Category: News

Johnny Carson has inspired John Kass to quit smoking.

Good luck, Kass.

These reporters don’t want information. They want to catch the President.

I know, that’s obvious, but I notice it most acutely when I actually listen to it.

Headline: Rural counties keep afloat with tape and bubble gum:

Weaverville, Trinity County — Supervisors in this 13,000-resident county the size of Rhode Island are postponing $3 million in road repairs to keep Trinity’s debt-ridden hospital afloat.

You mean Trinity County, which owns and operates five public use general aviation airports located throughout the County?

Trinity County, which gives out grants according to the directives of the its Trinity County Children and Families First Commission’s Strategic Plan [to spend money]?

Which has its own Department of Tobacco Education?

Which has its own Department of Risk Management?

Which has a number of parks and its own Library System?

Although money might be scarce, I think that these municipalities, like most other governments, lack clear priorities. They run out of money before they run out of ideas, but they don’t put the ideas on hold or examine their feasibility; instead, they get more money.

After an embezzler with the county government pilfered funds and overbilled a title company to cover the shortcoming, the county government says, too bad, so sad, we’re not recompensing the title company. Story:

When a St. Louis County employee stole $727,215 from a cash drawer over about six years, she covered it up by overbilling Investors Title Co. to balance the books in the Recorder of Deeds office. That means the county should bear the loss, company President Joseph Crutchfield told a jury Monday.

But Investors Title had the paperwork it needed to discover the crime from the start, and thus should accept responsibility, a lawyer for the county countered in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

The message, of course, is that you should just assume that your government is composed of felons out to rip you off.

It’s a good message. Thank you, St. Louis County, for stating it clearly and loudly.

Christian Slater explains why he loves London in a story in the Times of London, December 12, 2004:

I like the fact that there’s no gun culture here but I don’t necessarily feel safer. There’s a frisson in London that’s similar to Los Angeles or New York, a sense that something might happen at any moment, and I really appreciate that. If I was moving for safety’s sake, I’d head for somewhere like Vancouver, but I enjoy living in a country that’s a bit raw. In America there’s a real sense of danger right now, a sense that lightning might strike at any time; it’s not attractive. I prefer the edginess I find in London.

Christian Slater is attack with an edgy weapon in London, January 2005:

American actor Christian Slater has escaped a knife attack after a performance of his show in London’s West End.

Well, at least he’s safe from George W. Bush’s America and its gun culture.

Story: AMR might add flights:

American Airlines, the biggest operator at Lambert Field, will add more flights in St. Louis if it can negotiate lower airport costs in the coming year, AMR Corp. Chairman Gerard Arpey said Wednesday.

“If we can get facility costs down, that can only be good news for adding new service in St. Louis,” he said. AMR, of Fort Worth, Texas, is American’s parent company.

Kudos to the headline writer for recognizing that once AMR gets what it wants–lower rates–it might not actually deliver the possible new flights.

Is it just me, or is there a family resemblence here:

Bill Gates

Ellen Feiss

Upon hearing the clock chime three, I asked (rhetorically, of course) of the cat, “Where does the day go?”

I realize this was insensitive and wish to apologize, sincerely, to all the Italians I may have offended by saying syllables together that sound like an ethnic slur. Because I understand some members of some ethnic groups take offense at that sort of thing.

I saw this headline, Sports Authority cuts budget after complaints, I worried because I confused it with the Sporting Authority, our preferred retail outlet for non-bicycling athletic gear.

Fortunately, though, the retail establishment will remain open, and the St. Louis Regional Convention & Sports Complex Authority will continue spending private/public tax largesse with only the normal amount of annual abashment:

Board members of the St. Louis Regional Convention & Sports Complex Authority made the move after learning last month that the authority’s employees had gone over budget last year in nearly every expense category and had not notified the board.

The authority overspent last year even after Mayor Francis Slay and others publicly accused it of wasteful spending.

One of the cuts:

One new cost savings for this year: The board declined to renew the contract of the authority’s public relations firm.

Executive Director Kent Underwood had asked for $72,000 to be budgeted this year to pay the Vandiver Group, the PR firm.

Last year, the authority paid $98,000 to Vandiver – more than four times the $24,000 that had been approved by the board.

Good idea, since the PR firm certainly hasn’t convinced we the people of the purpose or necessity of this entity.

By now, most of you know, Prince Harry of England recently attended a costume party dressed in a Nazi uniform, and the for-public-consumption outrage uproared and stamped its hoof threateningly in the dirt. Mark Steyn writes a column about the big Hollywood premieresque indignation.

As a service to our readers, I include a handy table of costumes of both evil people and not evil people as whom Harry could have dressed and the uproar those costumes would have provoked:

Costume	Reaction:
Nazi	Because certain segments of the punditocracy continue to harp the x=Hitler equation, they must continue to reinforce the public’s opinion that Nazism and Hitler are the worst evils ever produced in the world, even though by twentieth century standards, they were a pretty standard lot of totalitarian killers of innocent people (see also Stalin, Tse-Tung, Amin, et al.)
Commisar	Red chic is so fashionable and retro ironic. Pass.
Mongol Horde Member	Sure, they raped, pillaged, and razed villages in the manner of Ghengis Khan, but that was so long ago it’s a worthless analogy to use on Bush or Blair, so Harry gets a pass. Unless he’s savaged, so to speak, for mocking a barbarian of color.
The Devil	As an icon of evil used by one or more major religions, the Devil has no more meaning than kitsch to the intelligentsia, many of whom the plebes could argue are already in the Devil’s pocket.
Jesus Christ	The professional shriekers only respond to the outrage of a select few Christian moonbats who would express outrage over this continuing example that Christians and Christ are the only thing you can dress up as for Halloween without outrage except for theirs. Those silly people, getting so upset for nothing, the intelligentsia would cluck.
Pontius Pilate	Who are you supposed to be? ask the chatterers. Who’s that? they ask when told.
Mohammed	After someone at the fanatic edge of Islam cuts Harry’s head off, the shrieking classes say he asked for it by offending the sort of people who would cut your head off.

So the outrage sort of fits into the total program of presentation, where Nazis are bad bad bad not so much because they’re totalitarians who tried to take over Europe and who killed a lot of people (which differs from the European bureaucracy only in body count, but not so much in intent), but because Nazis are bad, bad, bad. Because the Nazis have to be bad so that creatively-challenged dissenters can compare current world leaders to them thoughtlessly.

Does anyone else find this quote (also in Mark Steyn’s column) too earnestly Orwellian?

“In a Europe grounded in peace and freedom there should be no place for Nazi symbols,” declared Markus Soeder, general secretary of the Christian Socialist Union party. “They should be banned throughout Europe, as they are with good reason in Germany.“

Prohibition=freedom, citizen.

Satellite lost over the south Pacific:

Intelsat, Ltd. announced today that its IS-804 satellite experienced a sudden and unexpected electrical power system anomaly on January 14, 2005, at approximately 5:32 p.m. EST that caused the total loss of the spacecraft. In accordance with existing satellite anomaly contingency plans, Intelsat is in the process of making alternative capacity available to its IS-804 customers. The satellite, launched in 1997, furnished telecommunications and media delivery services to customers in the South Pacific.

If this were the early chapters of a Tom Clancy novel, the Chinese would be plinking.

(Link seen on /.)

Story in Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missouri fee agents prepare to lose contracts after shift in power: Democrats call for change in system:

Maria Turner knows that any day now, she’ll lose her job.

Turner runs Department of Revenue fee offices in Chesterfield and Clayton. The offices sell license plates, issue drivers licenses, process applications for titles and collect sales taxes on new vehicles and boats.

Her shops are among the busiest in the state’s 171-office network of independent contractors, and Turner is proud of her lower-than-average error rate in processing applications. But she figures her days are numbered. The reason: sheer politics.

Fee offices are among the last vestiges of patronage politics in state government. The governor’s campaign contributors traditionally get the contracts, which in some cases can provide six-figure incomes to their operators. The offices charge a fee for each transaction. After expenses are covered, the rest is gravy.

Democratic contractors appointed by former Govs. Bob Holden and Mel Carnahan expect to be replaced soon because Matt Blunt, a Republican, took over the governor’s office last week.

I don’t weep for Maria Turner, the woman who’ll have to go from clearing six figures plus salary for a number of years as a Democrat appointee to the soup kitchen. I do gasp, almost, with surprise that Democrats want to act now when their contributors will lose the gravy train. As far as I know, Carnahan, Wilson, and Holden didn’t agitate for it when they were governors or when the Democrats controlled the legislature, so I think the Democrats in Missouri are demonstrating another disingenuous and yet transparent maneuver to not allow the incoming Republican administration the same amenities their boys have enjoyed for the last dozen years.

That said, I think it’s a capital idea, and I hope pro-business governor Matt Blunt actually goes through with it. I’d like to see a minimum of two fee agents per county to ensure that citizens have a choice in their driver’s license renewal options and perhaps see some customer service out of the functionaries behind the counter whose inner clocks move on four year cycles.

What, you think I have had one or more bad experiences in these little ill-furnished storefronts and could do nothing but bite my tongue and line the pocket of someone idealogically opposed to me? I have, and I had no choice in it.