or more in periods when the government is flush, the move to the public Internet cafe means that costs will always escalate as the libraries need the latest technologies.

In Milwaukee, libraries are finding a cash crunch even though their budgets have gone up. Unfortunately, expenses are going up faster:

Spending by public libraries in the Milwaukee area increased by 12% from 2000 through 2003, and more than half of the area’s libraries raised operating expenditures by more than double the rate of inflation, a new analysis shows.

The spending increases come as municipal governments – the primary source of library funding – are under growing pressure to hold down costs and taxes. But an unusual state law governing the funding of libraries makes it nearly impossible for local officials to make significant cuts in library budgets.

“It is a bone of contention, especially in an environment where the Legislature is talking about things like tax levy freezes and spending limits,” said Curt Witynski, assistant director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, which has sought to have the law repealed.

This is the future of libraries in America; they’re changing their model from performing a valuable service to the public (which most of the public, tragically, doesn’t use) to offering an expensive service that most of the public will have in their own homes. Libraries are decreasing their relevance to become “hipper” and “sexier,” but it ultimately will look as hip and sexy as 1920s swimwear.

Both Neil Steinberg and Richard Roeper have weighed in on the new ordnance, whoops, sorry, ordnance is against the law in Illinois, ordinance banning use of cell phones while driving.

Roeper calls the ordinance “impossible to enforce:”

Last Thursday I was in a cab crossing Michigan Avenue. There was a temporary backup because of a truck backing into a garage just east of Michigan, and we found ourselves right next to a traffic cop. She could clearly see that my guy was gabbing away on his hands-free phone, but she didn’t say a word to him about it. So I spoke up — and he reluctantly hung up, just as he was sailing past the address I had given him in the first place.

If cops don’t care about the thousands of cabbies using hands-free phones, are they really going to direct their energies toward finding motorists using hand-held phones? Are they going to position themselves at the city limits, just waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to cross 87th Street while still on the phone?

My dear Mr. Roeper, it’s not impossible to enforce, but it would take a lot of effort to enforce the new ordinance, taking law enforcement resource committments from more important things. Chicago cops won’t enforce this ordinance every time they encounter an infraction, but they will enforce the ordinance when they want to. That is, when they want to stop you for something or take a look in your car, they’ll simply pull you over for talking on the cell phone.

Legislation in the twenty-first century doesn’t address major crimes against people and property; rape, murder, and assault have been illegal for centuries. Instead, our elected leaders have to search for new things to criminalize. They’ve got all day to think it up since that’s their full time jobs: to examine new technologies and brainstorm about how to criminalize and/or tax it.