Category: News

Since I don’t have anything witty or insightful to say today, perhaps you should just go read the Chicago Tribune‘s Steve Chapman in his column "The illusions of the minimum wage", which begins:

Asking Democrats if they favor an increase in the minimum wage is like asking Martha Stewart if she’d mind sharing some decorating ideas. There are few things they’d rather do, and Sen. Ted Kennedy thinks it is high time.

The Massachusetts Democrat is offering a measure that would boost the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. He notes that it has not been lifted since 1997, during which time senators have gotten seven pay raises. “If the Senate is serious about an anti-poverty agenda,” he said, “let’s start by raising the minimum wage.” Republicans, meanwhile, might accept an increase of $1.10, as proposed by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

It may seem like an inescapable truth that if you increase the amount employers pay their lowest-wage workers, you will have fewer poor people. Money, after all, is what they lack, and a higher minimum wage means more money to those in the worst-paying jobs.

In fact, this is one of those obvious facts that turns out not to be a fact at all. The available evidence suggests that raising the minimum wage doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.

You see, the gentleman can sound kinda smart about things when he’s not la-dee-dah about foreign policy.

Norville to Anchor From ‘Home Confinement’:

Now HERE’S a good excuse for working at home. Deborah Norville will anchor Monday’s program of “Inside Edition” from her home on Long Island, N.Y., to try to give viewers a taste of what Martha Stewart’s home confinement is like.

Muhahahaha! I laugh with almost hysterical tears. I work from home, so I sometimes don’t leave the house for weeks. You want to know what it’s like?

It’s maddening, but I like madness. It keeps me company and walks on cats’ paws.

Seriously, what’s next? Deborah Norville drives her own car so viewers know what commuting is like?

(Link seen on Tim Blair’s site.)

If I were a cynic, or a hopeful writer of suspense fiction, I might make something different of this story: Italian Journalist Rejects U.S. Account.

Okay, we have these salient events:

1. Sympathetic “journalist” disappears, “kidnapped” by “insurgents.”
2. Releases a tape making normal coerced political demands, which doesn’t differ from her normal uncoerced political demands.
3. Her government “negotiates” her release, which involves paying ransom money.
4. Upon her release, she claims the United States military “targeted her”–but missed–with 300 or 400 shots–after which her car looks like this, but
5. The only casualty is the Italian intelligence officer that acted as the bag man, who took one round to the temple, almost execution style; everyone else in the car miraculously survived.

And when the heat cools off and the journalist “recovered,” she would retire to Switzerland with her Iraqi lover on their ill-gotten loot.

I would title the book Ill Manifest.

Update: Real-life mystery writer Roger L. Simon offers a plot.

Update II: Baldilocks, who deploys a Ludlumian title for a post in The Sgrena Gambit, indicates that the car depicted above might not be the car alledgedly shot 300-400 times.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch waxes romantic about homelessness in its Metro section today: For two men, it was a place to call home.

Even now, more than a month later, the discarded bits of their lives litter the ground around the little green bench — a few twist-off beer caps, a couple of dozen cigarette butts and some scraps of candy wrappers half-buried in the March mud.

For the better part of a year it had been their bench, and even on those rainy nights when they would leave to take shelter under the roof of a nearby bus stop, they would always return. There was no address, not in the strict sense of the word, but for Morris White and Kerry Smith, it was the closest thing to a home they would know for much of 2004.

They arrived for the first time in the late spring, when the city air was warm and clean, and the sweetgum trees were heavy with new leaves.

I don’t understand. I thought homelessness was bad, but here the Post-Dispatch sepia-tones the story of two men who preferred to live on the streets to living with their families or in homeless shelters with their pissant regulations.

If these homeless people don’t care to change their condition, why should I? Why should tax money be spent on them, other than it’s free?

I doubt the Post-Dispatch wanted to raise these questions.

Well, that’ how I would have titled this story, which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “St. Louis County lures 300 jobs from Alton”:

Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. will move 300 jobs from Alton to Creve Coeur as part of a deal with St. Louis County that could net the company up to $4.2 million in tax breaks.

Those workers will move into a new 10-story headquarters building just off Interstate 270 and Olive Boulevard, where they’ll be joined by 200 employees from Clayton and a dozen or so from Chesterfield, under the deal unveiled Friday.

You see, the corporation is getting $4,200,000 in tax breaks, but the St. Louis County Executive says:

“Of course I’m excited,” said County Executive Charlie Dooley. “When someone tells you they’re going to move jobs someplace else, you take it very seriously. We need to do this to expand our tax base and keep our tax burden low.”

That expanded tax base isn’t coming from the company, dear friends. It’s coming from the employees who will have to travel further to work but will have to buy lunch in Missouri instead of Illinois, expanding the St. Louis County sales tax base. It will help, too, when they gas up here, since they can pay for our roads more cheaply than they can pay for Illinois roads.

Remember, St. Louis County government serves itself and its corporate juicers, not the residents. If you don’t believe it, buy a house where developers will want to build a strip mall in 2014.

Another coming of age story for young men results in charges: Teacher Accused of Sex Abuse:

A Braxton County middle school teacher is in police custody after allegedly confessing to sexual misconduct with five of her students.

The number could increase, as she could not be sure of an exact number because she was wearing a bag at the time.

Archaelogists uncover three coffins, mummies behind a secret door:

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered three coffins containing mummies behind a secret door that was hidden behind 42-hundred-year-old statues.

They didn’t even need an elf with them, werd.

A review of the Lincoln Town Car BPS, courtesy of Business 2.0:

When choosing an armored vehicle, it’s important to keep in mind how badly someone wants you dead. This will affect your purchase. If your assassin is an amateur — perhaps some punk with a .38, which fires a 158-grain, round-nose lead bullet at a velocity of 850 feet per second — you’ll probably be just fine in an aftermarket armored sedan or the one offered by Cadillac. In fact, even if your enemy comes at you with a .357 Magnum — a serious weapon capable of spitting metal-ripping charges at up to 1,395 feet per second — you’ll probably escape without a scratch in one of those sedans. But if someone really wants to kill you, you’d better be riding in the 2005 Lincoln Town Car Ballistic Protection Series.

Excellent.

In a story entitled "Between a rock and a hard place", the St. Louis Post-Dispatch must choose between tax spending government bureaucrats and senior citizens. And it chooses the government spenders:

Two changes in tax exemptions offered to Illinois taxpayers will mean a decrease in local funding for school districts.

Districts rely on property taxes for a significant part of their budgets.

For the Collinsville School District, that decrease is expected to total close to a $800,000 revenue shortfall for next year.

“We’re not alone with this. All school districts are affected – some more and some less,” said Superintendent Dennis Craft. “But we did not expect this (cut in funding) to this extent.”

The decrease stems from two exemptions. One, called the Homestead Exemption, is offered to senior citizens. The program increased the reduction amount from $2,500 to $3,000 on property assessments.

Another program, called Senate bill 1790, or owner-occupied exemption, increases what can be omitted from property assessments by as much as $1,500 from what was originally set at $3,500. This means that homeowners can potentially pay less in taxes because their property assessments are decreased. Seniors who own a home can take advantage of both exemption programs, saving as much as $8,000 from their home’s assessed value.

Use your head, Chester:

A day after opting out of the U.S. ballistic missile defense shield, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin reiterated Friday that Washington must get permission from Ottawa before firing on any incoming missiles over Canada.

“This is our airspace, we’re a sovereign nation, and you don’t intrude on a sovereign nation’s airspace without seeking permission,” Martin said.

Funny that Martin doesn’t chastise nations who would dare conceive of firing nuclear missiles over the sovereign nation of Canada to attack the United States.

I trust our government will do the right thing and destroy such missiles if possible and risking a Canadian retaliation of combustible submarines blockading the St. Lawerence Seaway.

Proper socialist education yields expected results: Yale students demand financial aid changes:

Fifteen Yale students staged a sit-in at the university’s admissions office Thursday while nearly 100 others rallied outside urging the school to offer more financial aid.

The 10-hour demonstration ended peacefully Thursday evening when police led the 15 students out of the building and cited them for trespassing.

Some protesters called on Yale President Richard Levin to reduce by half the amount of money students on financial aid are required to pay. The students said families earning less than $40,000 a year should not have to contribute any money.

So the students are standing up for the lower middle class and demand free educations for themselves. Oddly, though, they’re not also championing throwing open the doors of Yale to everyone who completes high school and providing them with educational opportunity to further serve the interests of Man, never mind the smaller class sizes and watered-down talent a larger professorial pool would require. These protestors want to retain the value of the Yale degree; they just don’t want to pay for it.

Standard “Republican Spending Restraint Kills Grandmas” template stuff in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Cuts may leave some out in the cold:

For Betty Jenkins and thousands of other Missourians, juggling grocery, utility and medical bills on a fixed income is a day-to-day struggle. The task becomes even more daunting when temperatures dip and home-heating bills reach triple digits, she said.

Jenkins, a retired social services worker in her 60s who lives on Social Security and disability insurance, said the cost of heating her six-room home in north St. Louis County can top $100 a month during winter. To get by, she turns down the temperature every afternoon and occasionally has relied on federal assistance to avoid disconnection of her gas service.

She and other Missourians who depend on home-heating aid may have fewer resources to draw from next winter because base funding for the country’s biggest energy assistance program would be cut by $85 million, or 4.4 percent, under President George W. Bush’s proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Missouri would see funding trimmed by $1.9 million; Illinois would get $4.9 million less. The amount of emergency aid available nationwide also would be reduced by a third, to $200 million from $297 million.

I expect these sorts of stories from the Post-Dispatch, which could appropriately be printed in actual red ink. But I don’t understand why this is a Business story.

Also missing from the story: calls to private citizens and charities to help out. Because although the Post-Dispatch and its idealogical contemporaries pose as champions of the common man, but it’s startling how little faith they have in us helping others without government coercion.

Government coercion where the government takes its vig off the top to pay for its own salaries and costs, and then splits the proceeds among sports facilities and their attendant highly-paid commissions, pay offs to corporations to pleasepleaseplease don’t move away, and then, if there’s anything left, to replace private charity and its warmth and benevolence with externally-imposed duty and bureaucracy.

Kenny Baker, the man inside the R2D2 suit, has been busted for driving under the influence in Britain, where he was probably doing something dangerous like driving on the right freaking side of the road.

Kenny, 70, was banned yesterday for being just over the booze limit.

The 3ft 8in actor admitted having two glasses of wine before driving home after rehearsals for a play.

With a person that size, it wouldn’t take much, ainna?

Remember that Twilight Zone episode about the monster on the wing? Doesn’t European regulation make unholy creatures who live to destroy seem tame by comparison?

A BRITISH AIRWAYS jumbo jet carrying 351 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing after an 11-hour transatlantic flight with a failed engine.

The fault occurred on take-off from Los Angeles but the pilot declined all opportunities to land in the US and instead continued on three engines for 5,000 miles to Britain.

The incident happened three days after a European regulation came into force requiring airlines to compensate passengers for long delays or cancellations. Under the new rules, if the pilot had returned to Los Angeles, BA would have been facing a compensation bill of more than £100,000.

That will promote tourism.

Ann Althouse has more information about Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide. It’s worse than I thought.

The Federal government often gets sued for the legislation it passes and the rules it enacts, but now it’s getting sued for not arbitrarily muddling in citizens’ lives:

A consumer group sued the federal government Thursday, saying that salt is killing tens of thousands of Americans and that regulators have done too little to control salt in food.

Despite advisories to take it easy on sodium, Americans are now consuming about 4,000 milligrams a day — nearly double the recommended limit to keep blood pressure under control, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said.

So the CSPI renewed a lawsuit first filed in 1983 to ask federal courts to force the Food and Drug Administration to declare sodium a food additive instead of categorizing it as “generally recognized as safe.” This would give the agency the authority to set limits for salt in foods.

What’s next? Moving Morton’s over the counter, limiting me to three cartons at a purchase, and putting my name in the database of users? Who funds CSPI and thinks its works are in the public interest? Why doesn’t CSICOP sue the CSPI because there’s just the slightest chance of confusion between the organization of scientists who expose crackpots and the organization of crackpots who use junk science?

Remember that Twilight Zone episode about the monster on the wing? Doesn’t this remind you of that?

Me, too, unfortunately.

Rocket Fuel Found in Breast Milk of Women in 18 States

Excellent! I expect the President to call for increased lactation to help the United States achieve energy independence from foreign sources of petroleum.

Headline in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Quarry doesn’t dig development: Operator fears new residents will gripe about dust, noise:

In the usual tug of war over suburban development, residents clamor to keep noisy businesses away from their backyards. But in this no-stoplight village, a stone quarry operator wants the backyards to stay away from his business.

Bill Halquist, the president of Sussex-based Halquist Stone, is objecting to a $30 million development that could bring 220 condominium and apartment units – and, he says, a population of new residents to complain about noise and dust from his processing plant.

“They wouldn’t let us put a plant 54 feet away from somebody’s house,” Halquist said. “So why are they putting a house 54 feet from our plant?”

He has every reason to fear. Look at how people who have moved into homes abutting highways have agitated for sound barriers when they discover why the properties were so cheap, or residents who have moved into neighborhoods near gun clubs that have forced the existing gun clubs to close.

Some would say it’s the American way, since settlers have displaced the native Americans and have remade the country to suit themselves, but criminey, haven’t we gotten past that yet?

I guess we have; now instead of smallpox and bullets, now we abuse the power of the majority and the overweaning, controlistic government.