Category: News

Because I’m just crass enough, I’ll ask this question: Would Helen Harcombe be alive if she lived in a nation with a free market health system?

Michelle Malkin links to the BBC weepy about a woman who died from cancer and left instructions for her husband on how to raise their daughter. However, amid the tissue-sopping prose, we get this glimpse of her health care decisions:

Mrs Harcombe, who was 28, died shortly after Christmas 2004. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, nine months after finding a lump in her right breast.

Her family said she had been initially told she was a “low-risk patient” because she was just 26.

She had undergone a mastectomy, but by last year the cancer spread to her liver and she was told she had six months to live.

Nine months from lump to biopsy, friends. Because “she had been initially told”–by her government health care provider, no doubt–that she was low risk.

In America, we can still get that second opinion and get that damn thing checked out in a week or two. Before it gets the opportunity to gestate into a death sentence. Whether you’re a “low risk” patient or not.

Well, most of us have that chance for the second opinion. Until the government ensures that all of us get a chance at its provider’s opinion. For The Children. The Children of everyone but the Helen Harcombes.

Forest fire ‘biggest in 20 years’: Landowner clearing burning site of grass ignited blaze:

A landowner clearing grass from his campfire and debris-burning site to make it safer ignited a massive forest fire that consumed 3,900 acres in central Wisconsin yesterday, the state Department of Natural Resources said today.

Now that he’s burned everything around his campsite to the bare earth and has removed the natural diet for herbivores which dangerous predators eat, he’s probably got the safest campsite in Wisconsin. But nothing to do there.

Benton Harbor, Michigan, school officials prohibit a marching band from playing “Louie Louie”:

A pop culture controversy that has simmered for decades came to a head when a middle school marching band was told not to perform “Louie Louie.”

Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning cited the song’s allegedly raunchy lyrics in ordering the McCord Middle School band not to perform it in Saturday’s Grand Floral Parade, held as part of the Blossomtime Festival.

In a letter sent home with McCord students, Dawning said “Louie Louie” was not appropriate for Benton Harbor students to play while representing the district – even though the marching band wasn’t going to sing it.

That the lyrics aren’t really raunchy didn’t factor into the decision, apparently.

Small explosions outside the British consulate in New York:

Two “improvised explosive devices” made from “novelty-type grenades” have exploded in front of the building that houses the British Consulate in New York City, police and officials said.

Surveillance cameras, on duty, didn’t prevent anything:

Authorities were reviewing video from security cameras in the area, and no arrests have been made, Kelly said.

There, citizen, do you feel safer knowing that governments and other entities are putting cameras throughout public spaces for safety’s sake? They didn’t prevent this “bombing” and they haven’t even provided leads yet.

My wife hates this mug. I’ve had it for over ten years, and it’s been the workplace mug. You know the one, the one that gets rinsed out some days, but some days that step’s overlooked. As a result, the inside bears the stain of thousands of cups of coffee. The outside’s fading, too, and some of the images are flaking off. But I won’t replace it this year. I graduated from Marquette in 1994, the last year that Marquette used the Warriors as a mascot. The leaders at Marquette felt that Warriors was demeaning to Native Americans; just remember that when you call a Native American a warrior, it’s like calling a black person a, well, one of those names. Or so the leadership of Marquette thought. So in 1994, Marquette’s mascot changed to the Golden Eagles. Because eagles don’t sue, I guess. The move angered a number of alumni and certainly didn’t impress the students. The controversy had percolated for a number of years, including polls among the students for new names (somehow, suggestions such as Jumpin’ Jesuits and Fighting Octopi didn’t make the student poll, and the most innocuous mascots did). So I’ve held onto this cup, and a t-shirt that no longer fits, because it had the image and mascot which I associated with Marquette. Now that the university has put on a show of considering a new mascot, including a return to the Warriors, it has come up with something more abstract and more inane than Golden Eagles: Marquette Gold (story) I guess it is important that your mascot symbolize and make concrete your ideals. Once, it was tenaciousness, hardiness, and other admirable traits. Then it was, what, freedom? Flight? Now, it’s just….gold.

I even wrote a column for the Marquette Tribune in 1992 defending the Warrior:

Through These Eyes #6: The Great Mascot Controversy

In the interest of saving the university some money, I would like to make my contribution to the “Name the Mascot” competition. There’s no need for them to go throwing away money to a private consultant, even though I realize they just stuck us for ten percent more for just such academic emergencies. Let that much-needed cash go to making some dean’s office more competitively decorated like that of other schools.

Okay, the Native Americans got a little bent out of shape that the university used an image of a Native American for a while there. I know what great strain and emotional upset some of them must have gone through attending basketball games and seeing the mascot, even if it was a descendent of the original Native Americans. This great debate is not limited strictly to the campus. All over the country, groups of Native American are protesting the use of their heritage on athletic teams. I mean, I can understand. I abhor the New York Yankees. How dare they?

So now the university needs a new, non-offensive mascot. Something that can be identified with the Warrior. I humbly submit the following.
How about a white man dressed in skins carrying a club? Think about it, a nice barbarian figure for our sporting events. No, wait. That might be deemed too something-ist for our school if we featured a White European Male mascot like that. Besides, it is not a sort of figure easily identifiable with a Warrior. We’d hate to be mistaken for the Marquette Neanderthals.

Okay, idea two. A nice knight figure. In armor. A chivalrous warrior. No, wait. That’s still a European figure. Besides, some Arabic or Islamic groups might get angry because every few years a bunch of these guys would get together and try to take over the Middle East, or select parts thereof.
Okay, check this out. An African tribesman. With a spear and paint. No, can’t do that. The African Americans would have the same objections as the Native Americans.

Well, how about a samurai in his battle robe and armor, helmet adorned with ox horns, quiver, gold-studded sword, his ancestral crest, the whole bit? Maybe a neat little pseudo-seppuku when the sports team is down? Oh, there’s that blasted heritage argument again.

How about that lone American warrior, the cowboy? Why not, Rick Fields classifies that historical figure as a warrior in his book The Code of the Warrior. Since I’m running low on ideas, why not? A six-gun and ten gallon hat, idealizing the American spirit of independence and swift justice. Uh-oh, wait a minute. Cowboys tended to shoot Native Americans, didn’t they? Maybe this version of our mascot wouldn’t placate them so well….

I have to admit, I’m getting a little frustrated here. When I think of a Warrior from history, I tend to think in terms of different heritages like that, and that’s already proven to be taboo. Either the Warrior was the member of a distinct ethnic group that can and will be offended, and/or they killed people of an offendable group.

I mean, that’s the way I see it. Of course, that is ignoring the common denominator among all Warriors, which is some sort of hardiness and bravery, a willingness to risk their very lives in pursuit of what they thought was right, the skills of life and death intertwined into a person who would kill or die for honor and justice. The Native American Warrior did this. Maybe having a brave as our mascot is not so much a way of spitting on a race of man and saying “Nyah nyah, you injun,” as it is a way of showing respect for a gallant breed of our species and the finest their culture produced.
Or, I guess we could have Patty Smythe mousse up her hair and paint her face up and start singing, “Shooting out the walls of heartache, bang-bang…” But that might get a bit expensive.

Sorry, honey, the mug will go on for at least another decade. But I won’t make you wash it.

Other thoughts:

• The American Mind
• Marquette Warrior

Laura Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.

Blogosphere reaction:

• But on Saturday night, Laura Bush set a new standard. After interrupting her husband and telling him to sit down, she did a stand-up routine that included what was probably the first joke told in earshot of a president that involved him and a horse’s phallus. (John Tierney, New York Times)
• The First Lady resorting to cheap horse masturbation jokes is not much better than Whoopi Goldberg trafficking in dumb puns on the Bush family name. Unlike many Beltway and Manhattan commentators, I do not think the Wonkette-ization of the White House is a good thing. (Michelle Malkin)
• So, thanks, Laura, for leaving us with that picture of George with a horse’s penis in his hand! (Ann Althouse)
• (countless others)

Good gravy, people, get a …. well, control of yourselves. Do I need to diagram this humor on the blackboard?

1. He tried to milk a horse, but grasping the teats of the animal didn’t produce milk because it was a horse.
2. What’s more, it was a male horse. You see, even if it had been a cow, Bush’s folly would have been for naught!

For crying out loud, the teats and the phallus are at different ends of the beast, and the joke makes no mention of handjobs or masturbation.

JFC, what kinds of things do you have in your DVD players that led you to this conclusion?

Personally, I am outraged enough with the whole concept of milking which requires manually grasping bestial teats. Perhaps this explains the preference I have had for beer over milk ever since elementary school. But do we have to always drag the level of discourse into the gutter when we could leave it, well enough alone, in the udder?

(Unfortunately, I have Wonkettized this post, since hers is the blog where I found the transcript without, surprisingly, added sexual connotations.)

The Madison County, Illinois, Coroner is awful quick to call it suicide:

Franklin E. Carver, 67, of the 2700 block of Greenwood Lane, shot himself five times – three times in the head and twice in the chest – inside his home Wednesday, but none of the shots was immediately fatal, authorities said. Carver then got into his customized van and drove 10 minutes to the Clark Bridge, where he parked in the bicycle lane and jumped off the south side of the bridge as a frantic motorist called 911 from a cell phone.

“This is probably the most unusual suicide case I’ve ever seen in my career,” said Lt. David Hayes of the Alton Police Department. “It’s a bizarre case; it really is.”

The Madison County coroner said Monday that preliminary autopsy results indicate Carver, who had several convictions, died of drowning. During the autopsy, performed Sunday, doctors pulled five small-caliber bullets that had lodged in Carver’s body. The three shots to the head did not penetrate the skull, while one shot to the chest missed vital organs and the other struck the liver.

Mystery readers and writers want to hear more about this “frantic motorist” who called 911.

The laws of economics have really pulled a good one on the AFL-CIO:

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, who is facing challenges from some of the labor federation’s largest member unions, yesterday acknowledged that the organization is financially squeezed and may have to lay off a quarter of its workforce.

If only those employees had a union….

(Link seen on Asymmetrical Info.)

Group Pushes Restricting of Cold Medicine:

An association representing more than 36,000 pharmacies is issuing guidelines for possible federal legislation to restrict sales of cold medications containing a substance often used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine — or “speed.”

Amphetamines are speed. Methamphetamines are crank.

But that’s just the word on the street, as filtered by a blogger who only hears the silence on the cul-de-sac.

Meanwhile, the media gives play to a group espousing more regulation. Shocker. Put out the Drudge siren. Speaking of which, why does everyone call the rotating light image the “Drudge siren”? Sirens make a sound. The Drudge Siren does not. Why does the blogging world insist upon destroying the semantic difference between light and siren.

The short item in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today, bearing the innocuous-sounding title “Additional fee on phones starts Sunday“, but it tells a story of the creeping socialism of modern life:

Beginning Sunday, Missouri telephone customers will pay an additional universal service fee to help subsidize telephone service for the poor and disabled.

Not that I am entirely without heart, but when did schnucking telephone service become a right necessitating public subsidy?

Let’s take bets….what’s the next thing that the government will subsidize or force us to subsidize through service fees?

• Cable television?
• Cellular phone service?
• Cellular phone service for The Children?
• Internet connections in every home?
• Trips to the doctor and free prescriptions every time you get a sniffle?
• Professional landscaping services?

Yes, number 5 is very popular, but watch for the others to sneak in while we’re fighting against free health care.

When the missing Georgia woman appeared in New Mexico with a tale of abduction, I scented some fully-processed bovine food. But I didn’t post fast enough, since she’s admitted she was not abducted after all.

Wilbanks, whose disappearance set off a nationwide hunt, called her fiance, John Mason (search), from a pay phone late Friday and told him that she had been kidnapped while jogging three days before, authorities said. Her family rejoiced that she was safe, telling reporters that the media coverage apparently got to the kidnappers.

But Wilbanks soon recanted, according to police.

Ray Schultz, chief of police in Albuquerque, said Wilbanks “had become scared and concerned about her impending marriage and decided she needed some time alone.” He said she traveled to Las Vegas by bus before going to Albuquerque.

I’d recommend that her fiance be skeptical about her new story, too; I expect she’s got something in her Sent Mail folder and IM archives regarding New Mexico or Nevada.

But I’m just the suspicious type. That’s why I have tapped my own phone to see what my beautiful wife is plotting.

What are the odds of that?

The legislation would limit the number of gambling boats in the state to 13 — and all the slots are spoken for.

The state limits gambling boats to 13. That’s rich.

Of course, I oppose the legislation. It’s arbitrary and capricious whimsy on the part of the government. 13, not 14. Why 13? Because that’s how many boats currently exist or are pending.

As a good libertineertarian, I oppose all limits on gambling as long as it’s not run by the state and favor removing the government’s statewide monopoly (the lottery). As for fools who gamble more than they can afford, well, let the wiser help part the fools from their money. Letting fools suffer consequences from foolishness; it will help cure them of their foolishness.

I don’t favor recreational arson and illegal gun possession, but I’m happy with this ruling:

Defense attorneys argued successfully that state Supreme Court rulings dictated that Charles’ 1983 arson and attempted murder convictions could be counted only as one strike, as they stemmed from the same attack. Prosecutors contended that the crimes were separate because Charles had committed arson to destroy evidence that he had drugged his son before setting fire to him.

The man lit his child on fire, and prosecutors charged him with arson and attempted murder. Same thing, but the single action led to two felony counts. This incident occurred 1983. If he tried that today, he’d also get felony counts of using fire in commission of a crime, leaving the scene of a crime he’d committed, possession of arson accellerants, felony child abuse, felony child endangerment, and possibly smoking during the commission of a felony. Needless to say, he’d fall not only under three strikes laws, but also striking out the side which probably demand summary execution.

This ruling would indicate that pissed-off prosecutors won’t get automatic life sentences for the criminal whom they convict if only the prosecutors can find or stretch three felony counts to blanket a single crime.

Because you never know when blogging against law enforcement to incite changes in criminal laws , blogging across interstate lines, and excessive use of italics in blog posts might criminalized, and by a single act that doesn’t neccesarily involve violence or wrongdoing, you might be eligible for life in prison.

(Submitted as an entry to Outside the Beltway’s Beltway Traffic Jam, if only the trackback thing would work.)

Apparently, certain segments of organized labor oppose environmentalism:

Operating Engineers Local 520 in Granite City formed an informational picket Monday at the Jennison-Wright Superfund site on West 22nd Street over the use of non-union labor to clean up the site.

The local began the picket about 7 p.m. and will continue its protest at the contaminated site until cleanup work is completed. That could take about three months. The cleanup is being done by Bodine Environmental of Decatur.

Cost-effective, efficient enviromental clean-up that allows the EPA to stretch its budget and clean more sites? Not if it costs union jobs!

Perhaps following the lead of Washington University protesting students, high school students staged a protriot when the school district superintendent fired their best friend, the principal:

During today’s three-hour protest, students chanted and walked through neighborhoods as well as taking part in fights, vandalizing cars and trying to break into a store as they walked along Chambers Road to the district’s administration office, 1370 Northumberland in Bellefontaine Neighbors.

That, my friends, is a protriot: a riot in the guise of a protest. Get a couple of picket signs and apparently the media, or at least the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will overlook a little assault and battery, a little property damage, and an attempted breaking and entering as long as it serves a cause. Not necessarily even a good cause.

No, gentle reader, I just wanted to demonstrate my superior logic skills, gleaned from the several sessions of Philosophy 001 – Logic classes at Marquette University through which I did not sleep. Ergo, gaze upon the following passage and note the false dilemma:

School officials say Ukaoma was dismissed because of poor performance. However, teachers, parents and students say the School Board is vindictive and that Ukaoma was the best principal the high school has ever had.

It is entirely possible that Ukaoma was both. Given how the student body is inspired by his presence and now his absence, I suspect such is the case.

Some dude in the LA Times thinks Google should buy a newspaper:

It’s only a matter of time before a Yahoo or a Google decides to buy an old media company in order to differentiate itself by offering high-quality, proprietary news. Or a company like Amazon could buy a prestigious newspaper publisher and reinvent itself as a portal, leapfrogging over those that treat news updates as a commodity.

Mickey Kaus disagrees and lists two good reasons why not, concluding:

I’ll invest kf’s retained earnings elsewhere, thank you!

Professor Bainbridge calls it a provocative business plan.

I have one word for them:

AOLTimeWarner

The “authorities” say it was an accident:

According to the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Animal Services, which conducted an investigation, the horse was running when it stepped on its own lead rope and broke its neck. Animal Services is ruling the death an accident.

Don’t believe the whitewash. Ask yourself:

What had the horse seen that would drive it to suicide?

Looks like “Republican” Senator Bond wants to spend lots of money, and those lots aren’t enough:

The Senate has opened debate on a highway bill that would send billions of dollars to Missouri and Illinois for key road and bridge projects over the next six years.

“This bill is long overdue,” Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo., a lead sponsor the legislation, said as lawmakers began debate on Tuesday. “Our roads are deteriorating, (highway) safety is deteriorating.”

But even as he championed the legislation, Bond and other lawmakers said the $284 billion price tag was not enough to meet the nation’s needs. And they vowed to include more money in the bill, even though the White House has signaled that $284 billion is the maximum the president would accept.

Jeez, spending lots of Federal money is good because it’s spent in Missouri! How short sighted does Bond think we are?

Probably only as shortsighted as we actually are.