Category: News

Neil Steinberg says today:

I never knew the name of the actor who played Dean Wormer in “Animal House” — John Vernon — until he died this week, at age 72. While the obituaries didn’t mention it, he uttered one of the great lines in movie history — “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” At least to those of us who struggle with all three.

Obviously, he does not read blogs every day; that line was mentioned in almost all of the blog memorials I read last week.

Steinberg, like many of other commentators, does Vernon disservice by not remembering Vernon’s role in Terminal Exposure and Sledge Hammer!.

A good fellow who looked a little too much like John Lithgow for true immortality.

When my beautiful wife and I were in the grocery store, a disparate pair of magazine headlines intruded upon the sane world in which we live:

Click for full size

So Brad Wants Jen Back! and Jen Fights to Get Brad Back!? Yeeks, these are direct opposites by implication. Tabloids should be careful since their regular readers, who seem to care about the state of Bradnifer’s marriage, might suffer from brain implosions when trying to comprehend how Brad is fighting for Jen and Jen is fighting for Brad.

Fighting whom?

Yeah, I know, I bought the magazines and only encouraged them. Shaddup.

Professor Bainbridge muses on Donald Rumsfeld’s reluctance to go to Germany:

So Donald Rumsfeld is afraid to go to Germany because he might get arrested on war crimes charges. So much for the NATO alliance, eh?

Well, that’s only on the good end of the spectrum. There’s always a chance that German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and some of his other leather clad apparatachiks might firebomb his motorcade or beat him to death with a brick.

Because that’s the caliber of leaders to which some would have America aspire, or to whom America should kowtow.

So, gentle reader, what do you think will result from this crime?

As the store’s alarm rang, thieves made off with 32 rifles and handguns from a Fremont gun shop early Wednesday, less than two weeks after police announced they will soon ignore burglar alarms unless there was a confirmed crime.

Irvington Arms owner Martin MacDonald was livid over the break-in at his shop, where burglars used an aluminum baseball bat to break the front door and smashed display cases with a crowbar before making off with $20,000 in weapons.

MacDonald blamed the break-in on the Police Department’s policy — announced last month but not effective until Feb. 18 — that officers won’t respond to burglar alarms unless they are told there is evidence of a break-in or security breach.

“I think they basically invited crime into the neighborhood,” said MacDonald, 35. “It’s on every channel and in the newspaper. They might as well have said, in bold print, ‘Commit robbery in Fremont,’ because the PD won’t respond. This was unacceptable.”

Will the community of Fremont:

• Scale back its police non-intervention program, ensuring that perhaps someone should drive by places with their alarms ringing.
• Ban the sale of guns in Fremont, because if it ain’t in Fremont, it can’t be stolen in Fremont, and when only outlaws can put guns for sale that other outlaws can steal, those other outlaws will have to steal the guns for sale from someone else, preferably in a different jurisdiction.

If you’re here for anything but a weird Google search involving hot pix of one sort or another, you know which one I think Fremont will implement.

Global warming: scientists reveal timetable:

A detailed timetable of the destruction and distress that global warming is likely to cause the world was unveiled yesterday.

Excellent. I ask of you, gentle reader, if you’re brave enough to make it to the bottom of this article, please e-mail me the exact date of the end of the world because of global warming.

Story in the San Francisco Chronicle: Delighting in the dollar’s decline: Foreign visitors find bargains abound in S.F, other tourist areas:

While Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is worried about the weak dollar, it has been a boon for foreign visitors and San Francisco’s tourism industry.

The precipitous drop of the dollar against the euro and other major currencies has increased the buying power of foreign tourists. Hotels are seeing more overseas guests, and business at shops and restaurants has picked up.

I’m no economist, but having people want to buy your goods and services sounds good to me.

Britain: U.S. Must Help Avert Climate Catastrophe:

Britain, arguing that climate change is now unstoppable, urged the United States on Tuesday to sign up to life-saving cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as environmentalists warned of approaching Armageddon.

Well, if it’s unstoppable, what can we do? Hurry up and cut down in the Amazon because I want some fresh rainforest lumber for a new deck.

And please have an SUV tow it straight from the interior of Brazil.

Your land doesn’t belong to you, citizen, except at the government’s leisure. Story:

Every month for 20 years, Gentle “Jim” Day mailed his $1,222.22 mortgage payment on his business, Royal Auto Repair.

He finally paid if off last year. But now Day, the son of Arkansas sharecroppers, faces losing his land and business.

An agency backed by the city is preparing to take Day’s business by eminent domain to make way for something called a “Media Box.”

A development group gets to take a commercial business owned by a private citizen for a mostly TBA addition to the “arts district.”

I don’t know about you, but I always suspect that government officials love these underused and underserving “arts districts” as personal come-ons to easy living and easy loving artists and wealthy, divorced or surviving spouse patrons of those arts. Arts districts don’t tend to serve the entire community, contrary the Utopian wishes of their proponents. Arts districts serve the upper crusts of society who go to the theatre, the symphony, or the opera. Sorry, but save for school field trips, that doesn’t tend to include the majority of Americans.

So now the city of St. Louis will forcibly seize the land of a working man to make something for the benefit of the well-to-do. Typical.

On a final note, I must include that this is a triumph for the Democrats who run St. Louis. I thought the Republicans were supposed to look and act like Mr. Moneybags from Monopoly Chance cards. I guess it’s just whoever’s in power.

From John Cole:

“Vietnam? You mean the Democrat conceived, Democrat initiated, and Democrat run war that is widely regarded as the only war the modern United States has ever lost? That Vietnam?”

It’s hard to believe that a grown-up wrote this column with Bill McClellan’s byline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

A young woman left a message on my voice mail. She said she was driving on Highway 40 when she noticed an SUV practically on her bumper. The driver flashed his lights at her and then pulled up next to her. He was a middle-aged man, and he snarled and yelled something she couldn’t make out. When he finally pulled ahead, she realized what the incident had been about. She has an anti-Bush bumper sticker, and the SUV had one of those “W-04” stickers.

“I have a question,” the young woman said. “The conservatives won. Why are they still so angry?”

If only he had left it alone with the mindreading, wherein he could tell from his desk at the Post Dispatch downtown that the other driver was not, in fact, upset because the woman who called Bill McClellan obeying the unwritten Missouri traffic standards and driving in the passing lane while doing about or below the speed limit.

No, then McClellan has to explain how conservatives are the dweebs, geeks, and nerds from high school while liberals were the cool kids, the cheerleaders, and the athletes.

The man’s next step is fingerpainting his columns, folks, I kid you not.

CNN Headline: Explosion targets Spanish hotel.

I’m not a physicist, so take what I am about to say with a grain of sodium chloride, but

Explosions don’t target things; people do

Headline writers use this cheap personification when they want to hide appropriate subject of the sentence, the actor who made the typically bad thing happen. To say “Basque Terrorists Target Hotel” makes the Spanish separatists sound just a little mean, doesn’t it? Better the explosion itself –an act of nature that just happens under just the right circumstances, such a combination of Semtex and detonator– take the rap than to single out the people who actually performed the deed.

Headline writers also use this when they want to emphasize an inanimate object’s role in the event, especially when the prevailing windsom indicates that the object itself is bad. That’s why you get SUVs running down grandmothers and guns killing innocent bystanders.

Personification is a nice device in fiction or creative non-fiction. Journalists should probably avoid it, except when their journalism is fiction or creative non-fiction. Come to think of it, perhaps journalists are already adhering to this maxim.

Story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Critics say that Jim Brown isn’t worth millions:

The city of St. Louis, the St. Louis Airport Authority and the transit agency Metro have paid more than $3 million over the past five years to a Washington lobbyist to be their chief advocate with Congress and federal agencies and to steer federal money back home.

The lead to this story highlights the fundamental inefficiency in the current system of government funding and its built-in waste.

The Federal government makes its sweeping national mandates that it wants states and communities to implement. To help the smaller government units handle the demands from above, the federal government passes on grants and whatnot.

So the Federal government collects the taxes, takes its percentage from the top, and hands the money to lower governments. The lower governments spend money from their general funds to employ grant writers and lobbyists to get the diminished revenue pool passed on by the Federal government. Meanwhile, government departments, advisors, and lobbyists get their points from the money passing through their hands from the citizen to the highest level of organization and then back down to the local governments who actually do the work.

So does the Post-Dispatch point out the inherent inefficiencies of the system and argue that the Federal government could scale back its centralization and allow local communities to use local tax revenue for local projects directly and that local communities wouldn’t have to waste existing tax revenue pursuing other tax revenue?

Of course not. They’re upset that the lobbyist isn’t efficient bringing the slop from the Federal trough:

But the lobbyist, Jim Brown, has a mixed record at best, according to interviews with two dozen members of Congress, aides and local officials.

From the LA Times story about a man in last week’s train crash in LA who

As he lay wedged under a train seat and metal debris, with whatever energy he could summon and a heartbreaking economy of words, he scrawled a farewell in blood on the seat. “I {heart} my kids. I {heart} Leslie,” he printed.

Some people are inspired by the story and want to find him, but he wants to remain anonymous:

“I’m a private person,” he said in a statement the hospital released for him, “and the message that I wrote was a private message to my wife and my kids because I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Ann Althouse comments:

The extraordinary thing is that this man with an opportunity to be paraded about in the public eye has chosen to remain private.

Perhaps his wife’s name isn’t Leslie. That would explain it, ainna?

Story: Sharon Stone steals charity limelight at poverty debate:

Hollywood siren Sharon Stone, more used to the film studio than the business stage, stole the limelight with an impromptu fundraiser at the World Economic Forum that secured one million dollars in aid to Africa.

Seizing her chance during a heavyweight debate on how to tackle poverty in Africa, Stone stood up in the middle of the crowded hall to offer an immediate personal pledge of 10,000 dollars — then challenged others to follow suit.

It rather undercut the big-name panelists, who included Britain’s finance minister Gordon Brown, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the billionaire Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

That won’t even buy a whole Land Rover for the do-spenders who distribute aid in Africa.

It’s also disingenuous of this journalist to say Sharon Stone upstaged Bill Gates. Let’s write it out with zeros:

750,000,000	Bill Gates donation to Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation
10,000,000	Bill Gates donation to UN for polio vaccines
3,000,000	Bill Gates donation to tsunami relief
10,000	Sharon Stone’s donation to poverty relief in Africa

But Bill Gates is an evil capitalist, and Sharon Stone is a feeling artist out of Hollywood with a good pair of legs and, as some lizards would atest, tasty feet, so of course she upstaged Bill Gates by promising an amount equal to 1% of what Sandra Bullock gave to tsunami relief.

But at least Sharon Stone was dressed appropriately, eh, Robin Givhen?

Virginia Postrel, who lives in Texas, concurs with a Washington Post fashionista who dings Vice President Cheney for dressing warmly for an outdoor ceremony in January:

You don’t dress for a solemn state ceremony as though you were going for a hike.

You know, Postrel and Robin Givhen might have approved of William Henry Harrison’s attire for his first inauguration speech. The sartorial splendor killed him.

Listen to this Wisconsin boy: if you’re going to be outside for a long period of time, you dress warmly and let the other people keep themselves warm giggling at your attire or expressing their outrage. That way everyone is comfortable.

Update: James Joyner agrees.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the best argument I can think of for term limits:

Kennedy Calls for Troop Withdrawal in Iraq:

The American military’s continued presence in Iraq is fanning the flames of conflict, and signals the need for a new detailed timeline to bring the troops home, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said Thursday.

Just three days before the Iraqi people go to the polls to elect a new government, the Massachusetts Democrat said America must give Iraq back to its people rather than continue an occupation that parallels the failed politics of the Vietnam war.

If we limited our senators to two terms, like we do our presidents, they would only have 12 years to turn into bloviating goofballs, would only have one re-election for which they needed to raise funds, and would not accrue valuable soft power that leads them right into lobbying.

Also, Teddy Kennedy would have just been another quiet lush in an expansive family compound after losing a presidential election in 1976.

I have, from time to time, also received a FEDERAL INCOME TAX REFUND, which is a greyer area. Depending upon your point of view, it’s either my money or money from the government, either an increase or decrease or I have somehow precipitated a cut in federal revenue.

Regardless, you should assume then, gentle reader, that I am withholding too much from my paychecks every week, and I think you would be right.